Christmas storms and sunshine is an interesting novel written by Elizabeth Gaskell. Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell, often referred to as Mrs Gaskell, was an English novelist, biographer, and short story writer. Her novels offer a detailed portrait of the lives of many strata of Victorian society, including the very poor. Her first novel, Mary Barton, was published in 1848 and it was inspired by the death of her only son. Gaskell was born on September 29 1810 in Lindsey Row, Chelsea, London. She was the youngest of eight children and unfortunately dies on December 1865.
Now to continue with the essay it is important for all of us to know what the values of commitment and citizenship mean since we are going to relate them to the story while doing a little summary of the story. Commitment is something that you must do or deal with that takes your time. Citizenship is the position or status of being a citizen of a particular country. There’s not much of these two values reflected in the story. As soon as the story begins and mentions the two families that are enemies we could spot commitment in the men of the family. Mr jenkins and mr hodgson both worked for the english newspaper in london and they used to always fight for a better spot in their work. I believe this shows commitment to their career and how much they care for being the best at what they do. As the story goes on, we could see that the problem of these two families is just not in the men, but with the wives as well. These two families were neighbours and they were enemies for a long while since they used to always compete about every single detail. They lived in the same building and that made things worse since mrs Jenkins cat entered the hodgsons house and started eating the plate of food of mr hodgson on the dining table. Krs hodgson was angry at mrs jenkins because of what her cat did while ms jenking was jealous and envious about how mrs hodgson had a son and they already had a complete family. One day mes hodgsons son got very sick that he was about to die that the mother asked for her neighbours help to save her son. She went from door to door until she reached the jenkins apartment and they shut her down and didn’t want to help their kid for personal reasons. They showed no empathy at all until mes jenkins got light hearted when she saw how bad her son was and decided to help them with him. He was about to die, so they put him in hot water and tried saving his life which did work out. Since then the hodgsons were very thankful and they started to get along better with the jenkins. They even invited each other for christmas dinner which did happen at the end of the story. They decided to put or leave all of their worries apart and focus on being a happy family. A family that could get along and forget about their past. They became kinder to each other, they showed care, peace and love. All of this shows citizenship to me since the story ends with them enjoying a meal together after everything they’ve went through as civilized  citizens. The story also shows how they are committed to their family, maybe not committed to their own thoughts tho since they end up changing their minds and behaviour towards each other which is actually a very good thing.