Cranford

The Baby’s Christening

The white Paduasoy reappears in the letters with almost as much vigour as before: in one it is being made into a christening cloak for the baby; later it decks the child when she goes with her parents to spend a day or two at Arley Hall; and it adds to her charms when she is pronounced “the prettiest little baby that ever was seen,” a regular “bewty.” The narrator thinks of Miss Jenkyns, now grey, withered, and wrinkled, and wonders whether her mother knew her in the courts of heaven, then knows that she did, and that they stand there in angelic guise.

The Published Sermon

After a great gap in the correspondence, the rector’s letters resume on the occasion of the publication of the sermon represented in the family portrait. His preaching before “My Lord Judge” and the publishing by request is plainly the culminating event of his life, requiring him to travel to London to oversee the printing, to consult many friends, and at last to entrust the onerous task to J. and J. Rivingtons. He is strung up to a high literary pitch by the occasion, breaking into Latin even when writing to his wife, as when one letter ends, “I shall ever hold the virtuous qualities of my Molly in remembrance, dum memor ipse mei, dum spiritus regit artus.” Meanwhile the endorsement on his wife’s letters has changed from “My dearest John” to “My Honoured Husband.”

Classical Poetry

The rector’s elevated mood soon produces a fit of classical composition in which his Molly figures as “Maria.” His wife endorses the letter containing the carmen as “Hebrew verses sent me by my honoured husband. I thowt 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.” A postscript in his hand notes that the Ode has appeared in the Gentleman’s Magazine for December 1782.

Mrs. Jenkyns’s Letters Home

Mrs. Jenkyns’s letters back to her husband, treasured by him as if they were M. T. Ciceronis Epistolæ, are far more serviceable to an absent husband and father than his Latinate flights are to her. She reports that Deborah sews her seam neatly every day and reads in the books he has set her; that the child is very “forrard” and good but asks questions her mother cannot answer, and so she avoids owning ignorance by stirring the fire or sending the child on an errand. Matty is now the mother’s darling and is expected (like her sister at that age) to grow into a great beauty—a hope that makes Miss Matty, hearing it read aloud, smile and sigh a little. The mother also reports on parish poor, the homely domestic medicines she has dispensed, the kitchen physic she has sent, and the cows and pigs for which she often does not get her husband’s directions.

The Unknown Brother

A second letter of exhortation from the grandfather, written after the grandmother’s death and on the birth of a little boy, is more stringent and admonitory than ever, now that there is a boy to be guarded from the snares of the world. He enumerates the various sins into which men may fall until the narrator wonders how anyone ever came to a natural death—the gallows seeming the likeliest end for most of the old gentleman’s acquaintance—and is not surprised at his describing this life as “a vale of tears.” It strikes the narrator as curious that she has never heard of this brother before, and she concludes that he must have died young, since surely his name would otherwise have been mentioned by his sisters.

Deborah’s Letters

By-and-by the women come to the packets of Miss Jenkyns’s own letters, and Miss Matty clearly regrets having to burn them. The other letters, she says, were only of interest to those who had loved the writers and it would have pained her to let them fall into the hands of strangers who had not known her dear mother, however her spelling may have erred against modern fashion; but Deborah’s letters are so very superior that anyone might profit by reading them. Miss Matty is sure she once thought Deborah could have said the same things as Mrs Chapone quite as well, and as for Mrs Carter, whose reputation rests on having translated Epictetus, Deborah would never have stooped to so common an expression as “I canna be fashed!”