Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell

Cranford. Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell

Cranford is one of the better-known novels of the 19th-century English writer Elizabeth Gaskell. It was first published, irregularly, in eight instalments, between December 1851 and May 1853, in the magazine Household Words, which was edited by Charles Dickens. It was then published, with minor revision, in book form in 1853. In the years following Elizabeth Gaskell's death the novel became immensely popular. The first instalment (in Household Words), which became the novel's first two chapters, was originally published "as a self-contained sketch", and the "irregular way" the further seven instalments were published suggests that it took Mrs Gaskell time to think of making this into a book. She was during this period busy writing the three volume novel Ruth, which was published January 1853. Cranford has been described as "practically structurelesss", and given the irregular nature of how it was first published, it is not surprising that it lacks unity. A. W. Ward describes the novel, as a "brief series of sketches, strung together with easy grace