Craft, Authorial Anxiety, and "The Cranford Papers"

Abstract

In Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford (1851-1853), the main character, an eld erly lady named Miss Matty Jenkyns, has one great skill. As her younger relative Mary Smith comments: she piqued herself upon, as arts, in which she excelled, was making candle-lighters, or 'spills' (as she pre ferred calling them), of coloured paper, cut so as to resemble feathers ... (185). These spills are Matty's signature production. We would know how to parse it if she were an artist who piqued herself on a particular painting, or a singer who specialized in a given air, but what precisely is the significance of being a spill-maker? What kinds of historical struc tures, aesthetic preferences, and ideological positions did this pursuit par ticularly, or the genre of paper crafts more broadly, communicate to a Victorian reader? To answer this question requires taking Cranford seri ously. This is a novel all too often described as charming, with the kind of homogenously pleasant tone and dismissively trivial content that that adjective implies. But following the paper trail, as it were, opens up signif icant issues for a reading of Cranford, in particular highlighting the prob lems of narratorial reliability and authorial anxiety. In this article I ask not just how Cranford enshrines or mimics craft practice, but more fun damentally, what the novel's affiliation with the domestic handicraft allows it to do.