North and South at Times Wanders Off Course
Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South is often described as an “industrial” Pride and Prejudice. Written a half-century after Jane Austen’s novel, Gaskell’s book features an intelligent, independent woman and a self-made man so confident he makes Darcy look indecisive. The protagonists clash every time they meet but are also attracted to the intellect and spirit of the other.
North and South as a title refers to the differences in culture and economics between the slower, genteel, and agricultural south of England—Austen’s Hampshire, as it happens—and the aggressive, striving attitudes of the northern part of the country during the Industrial Revolution. The smoky town of Milton is the fictional stand-in for the manufacturing town of Manchester. Gaskell wanted to name the novel for her female protagonist as she had done before. The novel, however, was serialized, and the magazine editor, one Charles Dickens, wanted to emphasize the regional differences.
Much criticism has in fact focused on the class differences between the South, where a gentleman does not work at trade or anything else, and the North, where trade—business of any kind—is the route to financial and social advancement. Another angle on class differences is the separation between the “measters”—the mill owners—and their laborers, who in the novel are striking for better pay and working conditions.
Gaskell's novel features complex characters and complicated relationships but sometimes wanders.
Margaret Hale, the heroine, in fact, is prejudiced against “shoppy people”—men in business—for their lack of education and refinement. She dislikes Milton for its foul air and poor neighborhoods. Her foil, mill owner John Thornton, doesn’t understand people who do not endeavor to improve themselves. To his credit, he is being tutored by Margaret’s father, who has brought his family north for work after he resigns his position in the Anglican church over changes in his spiritual beliefs.
What matters to me are not the socioeconomic implications but the power of the story and the engagement of its characters. In this regard, North and South has many strengths and a few serious weaknesses. The best elements of the novel involve the two protagonists as they interact with and reflect on each other.
Their awkward first meeting both puts him off and intrigues him. Her father asks him to stay and lunch with them. His response is typical of his complicated reaction to her throughout: “It would have been very inconvenient to him to do so, yet he felt that he should have yielded, if Margaret by word or look had seconded her father’s invitation; he was glad she did not, and yet he was irritated at her for not doing it.”
After their first meaningful exchange, when they criticize each other’s homeland, he nonetheless seeks to shake her hand as he leaves. Not expecting this, she “simply bowed her farewell,” leaving the impression that she is too proud to accept his gesture. She is immediately sorry for her mistake but is unable to say so. These regular errors around Thornton by the forthright and socially adept Margaret show how his presence flusters her. (Author Trudy Brasure points out that she cries thirty-one times in the novel, most often relating to Thornton.)
This complexity of characterization leads to one of the most dramatic moments, when the so-far most amiable and perfect of characters, Margaret, is trapped in an impossible situation and—lies. At this moment, the narrator deftly stays out of her head, leaving the reader to guess at her emotional turmoil. Learning of the lie, Thornton is in a position to humiliate her publicly but instead acts to protect her secret. Learning of his action (technically an inaction), she fights guilt and shame—and wonders over his motives—for the last third of the book.
Capitalist Thornton and union leader Nicholas Higgins provide a combative relationship that ultimately establishes something of a wary truce and even collaboration. Both are too proud to bend to others’ wishes, but over time both men come to reconsider and to heed the recommendations of peacemaker Margaret. Their back-and-forths provide one of the more interesting aspects of the story.
Another surprising character is Thornton’s mother. She is hostile to Margaret from the start for what she sees as her airs and becomes belligerent after Margaret refuses Thornton’s early Darcy-like blunder of a marriage proposal. Yet she also loves her son and fiercely protects him. A rare kindness undercuts her predictable nastiness and rounds her out as a character.
Mr. Bell, an older friend of Margaret’s father and the person who arranged for his job in Milton, is a rarity in nineteenth-century fiction: a warm and thoughtful person who is also genuinely funny.
Gaskell, who lived in Manchester, shows a solid grounding in manufacturing issues. Without boring the reader, she is able to show the economic conflicts from the perspectives of both the capitalists and the workers. Neither side is made hero or villain. The characters respond as people, not as social abstractions to prove a point.
Gaskell loses steam (industrial pun) by carrying some things too far. At first, Thornton is so proud that he’s a caricature. He disdains not only anyone who challenges him but even anyone who dares to disagree with him. Also, he falls rather too hard and fast for Margaret. On first sight, she “seemed to assume some kind of rule over him at once.”
Margaret is a strong, engaging, kind, and articulate character. Yet despite her presence of mind, she constantly bawls. Some of her lachrymosity stems from the number of people around her who sicken and die. But not a chapter passes without her pulling out the Fainting Heroine playbook and boo-hooing on cue.
Her father, Mr. Hale, is a puzzle. He possesses the moral courage to leave his vicarage position over a change in his faith, yet every other matter in his life leaves him lost. Repeatedly, Margaret must step in to make decisions or act. He’s so mentally frail that he can’t be told of the seriousness of his wife’s illness. If there’s a real connection to Austen, it’s the pairing of Gaskell’s Mr. Hale and his daughter Margaret with Austen’s Mr. Woodhouse and his daughter Emma. Mr. Hale makes Mr. Woodhouse look like a mental and physical powerhouse.
Plot is also problematic. Poor writers of the Austen-Gaskell century used excessive coincidences to tie up terrible plots. Good writers, beginning with Austen, used the consequences of character behavior to drive stories ahead. Gaskell uses death to turn the plot. She thinks this is a good thing: “there are five dead, each beautifully consistent with the personality of the individual.” Her characterization of the mortality is correct, but she seems not to realize that five deaths among fifteen characters will work only during war or the plague years.
Haskell appears not to have ever revealed whether she deliberately transposed the characters from Pride and Prejudice into a gritty industrial setting. Some commentators consider North and South an homage. Others believe that the best way for her to tell her story was to put together two opposites and let them have at each other.
At her best, Gaskell comes across as an earlier Hardy, able to reach into the hearts and minds of a variety of characters, especially those on the lower end of the economic scale. She shows them for the rich human beings that they are. At her worst, she falls into excessive melodrama. Here and there, I paged over short stretches of her worst moments in order to get on with the tale between Margaret and Thornton and Thornton and Higgins.
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My new book, Jane Austen and the Creation of Modern Fiction: Six Novels in “a Style Entirely New,” investigates her development as a writer and shows how her innovations as a prose stylist set the course for modern fiction. It is available from Jane Austen Books at a special low price.
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