In using her body to shield him she turns herself into an object for public scrutiny. Her transgression is complete when she intervenes in a violent scene between John Thornton and a mass of striking workers. If I live in a factory town, I must speak factory language when I want it. Instead of the socially superior attitude with which she arrives at Milton, Margaret begins to align herself with the workers, to challenge mill owner John Thornton about their conditions and to transgress the accepted boundaries of her class by speaking the language of the working class. In particular through her growing friendship with the vocal workers’ leader Nicholas Higgins and his gentle daughter Bessy. Her preconceived ideas about industry and trade, born from her experience of Southern ways, are gradually relinquished as she gets to know the mill workers. I like all people whose occupations have to do with land… I think we are far better off knowing only cottagers and labourers and people without pretence…. She arrives in Milton with an acute distaste of anyone involved in commerce. Her view of the North is a place of where people are not interested in learning, the air is dirty and illness and death abound. Southerners are people interested in education and conversation, their manners genteel. Margaret views the North as an alien world. This idyll is disrupted when her vicar father leaves the Church due to a crisis of conscience and moves the family north to the mill town of Milton (a psuedonym for Manchester). North and South focuses on Margaret Hale, a young woman who enjoys the peace and tranquility of the Hampshire countryside where she lives with her parents. The result is a blend of Bildungsroman with the Victorian industrial novel.

In North and South, she used her personal experience of suffering and poverty in the Manchester area for a narrative that shows how the attitudes of one individual to suffering change through expose to the problem. Like her contemporary Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell wanted to expose the human consequences of the Industrial Revolution.īut while Dickens sought “to take the rooftops off” to show the disease and suffering caused by the relentless pursuit of the capitalist enterprise, Elizabeth Gaskell took to the streets.

North south elizabeth gaskell