SUMMARY
Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford (1853) can be regarded as a notable work in terms of the attitude towards the dominant idea of progressivism in the Victorian era. Many works by Gaskell’s contemporaries tended to deal with social problems of the period, among which her own industrial novels can be included. However, Cranford has an exceptional stance in that the novel takes place in English countryside remote from all the turmoil created by industrialisation. Setting her characters in the middle of an idyllic landscape where the railways and impact of the capitalist economy are quite far away from the inhabitants of the little town Cranford, Gaskell presents a lifestyle associated with the remote past, which is still alive in the memories of English people. In view of the representation of a small town in the mid-Victorian period and the praise on a simple lifestyle, Gaskell’s attitude in Cranford can be defined as a challenge against progressivism. Hence, this article aims to analyse Gaskell’s Cranford in the light of the industrial transformation of the Victorian era and argues that Victorianism and the philosophy of progressivism were severely challenged longing for pre-industrial conditions.