MALTHUSIAN MENOPAUSE: AGING AND SEXUALITY IN ELIZABETH GASKELL'SCRANFORD

I N AN EARLY VERSION of Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford sketches, “The Last Generation of England” (1849), the narrator expresses a “wish…to put upon record some of the details of country town life,…for even in small towns, scarcely removed from villages, the phases of society are rapidly changing” (319). Before she begins her ethnographic preservation project, however, the narrator provides a disclaimer, suggesting the difficulty of categorizing the various aspects of what she is about to write: “As for classing the details with which I am acquainted under any heads, that will be impossible from their heterogeneous nature; I must write them down as they arise in my memory” (319). She then goes on to provide precisely what she claims is impossible–a categorical litany of the local inhabitants, beginning with the daughters of “very old” families who, “if unmarried, retired to live in–on their annuities, and gave the ton to the society there” (319). The reader is quickly taken through the town's social register, from “widows of the cadets of these same families,” to “professional men and their wives,” to a “grade lower…a class of single or widow ladies,” and on “[b]elow again,” to “the shopkeepers,” “the usual respectable and disrespectable poor,” and “a set of young men, [hanging about] ready for mischief and brutality” (319–20). Through her description, the narrator performs a double disavowal; heterogeneity prevents classification, but that very heterogeneity is itself what produces the need to classify. The rural society that serves as a precursor to Cranford (1851–53) represents a diversity that must be categorized–its hierarchy organized according to its uniqueness of place. Rendered as particular, readily-identifiable positions within the eccentric space of provincial English society, Cranford's denizens are inscribed through the Victorian fascination with taxonomy–a fascination with the seemingly paradoxical possibilities of “classing the details.”