Adventures on the High Teas by Stuart Maconie

Author:Stuart Maconie [Stuart Maconie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781407026985
Publisher: Ebury Publishing

People who don't like Jane Austen will often quite like Mrs Gaskell. Don't be put off by the name. It makes her sound dreadfully severe and fusty and schoolmarmish. In fact, by all accounts Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell was witty, principled and something of a rebel, although in the one picture I have seen of her she really ought to have done something different with her hair.

She lived into the age of photography – just – and in books such as Mary Barton and North and South she displays something Jane Austen barely touches upon, an awareness of the economic structures around her and political issues of the day. Mary Barton has been compared to the work of Engels in its unflinching critique of the conditions endured by Manchester's Victorian working class, and North and South views the industrial conflicts of the north-west through the eyes of a sensitive woman from the south. The latter was originally serialised in Charles Dickens' magazine Household Words. She must often have been late with her copy as Chas once said of her in exasperation, 'Oh Mrs Gaskell. If I were Mr G, O how I would beat her.'

In between these two social tracts is a very different book, a sweet almost Austenish thing about the genteel if disadvantaged folk of Middle England. It was too sweet for Virginia Woolf: 'too great a refinement gives Cranford that prettiness which is the weakest thing about it, making it, superficially at least, the favourite copy for gentle writers who have hired rooms over the village post-office'. Not everyone was as sniffy; Cranford is many people's favourite of all Mrs G's oeuvre. Just as in North and South Milton stands for Manchester, so Mrs G modelled her Cranford on a real Cheshire town, one waiting sleepily and nervously and a little snobbishly for the coming of the railways. Nowadays you're more likely to come across a premiership footballer in designer sunglasses here than Judi Dench in a bonnet. But Knutsford is still genteel. Hardly disadvantaged, though, unless you count not changing the Lamborghini this year as an index of poverty.

Around the north-west, Knutsford has always been thought of as a cut above, not least by Knutsford itself. It lies contented and secure, at least pre-credit crunch, in the rich fat Shires of Cheshire stockbroker land now colonised by a different kind of highflier, the Dimitars, Cristianos and, er, Waynes who comprise football's global elite. They play half an hour up the road – less, if you're driving a Lamborghini – at Old Trafford. In less privileged parts of the north-west – you'll know this if, like me, you grew up there – Knutsford has always been spoken of as having a certain sophistication and class. Moving there was a sign of rocketing social mobility. Not that anyone I knew ever did. A 'comedy' punk band called The Macc Lads have a song called 'Knutsford Scabby Women' sung lewdly to the tune of 'Nutbush City Limits' but this is clearly just the raging inferiority complex inherent in coming from nearby Macclesfield.

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