Shannon and Marshall read London alongside the city of Manchester, and the fictional town of Cranford in their chapter, which takes some of the decade’s industrial novels and examines them through the lens of sustainability. The chapter is mindful that it is in this period that industrialisation and globalisation begin to achieve the capacity that we are now seeking to control as we realise the environmental devastation of their proliferation; and that industrial success is based on a deeply unsustainable exploitation of human and natural resources. The authors argue that though Dickens and Gaskell did not have the language of sustainability that is available to us, nonetheless their work begins to recognise the costs of British trade domination. The picture is complicated by the novelists’ own dependence on the industrialisation of publishing, its increasingly necessary global reach, and the tight deadlines of the serialised novel, on which periodical publications depended.

Mary Howitt, Anna Mary Howitt, and Elizabeth Gaskell, who knew Jameson, extended her cross-cultural exchange across several genres left untouched by their precursor. Unlike Jameson, Howitt’s and Gaskell’s maternal roles were factors in their Anglo–German exchange. Mary Howitt authored a young adult novel set in Heidelberg (Which is the Wiser?) in which ethnoexocentrism is central to courtship. Another novella, Margaret von Ehrenberg, the Artist-Wife, drew upon her daughter Anna Mary’s experiences and writings as an art student in Munich; it addresses troubled marriage and the importance of professions for women. Anna Mary Howitt’s memoir An Art-Student in Munich is structured by the writer’s growth from narrow English national and religious identity to openness to Germans’ cultural, class, and religious differences, and by her movement from a marginalised foreign female art student to her acceptance as a German art student at the climactic artist’s ball. Gaskell adapts Anglo–German cultural exchange to probe the dangers posed by intercultural courtship and to innovate gender reversals in female and male characters in two short stories that draw on sensation fiction and German idyl.

This chapter considers the unobtrusive words, the conjunctions, and the grammar of Victorian realist prose, drawing on examples from Elizabeth Gaskell, Margaret Oliphant and Anthony Trollope. The styles of Victorian realist fiction are shown to lodge within their very grammar a psychology of style; they register in the turns and returns of their sentences, in their ‘forms of retardation, inference, and backwards-reappraisal’, thinking and reflection from within the midst of narrated experience.

The third chapter, “Life After the Marriage Plot,” examines how the women of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford preserve a temporal zone from the dual threat of patriarchy and modernization. The late-life romance between Miss Matty and Mr. Holbrook—a marriage plot without the possibility of marriage—generates narrative interest because it follows a set of temporal rules that originate from within Cranford rather than conforming to conventions about age and romantic love from outside the community. The superannuation of persons relates to a similar crisis in the marriage plot, which no longer reflects the experience of the older characters it purports to organize. Thus, I read Cranford’s representation of other forms of media—such as storytelling, the newspaper, and the letter—as a reflection on the formal obsolescence that takes place within the larger narrative economy of the novel. What emerges is a reconceptualization of the utility of what is “old,” insofar as the women of Cranford reterritorialize the obsolete as a particularly feminine challenge to the temporality of modernity.