Cranford

Mr Holbrook’s Hospitality

Mr Holbrook greets them at the door in great effervescence of hospitality, looking like the narrator’s idea of Don Quixote. His respectable housekeeper welcomes the elder ladies upstairs while the narrator asks to see the garden. Mr Holbrook, evidently pleased, leads her all around the property, showing her his twenty-six cows named after the letters of the alphabet, and along the way surprises her with apt quotations from Shakespeare, George Herbert, and modern poets, spoken as naturally as thoughts aloud.

The Garden Tour

Mr Holbrook gives the narrator a tour of his garden and grounds, displaying his six-and-twenty cows, each named for a different letter of the alphabet. As they walk, he quotes poetry with ease and feeling, demonstrating the literary tastes and solitary country contentment that characterise him.

Dinner in the Kitchen

Dinner is laid in the kitchen, a room with oak dressers and cupboards, a Turkey carpet on the flag-floor, and an unused oven that hints it could easily be made into a handsome parlour. The ladies are expected in a stiff, ugly apartment, but Mr Holbrook prefers his “counting-house,” filled with books that strew the floor, table, and walls—evidence of an extravagance of which he is half ashamed and half proud.

The Two-Pronged Forks

The company is dismayed at dinner to find only two-pronged black-handled forks for the ducks and green peas. Miss Matty spears peas one by one like Aminé from the Arabian tale, Miss Pole sighs and leaves hers untouched, while the narrator watches the host shovelling them wholesale into his mouth with his round-ended knife and imitates him successfully, though the ladies cannot bring themselves to do anything so ungenteel.