In brief
Margaret Hale grows up between a London drawing room and a Hampshire parsonage, and thinks of her village as “like a village in a poem” (ch. 1). Then her father resigns his living over a private crisis of conscience, and the family goes to Milton, a cotton town modelled on Gaskell’s Manchester, to live on the fees of a private tutor. There she meets John Thornton, a mill owner who reads Homer with her father in the evenings and faces down a strike by day, and Nicholas Higgins, a union man whose daughter is dying of what the carding room put in her lungs.
The romance is a good one: Pride and Prejudice rebuilt beside a factory floor, with a heroine who refuses the hero and is then humbled by events. It is also the method: Gaskell puts the argument about capital and labour between two people who cannot leave it alone, because opinions of a class change only in dealing with a person.
The argument
Margaret states the problem in her first long argument with Thornton: “I see two classes dependent on each other in every possible way, yet each evidently regarding the interests of the other as opposed to their own” (ch. 15). Thornton’s position is the respectable one of his day. A master owes his hands wages and owes them nothing else; outside the mill they are free men, and to interfere would insult them. Gaskell gives the creed dignity, because Thornton earned his place: his father’s death “under very miserable circumstances” took him out of school and put him in a draper’s shop (ch. 10).
The book’s reply is modest, and it comes late. After the strike Thornton hires Higgins on terms of open mutual dislike, and an argument over the men’s wretched dinners leads to a shared kitchen at the mill, run by the men, with Thornton buying in the food. He refuses a gift of ten pounds towards it from Mr Bell: “I don’t want it to fall into a charity” (ch. 42). The turning point is an invitation to eat: “Master, there’s hot-pot for dinner to-day, win yo’ come in?” By the end he has a conclusion he can state in a London dining room. No institution can bind class to class “unless the working out of such institutions bring the individuals of the different classes into actual personal contact. Such intercourse is the very breath of life” (ch. 51).
That can be called naive, and it does not touch wages, hours or the trade cycle that bankrupts Thornton anyway. But Gaskell is sharper about the problem than about the solution. Bessy explains why her carding room had no ventilating wheel: masters would not pay for it, and men used to swallowing fluff said it made them hungry and wanted higher wages to work with it. “So between masters and men th’ wheels fall through” (ch. 13). Nobody there is a villain, and a girl dies of it.
Nor does the novel award the moral victory to either region. Thornton has the best attack on the South: “One may be clogged with honey and unable to rise and fly” (ch. 10). Margaret defends it, then has to talk Higgins out of moving there, because farm labour “would kill you with rheumatism” (ch. 37). When she goes back at last to Helstone, she finds the parsonage altered and a village woman who roasted a neighbour’s cat alive, as a charm to recover some borrowed clothes (ch. 46). The poem was never true, and the title is a question.
The shape of the book
The novel seems to begin three times: a wedding in Harley Street, a return to Helstone with a proposal from a London lawyer, and then the train to Milton in ch. 7, when “a deep lead-coloured cloud” appears on the horizon. When Margaret refuses Henry Lennox, she refuses the novel of manners.
The first volume climbs to the riot in ch. 22 and the disastrous proposal in ch. 24. The second is a long subtraction. Bessy dies (ch. 27), then Mrs Hale (ch. 30), John Boucher (ch. 36), Mr Hale (ch. 41) and Mr Bell (ch. 48). Gaskell joked in a letter that she might call the book Death and Variations. Each death takes away someone who leaned on Margaret or whom she leaned on, until she is left in Harley Street as a young woman with money and no one to answer to.
The ending then reverses every term of the opening. Bell’s legacy makes Margaret the owner of the ground under Marlborough Mills (ch. 49), and American failures sink Thornton (ch. 50). In the last chapter she proposes to him, in effect, with a business plan, showing him that money of hers is “bringing me in only two and a half per cent” and could work his mill again (ch. 52). His reply is a pocket-book holding dead roses from Helstone, where he went alone when he had no hope of her. The last lines imagine their families’ horror, “That man!” and “That woman!”, so the novel closes on the old contempt turned into a joke.
The voice
Gaskell’s narrator is level and observant, closer to a sensible neighbour than to Dickens’s stage manager, and her best sentences are short. When Higgins, who has been drinking and has just lost his daughter, ends the evening at family prayers with the Hales, she writes: “Margaret the Churchwoman, her father the Dissenter, Higgins the Infidel, knelt down together. It did them no harm” (ch. 28).
The boldest thing on the page is the speech. Higgins and Bessy speak the dialect of the mills in full, and they are given long, intelligent arguments in it. Bessy’s account of the fluff, “Little bits, as fly off fro’ the cotton, when they’re carding it” (ch. 13), works better than any blue book because Margaret has to ask what the word means. The dialect spreads upward too. Margaret teases her mother that she does not know what a “knobstick” is (ch. 29), and the movement of words between classes is a small version of the book’s hope.
The argument about words peaks in ch. 20, when Margaret asks whether a man can be a gentleman and Thornton answers: “I take it that ‘gentleman’ is a term that only describes a person in his relation to others; but when we speak of him as ‘a man,’ we consider him not merely with regard to his fellow-men, but in relation to himself.” She has been dismissing him by that word since they met. The verse epigraph over each chapter, from Hood, Crabbe, Mrs Browning and others, was added for the book, and quietly insists that a cotton town has a claim on poetry.
The riot and the lie
Two acts by Margaret carry the plot, and they answer each other.
The first is the riot. Strikers storm the mill to get at Irish workers Thornton has brought in, and Margaret, who is in the house on an errand, tells him: “go down this instant, if you are not a coward. Go down and face them like a man” (ch. 22). When she sees they will hurt him, “she made her body into a shield from the fierce people beyond”, and a thrown stone cuts her forehead. The town reads it as a declaration of love. So does Thornton, who proposes the next day, and she replies in fury that “any woman, worthy of the name of woman” would have done the same (ch. 24).
The second is the lie. Margaret’s brother Frederick, under sentence for a naval mutiny (ch. 14), comes home secretly to see their dying mother. On the station platform as he leaves, a drunken former shipmate recognises him; Frederick shoves him off and escapes, and the man later dies. A police inspector asks Margaret if she was there, and she says she was not (ch. 34). The woman who lives by “Fais ce que dois, advienne que pourra” has told a plain falsehood, and it was pointless: a letter she reads too late shows that Frederick was already safe (ch. 35). Thornton, who saw her there with a young man, is the magistrate on the case. He stops the inquest to protect her, while believing that the man is her lover (ch. 38).
This drives the second half. Everyone in the novel breaks with some authority on grounds of conscience: Mr Hale with the Church, Frederick with the navy, Higgins with the masters. Margaret has been judging from a height, Thornton above all, and the lie takes the height away. She must live with the fact that the man she scorned knows it, and Gaskell does not let a noble motive excuse her. Thornton learns the truth about Frederick only long afterwards, by accident, from Higgins (ch. 50).
The people
Margaret Hale
Margaret starts out a snob with a clear conscience, who dislikes “shoppy people” and pities the poor. What saves her is that she asks questions and listens to the answers. After her father’s death she sets out to settle “that most difficult problem for woman, how much was to be utterly merged in obedience to authority, and how much might be set apart for freedom in working” (ch. 49).
John Thornton
Thornton convinces because he is neither a monster nor secretly a gentleman. He is honest, proud of his town and his machines, and very rude to a man who has waited five hours at his gate (ch. 38). Going after Higgins later to offer the job is the one apology he knows how to make, and it ends in a treaty: “I shall need a deal o’ brains to settle where my business ends and yo’rs begins” (ch. 39).
Mrs Thornton
Thornton’s mother is the book’s most frightening presence: a woman who brought her son through ruin and will not forgive anyone who hurts him. When he confesses that he loves Margaret still, she answers, “And I hate her” (ch. 26).
Nicholas and Bessy Higgins
Higgins is a union man and an unbeliever who often wins his arguments. His faults are real: the union forced John Boucher into the strike, and Boucher’s death in a shallow brook, “there’s not water enough to drown him” (ch. 36), lands on Higgins’s conscience. Bessy is Margaret’s exact contemporary (“And I too am nineteen”, ch. 13), and the one who brings her the mills from inside.
Mr Hale and Mr Bell
Mr Hale is a gentle man whose single brave act wrecks his family, and who leaves it to his daughter to tell her mother (ch. 4). Bell, the Oxford fellow, supplies the book’s wit and its money, and his sparring with Thornton sets Oxford’s leisure against Milton’s work (ch. 40).
How it was made
Gaskell’s first novel, Mary Barton (1848), had taken the workers’ side in Manchester; this one gives the masters a hearing. It ran in Dickens’s weekly Household Words in twenty parts from September 1854 to January 1855, directly after his own Hard Times, and she had to find out first whether he was using a strike. The Preston strike of 1853–54, with its slogan “ten per cent and no surrender”, had only just ended.
The collaboration was unhappy. Gaskell wanted to call the book Margaret Hale; Dickens insisted on North and South, which is the better title. She complained of being “compelled to desperate compression”; he complained of her “intractability” as sales fell, and found the story “wearisome to the last degree”. For the two-volume edition from Chapman and Hall in 1855 she expanded the close, and a brief preface explains that “Various short passages have been inserted, and several new chapters added”. The additions include the trip to Helstone, so the disillusioning return belongs to the book and not the serial. The Project Gutenberg text used here omits that preface.
Readers and critics
Reviews were cool. The Leader complained that a woman could not understand industrial problems; Charlotte Brontë, reading the opening parts, took it to be about the Church and dissent, though she allowed that Gaskell understood the North. Gaskell’s reputation then shrank to Cranford, and Lord David Cecil’s Early Victorian Novelists (1934) set the tone by calling her “all woman”.
The recovery began with Kathleen Tillotson, Arnold Kettle and Raymond Williams, who in the 1950s and 1960s treated the industrial novels as serious social thought. The standard objection remains in force: a private legacy solves a public problem, and the love plot takes over from the strike. Feminist critics then shifted the ground. Patsy Stoneman reads the ending as a “balanced emancipation”, and others stress how far Margaret moves out of the separate sphere. The sharpest complaint comes from the same side: Catherine Barnes Stevenson notes that women were more than half the factory workers of the time, and that the novel speaks of “masters and men” and gives them one dying girl.
Afterlives
The BBC has adapted the book three times. In 1966 Richard Leech played Thornton; in 1975 Patrick Stewart did, with Tim Pigott-Smith as Frederick; and in 2004 Sandy Welch’s four-part serial with Daniela Denby-Ashe and Richard Armitage, directed by Brian Percival, brought it a wide new readership, with Pigott-Smith promoted to Mr Hale. That version moves the ending to a railway platform, and audiences loved it, though the novel’s scene of a woman talking about interest rates is more awkward and more interesting.
The best literary descendant is David Lodge’s Nice Work (1988), which sends a feminist lecturer on Victorian industrial novels to shadow the manager of a Midlands engineering works in Thatcher’s Britain.
How to read it
- Do not stop at the wedding. The novel proper starts in chapter 7.
- Read chapters 34 and 35 twice. They ask more of Margaret than the riot does.
- Stay for chapter 46. Helstone answers anyone who takes the title as a simple contrast.
- Consider an annotated edition. Penguin Classics and Oxford World’s Classics carry notes on the dialect and the epigraphs, which the free text does not.
Read next
- Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton (1848). The same city seen from the workers’ side, angrier and less controlled, and the book this one answers.
- Charles Dickens, Hard Times (1854). The rival that ran just before it in the same magazine: fiercer satire, and much less idea of what a mill was like.
- Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813). The romance plot, before the chimneys.
- Émile Zola, Germinal (1885). A strike with no hot-pot at the end of it.