The Old Nurse's Story

A frame narrative is a story with a separate setting, and sometimes separate characters, that surrounds the main narrative of a story. Frame narratives usually contextualize the main story (which is usually a first-person narrative) and introduce key themes and characterization. Hester addresses her audience of children, whose mother she was also nurse to. The frame allows Gaskell to establish Hester’s reliability before she begins the ghost story that the nurse knows the children want to hear. Because this story first appeared as part of the Christmas narrative in Household Words, Gaskell’s frame for Hester’s tale is a “frame-within-a-frame.” Dickens has already set up a loose narrative connection between the stories he commissioned by having the first story in the collection come from a host who has asked everyone gathered around on Christmas Eve offer a story to entertain the group. The deliberate mimicry in print of this traditional Christmas pastime augments the resonance of the layers of storytelling and fosters a sense of community and oral culture.