From Knutsford to Cranford: The Emplotment of the Mid-Victorian Provincial Novel
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This essay reads the genre-hopping publishing history of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford (1851-53; 1853) in the context of nineteenth-century sociospatial dynamics in favor of metropolitanization. What originally began as a non-fiction essay based on Gaskell’s youth spent in Knutsford, Cheshire for a transatlantic audience was repurposed into a self-contained fictional sketch and soon thereafter adapted for serial publication before being released as a single volume. The evolving narrative structure, whereby the largely static, autonomous descriptions of provincial life of the earlier chapters or installments gradually give way to an accretive, thickening plot imbued with a propulsive sense of history that seeks resolution from the eponymous town’s embeddedness in the modern global network of trade, commerce, and empire, formally corresponds to the tales’ shift in sociospatial register from the regional to the provincial. Notably, this turn manifests in the recurring presence of male characters whose foreign-coded masculine difference drives the provincial society’s deepening contact with modernity. The piecemeal process by which Cranford was produced—formally, thematically, ideologically—as a provincial novel to be ranked among the exemplars of the subgenre’s high-water mark during mid-century affords insight into the mutual entanglements of space and narrative by which was engendered a literary imagination of locality, community, and world quintessentially modern in its provincialism.
Abstract
This essay reads the genre-hopping publishing history of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford (1851-53; 1853) in the context of nineteenth-century sociospatial dynamics in favor of metropolitanization. What originally began as a non-fiction essay based on Gaskell’s youth spent in Knutsford, Cheshire for a transatlantic audience was repurposed into a self-contained fictional sketch and soon thereafter adapted for serial publication before being released as a single volume. The evolving narrative structure, whereby the largely static, autonomous descriptions of provincial life of the earlier chapters or installments gradually give way to an accretive, thickening plot imbued with a propulsive sense of history that seeks resolution from the eponymous town’s embeddedness in the modern global network of trade, commerce, and empire, formally corresponds to the tales’ shift in sociospatial register from the regional to the provincial. Notably, this turn manifests in the recurring presence of male characters whose foreign-coded masculine difference drives the provincial society’s deepening contact with modernity. The piecemeal process by which Cranford was produced—formally, thematically, ideologically—as a provincial novel to be ranked among the exemplars of the subgenre’s high-water mark during mid-century affords insight into the mutual entanglements of space and narrative by which was engendered a literary imagination of locality, community, and world quintessentially modern in its provincialism.