Cranford

Deborah’s Letters

By-and-by the women come to the packets of Miss Jenkyns’s own letters, and Miss Matty clearly regrets having to burn them. The other letters, she says, were only of interest to those who had loved the writers and it would have pained her to let them fall into the hands of strangers who had not known her dear mother, however her spelling may have erred against modern fashion; but Deborah’s letters are so very superior that anyone might profit by reading them. Miss Matty is sure she once thought Deborah could have said the same things as Mrs Chapone quite as well, and as for Mrs Carter, whose reputation rests on having translated Epictetus, Deborah would never have stooped to so common an expression as “I canna be fashed!”

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.

第五章

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.