Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1854–55) is a love story with a social conscience. Forced to leave her home in the New Forest for the industrial north, Margaret Hale comes into direct conflict with selfmade textile entrepreneur John Thornton. The novel reflects the grim reality of life in mid-nineteenth-century Manchester, which Elizabeth Gaskell fictionalises as Milton-Northern in Darkshire.
North and South reflects the heyday of the Industrial Revolution — that seismic shift from producing goods largely by hand to using highly mechanised manufacturing processes which made nineteenth-century England ‘the workshop of the world’. It is significant that John Thornton lives opposite his ‘immense many-windowed mill, whence proceeded the continual clank of machinery and the long groaning roar of the steam-engine’.
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