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Why not just call it Manchester? Gaskell’s first novel, Mary Barton, is subtitled ‘A Tale of Manchester Life’ and her 1850 short story ‘Lizzie Leigh’ is set in the city that she had called home since 1832. In North and South, however, the city is called ‘Milton-Northern’. This adoption of a fictional place-name may be an attempt to extend the novel’s resonance or perhaps merely an attempt to avoid embarrassing friction with the mill-owners and industrialists who were Gaskell’s neighbours in 1850s Manchester. However, it can be argued that the choice of the name Milton is significant and that a consideration of its multiple meanings can lead to readings that make the novel more than a tale of Manchester life. Such a reading may downplay the novel as a commentary on contemporary social conditions and industrial relations, thus diluting its political power, but it highlights aspects of Gaskell’s symbolic vision and generic sophistication that can be overlooked if we see North and South only as a realist industrial novel.
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