"Cranford" is one of the better-known novels of the Victorian English writer Elizabeth Gaskell. The book is a collection of satirical sketches which sympathetically portray changing small-town customs and values in mid-Victorian England. Based on her childhood memories in the small Cheshire town of Knutsford, Cranford (a fiction city) is Elizabeth Gaskell's affectionate portrait of people and customs that were already becoming anachronisms.