Last Sunday evening we sadly waved goodbye to Cranford, whose inhabitants waved back at us for a time, outside the village church, to be thereafter frozen in the immortal silence of a photographic still. The wonderful five-part period drama has been one of the best adaptations of nineteenth-century literature and society that I have ever seen; a fitting match to last year’s ambitious adaptation of that quintessential Victorian writer’s epic Bleak House. The BBC has shown Cranford to be so much more than a quaint old-fashioned village, assumed to be already known and mechanically reproducible for pretty domestic frames. It is quaint, it is pretty, but it is also a village thriving with life and rich in vital human relations. In the BBC’s sensitive exploration of how social change and the processes of modernisation came to intertwine themselves alongside the life stories of such instantly loveable characters, the series Cranford is one that appeals across generations and interests, perhaps reviving (or at least reminding one of) a somewhat forgotten sense of community spirit in our own age. Even my partner laughed along with me in recognition and admiration of the sharp wit, appealing simplicity, and pragmatic conservatism of the Cranford ladies; my grandmother has shared with me her love for the earnest Mr Carter and his young protégée, Harry Gregson; whilst I have taken the greatest delight in simply being given the opportunity to soak up the charming atmosphere of another world within the comforts of my own.

One of my favourite characters during the series has been the enduring Mr Carter, a self-made man who continued to unfold a charged air of mystery that reached out beyond his own death. Even with the beginnings of a newly intimate relationship with Lady Ludlow’s milliner Miss Galindo (played by Emma Fielding), one gets a sense that the life story of Mr Carter must always remain something of a mystery, the man himself being fittingly left to rest in the reserved and private peace of his own strong silence. His radical legacy of earnest self-improvement and love of mankind crucially lives on through the young boy Harry Gregson. The triangular tensions between the old feudal economy, represented by Lady Ludlow and the new worlds of capitalism, industry, and an emergent democracy are brought to a head in these closing episodes, taking us from hostile separations to humble reconciliations made possible ultimately through what the novelist Gaskell believed in as the universal forces of love and respect – embodied in this case by the shared love and respect of Lady Ludlow and Harry Gregson for their mutual friend Mr Carter.

Lady Ludlow and Harry Gregson finally come to meet on equal terms in a spacious and notably empty room at the grand estate, where Lady Ludlow must not only face explaining to the young boy that he is the sole benefactor of Mr Carter’s will but also address him, with some evident difficulty, as an equal. It seems that the two are about to enter a strange new world together in which the aristocrat is literally indebted to the pauper. Moreover, this strange new world holds the prospect of changes that even the progressive Mr Carter appeared not quite ready for, notably the education of women and the fight for women’s suffrage. Only when women also have equal access to education on the same terms as men, observes Miss Galindo to a rather bemused Mr Carter, when boundaries of gender are crossed as well as class, will people really begin to truly understand the meaning of the word “progress” in the fullest sense of the term.

The final two episodes of Cranford delicately show how previous relations, beliefs, and ways of life are to be left behind in a smaller and simpler past age in order to be carried forward into the dawning of the increasingly pressing, larger and much more complex age of the modern world, ominously heralded throughout the series by the building of the new railway. The spirit of such change is emotively brought home through the practical and painful adjustments and negotiations that the people of Cranford have to come to finally make for the continuation and development of their own lives. Miss Matty, for example, is shown to be not only reconciled with her long lost brother Peter (who in turn appears to carry a flame for the gregarious Miss Pole – another favourite of my grandmother’s), but also opens a shop in her own home. One can only imagine what the stern Miss Deborah would say, a condemnation from up above of which Miss Matty herself appears all too aware. However, what initially begins as a necessity to which a now impoverished Miss Matty is forced to turn as a last resort quickly becomes both an interest and pleasure. Besides, as she herself is keen to stress, she will be selling tea, a refined commodity superior to articles of “common trade”, relieving her of the unpleasantness of having to handle those more tactile and odorous commodities such as cakes or buns; as Miss Matty says, she never could abide handling anything sticky.

And of course the episode closes traditionally with a marriage as the patient Dr Carter finally gains the hand of the beautiful Miss Sophie, and as a fitting ending to Cranford in particular, this marriage is made to symbolise the rebirth of the old world into the new as Miss Sophie passes from the hands of a man of the cloth to a man of science and crosses the altar wearing a wedding dress made from Miss Matty’s treasured muslim silk, brought by her brother Peter and intended for her all those years ago.

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By Clare Williams

Read Clare’s earlier reviews of Cranford here.

Read Josie Billington’s recommendation of Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters here.

In Cranford the novel Elizabeth Gaskell beautifully evoked those delicate silent spaces of restrained emotion and thought that express the moral working fibre of village life in mid-nineteenth-century. The BBC’s Cranford translates those finely tuned intricacies of Gaskell’s prose into detailed close-ups and shots held just long enough in the moment to slow the pace and make the charged silences of the thought and feeling manifest.

The third episode is certainly rich in such stills. When Lady Ludlow (Francesca Annis) visits the itinerant Gregson family the terror and repulsion which appears to overwhelm her on confronting a wretched scene of destitution, her own inability to do anything about it, and her own grotesqueness of appearance in being painfully out of proportion with the humbling scene, is all embodied and expressed dramatically in a sustained jerky close up of a reeling Lady Ludlow set askew. In another shot, during a visit to her old suitor’s house, Miss Matty is seen quietly staring into a black and white silhouette of a much younger Mr Holbrook, (the date of the print being marked 30 years earlier, in 1812,) and her inability of being able to access and go back to that past is forced upon the consciousness when she is simply confronted with her own eyes being reflected back at her, from the surface of the encasing glass and the background of black from Thomas Holbrook’s now indistinguishable silhouette.

What has also impressed me about BBC’s Cranford is its exploration of the relation between words and the image as an increasingly emerging concept in itself during this transitional period. In 1842, the age’s rapid technological advances were already beginning to forge the way for new social relations in Victorian England. The widespread introduction of the steam printing press, as well as the reduction of the newspaper tax, had begun to make the written word widely accessible to the public of the 1840s on an unprecedented scale – the printed word was no longer to be simply a medium for drawing rooms and salons of the privileged classes. It was now also something that was being visually presented for the common passer-by (whether literate or illiterate) to view in the streets through a mass of adverts, pamphlets, and cheap periodicals.

Cranford, like Britain itself, is clearly on the borders of experiencing cultural and social change made possible by the newly developing relations between the written word and the printed image. One of the opening scenes of this third episode, for example, shows an inspired Harry Gregson exultantly painting the word LIBERTY, in bold white capitals, across one of the interior walls of Lady Ludlow’s stables. Mr Carter is not simply teaching a young illiterate boy to read and write here. At a time when revolution was in the air on the continent of Europe, the British ruling classes nervously eyed the lower orders and wondered how to keep them in their place. Mr. Carter’s subversive game challenges the class structure on which British society was built. In another scene, and on a more humorous note, the ladies of Cranford are observing, in a mixture of wonder and astonishment, a shop window display of valentine cards. The fact that these cards have been mass produced by machines is certainly something which shocks but also mystifies the women. Mrs Johnson (Debra Gillett) amusingly observes ‘I can’t imagine what sort of sentiment an apparatus may convey’. While Mrs Jamieson (Barbara Flynn) holds a magnifying glass up to the cards, and expresses her concern that maidservants will no longer be able to hide their love affairs away from their mistresses as they did in the days when they received only flowers.

In a more sombre contrast to these newly developing cultural and social relations, we see, through Miss Matty’s world, the persistence of a more traditional way of life, where it is the Family Bible that is used to chronicle and preserve the past. Between its pages, Mr Holbrook’s primroses are lovingly pressed, names and birth dates of family members are carefully recorded, and precious family letters are protected. It is through Miss Smith’s noticing of the registration of a long lost brother called Peter in the Family Bible that Miss Matty explains how her brother had been forced to flee Cranford in disgrace following a practical joke in which he dressed up in women’s clothes and swaddled a pillow as an imaginary baby. For all the new developments between the written word and the printed image, and the consequent changes brought into social relations, this world of Miss Matty’s tenderly asserts its place as a vulnerable relic of a past age, and reminds one that while there was a new world being brought to light in this period, there also remained those who, in their own way, wanted to remain invisible, at times. A point one is left to reflect upon as Miss Matty, in her revelations about Peter, asks ‘Might we blow out the candles dear, I think I might talk better in the dark’.

The Cranford fan site is here.

The Elizabeth Gaskell pages on Victorianweb are here.

Cranford continues on Sunday 9 December on BBC1 at 9pm

By Clare Williams

Cranford: The Second Instalment

In the first episode of the BBC’s drama series Cranford we were briefly introduced to Harry Gregson and his family, but we were deliberately made to observe them from a distance. One could not but feel that something was not quite right in the moral atmosphere of Cranford (for all of its rigorous clinging to values of a stern social decorum) when the ladies of Cranford, including the much loved characters of Miss Deborah and Miss Matty, stand aside and stare at a poor pregnant young mother who collapses in the street under her load. It is left to the newcomer Captain Brown (Jim Carter) to help the young woman along with her young son Harry.

Whether or not the women of Cranford could be excused through a hopeful idea of their looks possibly expressing a sympathy paralysed by social restrictions was suggestively left in an ambiguous light as they appear shocked and almost appalled (rather than ashamed) by the Captain’s instinctive response. That all certainly is not right in Cranford becomes unmistakably clear in the second episode as we are taken into a dark miserable hut, significantly situated just on the edge of Lady Ludlow’s grand Harbury Estate, and which is the grim habitation of the Gregson family.

With their father absent, Harry Gregson and his younger brother have to fight for the survival of their baby brother, their mother being too malnourished to be able to feed her own child. As the mother helplessly tells Harry that the baby will die if he is not given milk, he takes his younger brother to steal into an enclosure and milk a big brown cow. The father, proud of his son for having looked after the family in his absence, presents Harry with a pair of boots, symbolically wrapped in sheets of newspaper. On proudly announcing that he is able to read the word ‘James’ on the newspaper and can recognise it as the name of his baby brother, the mother looks on him in wonderment, but the father approaches him with a look of something close to disgust, shouting at his son not to meddle in education.

However, there is in Cranford a man with a very different attitude to the subject of education for the working classes, and the self-made Mr Carter, the land agent of Lady Ludlow’s estate, takes it upon himself to educate the young Harry Carter. Mr Carter tells an awestruck Harry there is a great world of words and symbols that make the whole world move; yet, on this opening up of a world of discovery and adventure to Harry, one also dreads the response to be awaited from Mr Gregson, who, unlike Mr Carter, appears to angrily shut his mind to the prospect of anything else existing outside the suffocating limits of his own hut.

The other major social tension which is introduced into this second episode is the rumour of the approaching railway coming to Cranford. The 1840s, as well as being the age of popular education, was also the age of the railway, which expanded in unprecedented levels at this time, bringing with it the benefits of cheap travel to the population at large, the penny post, and a regular distribution of a national newspaper. However, it also brought with it a great amount of disruption to people’s much loved landscapes and protected sense of home. When Captain Brown reveals not only that he knows about the railway, but that he is personally going to be involved in its establishment in Cranford, Miss Deborah’s face turns from shock to disappointment to fury all in an instant. The women collectively charge away; the Captain is left dumbfounded and ostracised.

There is so much else that I could write about this second instalment of Cranford: the painful atmosphere of unfulfilled love between Miss Matty and her suitor, Thomas Holbrook; Jessie’s fingers hovering over the piano keys, perhaps wanting to recapture the music she had made with the Major the previous evening; the greyness of Lady Ludlow; and the closing image of the uninhabited fireside chair that once belonged to Miss Deborah, who died suddenly after hearing about the news of the coming railway. It is this respect for and conveyance of silence through the power of the visual image that is part of what makes the BBC’s Cranford a truly beautiful work.

By Clare Williams

Gaskell’s novels Mary Barton and North and South etched themselves upon my consciousness almost mythically: all those hard talking and hard living resilient characters of the great industrial North and the towns where the struggle for life and love is played out against a backdrop of unprecedented social and political upheaval. But I have not had the pleasure of reading Cranford. I am therefore writing this review from a certain disadvantage but also free from the need to weigh the film against the book. And I say, from this perspective, that I enjoyed the first episode in the serial a great deal.

In this first episode of Cranford, Judi Dench (who plays an immediately loveable Matty Jenkyns) and Eileen Atkins (who plays an equally loveable if not significantly more sombre Miss Deborah, Miss Matty’s elder sister) gracefully set the tone for the small Cheshire village of 1840s Cranford. It appears as a village governed by strict but respected codes of stern decorum and self-composure, but which also ripples with a communal spirit of shrewd wit and fortitude from a predominately female community.

Its sprightly rebellious spirit reveals itself in various concealed moments throughout the normal run of everyday life. In one amusing moment, at an evening supper of oranges where the Jenkyns sisters have great difficulty working out how to eat the exotic unruly fruit in a manner fitting to the decorum of Cranford. Miss Mary Smith (played by Lisa Dillan), a newcomer to Cranford, timidly suggests that the sisters make a small hole at the top of their oranges and suck the juice out of them. Needless to say, Miss Deborah is left speechless and Miss Matty timorously explains that her sister does not care for the word suck. The solution is to retire to their own rooms to eat their oranges in silence; we see them indulgently and mischievously sucking on their oranges in private.

Two other outsiders from the village also herald the beginnings of change and modern ways into the quaint rural village. A dashing young doctor Frank Harrison (played by Simon Woods) shocks the village by wearing a red (rather than the traditionally conservative black) coat in public. But when Jim Carter (played by Andy Buchan), the local joiner in the village, breaks his arm falling from a tree during one of his jobs, Dr Harrison wins approval by refusing to follow the normal procedure of amputation and successfully carries out a new medical practice he had been taught in London.

Meanwhile, an imposing Captain Brown (played by the spectacular Jim Carter) moves in over the road from the Jenkyns sisters. Captain Brown causes great discomfort and embarrassment to a reserved and stolid Miss Deborah with outspoken reference to his financial difficulties. When Captain Brown is called away on business Miss Deborah bravely ignores the conventions of Cranford to accompany his daughter Jessie (played by Julia Sawalha) on her bleak solitary walk behind her sister’s coffin. Captain Brown manages to win the affection of his neighbour by hand-making the sisters a new coal shovel as a thank you gift.

I think the BBC’s Cranford will win an avid audience this winter. Even my partner admitted to enjoying it and he would much rather watch Top Gear on a Sunday evening than anything remotely resembling ‘just another bleak boring period drama’. We perhaps expect the slow quiet but nevertheless emotionally charged rhythms of a past village community to appeal to an older generation. I know that my grandmother would have watched Cranford on Sunday, just as she watched Bleak House last year and was afterwards inspired to buy the book. But to also appeal to that particular niche of young adult males, who only read FHM and would normally run a mile from anything remotely resembling a serious novel, is surely something of a feat.

By Clare Williams

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