Cranford, Chapter 5 - Old Letters

Relax and enjoy listening to the fifth, extremely poignant chapter of Elizabeth Gaskell's classic novel. Miss Matty decides that some old family letters should be disposed of, and she and the narrator spend several evenings sorting through and then burning these vivid remnants of Miss Matty's earlier life. Gaskell's pin-sharp observation and humor alleviate the melancholy.

For more gently humorous writing you might like Ted the Shed, also available on Free Tracks.

Look out for The Great Gatsby, starting early in the New Year on Premium Tracks.

Transcript

Hello,

It's Mandy here.

Thanks so much for joining me tonight,

I really do appreciate it and welcome back to the world of Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell.

Tonight we're going to be listening to chapter five,

Old Letters,

But before that I'd just like to give you a little snippet about Elizabeth Gaskell.

In 1832 she married the Unitarian minister William Gaskell in Knutsford.

They settled down in Manchester where William was a minister and Manchester with its industrial surroundings and also via the books that Elizabeth borrowed from the library really influenced her writing and made her interested in writing about industrial life.

One book that particularly influenced her was Adam Smith's Social Politics.

Okay,

So before I begin,

Please go right on ahead and make yourself really comfortable.

Settle down into whatever surface you happen to be sitting or lying on.

Relax your hands.

Release any tension in your shoulders and soften your jaw.

That's lovely.

You might want to close your eyes.

Okay,

Then I'll begin.

Chapter five,

Old Letters.

I have often noticed that almost everyone has his own individual small economies,

Careful habits of saving fractions of pennies in some one peculiar direction,

Any disturbance of which annoys him more than spending shillings or pounds on some real extravagance.

An old gentleman of my acquaintance who took the intelligence of the failure of a joint stock bank in which some of his money was invested with stoical mildness worried his family all through worried his family all through a long summer's day because one of them had torn out instead of cutting the written leaves of his now useless bank book.

Of course the corresponding pages at the other end came out as well and this little unnecessary waste of paper,

His private economy,

Chafed him more than all the loss of his money.

Envelopes fretted his soul terribly when they first came in.

The only way in which he could reconcile himself to such waste of his cherished article was by patiently turning inside out all that was sent to him and so making them serve again.

Even now,

Though tamed by age,

I see him casting wistful glances at his daughters when they send a whole inside of a half sheet of notepaper with the three lines of acceptance to an invitation written on only one of the sides.

I am not above owning that I have this human weakness myself.

String is my foible.

My pockets get full of little hanks of it,

Picked up and twisted together,

Ready for uses that never come.

I am seriously annoyed if anyone cuts the string of a parcel instead of patiently and faithfully undoing it fold by fold.

How people can bring themselves to use India rubber rings,

Which are a sort of deification of string,

As likely as they do,

I cannot imagine.

To me,

An India rubber ring is a precious treasure.

I have one which is not new,

One that I picked up off the floor nearly six years ago.

I have really tried to use it,

But my heart failed me and I could not commit the extravagance.

Small pieces of butter grieve others.

They cannot attend to conversation because of the annoyance occasioned by the habit which some people have of invariably taking more butter than they want.

Have you not seen the anxious look,

Almost mesmeric,

Which such persons fix on the article?

They would feel it a relief if they might bury it out of their sight by popping it into their own mouths and swallowing it down.

And they are really made happy if the person on whose plate it lies unused suddenly breaks off a piece of toast,

Which he doesn't want at all,

And eats up his butter.

They think that this is not waste.

Now,

Miss Mattie Jenkins was cherry of candles.

We had many devices to use as few as possible.

In the winter afternoons,

She would sit knitting for two or three hours.

She could do this in the dark or by firelight.

And when I asked if I might not ring for candles to finish stitching my wristbands,

She told me to keep blind man's holiday.

They were usually brought in with tea,

But we only burnt one at a time.

As we lived in constant preparation for a friend who might come in any evening,

But who never did,

It required some contrivance to keep our two candles of the same length,

Ready to be lighted and to look as if we burnt two always.

The candles took it in turns,

And whatever we might be talking about or doing,

Miss Mattie's eyes were habitually fixed upon the candle,

Ready to jump up and extinguish it and to light the other,

Before they had become too uneven in length to be restored to equality in the course of the evening.

One night I remember this candle economy particularly annoyed me.

I had been very much tired of my compulsory blind man's holiday,

Especially as Miss Mattie had fallen asleep,

And I didn't like to stir the fire and run the risk of awakening her,

So I could not even sit on the rug and scorch myself with sewing by firelight,

According to my usual custom.

I fancied Miss Mattie must be dreaming of her early life,

For she spoke one or two words in her uneasy sleep,

Bearing reference to persons who were dead long before.

When Martha brought in the lighted candle and tea,

Miss Mattie started into wakefulness with a strange bewildered look around,

As if we were not the people she expected to see about her.

There was a little sad expression that shadowed her face as she recognised me,

But immediately afterwards she tried to give me her usual smile,

But all through tea time her talk ran upon the days of her childhood and youth.

Perhaps this reminded her of the desirableness of looking over all the old family letters and destroying such as ought not to be allowed to fall into the hands of strangers,

For she'd often spoken of the necessity of this task,

But had always shrunk from doing it with a timid dread of something painful.

Tonight however she rose up after tea and went for them in the dark,

For she peeked herself on the precise neatness of all her chamber arrangements and used to look uneasily at me when I lighted a bed candle to go to another room for anything.

When she returned there was a faint pleasant smell of Tonquin beans in the room.

I had always noticed this scent about any of the things which had belonged to her mother and many of the letters were addressed to her,

Yellow bundles of love letters 60 or 70 years old.

Miss Mattie undid the packet with a sigh,

But she stifled it directly as if it were hardly right to regret the flight of time or of life either.

We agreed to look them over separately,

Each taking a different letter out of the same bundle and describing its contents to the other before destroying it.

I never knew what sad work the reading of old letters was before that evening,

Though I could hardly tell why.

The letters were as happy as letters could be,

At least those early letters were.

There was in them a vivid and intense sense of the present time which seemed as if it could never pass away and as if the warm living hearts that so expressed themselves could never die and be as nothing to the sunny earth.

I should have felt less melancholy I believe if the letters had been more melancholy.

I saw the tears stealing down the well-worn furrows of Miss Mattie's cheeks and her spectacles often wanted wiping.

I trusted at last that she would light the other candle for my own eyes were rather dim and I wanted more light to see the pale faded ink.

But no,

Even through her tears she saw and remembered her little economical ways.

The earliest set of letters were two bundles tied together and ticketed in Miss Jenkins' handwriting.

Letters interchanged between my ever-honoured father and my dearly beloved mother prior to their marriage in July 1774.

I should guess that the Rector of Cranford was about 27 years of age when he wrote those letters and Miss Mattie told me that her mother was just 18 at the time of her wedding.

With my idea of the Rector derived from a picture in the dining parlour,

Stiff and stately in a huge full-bottomed wig with gown cassock and bands and his hand upon a copy of the only sermon he ever published,

It was strange to read these letters.

They were full of eager,

Passionate ardour,

Short homely sentences,

Right fresh from the heart,

Very different from the grand Latinised Johnsonian style of the printed sermon preached before some judge at a size time.

His letters were a curious contrast to those of his girl bride.

She was evidently rather annoyed at his demands upon her for expressions of love and couldn't quite understand what he meant by repeating the same thing over in so many different ways.

But what she was quite clear about was a longing for a white padua soy,

Whatever that might be,

And six or seven letters were principally occupied in asking her lover to use his influence with her parents,

Who evidently kept her in good order,

To obtain this or that article of dress,

More especially the white padua soy.

He cared nothing for how she was dressed,

She was always lovely enough for him,

As he took pains to assure her when she begged him to express in his answers a predilection for particular pieces of finery,

In order that she might show what he said to her parents.

But at length he seemed to find out that she would not be married until she had a trousseau to her mind,

And then he sent her a letter which had evidently accompanied a whole box full of finery,

And in which he requested that she might be dressed in everything her heart desired.

This was the first letter,

Ticketed in a frail delicate hand from my dearest John.

Shortly afterwards they were married,

I suppose,

From the intermission in their correspondence.

We must burn them,

I think,

Said Miss Matty,

Looking doubtfully at me.

No one will care for them when I am gone.

And one by one she dropped them into the middle of the fire,

Watching each blaze up,

Die out,

And rise away in faint white ghostly semblance up the chimney,

Before she gave another to the same fate.

The room was light enough now,

But I,

Like her,

Was fascinated into watching the destruction of those letters,

Into which the honest warm of a manly heart had been poured forth.

The next letter,

Likewise docketed by Miss Jenkins,

Was endorsed,

Letter of Pious Congratulation and Exhortation from my Venerable Grandfather to my Beloved Mother on occasion of my own birth.

Also some practical remarks on the desirability of keeping warm the extremities of infants from my excellent grandmother.

The first part was,

Indeed,

A severe and forcible picture of the responsibilities of mothers,

And a warning against the evils that were in the world,

And lying in ghastly wait for the little baby of two days old.

His wife did not write,

Said the old gentleman,

Because he had forbidden it,

She being indisposed with a sprained ankle,

Which,

He said,

Quite incapacitated her from holding a pen.

However,

At the foot of the page was a small t o,

And on turning it over,

Sure enough,

There was a letter to my dear dearest Molly,

Begging her when she left her room,

Whatever she did,

To go upstairs before going down,

And telling her to wrap her baby's feet up in flannel,

And keep it warm by the fire,

Although it was summer,

For babies were so tender.

It was pretty to see from the letters,

Which were evidently exchanged with some frequency between the young mother and the grandmother,

How the girlish vanity was being weeded out of her heart by love for her baby.

The white padua soy figured again in the letters,

With almost as much vigour as before.

In one,

It was being made into a christening cloak for the baby.

It decked it when it went with its parents to spend a day or two at Arley Hall.

It added to its charms when it was the prettiest little baby that ever was seen.

Dear mother,

I wish you could see her.

Without any partiality,

I do think she will grow up a regular beauty.

I thought of Miss Jenkins,

Grey,

Withered and wrinkled,

And I wondered if her mother had known her in the courts of heaven,

And then I knew that she had,

And that they stood there in angelic guise.

There was a great gap before any of the rector's letters appeared,

And then his wife had changed her mode of her endorsement.

It was no longer from my dearest John,

It was from my honoured husband.

The letters were written on occasion of the publication of the same sermon which was represented in the picture.

The preaching before My Lord Judge and the publishing by request was evidently the culminating point,

The event of his life.

It had been necessary for him to go up to London to superintend it through the press.

Many friends had to be called upon and consulted before he could decide on any printer fit for so onerous a task,

And at length it was arranged that J and J Rivingtons were to have the honourable responsibility.

The worthy rector seemed to be strung up by the occasion to a high literary pitch,

For he could hardly write a letter to his wife without cropping out into Latin.

I remember the end of one of his letters ran thus,

I shall ever hold the virtuous qualities of my molly in remembrance,

Dum memor ipsae me,

Dum spiritus regit artus,

Which,

Considering that the English of his correspondent was sometimes at fault in grammar,

And often in spelling,

Might be taken as a proof of how much he idealised his molly,

And as Miss Jenkins used to say,

People talk a great deal about idealising nowadays,

Whatever that may mean.

But this was nothing to a fit of writing classical poetry which soon seized him,

In which his molly figured away as Maria.

The letter containing the carmen was endorsed by her.

Hebrew verses sent me by my honoured husband.

I thought to have had a letter about killing the pig,

But must wait.

Mem to send the poetry to Sir Peter Arley,

As my husband desires.

And in a postscriptum note in his handwriting,

It was stated that the ode had appeared in the Gentleman's Magazine,

December 1782.

Her letters back to her husband,

Treasured as fondly by him,

As if they had been M.

T.

's Ciceronis epistolae,

Were more satisfactory to an absent husband and father than his could ever have been to her.

She told him how Deborah sewed her seam very neatly every day,

And read to her in the books he had set her,

How she was a very forward good child,

But would ask questions her mother could not answer,

But how she didn't let herself down by saying she didn't know,

But took to stirring the fire,

Or sending the forward child on an errand.

Mattie was now the mother's darling,

And promised,

Like her sister at that age,

To be a great beauty.

I was reading this aloud to Miss Mattie,

Who smiled and sighed a little,

At the hope so fondly expressed that little Mattie might not be vain,

Even if she were a beauty.

I had very pretty hair,

My dear,

Said Miss Matilda,

And not a bad mouth,

And I saw her soon afterwards adjust her cap and draw herself up.

But to return to Mrs Jenkins' letters,

She told her husband about the poor in the parish,

What homely domestic medicines she had administered,

What kitchen physic she had sent.

She had evidently held his displeasure as a rod in pickle over the heads of all the ne'er-do-wells.

She asked for his directions about the cows and pigs,

And did not always obtain them,

As I have shown before.

The kind old grandmother was dead when a little boy was born,

Soon after the publication of the sermon,

But there was another letter of exhortation from the grandfather,

More stringent and admonitory than ever,

Now that there was a boy to be guarded from the snares of the world.

He described all the various sins into which men might fall,

Until I wondered how any man ever came to a natural death.

The gallows seemed as if it must have been the termination of the lives of most of the grandfather's friends and acquaintance,

And I was not surprised at the way in which he spoke of this life being a veil of tears.

It seemed curious as I should never have heard of this brother before,

But I concluded that he had died young,

Or else surely his name would have been alluded to by his sisters.

By and by we came to packets of Miss Jenkins letters.

These Miss Matty did regret to burn.

She said all the others had only been interesting to those who loved the writers,

And that it seemed as if it would have hurt her to allow them to fall into the hands of strangers who had not known her dear mother,

And how good she was,

Although she didn't always spell quite in the modern fashion.

But Deborah's letters were so very superior.

Anyone might profit by reading them.

It was a long time since she had read Mrs Chapone,

But she knew she used to think that Deborah could have said the same things quite as well,

And as for Mrs Carter,

People thought a deal of her letters just because she had written Epictetus,

But she was quite sure Deborah would never have made use of such a common expression as,

I cannot be fashed.

Miss Matty did grudge burning these letters,

It was evident.

She would not let them be carelessly passed over with any quiet reading and skipping to myself.

She took them from me,

And even lighted the second candle in order to read them aloud with a proper emphasis,

And without stumbling over the big words.

Oh dear,

How I wanted facts instead of reflections before those letters were concluded.

They lasted us two nights,

And I won't deny that I made use of the time to think of many other things,

And yet I was always at my post at the end of each sentence.

The rector's letters,

And those of his wife and mother-in-law,

Had all been tolerably short and pithy,

Written in a straight hand,

With the lines very close together.

Sometimes a whole letter was contained on a mere scrap of paper.

The paper was very yellow,

And the ink very brown.

Some of the sheets were,

As Miss Matty made me observe,

The old original post,

With the stamp in the corner,

Representing a post boy riding for life and twanging his horn.

The letters of Mrs Jenkins and her mother were fastened with a great round red wafer,

For it was before Miss Edgeworth's patronage had banished wafers from polite society.

It was evident from the tenor of what was said that francs were in great request,

And were even used as a means of paying debts by needy members of parliament.

The rector sealed his epistles with an immense coat of arms,

And showed by the care with which he had performed this ceremony that he expected they should be cut open,

Not broken by any thoughtless or impatient hand.

Now,

Miss Jenkins' letters were of a later date,

In form and writing.

She wrote on the square sheet,

Which we have learned to call old-fashioned.

Her hand was admirably calculated,

Together with her use of many-syllabled words,

To fill up a sheet,

And then came the pride and delight of crossing.

Poor Miss Matty got sadly puzzled with this,

For the words gathered sighs like snowballs,

And towards the end of her letter,

Miss Jenkins used to become quite sesquipedalian.

In one to her father,

Slightly theological and controversial in its tone,

She had spoken of Herod,

Tetrarch of Edumea.

Miss Matty read it Herod,

Petrarch of Etruria,

And was just as well pleased as if she had been right.

I can't quite remember the date,

But I think it was in 1805 that Miss Jenkins wrote the longest series of letters,

On occasion of her absence on a visit to some friends near Newcastle upon Tyne.

These friends were intimate with the commandant of the garrison there,

And heard from him of all the preparations that were being made to repel the invasion of Bonaparte,

Which some people imagined might take place at the mouth of the Tyne.

Miss Jenkins was evidently very much alarmed,

And the first part of her letters was often written in pretty intelligible English,

Conveying particulars of the preparations which were made in the family with whom she was residing against the dreaded event.

The bundles of clothes that were packed up,

Ready for a flight to Alston Moor,

A wild hilly piece of ground between Northumberland and Cumberland.

The signal that was to be given for this flight,

And for the simultaneous turning out of the volunteers under arms,

Which said signal was to consist,

If I remember rightly,

In ringing the church bells in a particular ominous manner.

One day,

When Miss Jenkins and her hosts were at a dinner party in Newcastle,

This warning summons was actually given,

Not a very wise proceeding,

If there be any truth in the moral attached to the fable of the boy and the wolf,

But so it was,

And Miss Jenkins,

Hardly recovered from her fright,

Wrote the next day to describe the sound,

The breathless shock,

The hurry and alarm,

And then,

Taking breath,

She added,

How trivial,

My dear father,

Do all our apprehensions of the last evening appear at the present moment to calm and inquiring minds.

And here Miss Matty broke in with,

But indeed,

My dear,

They were not at all trivial or trifling at the time.

I know I used to wake up in the night many a time,

And think I heard the tramp of the French entering Cranford.

Many people talked of hiding themselves in the salt mines,

And meat would have kept capitally down there,

Only perhaps we should have been thirsty.

And my father preached a whole set of sermons on the occasion,

One set in the mornings,

All about David and Goliath,

To spirit up the people,

To fighting with spades or bricks,

If need were,

And the other set in the afternoons,

Proving that Napoleon,

That was another name for Boney,

As we used to call him,

Was all the same as a Napoleon and a Baden.

I remember my father rather thought he should be asked to print this last set,

But the parish had perhaps had enough of them with hearing.

Peter Marmaduke Arley Jenkins,

Poor Peter,

As Miss Matty began to call him,

Was at school in Shrewsbury by this time.

The rector took up his pen and rubbed up his Latin once more to correspond with his boy.

It was very clear that the lads were what are called show letters.

They were of a highly mental description,

Giving an account of his studies and his intellectual hopes of various kinds,

With an occasional quotation from the classics.

But now and then the animal nature broke out in such a little sentence as this,

Evidently written in a trembling hurry,

After the letter had been inspected.

Mother dear,

Do send me a cake and put plenty of citron in.

The mother dear probably answered her boy in the form of cakes and goodies,

For there were none of her letters among this set,

But a whole collection of the rector's,

To whom the Latin in his boy's letters was like a trumpet to the old war horse.

I don't know much about Latin certainly,

And it is perhaps an ornamental language,

But not very useful I think,

At least to judge from the bits I remember out of the rector's letters.

Presently it became very evident that poor Peter got himself into many scrapes.

There were letters of stilted penitence to his father for some wrongdoing,

And among them all was a badly written,

Badly sealed,

Badly directed,

Blotted note.

My dear,

Dear,

Dear,

Dearest mother,

I will be a better boy,

I will indeed,

But don't please be ill for me,

I am not worth it.

But I will be good,

Darling mother.

Miss Mattie couldn't speak for crying after she had read this note.

She gave it to me in silence,

And then got up and took it to her sacred recesses in her own room,

For fear that by any chance it might get burnt.

Poor Peter,

She said,

He was always in scrapes,

He was too easy.

They led him wrong and then left him in the lurch,

But he was too fond of mischief,

He could never resist a joke.

Poor Peter.

To be continued.

Reviews

What a fascinating chapter! Thank you and blessings.💞🕊️

Thank you, Mandy! I’m enjoying the bits u hear before drifting off. Happy New Year! 😊

I’m sure it’s an interesting chapter; I just don’t remember much, I fell asleep so fast! I will listen again, for sure!! Thank you Mandy.

Very poignant— and haunting to think about how short our lives are… thank you Mandy ❤️🙏🏼