The United States wasn't the only nation divided between North and South in the 19th century. The Industrial Revolution divided England. Manchester was the world's first industrial city, the center of the global cotton trade with more than 100 mills in the 1850s. Genteel Southerners, scorning livings made by trade, looked down on the Northern industrialists and their employees.
As North and South opens, 19-year-old Margaret Hale is a Southerner in actuality and sensibility. Her father is a vicar in an idyllic Southern village. In a crisis of conscience, Mr. Hale gives up the church and takes Margaret and his wife north to smoky, dirty Milton (stand-in for Manchester), where Hale intends to tutor industrialists who want a bit of culture.
At first Margaret snobbishly reflects her roots, seeing the bustling city as uncouth and vulgar. Gradually, however, she gets to know the family of a mill worker and becomes sympathetic toward their hardships. That makes her more disdainful of the mill owners who she thinks exploit them. One of the owners, John Thornton, is being tutored by Margaret's father, giving Margaret opportunities to spar with him. Thornton is a self-made man who thinks that those who fail to rise as he did deserve to be poor.
As the novel progresses, Margaret resists her physical attraction to Thornton. He is smitten with her and even willing to hire a union representative, Higgins, at her behest. By the end of the book, Thornton and Higgins arrive at a better understanding of one another, and Margaret changes her mind about Thornton.
Novelist Elizabeth Gaskell lived in Manchester with her Unitarian minister husband. She was clearly sympathetic to the working class but in North and South offered a nuanced perspective of both mill owners and workers. Gaskell's insight into the social change wrought by the Industrial Revolution wasn't appreciated for many decades, but today she is admired as ahead of her time in matters of class conflict and social justice.
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