north and south elizabeth gaskell sparknotes

Hale, and Margaret have numerous discussions about the cotton industry and class relations in Milton. Margaret voluntarily bears the burden of nursing her mother, as well as shielding her father from the news at first.ĭuring his visits to the Hales’, Thornton, Mr. Hale is also sickened by the smoky atmosphere, and she soon receives a fatal diagnosis. Margaret and Bessy often discuss Bessy’s yearning for heaven and her dread of the upheaval stirred by strikes, and Margaret comforts Bessy in her illness. Bessy, who is the same age as Margaret, is dying of a respiratory illness she contracted after years of working in a cotton mill. While walking through the streets of Milton, Margaret befriends a working-class father and daughter, Nicholas Higgins and Bessy Higgins, and begins visiting Bessy often. Thornton, meanwhile, admires Margaret’s regal beauty, but thinks her proud. Margaret finds him off-putting and “not quite a gentleman.” She especially dislikes the antagonistic way he speaks about employers and workers, despite Thornton’s own humble background. Soon after their arrival in smoky Milton, Margaret meets John Thornton, a young, successful cotton-mill owner who will be her father’s primary pupil.

Hale confides that, due to unspecified religious doubts, he must no longer be a minister in the Church of England the entire family must therefore move to Milton, a Northern industrial city, where Mr. Soon after Margaret’s longed-for homecoming, however, Mr. Would that contemporary novelists could also take on that challenge.After her cousin Edith Shaw’s wedding, eighteen-year-old Margaret Hale returns from London, her home for the past decade, to Helstone, the small Southern England village where her father, Richard Hale, and her mother, Maria Hale, still live. As Dickens himself found with Hard Times, marrying social concerns with enjoyable storytelling is far from straightforward, but Gaskell succeeds. 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.īut, actually, it doesn't matter. Dickens was apparently infuriated by its lack of focus, only for Gaskell to respond by cunningly reintroducing edited chapters later. There's even a Shakespearean case of mistaken identity, just to make the course of true love run a little less smooth.Īll of which makes North and South far too long. She becomes part of a clearly signposted will-they-won't-they love story with the outwardly rough-and-ready manufacturer Mr Thornton.

Margaret is torn from the bucolic surroundings of Hampshire in classic fish-out-of-water style.

Gaskell's priorities lay with storytelling.

North and south elizabeth gaskell sparknotes