Mr. Harrison's Confessions

Mrs Rose and Caroline Tomkinson find alternative husbands, while Jack Marshland confesses to his mischievousness and starts to court Jemima Bullock.

Mr Morgan emphasises a gentlemanly bedside manner as its defining sign while Harrison insists on the necessity of keeping pace with the latest scientific advances in treatment.

More indicative is Harrison's supposed association in London with the royal surgeon Sir Astley Cooper, who was appointed to that position in 1828 and had died in 1841, a decade before the story was published.

In a History of the English Novel it is judged a "coarser example of the Cranford manner" in which "the comedy degenerates into downright farce, the mere drollery of a magazine story.

[7] It has also been located as occurring "at a pivotal moment of recollection" which led from "the semi-factual reporting of her earlier "The Last Generation in England"" via her story Mr Harrison's Confession to its final transmutation into the novel.

[8] The culmination of such perceptions came when episodes drawn from these precursors, and from the later novella My Lady Ludlow, were combined in the five-part television series based on Cranford, first broadcast in 2007.