Difference between revisions of "Cranford (Gaskell, 1853)"

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(General)
(Materiality)
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* the whole of ch 5 is framed through object relations/economy
 
* the whole of ch 5 is framed through object relations/economy
 
*78-9 amazing story about a cat eating  Mrs Forester's lace collar
 
*78-9 amazing story about a cat eating  Mrs Forester's lace collar
 +
*111 memory inhering in objects, as Ms Pole remembering Peter being seen in India. Excuse of her Indian Muslim gown from the same year
  
 
===Shakespeare===
 
===Shakespeare===

Revision as of 17:51, 23 October 2017

Elizabeth Gaskell. Cranford. Pub. 1851-3. Ed. Elizabeth Porges Watson and Dinah Birch. Oxford World's Classics, 2011.

General

  • serialized in Household Words Dec 1851-May 1853, whilst Bleak House (1853) was being published
  • Forster a fan (Intro)
  • 4 positioning the audience as urban: "Have you any red silk umbrellas in London?"
  • also not talking about money and the class contrast with commerce and trade prefiguring North and South (Gaskell, 1855)
  • 5 vulgarity, "elegant economy" keywords
  • 6 protesting against the train - modernity
  • 69 the old arbiters of gentility struggling with forms of address
  • 76 the poorness of the peeress Lady Glenmire reassures them
  • 83 the range of superstitious beliefs when Brunoni the magician comes (which registers for Marty in not calling the drips of candle wax "winding sheets" but "rolley-polleys"
  • 105 Miss pole: "it argued a great natural credulity in a woman if she could not avoid getting married"
  • 106 Matty's sad, diffident monologue about what could have been
  • 110 by this point you really get the novel-ization of the disconnected stories

Theme Tracking

Reading/Writing

  • 10-11 scene in which Capt Brown reads aloud from picwick and Miss Jenkyns dismisses it as not as good as Johnson's Rasselas: "I consider it vulgar, and beneath the dignity of literature, to publish in numbers."
  • 14 Ms Deborah Jenkyns's letters "stately and grand, like herself"
  • 18 Capt Brown is struck and killed by a train whilst reading, presumably a new number of Pickwick?
  • 23 Galignani's newspaper for English men abroad brings Maj Gordon home to propose to Jessie Brown
  • 33 Mr Holbrook's messy library
  • 35 he quotes Tennyson and went to buy his book after reading a review in blackwood's
  • 43ff reading and sorting old letters
  • 46 the Jenkyns's father the Rector having his sermon printed
  • 50-1 Peter Jenkyns's "awful preparations" with dictionaries and lexicons when studying with his father
  • 59 Deborah becomes her father the rector's secretary (reading, writing, copying) as Casaubon wants Dorothea to do, but here more limitedly, in Middlemarch (Eliot, 1872)
  • 72 making candle lighters from old notes and letters
  • 74 the women pay quarter shares for the St James's chronicle, and the footman Mr Mulliner bogarts it and aggravates Miss Pole
  • 84 reading from the old encyclopedia

Materiality

  • cross ref with Schaffer 2011 on handicraft
  • so. Much. Fabric.
  • 42 string vs rubber bands
  • the whole of ch 5 is framed through object relations/economy
  • 78-9 amazing story about a cat eating Mrs Forester's lace collar
  • 111 memory inhering in objects, as Ms Pole remembering Peter being seen in India. Excuse of her Indian Muslim gown from the same year

Shakespeare

  • 14 plumed wars Othello
  • 33 Mr Holbrook's apt quotations from shakespeare and Herbert (the narrator compares him at least twice to Don Quixote)
  • 63 narrator "my prophetic soul" hamlet
  • 110 "as somebody says, that was the question" Hamlet - when they're wondering if Aga Jenkyns is Peter