Cranford Page #16

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.

• Novel

								


It was pretty to see from the letters, which were evidently exchanged
with some frequency between the young mother and the grandmother, how the
girlish vanity was being weeded out of her heart by love for her baby.
The white “Paduasoy” figured again in the letters, with almost as much
vigour as before.  In one, it was being made into a christening cloak for
the baby.  It decked it when it went with its parents to spend a day or
two at Arley Hall.  It added to its charms, when it was “the prettiest
little baby that ever was seen.  Dear mother, I wish you could see her!
Without any pershality, I do think she will grow up a regular bewty!”  I
thought of Miss Jenkyns, grey, withered, and wrinkled, and I wondered if
her mother had known her in the courts of heaven: and then I knew that
she had, and that they stood there in angelic guise.

There was a great gap before any of the rector’s letters appeared.  And
then his wife had changed her mode of her endorsement.  It was no longer
from, “My dearest John;” it was from “My Honoured Husband.”  The letters
were written on occasion of the publication of the same sermon which was
represented in the picture.  The preaching before “My Lord Judge,” and
the “publishing by request,” was evidently the culminating point—the
event of his life.  It had been necessary for him to go up to London to
superintend it through the press.  Many friends had to be called upon and
consulted before he could decide on any printer fit for so onerous a
task; and at length it was arranged that J. and J. Rivingtons were to
have the honourable responsibility.  The worthy rector seemed to be
strung up by the occasion to a high literary pitch, for he could hardly
write a letter to his wife without cropping out into Latin.  I remember
the end of one of his letters ran thus: “I shall ever hold the virtuous
qualities of my Molly in remembrance, dum memor ipse mei, dum spiritus
regit artus,” which, considering that the English of his correspondent
was sometimes at fault in grammar, and often in spelling, might be taken
as a proof of how much he “idealised his Molly;” and, as Miss Jenkyns
used to say, “People talk a great deal about idealising now-a-days,
whatever that may mean.”  But this was nothing to a fit of writing
classical poetry which soon seized him, in which his Molly figured away
as “Maria.”  The letter containing the carmen was endorsed by her,
“Hebrew verses sent me by my honoured husband.  I thowt to have had a
letter about killing the pig, but must wait.  Mem., to send the poetry to
Sir Peter Arley, as my husband desires.”  And in a post-scriptum note in
his handwriting it was stated that the Ode had appeared in the
Gentleman’s Magazine, December 1782.

Her letters back to her husband (treasured as fondly by him as if they
had been M. T. Ciceronis Epistolæ) were more satisfactory to an absent
husband and father than his could ever have been to her.  She told him
how Deborah sewed her seam very neatly every day, and read to her in the
books he had set her; how she was a very “forrard,” good child, but would
ask questions her mother could not answer, but how she did not let
herself down by saying she did not know, but took to stirring the fire,
or sending the “forrard” child on an errand.  Matty was now the mother’s
darling, and promised (like her sister at her age), to be a great beauty.
I was reading this aloud to Miss Matty, who smiled and sighed a little at
the hope, so fondly expressed, that “little Matty might not be vain, even
if she were a bewty.”

“I had very pretty hair, my dear,” said Miss Matilda; “and not a bad
mouth.”  And I saw her soon afterwards adjust her cap and draw herself
up.

But to return to Mrs Jenkyns’s letters.  She told her husband about the
poor in the parish; what homely domestic medicines she had administered;
what kitchen physic she had sent.  She had evidently held his displeasure
as a rod in pickle over the heads of all the ne’er-do-wells.  She asked
for his directions about the cows and pigs; and did not always obtain
them, as I have shown before.

The kind old grandmother was dead when a little boy was born, soon after
the publication of the sermon; but there was another letter of
exhortation from the grandfather, more stringent and admonitory than
ever, now that there was a boy to be guarded from the snares of the
world.  He described all the various sins into which men might fall,
until I wondered how any man ever came to a natural death.  The gallows
seemed as if it must have been the termination of the lives of most of
the grandfather’s friends and acquaintance; and I was not surprised at
the way in which he spoke of this life being “a vale of tears.”

It seemed curious that I should never have heard of this brother before;
but I concluded that he had died young, or else surely his name would
have been alluded to by his sisters.

By-and-by we came to packets of Miss Jenkyns’s letters.  These Miss Matty
did regret to burn.  She said all the others had been only interesting to
those who loved the writers, and that it seemed as if it would have hurt
her to allow them to fall into the hands of strangers, who had not known
her dear mother, and how good she was, although she did not always spell,
quite in the modern fashion; but Deborah’s letters were so very superior!
Any one might profit by reading them.  It was a long time since she had
read Mrs Chapone, but she knew she used to think that Deborah could have
said the same things quite as well; and as for Mrs Carter! people thought
a deal of her letters, just because she had written “Epictetus,” but she
was quite sure Deborah would never have made use of such a common
expression as “I canna be fashed!”

     [Picture: I made use of the time to think of many other things]

Miss Matty did grudge burning these letters, it was evident.  She would
not let them be carelessly passed over with any quiet reading, and
skipping, to myself.  She took them from me, and even lighted the second
candle in order to read them aloud with a proper emphasis, and without
stumbling over the big words.  Oh dear! how I wanted facts instead of
reflections, before those letters were concluded!  They lasted us two
nights; and I won’t deny that I made use of the time to think of many
other things, and yet I was always at my post at the end of each
sentence.

The rector’s letters, and those of his wife and mother-in-law, had all
been tolerably short and pithy, written in a straight hand, with the
lines very close together.  Sometimes the whole letter was contained on a
mere scrap of paper.  The paper was very yellow, and the ink very brown;
some of the sheets were (as Miss Matty made me observe) the old original
post, with the stamp in the corner representing a post-boy riding for
life and twanging his horn.  The letters of Mrs Jenkyns and her mother
were fastened with a great round red wafer; for it was before Miss
Edgeworth’s “patronage” had banished wafers from polite society.  It was
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