Cranford and Cruelty: An Interpretation

Abstract

In her memoir of D. H. Lawrence, Jessie Chambers recalls ‘the glow of his tender delight’ in Cranford, which she designated ‘that simple tale’,1 and over thirty years after Jessie and Lawrence read it together it could still be regarded as suitable for junior pupils. It was as a class reader in a junior form of a grammar school that I first encountered it (and like Ruskin and others before me I remember regretting the sudden demise of Captain Brown). In more recent years there has been an increasing awareness that it is not quite the ‘simple tale’ it had, for over a hundred years, been taken to be. The author of Mary Barton and North and South was obviously a serious novelist, and so unlikely to have written a tale characterised by bland charm, whatever its subject matter and, superficially, its mode of treatment might suggest. But the uncritical acclaim that greeted the BBC TV adaptation of Cranford showed not only that the challenge to the traditional view had not reached a wider educated and cultured public, but also, though the novel is currently available in two excellent paperback editions, that it is no longer widely read.2 The TV Cranford was, in fact, an amalgam of three completely separate narratives: Cranford itself, Mr Harrison's Confessions, and My Lady Ludlow. It was clear, however, that none of the professional TV critics was aware of which parts were based on Cranford and which on the other two stories. Consequently, they were equally unaware of how the parts which did derive from Cranford had been pulled out of shape by the artificial narrative links which had had to be introduced to join it to the two other stories. Nor did they remark that not only did the script allow Captain Brown to survive, but also that it did not allow him to be involved in any kind of railway accident. To anybody who has actually read Cranford, however, Brown's sudden death is unforgettable.