Cranford (Gaskell, 1853)
From Commonplace Book
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
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
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
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)
