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.