Cranford

Mrs. Jenkyns’s Letters Home

Mrs. Jenkyns’s letters back to her husband, treasured by him as if they were M. T. Ciceronis Epistolæ, are far more serviceable to an absent husband and father than his Latinate flights are to her. She reports that Deborah sews her seam neatly every day and reads in the books he has set her; that the child is very “forrard” and good but asks questions her mother cannot answer, and so she avoids owning ignorance by stirring the fire or sending the child on an errand. Matty is now the mother’s darling and is expected (like her sister at that age) to grow into a great beauty—a hope that makes Miss Matty, hearing it read aloud, smile and sigh a little. The mother also reports on parish poor, the homely domestic medicines she has dispensed, the kitchen physic she has sent, and the cows and pigs for which she often does not get her husband’s directions.

The Unknown Brother

A second letter of exhortation from the grandfather, written after the grandmother’s death and on the birth of a little boy, is more stringent and admonitory than ever, now that there is a boy to be guarded from the snares of the world. He enumerates the various sins into which men may fall until the narrator wonders how anyone ever came to a natural death—the gallows seeming the likeliest end for most of the old gentleman’s acquaintance—and is not surprised at his describing this life as “a vale of tears.” It strikes the narrator as curious that she has never heard of this brother before, and she concludes that he must have died young, since surely his name would otherwise have been mentioned by his sisters.