![]() ![]() Cranford is all about how we cling to the past, for good or ill: it is a novel about the pleasures, and pain, of nostalgia – the hank of string we cling to, lest we unravel altogether. Hoarding string might seem a perverse way to come at the charm of Cranford, Elizabeth Gaskell’s much loved but somewhat under-valued series of stories from the early 1850s. ![]() I have really tried to use it: but my heart failed me, and I could not commit the extravagance.’ Oh, don’t talk about India-rubber rings! ‘I have one which is not new,’ our narrator tells us, ‘one that I picked up off the floor, nearly six years ago. My pockets get full of little hanks of it, picked up and twisted together, ready for uses that never come.’ And elastic bands – or, as Cranford puts it, India-rubber rings. The narrator of Cranford (1851–3) knows all about hoarding. It’s no use turning to Marie Kondo in this sort of situation what I recommend is Elizabeth Gaskell. These are a few of the reasons why I cannot sit in my own front room, although there are more. But now she’s propped against moving boxes, still not unpacked. Look: here she is, smiling in her nurse’s uniform in the photograph that used to sit upon the mantelpiece. A bundle of yellowing letters, in my mother’s hand. A tin of buttons, their parent garments long decayed. ![]()
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