CONSERVATION OF SYMPATHY INCRANFORD

Abstract

By the mid-nineteenth century, British women had ample motivation for imagining forms of charity that did not require money. Property laws continued to deprive most married women of personal wealth and new statistics revealed a “surplus” of unmarried middle-class women lacking employment. Elizabeth Gaskell addressed these financial challenges by envisioning alternative forms of economic power for women. Her novellaCranford(1851–53) depicts a community of shabby-genteel women who support each other, in the virtual absence of men, through gift practices. Using principles of sympathetic and economic conservation,Cranford'ssystem of exchange reworks material limitations, turning these women's lack of private property to their advantage.Cranfordis among a number of mid-century works that treat sympathetic exchange in a sustained manner and on an expanded scale, writing women's charity in terms of sympathy and sisterhood rather than coin. By doing so, it not only co-opts the traditional province of the upper class by pitting middle-class women's care-giving against unfeeling wealth, but also defines a sympathetic gift economy in opposition to the masculinized marketplace essential to such models of charity as that of Dickens's turkey-buying Scrooge.

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