Cranford

Reading the Old Letters

The two women agree to look through the letters separately, each drawing one from the same bundle and describing its contents before destroying it. The narrator discovers for the first time what melancholy work reading old letters can be, even happy ones: the letters pulse with such a vivid sense of the present that the warm, living hearts behind them seem immortal, which makes their passing all the sadder. Miss Matty’s tears slip down the well-worn furrows of her cheeks and her spectacles need frequent wiping, but even through her tears she still watches the candle and remembers her economy, refusing to light the second one even when the faded ink is hard to read.

The Parents’ Courtship Letters

The earliest bundle is tied and ticketed in Miss Jenkyns’s hand as “Letters interchanged between my ever-honoured father and my dearly-beloved mother, prior to their marriage, in July 1774.” The narrator guesses the rector was about twenty-seven at the time and his bride just eighteen. Strange as it seems against the stiff, wigged portrait in the dining-parlour—with its full-bottomed wig, gown, cassock, bands, and hand resting on his only published sermon—the letters throb with eager, passionate ardour, written in short, homely, heartfelt sentences far removed from the grand Latinised Johnsonian style of his printed assize sermon. His letters stand in curious contrast to his girl-bride’s, who seems mildly puzzled by his many demands for professions of love but is entirely single-minded about one practical longing.

The White Paduasoy

Six or seven of the young woman’s letters are principally occupied with begging her lover to use his influence with her parents to obtain various articles of dress, especially a white Paduasoy—a finery she plainly cannot be married without. The rector assures her she is always lovely enough for him regardless of what she wears and begs her to put words of preference into his answers so she can show his wishes to her parents. At length, divining that she will not wed until her trousseau suits her, he sends a letter accompanying a whole box of finery and asking that she be dressed in everything her heart desires. This first letter is docketed in a frail, delicate hand “From my dearest John,” and shortly afterwards the correspondence ceases and the couple are married.

Burning the Love Letters

When the courtship letters have all been read, Miss Matty looks doubtfully at the narrator and says, “We must burn them, I think. No one will care for them when I am gone.” One by one she drops them into the middle of the fire, watching each blaze up, die out, and rise in faint white ghostly semblance up the chimney before surrendering the next to the same fate. The room is now bright enough, but the narrator, like Miss Matty, is held by the sight of those honest, manly heartbeats going up in smoke.

A Grandfather’s Exhortation

The next letter, likewise docketed by Miss Jenkyns, is 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 portion is a stern, forceful depiction of a mother’s responsibilities and a warning against evils lying in ghastly wait for a baby only two days old. The grandfather explains that his wife has not written because he has forbidden it, she being indisposed with a sprained ankle that, he says, quite incapacitated her from holding a pen. At the foot of the page, however, stands a small “T.O.,” and on turning it over one finds her letter after all.

The Grandmother’s Advice

Turned over, the page reveals a letter to “my dear, dearest Molly,” begging her, when she leaves her room, to go upstairs before going down, and instructing her to wrap the baby’s feet in flannel and keep it warm by the fire even in summer, because babies are so tender. The correspondence exchanged between the young mother and the grandmother makes it touching to watch girlish vanity being gradually weeded out of the mother’s heart by love for her baby.