Cranford

Captain Brown at Cranford Social Events

At the evening card party given in the narrator’s honor by Miss Jenkyns, the Captain and the Miss Browns are invited, to general curiosity about how a man will fit into Cranford’s female festivities. Card-tables with green baize are set by daylight, candles and clean packs of cards arranged, the fire made up, and the neat maid given her directions. Three ladies sit down to “Preference”; the next four go to another table; and presently tea-trays of delicate egg-shell china and glittering old silver appear, though the eatables are of the slightest. When the Browns arrive, ruffled brows are smoothed and sharp voices lowered; the Captain at once assumes the man’s place, attending to every one’s wants and relieving the maid by waiting on empty cups and bread-and-butterless ladies, all with easy dignity. He plays for threepenny points as gravely as for pounds, yet keeps a watchful eye on his suffering elder daughter. Miss Jessie, unable to play cards, talks amiably to the sitters-out and sings “Jock of Hazeldean”—a little out of tune—to an old cracked piano that was once a spinet, while Miss Jenkyns beats time, out of time, to appear musical.

第一章

This chapter unfolds at a card party in Cranford, where a sequence of social mishaps and literary clashes expose the characters’ pride, class-consciousness, and cultural pretensions. The central event is a debate between Miss Jenkyns and Captain Brown over the merits of Dr Johnson’s Rasselas versus Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers, which escalates into a reading contest and ends with Miss Jenkyns declaring her unwavering preference for Dr Johnson.