North and South
by Elizabeth Gaskell
Summary
Margaret Hale is nineteen and settled in a country parsonage in the south of England when her father, a clergyman who can no longer in conscience keep his living, moves the family north to Milton, a fictional mill town Gaskell built out of her own knowledge of Manchester. Margaret finds the smoke, the noise, and the manners of a manufacturing city genuinely shocking, and she clashes almost immediately with John Thornton, a self made cotton mill owner who admires her even as she tells him plainly that she finds his treatment of his workers hard hearted. She grows close instead to Nicholas Higgins, a union man, and his daughter Bessy, dying young of a lung disease caught from years of breathing cotton fluff on the factory floor. When a strike turns violent and a mob surrounds Thornton's mill, Margaret places herself between him and the stones being thrown, an act that reads to the whole town as a declaration and forces a proposal from Thornton that she refuses, not yet ready to admit what she feels. Her brother Frederick, wanted for his part in a naval mutiny, visits her in secret before fleeing abroad again, and Thornton, glimpsing the two of them together, wrongly assumes a lover. Only after her father's death, and her own inheritance, does Margaret return to Milton in a position to meet Thornton as an equal, and the novel ends with the two industries of the book, land and mill, effectively merging in their marriage.
Gaskell writes the industrial scenes with real specificity, the mill floor, the strike meetings, the particular ache of Bessy's illness, and the romance plot never lets the social argument go slack. It moves briskly for a long Victorian novel and rewards a reader who wants both a marriage plot and an honest look at what an 1850s factory town actually cost the people living in it.
Historical Context & Significance
North and South ran in twenty weekly instalments in Household Words, the magazine Charles Dickens edited, from September 1854 to January 1855, and Dickens found the pace of Gaskell's plotting frustrating even as he published it, complaining privately that the story was "wearisome to the last degree." The Leader accused her of getting Lancashire wrong and suggested a woman had no business writing about industrial conflict at all. Gaskell had planned twenty two installments but ran out of room in the twenty Household Words actually printed, later admitting she had been "compelled to desperate compression" to finish the story on schedule, and she restored some of the cut material when the novel appeared as a book.
Critical opinion dismissed Gaskell as a minor, sentimental novelist for decades after her death. That changed in the 1950s and 1960s, when critics including Raymond Williams and Kathleen Tillotson reread her industrial novels as serious treatments of labour and class, and North and South is now counted among the first English novels to put an employer and a worker in direct, sustained argument. The BBC's 2004 four part adaptation, with Richard Armitage as Thornton, brought the novel a much wider modern readership.