procures the medicine that cures her. Mrs Rose and Caroline Tomkinson find alternative husbands, while Jack Marshland confesses to his mischievousness and starts to court Jemima Bullock. Some time after Harrison and Sophy are married, another friend comes to stay with him and persuades Harrison to relate his story. Publication and reception Mr Harrison's Confessions, a long story in 31 sections, was first given magazine publication in the Ladies' Companion in 1851 and the following year in Godey’s Lady’s Book in the U.S. Its first book publication was in the volume Lizzie Leigh: And Other Tales (1855) in the Collection of British Authors series and thereafter the story appeared in other such compilations and omnibus editions of Mrs Gaskell's works. The story's small town setting has been identified with Knutsford, where Gaskell spent her early years. This was also the model for Cranford, the first episodes from which were appearing in Household Words at the end of the year in which Mr Harrison's Confessions was published. But the realistic medical details there had been learned from her uncle, Peter Holland, who had a London practice. Such a background adds to the story's comedy of manners an insight into the uncertain social status of the medical profession at the time. 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. The evident results are so much his vindication that Morgan ultimately confesses apologetically to having been "an old fool". That Gaskell was delving into her youthful memories for her story, a process begun with her humorous magazine article "The Last Generation in England" (1849), is suggested by details within it. Harrison arrives in Dunscombe by coach and has to ride over to the neighbouring Chesterton for a rail connection to London. 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. The link with Cranford was made explicit in the 20th century, usually while deprecating the story's quality by comparison. 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." A later commentator finds in it "a