Elizabeth Gaskell

Nothing much happens in Cranford, the BBC’s lush series that has become one of the most watched costume dramas in recent years. But like the outwardly placid life of its Victorian author, Elizabeth Gaskell, below the tale’s surface swirl dark undercurrents that hint at tragedy, scandal and what might have been.

It is odd to think that Gaskell’s desperate act of escapism – writing stories to forget painful memories of being a virtual orphan who later lost three of her own children – led to her being hailed as a feminist icon, a pioneer of the reality novel and creator of the first working-class heroine.

Stranger still that after years of being overshadowed by Jane Austen and the Brontës, Gaskell’s chronicle of a Cheshire market town in the throes of social change has utterly beguiled television critics who habitually gargle with vitriol. AA Gill confessed in The Sunday Times last weekend that he was “hooked, gaffed, netted and filleted” in the first minute.

The five-part adaptation revolves around a group of women, beautifully and minutely observed by a dazzling cast that includes Judi Dench, Eileen Atkins, Imelda Staunton and Francesca Annis. These are the “Amazons”, introduced at the outset of the novel, who dominate the town. Their preoccupation with hats, cake and tea is played out against the backdrop of social change and an imminent railway that threaten the patterns of a previous age.

Gaskell’s model for Cranford was Knutsford, where she had spent her early childhood and become fascinated with the lives of “11 widows of respectability, besides spinsters innumerable”. With their card games and strict visiting hours, these matrons were “living hoards of family tradition and old custom”, Gaskell recalled.

Twenty miles away lay Drumble, her pseudonym for Manchester, where she was to launch her literary career with 10 books and dozens of short stories. Her social circle included Florence Nightingale and Charlotte Brontë, who on one occasion hid behind the drawing room curtains as she was too shy to meet Gaskell’s guests. Gaskell wrote a biography of her friend which played a significant role in developing Brontë’s reputation.

Her most crucial ally and collaborator was Charles Dickens, who took the fledgling writer under his wing only to exclaim later to a subeditor: “If I were Mr G, oh heaven how I would beat her.”

As the wife of a Unitarian minister, she was well placed to describe the plight of the poor in such powerful terms that her first book, Mary Barton, caused outrage.

So why have we been so late to wake up to Mrs Gaskell, as she signed herself? The question perplexes John Carey, the Sunday Times literary critic. “There’s no 19th-century novelist you can think of with such real knowledge of wealth, the industrial north and the poor. She was more experienced in the things we consider important than George Eliot, let alone Dickens, who couldn’t write at all about women, really.”

The Gaskell Society is currently recording an “absolutely incredible” number of hits on its web page, but the delight of Joan Leach, its secretary, is tempered by the fact that the BBC decided not to name the series The Cranford Chronicles. “It would have alerted people to the fact that Cranford has been interwoven with two other novels. Cranford only started as a short story. Dickens published it in his literary magazine Household Words and liked it so much he kept saying, ‘Let’s have a bit more of that’. The episodes were gathered together in a book.”

Two years before the first episode appeared in 1851, Gaskell had written a prototype essay for an American magazine. “She said she wished to put on record some of the scenes of everyday life that were rapidly passing away,” Leach said. “She wrote about ladies being beaten up by thugs on their way home from card parties. It’s a side of Cranford she edited out.”

Jenny Uglow, whose biography is credited with bringing the author back into fashion, said that different generations have seized on particular themes: “In the 1960s and 1970s, people were reading Mary Barton as a social protest novel. Her novel Ruth featured the first working-class heroine – a young seamstress who had an illegitimate child at 15. As the women’s movement came to the fore, people recognised these extraordinary novels about ordinary life.”

She was born in 1810 in Chelsea. Her father, William Stevenson, was an austere and bookish man who worked for the Treasury in Whitehall. She was the family’s eighth child in 13 years, six of whom died. A year after Gaskell was born, her mother Elizabeth was also dead.

Rejected by her unloving father, who remarried, she was farmed out to her mother’s kindly sister, Aunt Hannah Lumb – “my more than mother” – in Knutsford.

This experience made her “unusually interested and sensitive to extended families”, said Uglow. A friend described her aunt’s parties where “we were very unconstrained and merry”.

She made notes and kept journals recording the local hierarchy, from the landed gentry, genteel widows and “respectable poor” down to the dogs that wore house shoes, the cat that swallowed lace and the cow in flannel drawers. It was a mother lode from which she drew for her gentle satire and often hilarious narrative.

“Shall I tell you a Cranfordism?” she wrote to the critic John Forster in 1854. “An old lady, a Mrs Frances Wright, said to one of my cousins, ‘I have never been able to spell since I lost my teeth’.”

The teenage Gaskell received a good education at a boarding school in Warwickshire, where her passion for collecting stories was revealed in letters imploring family and friends to send “more details, more details” of spicy gossip. When Gaskell was 18 tragedy struck once more: her beloved brother John disappeared at sea and was never heard of again, although he was to return in her fiction as the lost brother or sailor who unexpectedly returned.

Although she hankered for London balls and romance, she was to marry a bookish classicist like her father. William Gaskell was attractive, tall and five years older than her. As the junior minister of Cross Street Chapel, Manchester, his parish included the poorest slums, where his wife began to develop a fierce social conscience.

After losing two children at birth, Gaskell turned to writing ghost stories full of tragedy. Further traumatised by the loss of her 10-month-old son William to scarlet fever, she was persuaded to attempt a bigger writing project. Mary Barton, with its harsh depiction of mill owners, scandalised parishioners when they discovered she was the author, but the book was a sensation and she was lionised in London.

Dickens invited her to dinner and, recognising her storytelling gift, called her “my dear Scheherazade”, because “I am sure your powers of narrative can never be exhausted in a single night, but must be good for at least a thousand nights and one.” However, they furiously disagreed over the extent of his editing.

On the profits of her writing, the Gaskells moved to a larger house in Manchester and took their holidays on the Continent. Bored with Manchester and its “large, vulgar and overdressed parties”, the successful author gravitated increasingly to London until the couple were leading virtually separate lives.

They remained devoted despite Gaskell’s flirtation with Charles Norton, a 30-year-old American she encountered on a visit to Rome. Their friendship endured although nothing came of it. “It was in those charming Roman days that my life culminated,” she reminisced. “I shall never be so happy again.”

The pressure of being a working mother began to tell. “When you consider that she brought up four daughters and lived a very busy life, often writing on the kitchen table in a great hurry, she’s a good multi-tasking model for the current age,” said Leach.

Headaches and fainting fits left her “so tired of spinning my brain”, she wrote. Hatching a secret plan to persuade her reluctant husband to move south with her, she bought a large home in Hampshire. While refurnishing the new home, she was also rushing to finish the last episode of her book Wives and Daughters, which was due to appear in Cornhill magazine.

On Sunday, November 12, 1865, she walked to church with her daughters, impressing the vicar with her healthy appearance. Later that afternoon she was relating a conversation with a judge when she stopped in mid-sentence, gasped and died of a heart attack. She was 55. By then, the railway had reached Knutsford and another page of history had turned.

From The Sunday Times

BBC historical Sundays go some way to mitigating our bookly guilt. And oh, in how many ways do I hate them – these silver spoons of good-for-you cod-liver oil, the heritage nostalgia, with all its dressing-up-box gurning and posing and emoting. The smug, arrogant nudges that imply the Yanks may have the cash, the glitz and the popularity, but they can’t buy this: a National Trust house, with some daft bint wearing a basket on her head, who’s going to take four weeks to marry a dreary bit of Rada man-totty with a Byronic perm and £500 a year. God, I’m embarrassed by the cringing cultural kitsch of the classic serial.

So, I sat down to Cranford(Sunday, BBC1) girded and gimlet-eyed, my modernist cudgel ready to bludgeon it to a silly pulp. Then, in the very first minute, Eileen Atkins gave me a look – just for a moment, a sideways look, more a glance, really, but it had such depth of character, such promise of interest and intimations of stories to come of hardship and parsimony, of steadfastness, piety, worldliness and a little kindness, all packed together in that one tiny gesture, like an apothecary’s spice box – and I realised it was all up. I was hooked, gaffed, netted and filleted.

Atkins could have me for her tea with tartare sauce. She is the cur’s cods, the terrier’s testicles, the business.

I will go further and declare that Atkins is the finest actor appearing anywhere in the world right now. There is, in her performance, a miraculous ability to project a complex subtext or emotion and motivation in her face and posture, while delivering words that seem real and immediate but, simultaneously, tell us something quite different. With the merest tightening of a lip or flickering of an eye, she raises doubts, opens lines of plot and is able to hold and impart contradictory emotions clearly and profoundly. To be able to do this isn’t just talent or craft or practice, it is an intense sensitivity, an insight into the dilemmas of the human spirit. She is an era-defining actress.

And with her we got Judi Dench. To use a technical term, that was double bubble. Dench was the straight man, the feed, clearing space and giving time to Atkins. It was a performance of immense generosity, born from confidence and the understanding that to listen is as important as to speak; that a part isn’t measured in how many lines you say, but in how many are said to you. Between them, they created scenes of bright brilliance. But then, this was an entire cast of brilliant women, and I could fill the rest of this page with luvvie notes written in violet spittle, but I shan’t.

Cranford is a story of a lot of fairly silly women fussing about things of monumental insignificance. Its thinly redeeming grace as a Sunday adaptation is that, while it treats its costumes and sets with a curator’s dusty obsession, it rightly doesn’t take itself seriously. The plot is simply flung to the actors to make of what they will. Literary Cranford is based on Cheshire’s Knutsford, where the Hamiltons come from. Christine Hamilton could slip right into this series without make-up, costume or, indeed, a script. But the final word on all this is the acting. For all the relentless sniping and moaning about falling standards on television – which, incidentally, have been on a vertiginous slide since the Coronation – you will see better acting on television in any given week than in any other dramatic medium. Simply in terms of skill, range and honesty, television buries film at the moment. And we have a particularly strong cast of actresses who find themselves in their prime. The reason there are so many of them in Cranford is that the only people who will write decent parts for them are dead lady novelists, and that’s not just a shame, it’s a sinful waste of a great national resource.

AA Gill in The Times

Nancy Banks-Smith – The Guardian

Ah, the BBC Sunday serial! Something special like your Sunday best. Cranford (BBC1) will see you through beautifully until Christmas. Elizabeth Gaskell’s perfect little classic, beautifully and minutely observed, has been beefed up with two more stories. May God forgive them. In His own good time. However, as the extra stories are also by Mrs Gaskell, they transplant pretty naturally, like a couple of kidneys. Not that there was anything wrong with Cranford’s kidneys in the first place.

It has a simply stunning performance from Eileen Atkins as Miss Deborah Jenkyns, an upright, downright, do-right bit of single blessedness. She has a flicker of the eyelids, which cannot be confused with a flutter. When she spoke, I sat up straight. I had an aunt like that. The power of her performance is all the more remarkable considering the company she keeps. The gang’s all here. Judi Dench with that heartbreaking catch in her voice, Jim Carter, Imelda Staunton, Francesca Annis looking deliciously delicious, Julia McKenzie and Julia Sawalha. Jim Carter, you notice, looks a little isolated there. “A man,” as Miss Jenkyns remarked, “is so in the way in a house.”

Nothing happens in Cranford, though what might have been sometimes ripples across its placid surface. So, when something actually does happen, it has the impact of catching the down express in the small of the back. The most dramatic incident in this episode is a cat swallowing a fine lace collar, which has been left to bleach in a saucer of buttermilk. I was told once, and cannot swear to the truth of it, that in television dogs are actors but cats are props. This seems unfair on the cat, who gave a cracking performance. It is a world of bounden duty, faded love affairs laid aside in lavender, genteel poverty and quietly remarkable women.

Grafting Mr Harrison’s Confessions on to Cranford offers a great deal more excitement and a good dollop of men. Jem Hearne (nice work by Andrew Buchan) falls out of a tree and smashes his arm. Happily, young Dr Harrison has just arrived in town on, appropriately enough, a white horse. He refuses to amputate a carpenter’s right arm and, as Imelda Staunton says, hitting every plosive on the head, “seal the stump with tar”. Treating the patient with sugar, brandy and ice (which, if it doesn’t work, should at least make a decent drink), he gallops off for surgical needles and wax candles. (There was, I must say, a touch of the two Ronnies about his vain request for candles in the hardware store.) Dr Harrison pre-dates what Queen Victoria would call “that blessed, blessed chloroform”, and Jem’s yell as his bone is set raised me three inches from my chair. As the last candle guttered out, you could not be sure if it was morning or a metaphor.

Cranford is beautifully candlelit. They read by firelight, they sew by candlelight, sitting in little illuminated pools among the crowding shadows.