Name: The Crooked Branch
Rating: 3.33 (6 reviews)

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July 19, 2026

The Crooked Branch was first published as “The Ghost in the Garden Room” in the 1859 extra Christmas issue of Charles Dickens’s “All the Year Round”. It formed part of an end-of-year collection of eight linked stories by various authors, the overall collection being titled “The Haunted House”. This was the first of Dickens’s “bumper double issues”, but these collections would then be published annually until 1867.

The original title of Elizabeth Gaskell’s contribution is misleading, as no “garden room” features at all in this tale! The reason for the name is to do with its place in the group of stories, and not with the story itself. Dickens had decided to frame the portmanteau collection as a house which has a ghost in each room. He therefore had to write an introduction to Elizabeth Gaskell’s story, as otherwise it wouldn’t fit. Dickens wrote about the current tenant of the garden room in the house, who claims that his room is haunted by the ghost of a judge. The judge in question is a character at the end of the tale, but the suggestion has nothing whatsoever to do with Elizabeth Gaskell, or her story.

In fact four years earlier they had quarrelled. Initially Dickens had been an avid fan of Elizabeth Gaskell and her work, but grew frustrated with Gaskell missing deadlines. For her part, Elizabeth Gaskell didn’t like the serial style of writing, and was particularly upset when Dickens kept making edits to her pieces without asking her. After he rejected Gaskell’s eponymous choice of “Margaret Hale” as a title, and made severe edits to her latest serial novel, they were never as close, and she never wrote serials for him again. His own suggestion of “North and South” does seem to be a better title however, and Gaskell reinstated the parts he had edited out, when the novel was published later. She did also write short stories to be included in his magazines, such as this one.

The Crooked Branch was then published in 1861, in a collection of five of Gaskell’s stories, titled under the first story “Lois the Witch and Other Tales”. It is a shame that Elizabeth Gaskell’s story title did not have prominence right from the start, as it suits it perfectly. We are soon able to guess what the reference is.

Elizabeth Gaskell said that this story was based on a true story, which had been told to her in 1849 by a Mr. Justice Erle and Mr. Tom Taylor. Having been supplied with the basic plot, she then developed the characters, added details and established a convincing background. I will summarise the whole story in this case, and explain why later. It is quite a long story, with excellent character development and tension.

The story takes place in the rural North Riding of Yorkshire, which Elizabeth Gaskell knew well, although it is set a little earlier: around the beginning of the 19th century. There is a small cast of characters, beginning with Hester Rose’s parents; farming folk who want her to marry well. They do not approve when one of their workers, Nathan Huntroyd wants to court her, and dismiss him. However Nathan works hard, and his fortunes prosper, as Hester’s family’s decline. A few years later Nathan receives an inheritance and buys a small farm. He remember his first love, and seeks her out to see how she is.

He discovers Hester working as a maid, proposes, and they marry after a month. Nathan and Hester Huntroyd’s long‑delayed happiness seems complete when they have a child, Benjamin, born when they are already middle‑aged. Nathan and Hester raise Benjamin with deep affection and pride. He is clever and handsome.

After a while, Hester’s brother also falls on hard times. He has a big family, and Nathan and Hester decide they can help by offering a home to one of them. Bessie Rose, Benjamin’s cousin comes to live with the Huntroyd family. She is cheerful, industrious, modest, and becomes deeply attached to them all. Nathan and Hester soon thinks she is exactly the kind of daughter they might have wished for, had fate given them one.

Meanwhile Benjamin is becoming ambitious, and dissatisfied with his lot.Nathan and Hester invest heavily in his future, sending him away to be educated at a grammar school, which turns out to be a bad choice, as the the pupils learn deceitful, dishonest ways. When Benjamin is eighteen, he becomes an apprentice to an attorney, although it takes a great deal of their money. Their hopes for him are high: Benjamin is meant to be the “straight branch” that will grow strong from their humble roots.

Bessie misses him. At 14 she had noticed that he was peevish and lazy, and did not treat his parents with the respect she would have wished, but at 16 she thought he was everything she would wish in a sweetheart. Benjamin knew this, and played her along, although he did not care for her, and was ashamed of his origins and thus his parents. They made excuses thinking his school was entirely responsible for his behaviour.

Away from home, Benjamin began to fall into bad company, accumulating debts and developing a taste for idleness and vice. Letters home became infrequent and evasive. Nathan and Hester, anxious but trusting, continued to make excuses and support him financially, even when it strained their limited means. After many weeks, Benjamin came home on a visit and said he needed £300 to buy his share in a law firm with a “friend”, or else he would have to emigrate. Nathan had a long talk with him, but drew out nearly all his savings from the bank to give to his son, reserving just £15 in gold which he kept in a stocking in the cottage, to run the farm. They had an understanding that in time Benjamin would marry Bessie and take her to London to live there. Hester was very upset, but Bessie managed to reassure her.

Months passed, during which Benjamin’s letters home boasted of his success and prosperity, but after about a year, Nathan received another letter from Benjamin demanding more money, since, he said carelessly, it would all go to help Bessie anyway, when they were married. But owing to farming difficulties, Nathan now had only three of the fifteen pounds left, and wrote a stern refusal. The whole family was upset. Bessie gathered together all her sixpences and precious savings and found that they amounted to just over £2. Sure that Benjamin must need it really badly, she sent it to him secretly, with an affectionate letter.

One day, the family received a letter stamped “Dead Letter Office”. They panicked, worried that Benjamin must have died, until Bessie worked out that it must be a letter from her uncle which had been returned, undelivered. However Nathan remained convinced that his son had died and was heartbroken. He became ill, and on recovering wore a discreet black crepe ribbon on his hat as a sign of his grief for his son. After a while he told his wife what it was for, but she did not share his view, and began to be weak and lose her sight. Bessie felt sorry for them both, and suffered in her own way.

Nathan’s health also began to deteriorate, and soon he was no longer strong enough to run his farm. A neighbour, Job Kirkby, was a good friend to the family, and willing to buy most of the adjoining land, leaving Nathan with a much smaller stock. The Kirbys were happy to help him out at any time. Job’s son John seemed to like Bessie, but Nathan was not sure about him as a husband for his niece; John was in his forties, and Bessie was now twenty-eight.

One night Bessie is woken up by a strange noise, and then the front door opens, and she hears several people talking in the house. Realising that they must be robbers, Bessie slips out of the window to bring help from John Kirkby, who is in the barn nearby with the vet, nursing their sick cow.

The two men arm themselves with pitchforks, and run to the Huntroyds’ cottage with Bessie. Nathan lies stunned and helpless on the kitchen floor. The vet locks the door, and he and John go upstairs to tackle the robbers while Bessie stays with her unconscious uncle. She is suddenly aware that there is somebody else in the room, who starts moving about in the dark. (We know it is Benjamin, who has returned home secretly and at night, with two others, intent to steal his father’s small amount of gold.) Then one of the robbers is thrown downstairs, and Bessie pushes the other into a closet beneath the stairs, immediately then locking it.

Bessie starts to go to her aunt upstairs, but then hears her name called out, and recognises Benjamin’s voice. He begs Bessie to set him free, so that her aunt and uncle would not know he was one of the robbers. He promises to disappear, and she unlocks the closet. Benjamin runs away as fast as he can.

Nathan regains consciousness by the time John returns, but Hester remains still and impassive. John fetches the police to deal with the robbers and brings the doctor the next morning, who says he expects the couple to recover.

Bessie has to give evidence at the robbers’ trial and is terrified that she will have to mention Benjamin, but she doesn’t. Nathan and Hester are slow to recover, and Hester is losing her eyesight even more quickly than before. Bessie is extremely anxious to persuade them that there were only two robbers, but suspects that they know the truth.

The robbers hire a lawyer and tell him that it was all Benjamin’s idea, and then the old couple are summoned to court. At the hearing, Nathan reluctantly confirms that on the night of the robbery, they had heard Benjamin’s voice through the window, asking to be let into the house, and when the prosecutor insists on details, tells them in a broken voice that he had gone down and opened the door to Benjamin (and the two other robbers as a consequence).

Hester, although now extremely ill, is called to testify, and admits that the two robbers went upstairs into her bedroom, demanding to know where Nathan kept his money, although she refused to answer. She says that the third robber shouted something to his companions from down below, but Hester faints before she can answer what he said. Nathan answers, saying that Benjamin cried out to his two accomplices to “hold the old woman’s throat” so she would not call for help.

Hester dies that night.

What seems extraordinary to me - and the reason for this lengthy precis - is that this is almost identical to a story by Louisa May Alcott titled “The Cross on the Old Church Tower”, which was written in 1863 - LINK HERE for my review. The common elements are:

a poor rural family

And the moral implications are also broadly similar:

Parental love vs. moral responsibility
The dangers of indulgence and idealisation
Rural domestic life under strain
Gothic atmosphere used for moral storytelling

Both are extraordinarily shocking tales, written just less than 4 years apart. Elizabeth Gaskell’s is the first, and is a more complicated, detailed story, with a lot of character exploration and development. We really get to care about these people, whereas Louisa May Alcott’s story is too short for them to be anything other than two-dimensional characters: described just enough to perform the role which will best convey the moral. Both stories feel akin to a reverse Prodigal Son parable. The Crooked Branch follows a devoted rural farming couple whose indulgent, ungrateful son is lured into a life of crime and greed, culminating in a tragic and violent betrayal of his own parents. But who bears the most responsibility here?

It begins with a light tone, so could well have been a simple domestic tale, but increasingly the Victorian pathos is conveyed so effectively that it is well nigh unbearable, climaxing in such a long drawn out trial, Elizabeth Gaskell uses this narrative to explore the consequences of parental indulgence and the darker, corrupting forces of urban greed upon a traditional rural community. It departs from her typical domestic realism, delving into psychological suspense, gothic horror, and early crime fiction. Oddly enough, the part before the judge’s story has taken on a life of its own; so much so that the court scene seems like an unnecessarily cruel addendum. Both the prosecutor and judge were visibly distraught at what they were doing,

The intended highlight of the story was the court scene, but this protracted scene does border on the melodramatic. Coming after such a realistic tale, it feels like a mismatch. Although having said that, there are parts which certainly verge on the supernatural, gothic fiction.

If you are a reader who likes to categorise fiction, in my view The Crooked Branch falls best into the newly emerging sensation fiction. Sensation fiction began as a definable literary genre in the 1860s, although proto-sensation stories began appearing in magazines during the late 1850s. It is a very good example of the type, although some of the tropes which became expected are missing. I think Gaskell might well disagree though, preferring the moral aspect.

The Crooked Branch can now be read as a stand-alone or in various collections of her Gothic Tales. It’s well worth a look, but don’t expect a cosy tale.

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