North And South
Elizabeth Gaskell
Book Club August 20, 2023
Elizabeth Gaskell was a contemporary of Charles Dickens, and North and South was published in serial form simultaneously in the same periodical as Dickens’ Hard Times. But unlike Dickens she lived and worked in Manchester with her Unitarian minister husband, and was a direct witness of the social, political and economic conflicts and outrages wrought by the industrial revolution, at Ground Zero in the era when it was working the greatest and most divisive transformations in British life.
To the author’s credit, the novel is not a polemic, and she does not clearly throw the weight of her sympathy to any of the main characters. Rather, she constructs an intricate labyrinth for the leading man and lady, and forces them to thread their way through it to each other; along the way requiring each to face their deficiencies and blind spots. The resolution of the story hinges on each confronting the self-imposed circumscription of their horizons. Thus despite the epochal conflicts surrounding the protagonists, the work brings down its scope in the end to necessary human and intimate dimensions.
And that is perhaps the biggest surprise of the experience of reading it, given the broad tapestry Gaskell’s discursive and armillary style weaves, as one at last perceives in the final pages the intricate trap she has set and sprung on both her lovers and the reader.
Reviewers have remarked on Jane Austen’s influence on Gaskell here. Teenage Margaret Hale and mill owner John Thornton superficially resemble Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy from Pride and Prejudice. They meet, he falls in love, she dislikes him and dismisses his advances. And Margaret’s parents seem to be living a disappointing aftermath of Sense and Sensibility. Mrs Hale is well-bred and was raised in London society, but marries poor Mr Hale for love and resolves to live with him in a remote rural vicarage. As her middle-aged regrets mount, Mr Hale supplies the final straw by abruptly announcing that he has resigned his position as an Anglican minister for recondite reasons of spiritual conscience.
Facing imminent poverty, they move from the south of England to Manchester, the center of British industrialization, so Mr Hale can scratch together a living as a tutor of the classics to its roughly-educated citizens. Margaret, still a dedicated Christian clergyman’s daughter, is appalled at the depredations that mill work with its low wages and pollution has wrought on the city’s helpless poor. Thornton is an early portrait of a spirited libertarian, always ready with passionate justifications and rationalizations for his business practices despite the damage they may do.
What appears to be a soap opera-ish discursion is introduced: Margaret’s long-absent older brother Frederick returns to visit their mother at her deathbed. Frederick had been a naval officer with good prospects, but mutinied against a tyrannical captain. He has been on the run for years, not daring to set foot in England for fear of court martial and hanging. He slips into Manchester just in time to comfort his mother, but as he departs he is recognized and almost captured after a scuffle.
Meanwhile, Thornton is dealing with an impending strike at his mill, but refuses to raise his workers’ wages due to what he claims are the iron laws of economics and the demands of the market. Mortal bad blood arises between him and his union-led workers, and the strike is finally nullified when Thornton brings in replacements from Ireland who are willing to work at any wage.
Thornton had been taking lessons from Margaret’s father, but he ultimately gets his tutoring in the humanities when he begins to form relationships with some of his workers after seeing the misery of their conditions during the strike, even as his business spirals downward due to the interruption in production and his debts being called in.
Margaret lies to the authorities about her involvement in Frederick’s scuffle and escape in order to protect her brother, and Thornton finds out about her lies. Her repulsion toward Thornton is exacerbated by her Christian remorse and guilt over her lies and what she imagines Thornton must think of her. Late in the novel she undergoes a long period of introspection and self-recrimination. During a visit to her tiny home town which in her childhood had seemed ageless, she is dispirited to see visible changes in just the few years since she has left. She muses:
I begin to understand now what heaven must be - and, oh ! the grandeur and repose of the words - “The same yesterday, today, and for ever.” Everlasting! “From everlasting to everlasting, Thou art God.” That sky above me looks as though it could not change, and yet it will. I am so tired - so tired of being whirled on through all these phases of my life, in which nothing abides by me, no creature, no place; it is like the circle in which the victims of earthly passion eddy continually.
This passage, as the core expression of Margaret’s crisis, surprised me because of its modernity. It is exactly like the crisis pronounced in the play Angels in America, in which the angel Metatron demands that humanity “Stop moving!” This demand and this nostalgia are the end result of the neurotic Christian yearning for sinlessness as the only conceivable embodiment of personal integrity. For finally the only possible sinless world in the Christian worldview is a static one.
Thus the crux of the anxiety about industrialization is not due ultimately to its social or political ramifications. On the deepest level it represents (to what Orwell called ‘oldbelievers’) a storming of Heaven. Manchester in the novel goes by the pseudonym ‘Milton’, which I dare say is a reference to the poem by William Blake; which contains the lines:
And did the Countenance Divine,
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills?
Meanwhile Thornton is undergoing a crisis of his own, though a more positive one. He has gone bankrupt, but he is energetically trying to raise backers to restart his business with a new management approach, inspired by the empathy he learned from his workers in the last days of his previous enterprise:
I felt that I was on the right path, and that, starting from a kind of friendship with one, I was becoming acquainted with many. The advantages were mutual: we were both unconsciously and consciously teaching each other…
My only wish is to have the opportunity of cultivating some intercourse with the hands beyond the mere ’’cash nexus”…
I have arrived at the conviction that no mere institutions, however wise, and however much thought may have been required to organize and arrange them, can attach class to class as they should be attached, 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. A working man can hardly be made to feel and know how much his employer may have laboured in his study at plans for the benefit of his workpeople. A complete plan emerges like a piece of machinery, apparently fitted for every emergency. But the hands accept it as they do machinery, without understanding the intense mental labour and forethought required to bring it to such perfection. But I would take an idea, the working out of which would necessitate personal intercourse; it might not go well at first, but at every hitch interest would be felt by an increasing number of men, and at last its success in working come to be desired by all, as all had borne a part in the formation of the plan; and even then I am sure that it would lose its vitality, cease to be living, as soon as it was no longer carried on by that sort of common interest which invariably makes people find means and ways of seeing each other, and becoming acquainted with each other’s characters and persons, and even tricks of tempers and modes of speech. We should understand each other better, and I’ll venture to say we should like each other more.
The term “cash nexus” above is a contemporary one used in critiques of capitalism at the time. It was used in relation to the observation that capitalism tended to drive out of the public forum any notion that humans had any obligations or social commitments whatsoever to one another, beyond mere cash transactions.1
As Thornton is having these epiphanies in the novel’s last pages, the tables have turned. Margaret has inherited significant wealth, yet she can escape neither the guilt and remorse of the lies she told about her brother (even though it was to save his live) nor the feeling that she is living under the silent opprobrium of Thornton and his family (despite the fact that Thornton, after his declaration of love was rebuffed, has resolved never to acknowledge any of his feelings toward her and limits himself to strictly correct social pleasantries).
Despite these complexities of plot and character, it turns out that everything works itself out literally in the last two pages. Margaret offers a loan to Thornton to help him restart his business… Thornton simply replies “Margaret!”… and after a few halting sentences and long silences, they fall into each other’s arms and all is resolved between and within them.
But these two pages are enough for the trap Gaskell has set to be sprung, and for the key to be discovered. In the months preceding this scene, Margaret’s ordeal of introspection and soul-searching made her more humble, more empathetic, more calm. It seemed like a sort of personal growth fitting for the wrap-up of a long novel. In fact something had gone terribly wrong; for in trying to resolve her feelings about Thornton she makes a conciliatory gesture in the form of a business transaction: “if you would take some money of mine, eighteen thousand and fifty-seven pounds, lying just at this moment unused in the bank, and bringing me in only two and a half per cent. – you could pay me much better interest, and might go on working Marlborough Mills.” Somewhere along the line her self-perceived sin became an unbearable burden, and to anaesthetize her feelings she let herself fall into the worldview of the cash nexus.
On some level, Thornton recognizes the poison of her offer and evades its danger. Instead, he takes to heart his own preaching about new ways to manage relationships, drops his pride and wounded feelings, and insists on a moment of purely human interaction between them, much of which necessarily (but a bit surprisingly for a novelist) takes place in silence.
And this is enough for the breakthrough. Gaskell has resolved to show that neither Christian piety nor libertarian dynamism is sufficient to address the issues of her present moment in history. She repudiates both her own religious background and her adopted hometown’s guiding animus to insist on something more.
Speaking of Angels in America, I want to think the two works inform each other and help illuminate their endings. In the play, God has absconded from Heaven, causing consternation and panic among the angels. They want to entice Him back by removing the blot of sin from His creation, but they believe they can only do this by putting humanity into stasis. Humanity politely refuses this solution.
Gaskell’s polite refusal of the options presented to her by her cultural milieu reflects Prior Walter’s. And among the bereft and the lonely, the only remaining vision of how to bring God back is to call Him forth within the matrix of human relationships, in the form of the Shekinah – to regenerate Him as it were, in the milieu of a brave new Creation.
The Great Work begins…