Review: Cranford, and Cousin Phillis, by Elizabeth Gaskell

Review: Cranford, and Cousin Phillis, by Elizabeth Gaskell

by Rich Horton

These days I get a bit itchy when I haven't read a Victorian novel in a couple of months, so I decided to read Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford (1853) in amongst my Readercon reading over the last couple of weeks. My copy of the novel, a 1976 Penguin edition, also includes Mrs. Gaskell's short novel (or nouvelle) Cousin Phillis, plus a short story sort of sequel to Cranford called "The Cage at Cranford", Gaskell's essay "The Last Generation in England", and an excellent introduction by editor Peter Keating.

I will preface my review with an embarrassing admission. I searched through my SFF Net notes for any mention of Gaskell prior to writing this, and I found that I had actually read Cranford previously, in 2001! I wrote a couple of paragraphs back then, paragraphs that are accurate and appreciative but don't capture my feelings about the novel as of now. I'm not sure if the difference is my age, or my more recent reading of another Gaskell novel (one of her greatest, North and South), or my generally fuller involvement with Victorian literature. I will add that at the time I noted that Sherwood Smith recommended Wives and Daughters as her best work, and that Gregory Feeley has in later years also made that suggestion. I do have a copy of Wives and Daughters and I promise I'll get to it. I just needed something shorter and lighter for now!

Here's the potted bio I wrote for my review of North and South: Elizabeth Cleghorn Stevenson was born in 1810. Her father was William Stevenson, a Unitarian minister and writer on economic subjects. (Stevenson, by the way, resigned his position as minister on conscientious grounds: remember this in view of events in North and South!) Elizabeth married a Unitarian minister, William Gaskell, in 1832. They eventually settled in Manchester. She wrote and published poems (with her husband) and some non-fiction beginning in the 1830s. Her first short story was published in 1847, and her first novel, Mary Barton, in 1848, which made her name as a writer. Other important works are Cranford, Sylvia's Lovers, Cousin Phillis, and her last novel, unfinished at her sudden death in 1865, Wives and Daughters; as well as the first biography of her friend Charlotte Brontë. 

So, to Cranford. It seems to me that, very crudely, her books might be divided into two groups. One is her "industrial" novels, dealing with the social problems resulting from the industrialization of England in the 1840s and beyond. These would include Mary Barton, Ruth, and North and South. The other group are perhaps "social" novels, detailing life in England, especially the rural areas, in the decades preceding the '50s. Cranford and Cousin Phillis surely fit in this category. Such a division is very rough, and I should note that a novel like North and South is certainly "social", and indeed in some part deals closely with rural life in the South of England; and much of the tension in Cranford is between the disappearing social order that hangs on in the village of Cranford (a stand in for Knutsford, where Gaskell grew up) and the more vigorous society of nearby Drumble (a stand in for Manchester, where Gaskell lived as an adult.) Likewise the plot of Cousin Phillis is driven in part by the impending arrival of the railroad in a rural area. One aspect of this division is that the tone of the more rural books is sweeter, and, particularly in Cranford, much more comedic.

Cranford grew out of a shortish story, or sketch, published in Charles Dickens' magazine Household Words in 1851, called "Our Society at Cranford". This piece proved popular, and (with Dickens' eager approval) Gaskell produced seven more sketches, published in 1852 and 1853. The book version was published in 1853, and Gaskell revised it somewhat for that edition, making it a bit more consistent among other changes. Cranford was fairly popular in Gaskell's lifetime, and she called it the only one of her books she could reread. It became her most popular book in the decades after her death, and I admit it was the only one of her novels I was aware of, when I first read it back in 2001. Gaskell's reputation, as with many Victorian writers not named Bronte, Dickens, Thackeray, Eliot, or Hardy, declined precipitously by the early 20th Century, but it has since recovered -- as it should have because she was a wonderful writer -- and the latter day ranking of her novels seems to put North and South and Wives and Daughters at the top. And likely that is fair (though I haven't read enough of her work to make a personal ranking) but Cranford is really quite wonderful in its way.

The novel is narrated by a young woman named Mary Smith, who grew up in Cranford but now lives with her wealthy father in Drumble. Mary (and I should note we don't learn her name until towards the end of the novel) frequently visits her friends in Cranford, who are mostly a generation older than she. She notes in the first sketch that Cranford society is ruled by its "Amazons" -- a group of old maids and widows. As such, men are regarded with suspicion, and if not excluded from society, are at least not seen as important to it. The society is extremely class conscious, and quite conscious of financial matters, in a somewhat paradoxical manner -- some of these women are understandably not well off at all, and thus it is important nobody flaunt their comparative wealth -- instead, practice "elegant economy". (But it is very clear that they are still quite aware of who has money, even as the richest of them is the most parsimonious in her entertainments.) All this is detailed in Mary Smith's affectionate but gently sardonic voice. The novel is, throughout, extremely funny in a lightly amusing way. By which I mean, sometimes laugh out loud funny and always cute.

Having said that -- which is more or less all I saw on first reading -- it is also acutely observant: of why this social order exists, of why and how it is changing, of how it is maintained outwardly while often flouted, and of what it means to the people of Cranford, especially the women. Some of this is told via a series of romantic stories that run through the eight sketches. There is at the beginning Miss Jessie Brown's wedding to an old admirer, a certain Major Gordon, which follows upon the deaths of her father and elder sister. There is the impoverished widow of a Scottish lord, Lady Glenmire, marrying the lower class Mr. Hoggins, the town doctor, who is looked down on despite his evident accomplishments. And most of all there is the story of Mary Smith's closest friend, Matilda Jenkyns. Matilda, called Matty, is the daughter of Cranford's previous rector. Her parents are long dead, and their brother is assumed dead after he ran away to join the Navy. Matty and her hidebound elder sister Miss Jenkyns have lived alone for decades on a reduced income. Miss Jenkyns has ruled over Matty, who is perhaps "simpler" but far more sympathetic, for years, in particular thwarting her romance with a (lower class) farmer. Even after Miss Jenkyns dies, her influence shapes Matty, though she does manage to allow her maid to have a "follower". But Matty's sweetness is real, and at the close, when a disastrous investment of Miss Jenkyns goes bad, that sweetness and honesty is what saves her, in an ending that is perhaps a tad over-sentimental, and perhaps a tad reliant on a deus ex machina, but which is for all that powerful.

The latter day story, "The Cage at Cranford", is more or less trivial. The humor is okay, but seems a bit forced. It concerns Mary Smith trying to buy a gift for Miss Pole, one of the old maids of Cranford, who would like a nice new cap, but not anything so fashionable as Mary might end up with. It's a pendant, and changes nothing about the novel.

Cousin Phillis was published in the Cornhill Magazine in four parts between November 1963 and February 1864. It is told by Paul Manning, a young man who has taken a job working for a railroad company in the early 1840s. His father is a mechanically minded man, an inventor indeed, and Paul is a worthy fellow but without his father's brilliance. He learns that a cousin of his, a Mrs. Holman, lives near one of the towns the railroad is being extended towards, and his boss, an intelligent young man named Mr. Holdsworth, allows him to visit. 

His cousin Mrs. Holman lives at Hope Farm, and her husband is a nonconformist minister who also runs the farm, very capably. Their daughter is Phillis, who is tall and beautiful and intellectually brilliant. Paul is fascinated by her, but quickly realizes she's quite out of his league. (Not only is she much smarter than he, she is taller!) They become good friends. Paul becomes close to the Holmans, in part out of great respect to Minister Holman, who is not only a committed and deeply moral dissenting minister, but a profoundly intelligent and mechanically inclined man, who over time becomes good friends with Paul's father.

Here I will say that I immediately guessed nearly the exact course of the story ... and I was right. Paul greatly admires his boss Mr. Holdsworth, who is, like Phillis, quite brilliant. In the course of things, Phillis and Mr. Holdsworth are introduced. Mr. Holdsworth charms both of Phillis' parents, and Phillis quite falls for him. It is clear that Mr. Holdsworth is enchanted with Phillis as well -- but then he is called away to a railway project in Canada. And ... well, Phillis doesn't take this well. Aspects of this seemed just a bit overwrought to me, but perhaps that is my 20th/21st Century perspective. The nouvelle resolves itself not as melodramatically as I suppose I feared. It becomes a moving meditation on the place of intelligent women in mid 19th Century English society, and also on how even a well intended man like Minister Holman can completely misunderstand his daughter. It's a very fine story, perhaps not quite a great story, but certainly worth reading.