Mary Smith is a young woman from the industrial city of Drumble in England who frequently visits the small town of Cranford. When away, she remains abreast of events through correspondence with her friends, telling the stories of Cranford's illustrious citizens, and sympathetically portraying transformation of a small town customs and values in mid Victorian England. Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-1865) was an English novelist and short story writer. Her novels offer a detailed portrait of the lives of many strata of Victorian society, including the very poor, and are of interest to social historians as well as lovers of literature. Some of Gaskell's best known novels are Cranford, North and South, and Wives and Daughters.

Tracing the publishing history of Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford from its initial 1851-53 serialization in Dickens's Household Words through its numerous editions and adaptations, Thomas Recchio focuses especially on how the text has been deployed to support ideas related to nation and national identity. Recchio maps Cranford's nineteenth-century reception in Britain and the United States through illustrated editions in England dating from 1864 and their subsequent re-publication in the United States, US school editions in the first two decades of the twentieth century, dramatic adaptations from 1899 to 2007, and Anglo-American literary criticism in the latter half of the twentieth century. Making extensive use of primary materials, Recchio considers Cranford within the context of the Victorian periodical press, contemporary reviews, theories of text and word relationships in illustrated books, community theater, and digital media. In addition to being a detailed publishing history that emphasizes the material forms of the book and its adaptations, Recchio's book is a narrative of Cranford's evolution from an auto-ethnography of a receding mid-Victorian English way of life to a novel that was deployed as a maternal model to define an American sensibility for early twentieth-century Mediterranean and Eastern European immigrants. While focusing on one novel, Recchio offers a convincing micro-history of the way English literature was positioned in England and the United States to support an Anglo-centric cultural project, to resist the emergence of multicultural societies, and to ensure an unchanging notion of a stable English culture on both sides of the Atlantic.

Cranford is one of the better-known novels of the 19th-century English writer Elizabeth Gaskell. It was first published, irregularly, in eight instalments, between December 1851 and May 1853, in the magazine Household Words, which was edited by Charles Dickens. It was then published, with minor revision, in book form in 1853

Vol. for 1867 includes Illustrated catalogue of the Paris Universal Exhibition.

Residents of Cranford greeted the publication of a photographic history of their community with tremendous enthusiasm in 1995. For the first time, significant people and events in the township's past were celebrated in a vivid record available to all. The authors of that volume--Robert Fridlington and Lawrence Fuhro--have worked together again to produce an all-new second book on Cranford that includes many newly discovered images. Cranford Volume II covers the history of the town from 1871 to 1960, and highlights its role as a riverside resort and suburb. Images of well-known Cranford residents like pure-food crusader Alice Lakey and beloved high school coach J. Seth Weekly are also featured, documenting the unique contributions of these citizens to their hometown.

The story of suburban Cranford, New Jersey, began after the Civil War as wealthy New Yorkers came to the area for the fresh air and the beautiful Rahway River that winds through town. After its incorporation in 1871, the town grew as neighborhoods like Roosevelt Manor, Lincoln Park, and Sunny Acres were established by Albert Eastman, Alden Bigelow, Miln Dayton, J. Walter Thompson, Severin Droescher, and the Sears Roebuck Company. Public buildings like the Opera House Block and the Cranford Casino and grand private houses were designed by local architect Frank Lent. Celebrations on the Rahway River gave birth to the nickname the "Venice of New Jersey." Meanwhile, the citizens of Cranford went about daily life, shopping downtown, going to school, attending services at houses of worship, and working at local businesses. As the town celebrates its 150th anniversary in 2021, Celebrating Cranford illustrates Cranford's story and highlights its citizens, some well known and some overlooked in the past.