Cranford

Miss Matty Relents on Followers

On the evening of the day they learned of Holbrook’s death, Miss Matty, silent and thoughtful through prayers, calls Martha back. She tells the young woman she may, if she meets a respectable young man she likes, receive him as a visitor once a week, adding in a low voice, “God forbid! that I should grieve any young hearts,” as though providing against some distant contingency.

Jem Hearn Approved

Martha, ready and eager, immediately names Jem Hearn—a joiner earning three-and-sixpence a day and standing six foot one in his stocking-feet—promising that anyone will vouch for his steadiness and that he would gladly come the very next night. Startled by this ready-made suitor, Miss Matty nonetheless submits to Fate and Love.

KAPITEL V.

Chapter V, titled “Old Letters,” opens with the narrator’s reflection on individual small economies and careful penny-pinching habits before settling into the evening when Miss Matty Jenkyns and the narrator read through and burn a packet of family correspondence spanning the late eighteenth century. The chapter weaves together intimate domestic detail, the rector’s courtship and marriage to Molly, the publication of his sermon, his brief foray into classical verse, and Miss Matty’s reluctant destruction of her sister Deborah’s superior letters.

Personal Economies

The narrator observes that nearly everyone harbors a peculiar private economy—an idiosyncratic habit of saving fractions of pennies in some particular direction—whose disturbance irritates far more than genuine extravagance. She describes an old gentleman who bore the loss of his savings in a failed joint-stock bank with stoic calm but fretted all day over torn leaves in his useless bank-book, and who turned every envelope inside out for reuse. The narrator confesses her own foible is string: her pockets are full of little hanks, she cannot bear to see parcels untied by cutting, and she treasures a six-year-old india-rubber ring she could never bring herself to use. Others, she notes, are grieved by small wasted pieces of butter and the careless way some people take more than they want.

Miss Matty’s Candle Economy

Miss Matty Jenkyns, like the narrator and her acquaintances, has her own private thrifty habit—she is chary of candles. In winter afternoons she sits knitting for hours in the dark or by firelight, and when the narrator asks for a candle to finish her stitching, Miss Matty tells her to “keep blind man’s holiday.” Candles are usually brought in only at tea, and then just one is burnt at a time. Because they live in constant readiness for a friend who might drop in (but never does), Miss Matty contrives to keep two candles of equal length on hand, taking turns lighting them, and her eyes are habitually fixed on the current candle so she can extinguish it and light the other before they grow too uneven.

Blind Man’s Holiday

One particular evening, the candle economy exasperates the narrator, who has grown weary of her compulsory “blind man’s holiday,” especially as Miss Matty has dozed off by the fire and she dares not stir it for fear of waking her. Miss Matty, asleep, murmurs names of people long dead, as if dreaming of her youth. When Martha brings in the lighted candle and tea, Miss Matty starts into wakefulness with a bewildered look, briefly wears a sad expression on recognizing the narrator, and then recovers her usual smile. Over tea her conversation drifts to her childhood, and from there to the long-deferred task of sorting through the family letters.

Fetching the Old Letters

Moved by her mood, Miss Matty rises after tea and goes for the old letters—in the dark, since she prides herself on the precise neatness of her rooms and frowns on lighting a bed-candle to fetch anything from another chamber. When she returns, the room carries a faint, pleasant smell of Tonquin beans, a scent the narrator always associates with things that belonged to Miss Matty’s mother. The bundle is made up of yellow love-letters sixty or seventy years old, addressed to the mother, and Miss Matty undoes it with a sigh she immediately stifles, as if it were wrong to regret the passing of time or life.