Cranford

Reluctant to Burn

Miss Matty’s reluctance to burn Deborah’s letters is unmistakable: she will not let them be carelessly skipped through in a quiet reading to herself, but takes them from the narrator and even lights the second candle so she can read them aloud with proper emphasis and without stumbling over the big words. The reading drags on for two long nights, the narrator longing all the while for facts rather than reflections, and confessing that she used the time to think of many other things—yet she was always at her post at the end of each sentence.

CAPÍTULO V.

Chapter V opens with a description of the physical characteristics of letters written by various members of the Jenkyns family, then turns to Miss Jenkyns’s distinctive letter-writing style, her alarmed correspondence from Newcastle-upon-Tyne during the feared Napoleonic invasion of 1805, and concludes with the schoolboy misadventures of Peter Marmaduke Arley Jenkyns as recorded in his correspondence with his father.

Jenkyns Family Letter Physical Traits

The rector’s letters, along with those of his wife and mother-in-law, were short, pithy, and written in a straight hand on yellowed paper with brown ink, sometimes filling only a scrap. The sheets were old original post stamped with a post-boy riding for life. The women’s letters were sealed with large red wafers, while the rector affixed an immense coat of arms, expecting recipients to cut rather than break the seal. The correspondence reveals that franks were commonly used both as free postage and as a means of paying debts by impecunious Members of Parliament.

Miss Jenkyns’s Letter Writing Quirks

Miss Jenkyns’s letters dated from a later period and were written on the old-fashioned square sheet. Her careful hand and fondness for many-syllabled words filled every line, and she took particular pride in crossing her letters. Her prose grew increasingly sesquipedalian toward the end, to the confusion of her sister Miss Matty, who once misread “Herod, Tetrarch of Idumea” as “Herod Petrarch of Etruria” and remained satisfied with her error.

1805 Newcastle Invasion Letters

Around 1805, during a visit to friends near Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Miss Jenkyns wrote her longest series of letters concerning preparations to repel a feared invasion by Buonaparte at the mouth of the Tyne. She described packed bundles of clothes ready for flight to Alston Moor, church bells rung as a warning signal, and a genuine alarm raised during a Newcastle dinner-party. Recounting the breathless shock of the false alarm, she reflected on the triviality of past fears—though Miss Matty interrupted to recall her own night-time terrors, her father’s sermons casting Napoleon as Apollyon and Abaddon, and parish talk of hiding in the salt mines.

Peter Jenkyns’s School Misadventures

Peter Marmaduke Arley Jenkyns, now at school in Shrewsbury, sent his father highly mental show letters filled with accounts of his studies, classical quotations, and intellectual aspirations, though the animal nature of the boy occasionally surfaced in a hurried plea for a cake with plenty of citron. The rector, invigorated by his son’s Latin, responded in kind, but it soon became clear that “poor Peter” was frequently in scrapes, writing stilted notes of penitence. Among them was a poorly written, blotted note to his mother promising to be a better boy—a note Miss Matty could not read without weeping, and which she carefully preserved in her own room.

CAPÍTULO VI.

Chapter VI, titled “Poor Peter,” recounts through Miss Matty’s narration the tragic downfall of Peter Jenkyns, the younger brother of Miss Matty and Deborah. Once a Shrewsbury schoolboy with a bright future mapped out by family and friends, Peter becomes infamous for practical jokes that eventually culminate in a devastating public flogging by his father, prompting him to disappear and secretly enlist in the navy during wartime. The chapter traces this arc from hopeful expectations through pranks and humiliation to a sorrowful separation that permanently alters the Jenkyns family.

POOR PETER

The chapter opens by contrasting Peter’s cheerful, well-laid future—Shrewsbury School, Cambridge honours, and a church living from his godfather Sir Peter Arley—with the very different fate that actually befell him. Miss Matty, who narrates the whole story, finds it a relief to share the account. Peter’s trajectory transforms him from a promising young man into a figure of pathos, encapsulated in the chapter’s title “Poor Peter.”