As far as Victorian novels go, I think North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell retains a degree of accessibility that many have shed in the intervening 150 years or so. The North/South divide lives on in the popular consciousness where workhouses and rigid sexual morality have long since melted into air.

The Northerner retains a fiercely guarded cultural identity. It is rarer these days for a Southerner to be quite so vocal. Economics plays less of a role in the split now. The Northerner is generally less well-off, and more dependent on government support. Wealth is generated in the financial centre: London.

It wasn’t always so. Britain’s growth used to be far more concentrated around its middle. Manufacturing was the preserve of the North and factory towns were the economic engine of the nation. Money was made here and the workers were beginning to understand their significant bargaining power balanced against the turbulence of world trade.

Gaskell brings an outsider’s perspective on all this in the dauntless character of the vicar’s daughter, Margaret Hale from Hampshire. Margaret adores the rural idyll in which she has grown up – Helstone – and finds interest and pleasure in the London society of petty gentry, her adolescent social milieu. By the novel’s conclusion, however, she has come to see what her contemporaries Marx and Engels described as the “idiocy of rural life”. Higgins, a fervent unionist out of work contemplates moving to the south to become an agricultural labourer. Margaret counsels him against this in the strongest terms:

You could not stand it. You would have to be out all weathers. It would kill you with rheumatism. The mere bodily work at your time of life would break you down. The fare is far different to what you have been accustomed to.

[…]

You would not bear the dullness of the life; you don’t know what it is […] They labour on from day to day, in the great solitude of steaming fields—never speaking or lifting up their poor, bent, downcast heads. The hard spadework robs their brain of life […] they go home brutishly tired, poor creatures! caring for nothing but food and rest.

North and South, Chapter 37

North and South belongs to the Condition of England genre. I began re-reading this novel just as I finished the BBC 4-part miniseries, Collateral. It, too, exemplifies the Condition of England in presenting a portrait of a nation conflicted, contradictory and divided in novel and emerging ways. Collateral and Gaskell feature a vicar with a crisis of faith, an awol militarist, would-be perjurers and embittered migrant politics. In Collateral, gig work and the casual economy are the focus, employment that recruits from and is attractive to immigrants in its unofficial, as-and-when nature. North and South puts the spotlight on the mills where work is similarly susceptible to the feast and famine of demand and the value of labour undercut by desperation and imported “hands”. On its own terms, Collateral is worth watching for the unresolved nature of its central conflict and I think it is particularly courageous in its portrayal of an alternative reality Labour party trying to out-nasty the Conservatives on immigration and security. The principled MP, played by John Simm is an incisive creation that ought to jolt the leader of the opposition into action, but inevitably will not.

As in Collateral, most characters in North and South are either in dysfunctional relationships, single, widowed, divorced or bachelors. The romance element in the novel is less, “will-they, won’t they” than “she won’t but he still would”. Margaret is bewildered by two declarations of love respectively in the novel’s second chapter and first half, both of which she immediately shuts down. There is certainly an element of realism in this but it rather throttles that source of tension. Instead of manly feats of strength, the novel’s antagonist, the industrialist Mr Thornton attempts to woo Margaret essentially by being nice to her family and pulling some bureaucratic strings to avoid her having to perjure herself. Hardly bracing eroticism.

Beyond the bearing of fruit baskets to the protagonist’s dying mother,  Mr Thornton is a fascinating character who boldly embodies the Zeitgeist. His story is principally that of squaring his hard-headed capitalist realism with the challenging and softening influence of Margaret and the union leader, Higgins. Both Higgins and Thornton despise charity. For Thorton it encourages dependency by the weak-willed and artificially perpetuates the unsuccessful and lazy. For Higgins it erodes the dignity of working people and disempowers them, discouraging political action.

Thornton refuses to give in to the striking workers’ demands and the strike breaks down as the union fails to maintain discipline and he undermines the action by hiring Irish immigrants.[1] He will only raise wages if the market allows; his hand will not be forced. Higgins respects him as an antagonist and is similarly a stickler for rules and principle. He recognises that the relation between worker and master is material in character. It is on this basis that he objects to the ban by Thornton’s rival industrialist, Hamper on workers paying into the union and organising. Higgins defends trade unionism with an appeal to individual liberty – one should have the choice to spend one’s money and free time as one likes.

Although Thornton recognises that the interests of the workers and masters are fundamentally opposed and initially describes the struggle between them as a “battle”, his attitude changes over the course of the novel. Presumably, owing to the influence of Margaret, he sets up a kitchen for his workers and allows them to buy ingredients from him and make their own meals. He recognises his purchasing power; his ability to buy in bulk for cheaper is far greater than that of his employees. Thornton, much like Higgins, despises charity, however, and allows the workers to help themselves rather than literally dishing out meals. His self-mythology is that of someone who brought themselves up to their position and his kitchen is part of an altered worldview of facilitating those who are capable to become masters in their own right.

Of course, none of this is explained to his employees just as fluctuations in world trade are not appealed to as a defence against not raising wages. Thornton is a technocrat – this is an experiment conducted by someone whose know-how is beyond the ken of workers. It is an attempt to solve a problem that by the end of the novel he is beginning to recognise. If it fails, it will be abandoned and new “solutions” devised. Such is the innovating power and drive of the bourgeoisie which will—

 hardly submit to the decision of an umpire, much less to the interference of a meddler with only a smattering of the knowledge of the real facts of the case, even though that meddler be called the High Court of Parliament.

North and South, Chapter 10

North and South as a novel is too long. It has obvious issues with plotting and pacing. Physical descriptions of Margaret Hale start off as disparaging and end up as weirdly idealising. Its religious concerns hardly resonate today.

However, it contains an unflinching depiction of the realities of industrialised capitalist society in full flow and both trade unionist and manufacturer philosophies in all their contradictions. It’s a novel that resonates in spite of itself because, melodrama aside, it is fundamentally realist and material relations govern our lives as much as they ever have.

Unions still clash with employers and divide public opinion. While we have abolished the most egregiously unsafe industrial practices in Britain, global manufacturing is outsourced to countries with far laxer environmental and safety norms. We have not yet evolved out of capitalism, and so a 19^th-century doorstopper still bears the heft it once did. Indeed, it is perhaps even more clear-sighted in retrospect than at the time it was published.

[1] There was speculation at the book group meeting that this was the origin of much of continuing anti-Irish prejudice in Glasgow – a hangover from when they were brought over as strikebreakers.