ABSTRACT
THE SERIES OF SKETCHES THAT RAN IRREGULARLY IN HOUSEHOLD WORDS between 1851 and 1853 and that was soon after published as a single-volume novel under the title Cranford has a special place in Elizabeth Gaskell’s fictional mappings of England. With its apparently modest focus on the structure of a small-town society run by women of the rentier class, it is emphatically not a condition-of-England novel in the way Mary Barton or North and South are; not surprisingly, critical discussions of the industrial novel, such as Raymond Williams’s and Catherine Gallagher’s, hardly mention this text at all. Some readers have been led by the novel’s conversational tone to regard it as a sort of breather from the weighty matters of class relations and the grimness of working-class life. 2 But Cranford is Gaskell’s most determined experiment in ethnographic narrative, a continuation on different ground of the type of undertaking already discernible in Mary Barton. The industrial novel often took upon itself tasks we have come to associate with the practice and discourse of ethnography, which was just beginning to emerge as part of a comprehensive epistemological reorganization of sci ence in the 19th century. Even though Gaskell did not use the ethnographic concept of culture, a novel like Mary Barton does seem to be predicated on the idea that there is such a thing as a distinct culture of the Manchester working class, and that this thing can be isolated for the attention of a concerned middle class. Like other industrial novels written by middle-class authors, Mary Barton was based on the assumption that its material was unfamiliar to its reading public. Unlike many Victorian realist novels in which a variety of class and cultural bonds were tacitly or expressly assumed to exist between the reading public and the depicted world, the industrial-ethnographic mode of fiction required the perception of radical social division, the perception to which Benjamin Disraeli resoundingly gave the name of two nations. The industrial novel offered itself as a mode for reconciling the polarized segments of the nation, claiming to discover grounds for understanding and sympathy between the class for which it wrote and the one of which it wrote. The way working class people behaved,
what they believed, and, especially, how they spoke were all parts of a way of life that would participate in, and not be swallowed up in, the national reconciliation. The culture of the workers was to be recognized by the readers not just as a culture of deprivation and ignorance, but as a respectable form of English difference. The first edition of Mary Barton had a supplement of explanatory notes on the Lancashire dialect, written by Gaskell’s husband, and the fifth edition in 1854 contained two lectures on the dialect also supplied by him-telling evidence of an impulse towards documentation and analysis of what emerges as an unfamiliar cultural domain in need of such explication.
