Abstract
Examining consumption and consumerism in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford (1851–53), Longmuir shows that Cranford is not an exclusively nostalgic text, but is cognizant of the major economic shifts beginning to occur in the 1850s. Responding to changes in consumer habits in the wake of the 1851 Great Exhibition, the novel anticipates John Ruskin’s groundbreaking writing on consumption, particularly The Political Economy of Art (1857) and Unto this Last (1860). Challenging mid-nineteenth-century separation of feminine domestic sphere and masculine commercial sphere, Cranford’s ‘elegant economy,’ Longmuir suggests, can be understood as political economy. Like Ruskin, Gaskell’s female characters implicitly challenge two of the processes associated with the rise of commodity culture in industrial Britain: the abstraction of commodities into money value and the spectacularization of consumer goods.
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- 1.
In Volume One of Das Kapital: Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie (Capital: Critique of Political Economy) (1867), Marx notes that one of the consequences of the obfuscation of labour associated with commodity fetishism is that ‘the relations connecting the labour of one individual with that of the rest appear, not as direct social relations between individuals at work but as what they really are, material relations between persons and social relations between things’ (‘Capital, Volume One’ 321).
- 2.
Cranford is as notable for goods that are not purchased as it is for goods that are. While Miss Matty does purchase tea in Chapter 13, ‘Stopped Payment,’ she does not purchase her silk, the Town and Country Bank having collapsed (121, 123). Miss Matty’s and Mr Holbrook’s planned purchases of ‘green or red silk’ and a pair of gloves, respectively, remain unmade in Chapter 3, ‘A Love Affair of Long Ago’ (30), while Miss Pole is notorious for ‘rambling from shop to shop, not to purchase anything (except an occasional reel of cotton or a piece of tape), but to see the new articles and report upon them, and to collect all the stray pieces of intelligence in the town’ (82).
- 3.
Given the popularity of peerage reference books in Cranford (both Mrs Forrester and Mrs Jamieson own one), it is unsurprising that the town’s inhabitants explicitly believe that one’s family associations rather than personal finances determine social position. Thus, even after her impoverishment and decision to become a shopkeeper, Miss Matty does not ‘forfeit her right to the privileges of society in Cranford’ (143), because, as Mrs Jamieson decrees, ‘whereas a married woman takes her husband’s rank by the strict laws of precedence, an unmarried woman retains the station her father occupied’ (143).
- 4.
An unsigned Household Words article with the somewhat alarmist title ‘Death in the Teapot’ claimed in 1850 that ‘a great deal, if not all the common green tea used in this country is coloured artificially’ (277), while Arthur Hill Hassall noted in 1857 that ‘in his tea, of mixed or green,’ the consumer ‘would certainly not escape without the administration of a little Prussian blue, and it might be worse things’ (22).
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Longmuir, A. (2018). ‘The eatables were of the slightest description’: Consumption and Consumerism in Cranford. In: Gavin, A., de la L. Oulton, C. (eds) British Women's Writing from Brontë to Bloomsbury, Volume 1. British Women’s Writing from Brontë to Bloomsbury, 1840-1940, vol 1. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78226-3_12
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