North and South

North and South is an 1855 novel by Elizabeth Gaskell, in which Margaret Hale moves from the pastoral South of England to the industrial mill town of Milton-Northern and is caught in the conflict between masters and workers. It is set for HSC English Extension 1, elective Historical Worlds: the past reconstructed and contested.

Elizabeth Gaskell wrote North and South as a serial for Dickens's Household Words across 1854 and 1855, from inside the world it describes: the wife of a Unitarian minister in Manchester, the "Milton-Northern" of the novel, she had watched the industrial city grow and had already made the condition of the manufacturing poor her subject. The novel is built as a structure of displacement and return. Margaret Hale's father, a clergyman, resigns his living over a crisis of conscience and moves the family from the pastoral Hampshire village of Helstone - which Margaret remembers as "a village in a poem" - to the manufacturing town of Milton-Northern in the industrial county of "Darkshire". There the volume registers the shock of arrival and introduces the two figures who will contest the meaning of this world for her: the mill-owner John Thornton, her father's pupil, and the union man Nicholas Higgins. Milton hardens into conflict: a strike brings a mob to Thornton's mill, and in the riot Margaret throws her body between Thornton and the crowd, an act misread by everyone as a declaration of love. Thornton proposes; Margaret refuses. The deaths of Bessy Higgins and Mrs Hale press the human cost of the industrial world on her, and to protect her fugitive brother Frederick she lies to a police inspector - so that Thornton, who knows the truth, believes her a liar. Orphaned, Margaret returns south to find the remembered village itself changed and the idealised past unrecoverable. Inheritance makes her wealthy, Thornton fails in business after learning to know his workers "man to man", and the close unites them in a settlement that remakes, rather than restores, the worlds each began from.

The novel lodges its suspicion of nostalgia in Margaret's own figures of speech. "Helstone is like a village in a poem--in one of Tennyson's poems." converts the South into a genre rather than a place, memory reconstructing the past as pastoral idyll; and the return tests that image to destruction - "There was change everywhere; slight, yet pervading all.", a change too small to name yet total in reach, so nostalgia meets not ruin but a quiet, universal instability harder to mourn.

The industrial North arrives first as perception. The "deep lead-coloured cloud" and the "long, straight, hopeless streets" carry the observer's mood into the town itself, the transferred epithet letting the reader watch a historical world coloured by the present that looks at it. Against this partial gaze Gaskell admits the witnesses the powerful story leaves out: Bessy Higgins's plain vernacular, "the fluff got into my lungs and poisoned me.", puts the labouring body into the record, and Higgins's untranslated dialect, "clemming to know when they're put upon", forces the middle-class reader to receive the North in its own tongue.

The novel's centre is a contest over the vocabulary of the age. Thornton's redefinition, "A man is to me a higher and a completer being than a gentleman.", reverses the gentry hierarchy Margaret brought north and gives the manufacturing world a philosophy of itself; the riot stages the collision of rival histories in the flesh; and the settlement is imagined as "intercourse with the hands beyond the mere 'cash nexus.'", the borrowed Carlyle phrase naming the wage relation the master had taken for the whole truth.

Finally, Gaskell makes the keeping of the record an ethical crisis. Margaret's lie to the inspector - "I was not there," - forces truth and loyalty apart, and the narrator's blunt epizeuxis, "She stood as a liar in his eyes. She was a liar.", insists that to distort the record even for love is to be marked by it. Honest history, the novel suggests, is reached only "man to man", beneath the roles that usually write it - every account shaped by the attachments of the one who gives it, the archive never innocent of the interests it serves.

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• HSC English resources