Cranford is an episodic novel by the English writer Elizabeth Gaskell. It first appeared in instalments in the magazine Household Words, then was published with minor revisions as a book with the title Cranford in 1853. The work slowly became popular and from the start of the 20th century it saw a number of dramatic treatments for the stage, the radio and TV.
The fictional Cranford is based on the small Cheshire town of Knutsford in which Elizabeth Gaskell grew up. She had already drawn on her childhood memories for an article published in America, "The Last Generation in England" (1849), and for the town of Duncombe which featured in her extended story "Mr. Harrison's Confessions" (1851). These accounts of life in a country town and the old-fashioned class snobbery prevailing there were carried over into what was originally intended simply as another story, published as "Our Society in Cranford" in the magazine Household Words in December 1851. Seeing the possibilities of a longer work in the piece, which eventually formed the first two chapters of her novel, Charles Dickens, the magazine's editor, encouraged the author to write more episodes.[1]
Thereafter Mrs Gaskell added eight further episodes over the next 18 months, with an eight-month gap between the sections ending at what is now chapter 8 (written between December 1851 to April 1852) and the later sections (written between January to May, 1853).[2] During this period, she was also engaged in writing the three volume novel Ruth, which was published in January 1853.[3] Cranford itself soon followed its serialisation as a single-volume book published by Chapman & Hall in June 1853, with a second printing in August and a US edition that same month. Following a third UK printing in 1855 came a French translation in 1856 and a German translation in 1867. However, the book was not widely reviewed in Britain and it was not until the 1890s that it became really popular.[4]
One of the routes to the novel's growth in popularity was the policy of publishers to increase sales by providing lower-priced illustrated editions. The first of these in Cranford's case was issued by Smith, Elder & Co in 1864 with illustrations by George du Maurier, whose approach was to interpret scenes in contemporary terms. There was a change of emphasis in Hugh Thomson's 1891 illustrations, where the Cranford interiors and styles of dress are pictured as closer to the preindustrial Regency period of Elizabeth Gaskell's memories. There was also an emotional shift from Du Maurier's psychological but compassionate depiction of people in limited circumstances to a greater emphasis on humour and sentimentality, a change of approach which was to prove influential on other illustrators for decades to come.[5]
Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell (née Stevenson; 29 September 1810 – 12 November 1865), often referred to as Mrs Gaskell, was an English novelist, biographer and short story writer. Her novels offer a detailed portrait of the lives of many strata of Victorian society, including the very poor. Her work is of interest to social historians as well as readers of literature. Her first novel, Mary Barton, was published in 1848. Gaskell's The Life of Charlotte Brontë, published in 1857, was the first biography of Charlotte Brontë. In this biography, she wrote only of the moral, sophisticated things in Brontë's life; the rest she omitted, deciding certain, more salacious aspects were better kept hidden. Among Gaskell's best known novels are Cranford (1851–53), North and South (1854–55), and Wives and Daughters (1865), each having been adapted for television by the BBC.