Cranford

第五章

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.