Elizabeth Gaskell had not done entirely with Knutsford with the publication of Cranford. Thomas Higgins, an 18th-century highwayman and former inhabitant of the town, was made the subject of "The Squire’s Story", published in the Christmas 1853 number of Household Words, although it was there set in the fictitious Derbyshire town of Barford.[12] Then years later she made the arrival of the hoop skirt the subject of an additional farcical episode in "The Cage at Cranford", published by Dickens in his new magazine All the Year Round in November 1863.[13]
Theatrical adaptations of the novel began at the turn of the century, the first few of which were produced in the US.[14] Among these were Alice Byington's Cranford Dames, a play in five scenes (New York, 1900),[15] and Marguerite Merington's Cranford: A Play, a three-act comedy set in the time of William IV, (New York 1905).[16] Some of the later British examples were merely dramatic episodes and included "The Bank Breaks" by Arthur Phosphor Mallam (1872–1948), based on chapters 13–15 (1912); Guy Pertwee's "A Cranford Card Party" (1913); Harry Brighouse's 'Cranford sketch', "Followers" (1915); and Amy M. Robertson's "The Panic from Cranford" (1930), based on chapter 10. 1930 also saw the tangential 'play for boys', Higgins, the Highwayman of Cranford, by Ronald Gow.
In America the novel was adapted for NBC radio in 1946. Martyn Coleman's three-act play for theatre, first produced in 1951, was adapted for British television that year. Subsequently, a four-part television adaptation from the novel was broadcast by BBC in 1972. There was also a British musical based on the novel staged in 1975 and another broadcast by Thames Television in 1976.[17] In 2007 the five-part television series that appeared under the title Cranford was in reality elided with three other works by Gaskell: My Lady Ludlow, Mr. Harrison's Confessions and The Last Generation in England. A sequel, Return to Cranford, was broadcast in 2009 in the UK and 2010 in the US.
