Elizabeth Gaskell: The Making of Cranford

 Photographs:

1. Elizabeth Gaskell’s Grave in Brook Street Chapel Graveyard in Knutsford
2. The entrance to Brook Street Chapel Graveyard in Knutsford
3. “Miss Matty’s Teashop”. The house which  Elizabeth Gaskell imagined as Miss Matty’s
4. The Heath, Aunt Lumb’s house in Knutsford where Elizabeth Gaskell grew up

Elizabeth Gaskell was  born Elzabeth Stevenson in Chelsea, a fashionable area of London, in 1810. She was only thirteen months old when her mother died and in some ways, this was the central event of her life; it is certainly the central theme of her fiction.

She was rescued by her mother’s sister, Hannah Lumb, who offered to bring up the child in the country air of Knutsford, a small market town in Cheshire, in the north of England. William Stevenson, her father, radical journalist and Unitarian minister, agreed immediately. The baby was taken from Chelsea to Knutsford by a neighbour, and her new life began.

In a short time, William re-married and a half-brother and sister were born. Although Elizabeth was occasionally sent for, she felt out of place among his new family, disliked her stepmother and was always unhappy in London. The one exception was the time spent with her beloved elder brother, John, the one survivor of seven siblings.

Knutsford, with its great houses of Tatton Park, Arley Hall and Tabley Hall nearby, remained the true home of her inner life, inspiring her through thirty three years of married life in ‘dear old, dull, ugly, smoky, grim, grey Manchester’. It was a rich mine for her fiction, appearing in many guises: as Cranford itself, as Duncombe in Mr Harrison’s Confessions,as Eltham in Cousin Phillisand as Hollingford in her late masterpiece, Wives and Daughters.

Aunt Lumb lived with her crippled daughter, Catherine, on the edge of the famous Heath in Knutsford where horse races were run and cricket balls flew. Her house was a pleasant brick-built, double-fronted Queen Anne building with a richly-stocked country garden of trees, flowers, fruit and vegetables at the back. A meadow stretched beyond. Aunt Lumb’s ducks and geese, pigs and poultry and even, like Miss Betsy in Cranford, a cow, gave the little girl an interest and skills which would re-surface in quite another setting.