Cranford

Family Search for Peter

The family mounted a frantic search, with Mr Jenkyns sending servants in all directions and the parents walking endlessly from room to room, calling for Peter. Miss Matty sent word to Mr Holbrook, who had been kind to Peter and taught him to fish, but he was away and had not seen the boy. Old Clare’s grim suggestion of dragging the ponds from the weir nearly broke Miss Matty with horror. Mr Jenkyns wept openly when his wife could not comfort him, and her soft eyes never recovered, taking on a permanently restless, searching look. Miss Matty wrote for Deborah to come home, and when she arrived she took charge.

Peter’s Navy Enlistment

Peter had made his way to Liverpool, where, with war then raging and the king’s ships lying off the mouth of the Mersey, he enlisted as a sailor. Standing five foot nine and described as a fine likely boy, he was welcomed aboard. The captain wrote to Peter’s father, and Peter wrote to his mother. The chapter thus reveals Peter’s fate as a sudden and decisive flight into a military life at sea, far from the broken home he left behind.

Mrs Jenkyns’s Unopened Letter

While searching for letters related to Peter, Miss Matty and the narrator light a candle and discover, alongside the captain’s letter and Peter’s own, a small simple begging letter from Mrs Jenkyns addressed to Peter at the house of an old schoolfellow. The letter had been returned unopened by that schoolfellow and had been inadvertently filed with other correspondence from that period, remaining sealed and unread ever since. This unopened letter becomes a poignant relic of the family’s anguish and Peter’s abrupt departure.