North and South Summary: Elizabeth Gaskell's Novel of Mills, Class and Conscience
What it is about
North and South is a social novel by Elizabeth Gaskell, serialised in Charles Dickens's magazine Household Words and published in 1855. Gaskell wanted to name it after her heroine, Margaret Hale. Dickens insisted on North and South, and the title he chose tells you what the book is doing: setting one half of England against the other and making a young woman stand in the gap.
Margaret Hale is nineteen. She has spent almost ten years in London with her wealthy Aunt Shaw and her cousin Edith, and she returns gladly to Helstone, the quiet southern village where her father is the local pastor. She has already refused a marriage proposal from Henry Lennox, a rising barrister. Then her father's conscience upends everything. Mr Hale can no longer accept the doctrines of the Church of England, resigns his living, and becomes a dissenter. On the advice of his old Oxford friend Mr Bell, the family moves north to Milton, a fictional cotton town in the textile county of Darkshire. Gaskell based Milton on Manchester, where she lived as the wife of a Unitarian minister.
Milton shocks Margaret. It is smoky, loud, blunt and poor. The Industrial Revolution is in full swing and masters and workers are clashing in the first organised strikes. Her father, now in reduced circumstances, works as a tutor, and one of his pupils is John Thornton, master of Marlborough Mills. Margaret finds Thornton coarse and unfeeling. He finds her haughty. Over the eighteen months she spends in Milton, she befriends the mill hands, learns what the strike actually means to the people living through it, and comes to see that the questions of labour and ownership are far harder than she first assumed.
Gaskell had already written about industrial conflict in Mary Barton (1848), which took the view of the working poor in Manchester. North and South does something different. It uses a southern outsider to look at mill owners and workers at once, and it refuses to make either side simply right.
The main characters
Margaret Hale is the moral centre. She is proud, articulate and quick to judge, and the novel is largely the story of her judgements being tested. She also becomes the practical head of a family that cannot cope: a father who has given up his living, a mother who is dying, a brother in exile.
John Thornton is the self-made manufacturer, nouveau riche, risen from poverty, scornful of his workers and fiercely proud of what he has built. He is drawn to Margaret's beauty and self-assurance almost against his will. His mother, Mrs Thornton, is formidable and protective, suspicious of Margaret from the start.
Nicholas Higgins is a union representative and the closest thing the workers have to a spokesman in the book. His daughter Bessy is dying of byssinosis, the lung disease caused by breathing cotton dust, and her friendship with Margaret is how the novel makes the human cost of the mills specific rather than statistical. Frederick Hale, Margaret's brother, lives abroad in exile, wanted for his part in a naval mutiny. Mr Bell, the Oxford friend, owns property in Milton and keeps pulling the plot along from the outside.
The themes
Class is the obvious one, but Gaskell is more interested in what class does to understanding. Margaret and Thornton each misread the other for most of the book, and both misreadings are rooted in where they were raised and what they were taught to respect.
Conscience runs through everything. Mr Hale gives up his career for intellectual honesty. Margaret tells a lie to the police to protect her brother and is tormented by it. Thornton, acting as magistrate, has to decide what justice actually requires. The novel keeps asking whether being right is the same as being good.
There is also the question of what industry owes the people who make it work. The strike, the imported replacement workers, the mob at Thornton's gates, Bessy's lungs: Gaskell lays out the machinery of the conflict without pretending there is an easy settlement.
How it ends
Skip this paragraph if you want the ending fresh. After her father dies at Oxford, Margaret returns to London. Mr Bell dies too, leaving her a legacy that includes Marlborough Mills and the Thornton house, which makes her Thornton's landlord. The strike and market fluctuations push him towards bankruptcy. He learns the truth about Frederick from Higgins and comes to London on business. When Margaret offers to lend him money, he understands that she has changed towards him. He proposes a second time, and she accepts.
Why it still matters
North and South sits with Cranford (1853) and Wives and Daughters (1866) as one of Gaskell's best-known novels, and it has been adapted for television three times, in 1966, 1975 and 2004. It survives because it does two things at once and does both properly. It is a courtship novel built on genuine antagonism, and it is a serious account of industrial conflict written by someone who lived in the city she was describing. Readers who come for the romance stay for the argument. Readers who come for the social history find the argument conducted through two people who cannot stop misjudging each other.
