Talia Schaffer - Craft, Authorial Anxiety, and "The Cranford Papers" - Victorian Periodicals Review 38:2 Victorian Periodicals Review 38.2 (2005) 222-239 Craft, Authorial Anxiety, and "The Cranford Papers" Talia Schaffer Queens College and Graduate Center, CUNY In Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford (1851–1853), the main character, an elderly lady named Miss Matty Jenkyns, has one great skill. As her younger relative Mary Smith comments: "What she piqued herself upon, as arts, in which she excelled, was making candle-lighters, or 'spills' (as she preferred calling them), of coloured paper, cut so as to resemble feathers ..." (185). These spills are Matty's signature production. We would know how to parse it if she were an artist who piqued herself on a particular painting, or a singer who specialized in a given air, but what precisely is the significance of being a spill-maker? What kinds of historical structures, aesthetic preferences, and ideological positions did this pursuit particularly, or the genre of paper crafts more broadly, communicate to a Victorian reader? To answer this question requires taking Cranford seriously. This is a novel all too often described as "charming," with the kind of homogenously pleasant tone and dismissively trivial content that that adjective implies. But following the paper trail, as it were, opens up significant issues for a reading of Cranford, in particular highlighting the problems of narratorial reliability and...