Cranford.

Green cloth binding with gilt title on the spine and front board.

A lovely book with a good pedigree

First edition of this work was in 1853, so this is a reprint. Green boards have gilt text and decorations on spine and front. Spine shows gilt wall clock with long chained weights and pendulum, front has twice blind stamped rectangle gilt title and author in inner. Back board has blind stamped Bliss Sands colophon on bottom edge.

Cranford is an episodic novel by the English writer Elizabeth Gaskell. It first appeared in instalments in the magazine Household Words, then was published with minor revisions as a book with the title Cranford in 1853. The work slowly became popular and from the start of the 20th century it saw a number of dramatic treatments for the stage, the radio and TV.

Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell(née Stevenson; 29 September 1810 – 12 November 1865), often referred to as Mrs. Gaskell, was an English novelist, biographer, and short story writer. Her novels offer a detailed portrait of the lives of many strata of Victorian society, including the very poor. Her work is of interest to social historians as well as readers of literature. Her first novel, Mary Barton, was published in 1848. Gaskell's The Life of Charlotte Brontë, published in 1857, was the first biography of Charlotte Brontë. In this biography, she wrote only of the moral, sophisticated things in Brontë's life; the rest she left out, deciding that certain, more salacious aspects were better kept hidden. Among Gaskell's best-known novels are Cranford (1851–53), North and South (1854–55), and Wives and Daughters (1865), each having been adapted for television by the BBC.