Letters kept, letters destroyed
Given the fragility of letters, it’s astounding how many have survived centuries and even millennia. Added to which it seems...
Off the peg thoughts
A fine metaphor for a mind incapable of original thought or phrasing. The lady has a stock of ready-made comments...
Eagerly-tended refreshments
You can see the gushing, fawning manner of shopkeepers keen to please the Chief Procurement Officers of the nearby grand home.
...
Sea-stained letters
A source of sorrow to the Hale family is the injustice inflicted on their son and brother, Frederick. Wanted for...
Plus ça change…
There’s something reassuring in seeing that what appears an ‘issue’ today appeared equally so to people long ago. It puts...
A cut above the rest
The clear-cut class divide wasn’t as neat and sharp as the speaker’s comments imply. In fact, there was some fluidity...
Lead-coloured cloud
This ‘lead-covered’ cloud symbolises the mood of the family as they approach the ‘grim North’, and soon they smell the...
Letters tolerably long
Gaskell has many Jane Austen touches in cheerily summing up lightweight characters. But inconsequent as the letter and the writer...
OK in bits, but not on the whole
This is a classic case of ‘damning with faint praise’. The individual’s component bits just made it to ‘very nice’...
Many-windowed factory
The Hale family’s first sight of their new home is grim and constrained, comprising small, brick houses dotted among ‘many-windowed...
Three-tailed bashaw
In this story, the stepmother isn’t wicked, she’s just stupid and pretentious. And calculating. She has a daughter and a...
Kind-hearted termagant
Great word ‘termagant’, sadly underused and, referring as it does to bad-tempered women, no doubt politically unacceptable. Here it describes...
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