STUDYING & WATCHING NORTH AND SOUTH BY ELIZABETH GASKELL (1855)

 THE STORY

When Margaret Hale arrives in Milton - in the industrial northern district of England - she is so disappointed by the bleak, smoky, noisy, grey atmosphere of the place. Her father has left the Church and decided to uproot his family from Helstone , in the beautiful countryside of the South of England. Margaret is greatly prejudiced against the people from the North and their rather direct, almost wild manners. So she starts idealizing the South

Mr Bell, one of Mr Hale’s former university mates, suggested them to settle in Milton where he owns a cotton mill run by his tenant, Mr John Thornton. Mr Thornton helps the Hales to find accomodation and becomes Mr Hale’s friend and pupil. He is handsome and smart, self-confident and successful in his job, greatly appreciated in Milton both as an entepreneur and a magistrate.

MASTERS & WORKERS : MR THORNTON AND NICHOLAS HIGGINS, THE IDEAL RELATIONSHIP ACCORDING TO MRS GASKELL

In  Mary Barton  (1848), Elizabeth Gaskell  started to draw her own tragic picture of the “eternal subject for agitation in the manufacturing districts”: “the differences between the employers and the employees”.  John Barton, after witnessing  the painful death of his only little son helplessly, had tried to fight for better living and better working conditions for himself and his fellow workers as chairman of a Trade Union  . He had also joined a political movement asking for universal male suffrage and the possibility for a man of no property to become member of Parliament:  Chartism . All his attempts resulted  as failures and that made his rage against factory-owners explode into murder.

Desperate workers attack the mill - From BBC North and South (2004)

ELIZABETH GASKELL AND THE INDUSTRIAL NOVEL - MARY BARTON (1848) - POWER POINT PRESENTATIONS, WORKSHEET & VIDEO

In the Flash_Widget Box on the right you'll find two Power Point Presentations related to Mrs Gaskell and her first novel, Mary Barton (1848):

- Gaskell ppt
- Mary Barton ppt
Click on the icons in the box and download them.
With Mrs Gaskell and her "industrial" or "social - problem" novels, 

 we will be able to experience a completely new world as readers, that of Victorian industrial cities with their restless, fierce and troublesome citizens: factory owners and factory workers, "masters" and "hands", the rich and the poor.

Industrialization was radically changing the strictly  conservative Victorian society but the strife to obtain modernity and basic rights was to be long, hard, paved with sufference and tragedy for workers.