Cranford

Burning the Love Letters

When the courtship letters have all been read, Miss Matty looks doubtfully at the narrator and says, “We must burn them, I think. No one will care for them when I am gone.” One by one she drops them into the middle of the fire, watching each blaze up, die out, and rise in faint white ghostly semblance up the chimney before surrendering the next to the same fate. The room is now bright enough, but the narrator, like Miss Matty, is held by the sight of those honest, manly heartbeats going up in smoke.

A Grandfather’s Exhortation

The next letter, likewise docketed by Miss Jenkyns, is endorsed “Letter of pious congratulation and exhortation from my venerable grandfather to my beloved mother, on occasion of my own birth. Also some practical remarks on the desirability of keeping warm the extremities of infants, from my excellent grandmother.” The first portion is a stern, forceful depiction of a mother’s responsibilities and a warning against evils lying in ghastly wait for a baby only two days old. The grandfather explains that his wife has not written because he has forbidden it, she being indisposed with a sprained ankle that, he says, quite incapacitated her from holding a pen. At the foot of the page, however, stands a small “T.O.,” and on turning it over one finds her letter after all.

The Grandmother’s Advice

Turned over, the page reveals a letter to “my dear, dearest Molly,” begging her, when she leaves her room, to go upstairs before going down, and instructing her to wrap the baby’s feet in flannel and keep it warm by the fire even in summer, because babies are so tender. The correspondence exchanged between the young mother and the grandmother makes it touching to watch girlish vanity being gradually weeded out of the mother’s heart by love for her baby.