Thomas Recchio. Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford: A Publishing History. Burlington: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2009. ISBN: 9780754665731. Price: US$104.95

The first chapter of this study considers the serial publication of Cranford in relation to its original context in Charles Dickens’s Household Words, where it initially and irregularly appeared between December 1851 and May 1853. Discussing the placement of the text, Recchio argues that “relations of contiguity in reading become dialogic relations” (63). To take one example, in his demonstration of the “more than merely miscellaneous” mix of materials in each issue (46), he reveals how an 1851 article on “The Merchant Seaman’s Fund”—which, after being established for the benefit of wounded mariners and their families was about to be closed—might have benefited from its placement following the fictional death of Captain Brown and the near-destitution of his daughter in Cranford (48). This chapter places particular stress on the orientalist and economic threads of the novella, showing “the ways in which the material surrounding the Cranford papers encourages particular interpretive emphases” (51). Highlights of the chapter include Recchio’s discussion of how the “uncertainty and discomfort […] of the ladies’ response to the Indians” (51) approximates the ambivalent approach of Dickens’s 1852 article “Pearls from the East,” connects the tale to the British imperial project, and ultimately becomes “a strategy to encourage community cohesiveness” (57). Recchio’s analysis of contemporary reviews of Cranford is nuanced but left me wondering why a publishing history that otherwise does such an admirable job of working with primary sources would rely on “the two reviews [Angus] Easson has excerpted for us” in a volume of reviews collected two decades ago (65), even if “[t]he substance and tone of these reviews set a precedent for subsequent judgments of Cranford” (66). Also puzzling to me in this chapter was its discussion of late-century fiction “that evokes with various degrees of specificity Cranford as ur-text” (66). Despite the engaging nature of this material, it struck me as out of place in a larger argument about the tale’s original context, contiguity, and dialogue and might have been more effective in a chapter on textual adaptations. In his second chapter, Recchio provides detailed readings of three illustrators’ visual representations of Cranford. A discussion of George du Maurier’s 1864 illustrated edition emphasizes how the visual focus on human relationships “suggest a plot […] and in so doing […] can be said to have made Cranford into a novel” (85). In contrast with assessments that this tale—as “a depiction of place” and a “way of life”—lacked “a narrative center” (85), Recchio argues that “du Maurier’s illustrations highlight the psychological drama of Miss Matty, whose fundamental desires come into conflict with community practices in unspoken but inexorable ways” (92). However, the popular and influential illustrations of Cranford by Hugh Thomson in 1891—images which, as Recchio notes in his subsequent discussion of stage adaptations, would govern many theatrical performances of Gaskell’s work as well—pass over this “sense of narrative” (94) in favor of a “sense of the past as pleasant retrospect” (97) or nostalgia. Reading Thomson’s images as “a response to two related cultural anxieties […]: the perception of the degeneration of the English people and of the decadence of literature” (98), Recchio makes a persuasive case that they “functioned as a visual counter-argument” to these fears (99) and “seem less engaged in interpreting Cranford as a novel than in […] connect[ing] the novel to an idea of a visually recognizable, quintessential English nation” (113). Discussions of illustrated editions, like the earlier discussion of Household Words, show how Cranford’s domestic concerns are also of national importance. The increasingly visible presence of India in illustrated editions highlights British ambivalence about empire …