ABSTRACT
Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford has been compared by some commentators to anthropological field work. It had its origin in a periodical essay, written for an American audience, which purports to describe the fast disappearing ways of 'the last generation of England'. The stories of the 'Cranford' pieces which appeared subsequently in Dickens's Household Words are largely concerned with the functioning of a small society made up of several of the town's genteel unmarried women, spinster or widowed, and their immediate associates. Many of Cranford's first readers will, one assumes, have lately attended or otherwise taken an interest in the Great Exhibition of 1851, that gaudy and highly considered celebration of British manufacturing as an engine of world cultural progress. The final 'Cranford' piece devolves on the mistaking of a cage—a crinoline skirt's hooped support which is an a la mode gift from Paris—for a birdcage, a new home for Miss Pole's cherished cockatoo.
