North and South is…well I’d call it a Victorian Novel, but I guess it is more precisely a Social Novel from the Victorian era. It is set primarily in the fictional manufacturing town of Milton, England in the mid-19th Century and is based on Gaskell’s adult home of Manchester. Gaskell intended to title it with the heroin’s name, but at the insistence of her publisher, Charles Dickens, she agreed to North and South. Dickens didn’t care for the novel much either.
The social issue this novel addresses is ostensibly the plight of the working class during the industrial revolution: unhealthy working conditions, poor wages, no job security. However, I think there was another issue: prejudice and ignorance between the industrialists of the North and landed gentry of the South.
The tale opens on Margaret Hale who enjoys an idyllic life in Hampshire, Southern England until her pastor father has a crisis of conscience that causes him on his own accord to leave the ministry and move to Milton where he has found work teaching some of the families in the smoky manufacturing city. Margaret and her mother are distraught by the change in fortune, and even more so by the change in environment and society. However, Margaret supports her father and accepts their new situation intent to make the best of it.
One of Mr. Hale’s most notable and sincere students is John Thornton, a wealthy, self-made factory owner. Thornton and Margaret are intelligent and assertive and quickly develop a courteous antagonism regarding the merits and faults of North versus South. In one exchange Margaret opines…
“Now in the South we have our poor, but there is not that terrible expression in their countenances of a sullen sense of injustice which I see here. You do not know the South Mr. Thornton” she concluded, collapsing into a determined silence, and angry with herself for having said so much.
“And may I say you do not know the North?” asked he with an inexpressible gentleness in his tone as he saw that he had really hurt her.
Initially, they hold each other in mild contempt, yet they also have a restrained, perhaps even reluctant admiration for each other.
When Thornton is admonished by his mother that he thinks too well of Margaret, Thorton replies…
“Mother” (with a short scornful laugh), “you will make me confess. The only time I saw Miss Hale, she treated me with a haughty civility which had a strong flavour of contempt in it. She held herself aloof from me as if she had been a queen, and I her humble, unwashed vassal.
Conversely when Mr. Hale chides his daughter for being too hard on Thornton, Margaret declares…
“He is the first specimen of a manufacturer – of a person engaged in trade – that I had ever the opportunity of studying papa. He is my first olive: let me make a face while I swallow it.
You’ve probably read/viewed enough Gaskell, Victorian novels, Hallmark movies to guess where their relationship is going.
Margaret also encounters the working man, specifically Nicholas Higgins and his two daughters. Margaret and Higgins are also at odds initially, but it is merely from misunderstanding different customs. As they become friends, Higgins asks where Margaret is from and she tells him Hampshire.
That’s beyond London, I reckon? And I come fro’ Burnleyways, and forty miles to th’ North. And yet, yo see, North and South has both met and made kind o’ friends in this big smoky place.
Margaret Realizes...
From that day Milton became a brighter place to her. It was not the long, bleak sunny days of spring, nor yet was it that time was reconciling her to the town of her habitation. It was that in it she had found a human interest.
Higgins is also a union representative, which puts him on no good terms with Thornton, and by proxy does not improve Thornton’s opinion of Margaret.
And yet…
There is reason to be hopeful.
It's a marvelous read, masterful work. Gaskell is clearly sympathetic to the working class, but she is fair to portray vice and ignorance on both sides, as well as virtue and nobility. I was less aware of the prejudice in England between North and South. Again, Gaskell made what I believe was a fair portrayal of both. This is the second novel I’ve read by Elizabeth Gaskell, Wives and Daughters being the other. Both were very good, and I will certainly read more.
My
rating: 4 out of 5 stars
This
novel satisfies the “Cardinal Direction” category in the What’s in a Name? 2025
challenge. The title must contain a reference to a cardinal direction. I should
get double credit.
