Cranford

Captain Brown’s Initial Ostracism

Captain Brown’s arrival at Cranford causes general dismay. He is not only a man in a society of women, but a half-pay captain who has obtained a position on the very railroad the town petitioned against, and—worst of all—he openly speaks of being poor, in a loud military voice, in the public street, as a reason for not taking a particular house. The Cranford ladies, who have tacitly agreed that poverty must never be named in polite ears, resolve to send him to Coventry.

Captain Brown’s Earned Respect

Yet Captain Brown gradually earns respect. Blind to small slights, friendly in the face of coolness, and answering sarcastic compliments in good faith, he overcomes the ladies’ shrinking with his manly frankness. His masculine common sense and skill at devising domestic expedients give him an extraordinary position as authority. The chapter illustrates this with the tale of Miss Betsy Barker’s Alderney cow, which falls into a lime-pit and is rescued hairless and shivering; Miss Betsy weeps and considers an oil bath, but Captain Brown decisively prescribes a flannel waistcoat and flannel drawers—or, better still, killing the creature at once. His jesting advice is taken in earnest, and soon the whole town watches the cow going meekly to pasture in dark grey flannel.

The Brown Family of Cranford

Captain Brown, upwards of sixty but wiry and elastic in figure, with a stiff military throw-back of the head and a springing step, lives in a small house on the outskirts of town with his two daughters. Miss Brown, the elder, looks almost as old as her father—about forty, plain, hard-featured, sickly, and careworn, with the gaiety of youth long faded. Miss Jessie Brown is ten years younger and “twenty shades prettier”: round-faced, dimpled, with large blue wondering eyes, an unformed snub nose, red dewy lips, and little rows of curls that give her a childlike air she will probably never lose. Miss Jenkyns, in a fit of anger at the Captain, will declare it is time Jessie left off her dimples. Jessie has her father’s jauntiness of gait and dresses about two pounds per annum more expensively than her elder sister—a large sum in the Captain’s finances. On their first appearance together at Cranford Church, the Captain holds his double eye-glass during the Morning Hymn and then sings out loudly and joyfully, drowning the piping clerk.