SOURCE: "Cranford and the Victorian Collection," in Victorian Studies, Vol. 36, No. 2, Winter, 1993, pp. 179-206.

In the excerpt that follows, Dolin examines Gaskell's Cranford as a paradigm of the Victorian experience, specifically because it is organized as a collection of anecdotes centering around women's lives.

The freight of Victorian things remaining in our own century has left historians with a plentiful resource, but also with a number of special problems. One has only to pause in a recreated drawing-room, at a genre painting, or over a passage of description in a novel, to sense the abundance and oppressiveness of a famously cluttered age. In The Victorian Treasure-House, Peter Conrad elicits something of this ponderousness when he pieces together a composite picture of the Victorian frame of mind by showing how things were implicated in cultural forms, scientific practices, and middle-class domestic ideology. The emphasis he places on materiality is...