Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford

Reviewed by: Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford: A Publishing History Laurel Brake (bio) Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford: A Publishing History, by Thomas Recchio; pp. xiv + 273. Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2009, £60.00, $104.95. Thomas Recchio’s thoughtful account of the publishing history of Cranford (1853) ambitiously takes in a number of formats and periods. Not confined to books, print, or the nineteenth century, in four chapters it treats the 1850s periodical publication of the nine “Cranford papers” in Household Words (1852–53); the illustrated editions which allegedly established Cranford as a novel; school editions (largely American) between 1905 and 1966; and stage, film, and television dramatizations of Cranford from 1899 to 1966. It concludes with an epilogue that critiques the 2008 BBC conflation of “Mr. Harrison’s Confessions” (1851), “My Lady Ludlow” (1858), and the Cranford papers. The chapters vary considerably in length, indicating the relative weighting of the argument: those on illustration and dramatic versions are longest (seventy and forty-eight pages, respectively), followed by those on Household Words (forty-eight pages) and school texts (thirty-two pages). Along with a basic index are two very useful appendices, one on school editions and one on dramatic adaptations. In a leisurely introduction, Recchio explicates his approach to publishing history, according to which material characteristics of the text change over time, with [End Page 767] each edition or format responding to and registering its cultural functions and changing meanings. His basic questions are “why was Cranford published in a particular format at a particular time?” and “to what cultural uses were those versions of Cranford put?” (3). The interests of editor, publishers, illustrators, producers, and nation all figure in the shaping and cultural use of the diverse editions Recchio identifies and inspects. The multi-vocality and indeterminacy of the Cranford texts are enhanced by their original appearance as a series of sketches irregularly published and without a uniform title, which left them generically open to interpretation as social studies of a barely disguised English village, fictional sketches or short stories, or travel writing. Recchio calls the result “an accidental novel” and attributes these writings’ ability to be read as a novel to two illustrated editions: an 1864 edition with four woodcuts by George du Maurier and an 1891 Macmillan edition, lavishly illustrated with 126 images by Hugh Thomson, which was immediately and copiously reprinted. What is missing from Recchio’s account, however, is attention to the first book edition of the Cranford papers, the title page of which does not mention Elizabeth Gaskell’s name, though it does note the book’s origin in Household Words, along with a “by the author of” formulation. Neglected speciously on the basis of poor sales and few reviews, this edition could readily have been part of the timeline of reception from “papers” to novel. While forty-eight black and white illustrations adorn Recchio’s book, it is regrettable that the Household Words chapter alone lacks any. In an argument premised on the material culture of texts, Charles Dickens’s weekly is not only of generic interest but germane; the small Household Words page, the anonymity of the nine papers, the lack of uniform titles, and the framing of each text’s opening by running heads of the journal’s title and the name of its conductor inform us at a glance of the indeterminate occasional paper or sketch genre of the original pieces, their (relentlessly stated) domestic context, and their affiliation with Dickens. Moreover, some of the argument in this chapter might have been better or additionally promulgated by tabular lists of issue contents, the sequences of which are laboriously described in discursive form in passages of content analysis; tables might also have accommodated additional and useful detail, such as pagination allocation and the position of individual papers in the sequence of their issue. That said, one of the interests of this book is its attempt to pursue its claim, common to many cultural materialists in periodical studies, that single items (articles, illustrations, fiction, leaders, and so on) reflect other elements published in the same issue as well as the editing and the remit of the periodical in question. Unlike most scholars, Recchio

Argument (complex analysis · Art · Art history · Literature · Media studies · Publishing · Sociology · Classics · History · Irish and British Studies · Literature Analysis and Criticism · Medicine · Migration, Policy, and Dickens Studies