‘Elegant economy’! How naturally one falls back into the phraseology of Cranford! There, economy was always ‘elegant’, and money-spending always ‘vulgar and ostentatious’ a sort of sour-grapeism, which made us very peaceful and satisfied.

On Mary’s visits to her sweet, impoverished friend Miss Matti, they knit in the dark–Matti claims she can knit without seeing– and light only a single candle when Matti admits night has fallen beyond a shadow of a doubt. (But her descriptions are tongue-in-cheek.) Money is never discussed in Cranford, and it is considered “vulgar” to serve expensive food at the evening entertainments, which end very early because everyone keeps such early hours. Mary is so precise that she has almost an anthropological turn of mind.

And men take a secondary place to them, except for the doctor. Yes, the residents are mostly ladies, some of whom live in genteel poverty. The narrator, Mary Smith, a former resident of Cranford, wittily explains and analyzes the domestic arrangements and social doings of the “Amazons” in Cranford. What finally emerges from his management of a slender store of incident is the identity between the local economy of Cranford/Cranford and larger fictional economies underlying Gaskell's narrative.But I discovered Cranford is a delight when I broke down and perused it over the holidays.

In the same way, Cranford's narrative reflects the formal properties of economy. Minor though they might seem, the sundry small events of village life are the principal on which Cranford draws for its barely eventful subsistence. The innumerable 'small economies' practiced by Gaskell's characters are among innumerable such arrangements forming the larger social and narrative economy of Cranford/Cranford.

In Cranford (1853) everything from managing household expenditures to managing one's life is regualted by considerations of economy. Throghout Gaskell's fiction the rightness or the wrongness of a household usually finds its objective correlative in the manifest management of that household. Gaskell the standard of 'economy' is applied in its older, undissociated sense, encompassing the regulation, rather than the mutually exclusive demarcation, of material and moral life. 'ECONOMY.' writes William Cobbett in Cottage Economy (1821-22), 'means management, and nothing more and it is generally applied to the affairs of a house and family, which affairs are an object of the greatest importance, whether as relating to individuals or a nation.' Due to the influence of the dismal science of political economy, the nineteeth century witnessed a narrowing of this concept to denote a specialized instrumentality rather than the integrated totality formerly encompassed by the term.

Cranford mrs gaskell