is Mrs Gaskell's best-known and best-loved work. Until relatively recently it continued to be regarded as the quaintly comic and nostalgic depiction of provincial life which was enthusiastically embraced by Mrs Gaskell's contemporaries and which the work itself appears to be.

began life, after all, as a short story (now the first two chapters of the book) written for Dickens's periodical

and worked up from an earlier story-essay, “The Last Generation in England”, in which Mrs Gaskell had made use of her childhood experiences of the small country town of Knutsford. These opening chapters offer a distilled version of

entire. Their distinctive hallmark is a concentration, through representative episodic sketches, upon a community of middle-aged…

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Citation: Billington, Josie. "Cranford". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 05 November 2001 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=5808, accessed 22 November 2024.]