The Last Generation in England

"The Last Generation in England" is a non-fiction article by Elizabeth Gaskell, published in the American Sartain's Union Magazine in July 1849, relating memories of a small country town in the generation prior to her own. As such, it is seen as the real-life background for her novel Cranford. Feeling she was living through a time of great and rapid change, she was inspired to write it by reading that a history of English domestic life had once been considered by the author Robert Southey.