Dave's Book Blog: December 2025

Margaret Hale, a vicar's daughter, is raised as a poor relation in the posh London house of her aunt but when her cousin gets married she must return to the vicarage in the New Forest. This rural idyll also comes to an end when her father has 'doubts' and resigns his vicarage. They are forced to leave the Garden of Eden so dad can work as a private tutor in Milton, a smoky northern manufacturing town. Margaret flits about visiting the sick and debating economics and industrial relations with her father's first student, a mill-owner who wants to learn a bit of culture. Love blooms to the background of a strike and a riot but a proposal is indignantly rejected. Then tragedy in the form of death strikes and strikes again. Margaret flees back to London to her rich relations while her godfather Mr Bell acts the part of fairy godmother. Inevitably, the book ends with avowals of love.

I couldn't help thinking of Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte who was a friend of Mrs Gaskell's (Mrs G wrote Charlotte's authorised biography). Mill-owner Mr Thornton is very like Mr Rochester, although Margaret does not have the hots for him like Jane does. Nevertheless, marriage is only possible after Mr T, like Mr R, has been cut down to size, not by being blinded and mutilated in a fire, but by going bankrupt, only to be saved when Margaret, having inherited money from Mr Bell, invests in his plant: the theme of the bad boy tamed.

I found it hard to like the protagonist, Margaret. She starts out as a privileged snob, upbraiding the servant, Dixon - who is the only member of the household who actually does anything useful to keep it going - for speaking out of turn. She looks down on tradesmen and, upon reaching Milton, extends this disdain to manufacturers:

“I like all people whose occupations have to do with land; I like soldiers and sailors, and the three learned professions, as they call them. I'm sure you don't want me to admire butchers and bakers, and candlestick-makers, do you?” (Ch 2)
“‘A private tutor!’ said Margaret, looking scornful. ‘what in the world do manufacturers want with the classics, or literature, or the accomplishments of a gentleman?’” (Ch 4)

It takes the opposing arguments of Mr Thornton on the one hand and Nicholas Higgins on the other before she begins to realise that the old certainties of her 'Whig Ascendancy' upbringing are not so clearly defined. People in the South (which is equated with a rural peasant-based existence) may be content but that content has sapped their get up and go. On the other hand, Northerners (= those working in manufacturing industries) can't seem to sit still. “I suppose each mode of Life produces its own trials and its own temptations. The dweller in towns must find it as difficult to be patient and calm, as the country-bred man must find it to be active, and equal to unwonted emergencies. Both must find it hard to realize a future of any kind, the one because the present is so living and hurrying and close round him; the other because his life tempts him to revel in the mere sense of animal existence, not knowing of, and consequently not caring for, any pungency of pleasure, for the attainment of which he can plan, and deny himself and look forward.” (Ch 37)

I suppose it could be argued that this is a developmental novel, a sort of bildungsroman, except that the main change is that in Mr Thornton who starts providing his workforce with cooked lunches and even sitting down at table with them.

Margaret herself is sometimes hateful. When Boucher commits suicide, his widow, in the first flush of her grief, lays the blame on the millowners and the union and even his own children, citing them as reasons why he was driven to make her a widow. The narrator comments: “Margaret heard enough of this unreasonableness to dishearten her.” Unreasonableness? I found this breathtakingly cruel. Yes, the widow is being irrational, yes she is being selfish by considering only how her husband’s death affects herself. But anger is a typical response to bereavement.

This book was written in 1854 - 5, a few years after the publication of the Communist Manifesto but this book has a fundamentally anti-meritocratic message. In the end Thornton is defeated by the strike because he has invested in machinery but is unable to fulfil his orders. Margaret, having inherited money, rescues him. The moral of the story is that progress must be rescued from entrepreneurial Armageddon by old money possessed by those who have done nothing to deserve it. This is still a world where birth into the established social order matters. As Bessy Higgins, who dies of consumption early in the story, says: “Some's pre-elected to sumptuous feasts, and purple and fine linen ... others toil and moil all their lives long.” (Ch 19). Such quasi-Calvinistic beliefs in predestination were exploited by the conservative establishment as a way of justifying the social order as being ordained by God. This is exemplified by the third verse of the popular hymn ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’ which asserts: "The rich man in his castle,/ The poor man at his gate,/ God made them, high or lowly,/ And ordered their estate.” This verse is frequently omitted in modern versions of the hymn.

I myself believed that a key way to achieve social mobility is through education, which was a major motivation behind my 33 years as a teacher. There is some discussion of education. In chapter 4, Margaret disdains the idea that manufacturers might benefit from being educated in literature (see above). In chapter 46, Mr Bell, who is a fellow of an Oxford College and therefore might be expected to value education, is similarly dismissive when it comes to a peasant’s daughter going to the parish school in Helstone (where she will presumably be taught to read and write): “The child was getting a better and simpler, and more natural education stopping at home, and helping her mother, and learning to read a chapter in the New Testament every night by her side, than from all the schooling under the sun.”

It might be argued that Margaret herself learns to value the poor: she makes friends with the Higginses. As early as chapter 10, she argues with Mr Thornton: “You consider all who are unsuccessful in raising themselves in the world, from whatever cause, as your enemies.” (Ch 10) It is true that successful people often despise the unsuccessful on the basis of 'If I could do it, why couldn't they', frequently downplaying the beneficial effects of luck (be it good health, or the right contacts, or being in the right place at the right time, or having the ability to work that bit harder) has on their own life. But I would argue that Margaret is worse. She too despises the Higginses and the rural folk when she returns to Helstone. She thinks she is better than them and therefore patronises them. But she has done nothing to deserve her privilege. At least Thornton worked for wealth AND recognises that he is lacking in cultural education which is why he takes lessons with Margaret's dad from the start.

As for the minor players, we are often in the dark:

We never discover what conscientious objections lead Margaret's dad to given up his cosy parish in the New Forest even though this is the catalyst that triggers the plot.

Frederick's mutiny and subsequent exile might have been developed in accordance with a theme of a principled battle against the established order (such as Mr Hale's, or the strike) and it could have been the occasion for Margaret to realise that her own family were law-breakers, but in the end he is little more than a plot point.

Mr Bell is summoned half-way through the story to act as a fairy godmother, ensuring Cinders goes to the ball.

Dixon is the quintessential servant, a hugely loyal family retainer more necessary to Mrs Hale in her illness than either husband or daughter. And yet Gaskell can’t resist the opportunity to make her a figure of fun, when she is scared that if she goes to Spain she might be converted to Roman Catholicism (Ch 47). This relegates a character who could be three-dimensional into the stock clown-servant of traditional drama.

Edith is the stereotypical spoilt young woman of a good family.

Mrs Thornton, Thornton's mum, is a strong character. She is fiercely protective of her son, hating Margaret both for entrapping her son when he falls in love with her and also for rejecting him and making him unhappy. She is proud and fearless. I'm not sure there are any traces of the poor woman she must once have been but as a battle-hardened matriarch she works well.

Thornton the love interest has some strong opinions at the start but once he has fallen for Margaret he is little more than her helpless admirer. And he disappears for most of the last third of the book (rather like Rochester disappears in Jane Eyre) to be brought back when things need to be resolved.

The story was originally published as a serial in Household Words, the weekly magazine edited by Charles Dickens. Mrs Gaskell battled with him over a number of points, including the title 'North and South' which he imposed. There must have been a certain feeling of discontent in that it was immediately preceded by Hard Times, the Dickens novel, which also dealt with industrial conditions in a fictionalised Manchester. In the Preface to the First Edition, Mrs Gaskell acknowledged that the "conditions imposed by the requirments of a weekly publication [including] ... certain advertised limits" meant that she found it "impossible to develop the story in the manner originally intended".

Selected quotes:

“It was like the story of the eastern king, who dipped his head into a basin of water, at the magician's command, and ere he instantly took it out went through the experience of a lifetime.” (Ch 3) The notes tell me that this story is from The History of Chec Chahabeddin in Turkish Tales published in 1708.
“Railroad time inexorably wrenched them away from lovely, beloved Helston, the next morning.” (Ch 6)
“North and South has both met and made kind o’ friends in this big smoky place.” (Ch 8)
“I do not look on self-indulgent, sensual people as worthy of my hatred; I simply look upon them with contempt for their poorness of character.” (Ch 10)
“Loyalty and obedience to wisdom and justice are fine; but it is still finer to defy arbitrary power unjustly and cruelly used - not on behalf ourselves but on behalf of others more helpless.” (Ch 14) This is Margaret defending Frederick.
“We, the owners of capital, have a right to choose what we will do with it.” (Ch 15)
“She saw unusual loiterers in the streets: men with their hands in their pockets sauntering along; loud-laughing and loud-spoken girls clustered together, apparently excited to high spirits, and a boisterous independence of temper and behaviour.” (Ch 17)
“One had to learn a different language, and measure by a different standard, up here in Milton.” (Ch 20)
“Margaret the Churchwoman, her father the Dissenter, Higgins the Infidel, knelt down together. It did them no harm.” (Ch 28)
“I’d as lief stand on my own bottom.” (Ch 28)
“Nothing like the act of eating for equalizing men. Dying is nothing to it. The philosopher dies sententiously - the pharisee ostentatiously - the simple-hearted humbly - the poor idiot blindly” (Ch 43)
“This visit to Helstone had not been all - had not been exactly what she had expected. There was change everywhere; slight, yet pervading all. Households were changed by absence, or death, or marriage, or the natural mutations brought by days and months and years, which carry us imperceptibly from childhood to youth, and thence through manhood to age, whence we drop like fruit, fully ripe, into the quiet mother-earth. Places were changed - a tree gone here, a bough there, bringing in a long ray of light where no light was before - a road was trimmed and narrowed, and the green straggling pathway by its side enclosed and cultivated. A great improvement it was called; but Margaret sighed over the old picturesqueness, the old gloom, and the grassy wayside of former days.” (Ch 46) Margaret might come to understand the need for change, but in the end she is still a nimby.
“I always keep my conscience as tight shut up as a jack-in-a-box, for when it jumps into existence it surprises me by its size. So I coax it down again, as the fisherman coaxed the genie.” (Ch 46)
“If the world stood still, it would retrograde and become corrupt.” (Ch 46)
Henry Lennox, Margaret’s first suitor, is described as “pushing on in his profession; cultivating, with profound calculation, all those connections that might eventually be of service to him; keen-sighted, far-seeing, intelligent, sarcastic, and proud.” (Ch 47) He's a solicitor and the parallel with the solicitor husband, seeking connections for personal gain, in The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim was strong.
“She tried to settle that most difficult problem for women, how much was to be utterly merged in obedience to authority, and how much might be set apart for freedom in working.” (Ch 48)

Some considerations:

In chapter 15, Mr Thornton asserts: “We, the owners of capital, have a right to choose what we will do with it.” and Margaret responds “A human right” but sotto voce and, when asked what she said, she replies: “I said you had a human right. I meant that there seemed no reason but religious ones, why you should not do what you like with your own.” How should the phrase ‘human right’ as Margaret uses it be understood?
I wondered at the choice of Milton (the first time it is mentioned it is called ‘Milton-Northern’) as the pseudonym for Manchester. The translation to ‘mill town’ is obvious but is there a hint towards the poet John Milton whose most famous poem, Paradise Lost, describes how Adam and Eve are cast out of the paradisaical Garden of Eden to earn their bread through labour. At the same time the idyllic New Forest village in which Margaret grows up is called Helstone. Is this perhaps ‘Hell’s Town’?
The ladies at the dinner party given by the Thorntons talk of wealth. Margaret shows this by saying: “They took nouns that were signs of things which gave evidence of wealth, - housekeepers, under-gardeners, extent of glass, valuable lace, diamonds, and all such things” (Ch 21)
One of the titles Gaskell considered for her book was ‘Death and Variations’. There are six deaths in it: those of Bessy Higgins, Margaret’s mother, Boucher, Margaret’s father and godfather Mr Bell. This last reflects that there are variations on the act of dying: “Nothing like the act of eating for equalizing men. Dying is nothing to it. The philosopher dies sententiously - the pharisee ostentatiously - the simple-hearted humbly - the poor idiot blindly” (Ch 43)

First published as a weekly serial in the magazine Household Words in 1854 - 1855.

Published as a novel, with additional chapters, by Chapman and Hall in 1855

My Wordsworth paperback edition was issued in 2002

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling

and The Kids of God

Other novels by Mrs Gaskell include