Classics cornerClassics This article is more than 11 years oldNorth and South by Elizabeth Gaskell – review
This article is more than 11 years oldElizabeth Gaskell's rich weave of storytelling and social chronicle remains a landmark1854 was certainly a good year for the social novel. Charles Dickens had just completed Hard Times, his serialised account of life in a northern mill-town. The very next story published in his Household Words magazine was also set in the "smoky, dirty" north – except, this time, the injustices of working life weren't chronicled by an appalled visitor but by someone who lived in Manchester, Elizabeth Gaskell.
Whether this made for a more authentic novel is moot. Undeniably, Gaskell's sympathies were with the poor: North and South's central concept is the gradual realisation of haughty, scornful southerner Margaret Hale that there is a beauty to the "vulgarity of shop people". There's also a clever balance to North and South, a certain acknowledgment of the middle-class manufacturers who raise themselves "into the power and position of a master by [their] own exertions".
Gaskell's priorities lay with storytelling. Margaret is torn from the bucolic surroundings of Hampshire in classic fish-out-of-water style. She becomes part of a clearly signposted will-they-won't-they love story with the outwardly rough-and-ready manufacturer Mr Thornton. There's even a Shakespearean case of mistaken identity, just to make the course of true love run a little less smooth.
All of which makes North and South far too long. Dickens was apparently infuriated by its lack of focus, only for Gaskell to respond by cunningly reintroducing edited chapters later. It's not exactly original, either – there's more than a doff of the cap to Charlotte Brontë's Shirley, and suggestions that it's an industrial Pride and Prejudice certainly hold some water.
But, actually, it doesn't matter. As Dickens himself found with Hard Times, marrying social concerns with enjoyable storytelling is far from straightforward, but Gaskell succeeds. Would that contemporary novelists could also take on that challenge.
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