Cranford

Cranford may refer to:

Cranford may also refer to the following places:

See also

Cranford (NJT station)

Cranford is a New Jersey Transit railroad station on the Raritan Valley Line, in Cranford, New Jersey. The current Cranford station was built in the mid-1930s by the Central Railroad of New Jersey on an embankment as part of a grade crossing elimination project. Three stations preceded the current building. The station building has a ticket office, waiting area, and offices. The platforms are accessed by stairs and elevators.

Following the implementation of the Aldene Plan in 1967, the station served as the western terminus of the Cranford-Bayonne Shuttle. The station is the eastern-most station on the old main line of the Central Railroad of New Jersey still serving as station. Like several other New Jersey Transit lines a once a week freight train can be seen in the early morning hours at Cranford station (which the plan has been currently scrapped due to NJ Transit train delay issues).

Cranford Station has been identified as a stop on the Union go bus expressway, a proposed bus rapid transit line utilizing the a portion of the abandoned Central Railroad of New Jersey (CNJ) right-of-way between it and Midtown Station, a transit hub combining the NJT station and the former CNJ station in Elizabeth.

Cranford (novel)

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.

In the years following Elizabeth Gaskell's death the novel became immensely popular.

Background

The first instalment (in Household Words), which became the novel's first two chapters, was originally published "as a self-contained sketch", and the "irregular way" the further seven instalments were published suggests that it took Mrs Gaskell time to think of making this into a book. She was during this period busy writing the three volume novel Ruth, which was published January 1853.

Cranford has been described as "practically structurelesss", and given the irregular nature of how it was first published, it is not surprising that it lacks unity. A. W. Ward describes the novel, as a "brief series of sketches, strung together with easy grace".