Cranford (Gaskell, 1853)

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

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

14 plumed wars Othello
33 Mr Holbrook's apt quotations from shakespeare and Herbert (the narrator compares him at least twice to Don Quixote)