In Our Time - North and South

Episode Date: March 9, 2017

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Elizabeth Gaskell's novel North and South, published in 1855 after serialisation in Dickens' Household Words magazine. It is the story of Margaret Hale, who was raised in the South in the New Forest and London's Harley Street, and then moves North to a smokey mill town, Milton, in Darkshire. As well as Margaret's emotional life and her growing sense of independence, the novel explores the new ways of living thrown up by industrialisation, and the relationships between 'masters and men'. Many of Margaret Hale's experiences echo Gaskell's own life, as she was born in Chelsea and later moved to Manchester, and the novel has become valued for its insights into social conflicts and the changing world in which Gaskell lived.With Sally Shuttleworth Professor of English Literature at the University of OxfordDinah Birch Pro-vice Chancellor for Research and Professor of English Literature at the University of LiverpoolAndJenny Uglow Biographer of Elizabeth GaskellProducer: Simon Tillotson.

This is the BBC. Thanks for down learning this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programmes if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoy the programmes. Hello, in 1854, Charles Dickens published a serialised novel, North and South, by Elizabeth Gaskell. It tells the story of Margaret Hale,

forced to leave her rural childhood home in the south of England, and live among the polluted cotton mills of Milton to the north, the version of Manchester, with countless workers in unspeakable slums, caught up in strikes and riots, she overcomes her prejudice and learns to prefer her new life to her old. Gaskill lived in Manchester and knew her subject well. More than any other writer of her time, her novels brought the reality of industrial life to a southern reading public, and she's now seen as one of the great writers of her century. With me to discuss North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell, and Sally Shuttlerworth, Professor of English Literature at the University

Wachdana Birch, Pro-Vice Chancellor for Research and Professor of English Literature at University of Liverpool and Jenny Ugler, biographer of Elizabeth Gasco. Diana Birch, what do we need to know about Gasco's early life? She was born in reasonably affluent circumstances, not into poverty, into a Unitarian family. That is something we need to know. She suffered a misfortune when she was a baby in that her mother died. Her father sent her to live with a loving aunt Hannah Lum in Nutsfield. So though she had been born in London, she was brought up in the North West. She had one sibling, John, and John was a close association. He visited her in Cheshire. He was 12 years older than she was. A second misfortune when she was a teenager,

when John vanished. He was on a voyage out to India. He arrived. but nothing further was heard from him. And that's a fact that haunts her. Her father died soon after, but she married a Unitarian Minister, a fortunate marriage, William Gaskell, a great supporter and a very active social reformer. Someone, it would be good to know more about.

She then had a family. She had four surviving daughters. She lost a son, William Gaskell, at the age of nine months. And in order to help her overcome that trauma, she began to write and to publish. Thank you. Religion was vitally important to write to the time.

It's difficult often to transfer to people, how important faith was. Gascals' religion was Unitarianism. Can you tell us what the fundamental beliefs the Unitarians were? So, as the name suggests, they believed in unity. So they rejected the doctrine of the Trinity

Father, Son and Holy Ghost. Their argument was that God was a unified entity. And as a consequence of that, they also rejected the concept of the divinity of Christ, quite a heretical notion in the eyes of many at the time. But the Unitarians believe, and this is really important to Gaskill's life and work, that reason, philosophy and science,

could work alongside faith, actively in the world. And the third thing that's really important about Unitarianism as Gaskill developed and grew up is that the Unitarians believed that women should be educated and that women should be given the opportunity to be active in the world. So though her husband was a minister of religion, he was very supportive of Elizabeth Gaskill's work as a writer, her work in Manchester where they lived

and that mattered to her development as a writer. They didn't believe in Hellfire either and they didn't, as I understand it, and they didn't believe in original sin. There were some Unitarians who believed in Eternal Darnation but they were very much a minority. Most rejected that doctrine. Elizabeth Gaskell certainly rejected that doctrine.

The Unitarians were closely bound with education, especially education which was not being offered at Oxford and Cambridge, which was just as well because they were not allowed to go. there and they built up educational faculties in their own systems and that as you say spread to women as well as men sometimes can you just dwell a little bit more on that how that was happening in Manchester when she got there they did believe in education I mean Elizabeth Gaskell herself was a very inclusively inclined religious woman so her work with Unitarians was mingled with work with other dissenting and non-conformist bodies in Manchester but you you are right. She and her husband were very committed to education as a principle and in practice. So she did work alongside others in Manchester to disseminate knowledge, to disseminate religious principles, but also active scientific knowledge. That was important to what she and her husband believed was needed to help people who are living in such dreadful conditions in

Manchester. Jean Eugler, what impact did Elizabeth Gaskill's earlier works have? Oh, she'd always written. She'd just loved stories and she loved listening to people. Always being what, starting at 8, 9, 10, 12 works? Yes, yes, yes. And she started writing short stories for her own entertainment. But then when she was in Manchester,

she was so struck by what she saw because she was coming from Nutsford. She was coming from rural Cheshire into this new world, and it was very startling. And that's absolutely right, because they're involved in reform. She saw things and heard about things that she could never have imagined, like people living in cellars, starving and so on. And so when she came to write, she began to write stories about them.

And then when her son died and William encouraged her to write a novel, she loved romance. And she thought of writing a romantic novel set on the Yorkshire borders. But instead, she said, the life of those who surrounded me pressed so strongly upon me, the people I bumped into in the street, that she wanted to write about them. And what seemed most important to her was that nobody had given them a voice. So she wrote the novel Mary Barton, which was really a voice. about, as it were, the struggle of chartism

and involved the murderer of Milona, and was very, very much on the side of the poor. And this was profoundly shocking to Manchester Miloners, but also completely revelatory to people in the South. It might be worth pointing out that in about 1800, Manchester's population was round about 4,000, and by the time she got there, it was 400,000. It was on the biggest cities in the world,

biggest industrial city in the world, and the young Benjamin Israeli was saying, I think not of ruins anymore. Athens, the new Athens is Manchester. So it had the size, it had the possibility, it had interaction, but it also had this deep, deep, this seam of sorrowful life going on. What did she bring to the novel in terms of her own reading? She saw people she bumped into on the street.

She wrote about them. It outraged people that Williams preached to in his chapel, some of which were millerners. Some of them burnt the book. Is that right? They burnt her second book, which was even more shocking, which was Ruth,

which was about a 15, exactly, 15-year-old seamstress who is seduced and becomes pregnant, has an illegitimate child, and it's then taken in by a Unitarian clergyman who passes her off as a widow. And this was thought to be really shocking. And yes, and she said,

would you have thought, you write to her friend, would you have thought I was so terrible that my book is actually burnt by one of Williams' congregation and also another man had said they would not even let their mother read it. So she was, sort of be shocking.

But you're right, she had a different kind of reading. She was writing, Mary Barton was published in 1848 and people had begun to talk about what they called the Condition of England. It's in Carlisle. Thomas Carlyle had written Chartism and then past and present. and talking about how people were living in a world

which was now completely conditioned by cash relations, by bought labour. So it was a serious issue. And then Disraeli, as you say, had written about the two nations in novels like Conningsby and Sybil. And people were starting to try and write about factory life. Fanny Trollope had written a novel about that. But what Gaskill wanted to, people to hear were not

just the words of the commentators but the people that actually lived there. So she and William were very interested in local writers. Dialect writers. In dialect writers. In people like Ebenezer Elliot, we don't hear much

about, known as the Cornlaw Rimer and Samuel Bamford, who was a chartist writer. And she used that dialect and she used their voices as part of her writing. As you gave the working class of culture, which they weren't, one thought to have at the time.

And we must remember that in 1848 we have the very early organised strikes, which had not taken place, which was thought to be an absolute terrible thing, as if the army had gone on strike. It was that terrible in the eyes of the establishment. So there's turmoil going on, there's creativity going on, there's massive faith going on, and much money-making. In the middle of all that, you're at this book, Sally, on the shuttle world. Can you just summarise the pot? You do so brilliantly in your thing, you do it in one paragraph.

Thank you. But it's a love story. But it's set against the class conflict and industrial strife in Manchester. Initially, we see Manchester through the eyes of the rather bewildered Margaret, who's come from both rural Hampshire and also London. So she brings... 19 years. Yes, she's 19.

She's opposed. who are going to Manchester and is completely taken back by what she sees. But there she meets the manly mill owner, Mr. Thornton, but also a worker, Nicholas Higgins. And both of them, in a sense, educate her and she educates them as she attempts to mediate between the workers and the masters. And so you get a resolution in the end where man and woman come together, classes come together as well,

and the marriage of the male and female stands in for the desired marriage between these warring classes. But it doesn't hold back from the antagonism between them at the start. It doesn't hold back from polarised positions between Margaret and Thornton, for instance. No, no.

Margaret is... I mean, there are each other strokes more or less from the start and almost the last play, don't they? Yes, yes. No, she is horrified by this man initially. She thinks he's got no culture. He's standing there, demanding his rights, no sympathy for the workers

so yes she has to be educated to see that there are positive sides of him but also with Higgins she's very very sympathetic to the poor but then worried about the strikes and also why are they sending people to Coventry

if they don't join the union and so through conversations we learn to understand the perspectives of each other she actually educates her read is through conversations, isn't she? Yes, she does. Yes, and by seeing the shifts of

position of the various individuals. Now, she'd been writing for household words, Dickens magazine, and she wrote this for household words. Dickens was a tempestuous editor, and she was a very obstinate and firm-minded young woman, so what happened? Rather

a stressful story, because Gasco was not happy in writing a weekly series, sections. So there's the pressure of time, the pressures of length. Also, Dickens kept editing her. He says he took out the plungings and the lungings and the convulsions and she puts them all back in again. And then at the end, she wants more space to finish it. And Dickens says, no, you've got this segment, you've got to do it. And she's furious and talks about the way in which her book has been ruined.

But interestingly, when she then rewrites it for the book version, she keeps the end just as it is. and actually insert some other material in that doesn't really help much at all. How did it go down, in Household Words? Oh, very well, I think. Yes, yes. Interestingly, though, it's... Oh, Jenny Biggs. Hence of being shaken across the table.

I got the impression that it wasn't a hit as a serial because it is too long and too slow. But when it's published in volume form, and people can, as it were, read it. Then they take it more seriously. I think perhaps household words wanted things to be brisker and quicker. Dickens was quite critical

for Zion bread, probably. Dickens wanted things to be brisky. It was worried that there were too many deaths in the book. I wish your characters had firmer legs and that sort of thing. Yes. And Gaskell herself jokes and says you could call it death-blown variations because there are actually five deaths within it.

But he also objected to the way in which people were so passionate because she gives all her characters quite a lot of emotion and they're forever fainting or sort of having throbbing hearts, etc. So yes, he wanted it to be brisker in that sense. But when he came out as a book, it began to get some recognition then, although we'll talk later about the story of its reception which went down and then up again. Yes.

Thanks a slightly to people are yourself. It was well reviewed. I suppose there probably weren't as many reviews as for Mary Barton, but mill owners were very relieved because she wasn't being as critical of the mill owners as she had been in Mary Barton. So there were positive responses in that regard. Diana, Dina Bush, how familiar would Southern readers have been with the world that Elizabeth Gascoe depicted? Well, it would depend on what they read. There was quite a lot of material in print of various kinds that did approach these issues.

We mentioned some of them. Mary Barton was very successful, and Mary Barton is in fact much more graphic about the sufferings of the industrial workers than North and South is. There were also non-fictional accounts. There was, for instance, Engels, condition of the working classes, 1845. We've already mentioned Disraeli's Sybil, again 1845, Fanny Trollops, the story of Michael Armstrong, the factory boy. And all of these...

So there was that background and if you'd been a concentrator of stuff from the north, you'd have read some of that. But do we know what impact this novel had on southern readers? It did have a significant impact. It didn't create quite the stir that Mary Barton did. Mary Barton is in some ways a more shocking novel. So it has that kind of immediate punch.

North and South was easier in some ways for those who were used to a traditional romance plot. It is, as Sally said. It's a love story. And that perhaps eased people in to some of its more challenging implications. So from that point of view, I think it worked its way under the skin of readers. And another point, and it's one that Jenny's made, and I think it's really important, is that these are novels, true of Mary Barton, too, that give the workers their own voice.

when Disraeli, for instance, does attempt to do that, and to be fair to him, he does, they all speak like Disraeli, which is not very convincing, whereas Elizabeth Gaskell gives an authenticity to the voices. The reason for that is a simple one. She knew the people that she was writing about on an intimate, long-term basis. She wasn't working from printed materials as Disraeli was or from as it were flying visits to the north as many of those who had previously trying to address these issues were she lived there she worked there it makes a huge difference to the basis on which she can describe those lives what did the mill owners make the millerunners went to her husband's church we told

and objected to Mary Martin because they thought they were misrepresented what did they make of North and South and Mary Barton. What is the condition of the millerners with regard to her books? It's very interesting. It does change. Mary Barton, they certainly

felt that they were absolutely misrepresented. Meaning what? They were presented as unthinking, as concerned, only with their own interest, as prepared as

almost to let their workers and their families starve without thinking around them. Indeed they did. And that's exactly what Gaskell said. So they were completely outraged. And then they did accuse her of having no understanding of economics and no understanding of the workings of trade. Did you have no understanding of economics? Well, I think that she did. And she was also...

Do you mean she did have understanding? Yes. Yeah. The Unitarian congregation in Manchester is extremely interesting in that many of the leading manufacturers are non-conformists and many of them came to that church and she visited their homes and she listened. She's a great, as Diana said, a great listener.

She understood the issues that were going on. She listened to the arguments about the Corn law reform and so on and she read. So that what she wanted to do was to try and find new ways of resolving this relationship between masters and men. So one of the influences on her books was actually the rise of Christian socialism, really, with F.D. Morris and Kingsley. Charles Kingsley, Waterbergers.

Charles Kingsley, exactly. And the idea that came from that was that, was that, you could have a working system which was to do with cooperation rather than sort of master and servant absolutely. And indeed, you know, J.S. Mill and principles of economy, he foresaw a future where wage labour might disappear. Everything could be collective and collaborative. Gaskell never goes that far.

But she wanted, she had seen among the manufacturers too, experiments in exactly this kind of thing, or rather paternalistic experiments, masters and men eating together, you know, education on the workplace, more communication. So she wanted to bring in those ideas. And when she wrote North and South,

she was very worried because she said that she'd been able to write Mary Barton because she felt so strongly for the poor. And she didn't really feel so strongly the other way around. and maybe it would be a feeble and it would be a failure. But she tried hard and it was a conciliatory novel, so the manufacturers were pleased and relieved. Sally, from what I've read and what you three have said,

it seems that in one way she was as much a preacher as her husband in his church. She was trying to persuade people to come together in a way that I presume, I don't know where we have any of his sermons, but he was doing it in fiction. Yes, I think that's a very good point, that he was a wonderfully powerful orator from the pulpit, and she was doing very much the same through her novels. A real sense of moral purpose there that she believed that through her fiction, she hopefully would be able to change lives and get people to just think about things in a different way,

to try and understand why the workers would join a union, for example, when, for Dickens, for example, writing hard times, which was put it, he serialised in household words before North and South. He hated the unions, and so the unions were led by this demagogue who was completely untrustworthy, whereas what Gaskell is saying, no, look, she almost suggests at one point that to join a union is the most Christian thing you can do. She then shows how it goes wrong if they resort to violence, etc. But the sense is that there is justice and a really powerful argument for, for the poor.

Do you think that does she suggest as much that the owners go wrong? Not as much as in Mary Barton, definitely. There's one point which I think is quite interesting. There's a poor young woman Bessie who is dying from having ingested fluff in a factory. And you'd think that this would be absolute, it is wrong of the employers, what are they doing?

Because it was known that you could install a wheel to get rid of the fluff. But actually, Gaskell inserts the fact that in many factories, where they had these wheels, the workers complained because they couldn't fill their bellies full of the fluff. So she tries to be very even-handed. So at the one point, you have got the poor girl dying very definitely from an industrial disease. But then she tries to suggest that not all the mill owners are bad. There's a spectacular riot in this book, in which she tries to car. first of all Thornton tries unsuccessfully to calm the rioters are coming to his yard

and then she goes out and attempts it and a stone hits her and he carries her into the house and so on but they the rioters go away. Big thing that seems to me from what you've written offended people that she took off her bonnet and her was loose while she spoke this was the big deal. Why was that a big deal and am I right? Yes, absolutely you're right. Throughout Victorian novels you find out if a woman takes off her bonnet then she's about to be almost sexualised and certainly passionate

because women always had their bonnets on but Margaret seems to deliberately tear it off she's so caught up in the moment and she's actually ordered Thornton to go down there and face the men like a man and so she feels guilty but yes she is very dramatic she goes and throws herself in front of Thornton

in front of the crowd and is seen afterwards to have disgraced herself in this unfeminine behaviour And was that widely commented on at the time? Was that something that people picked up from north and south that made it rather vulgar? Yes, a sense that what is she doing? Having a woman who would, because at that point,

even to have a woman talking on a platform was thought to be very unfeminine. So to have her actually go out there and throw her body, Margaret afterwards is completely taken up with shame that she could have done such a thing and that people could have interpreted it in a sex. manner, which they certainly did. Nana, you wanted to come in. Yeah, I think that all that we've been saying about the moral and political drive of the novel is absolutely right.

But I don't think we should give the impression that it is a treatise or a didactic novel in any kind of narrow sense. I think one of the sources of the power of this novel is a really powerful novel, is the way in which it fuses all of those broader concerns with some deeply personal preoccupations. It gives it a kind of emotional energy. The return of Frederick, we haven't mentioned Frederick, Margaret's lost brother, which is an important kind of thread in the novel. It's one of the ways in which the developing romance between Margaret and John Thornton is threatened because John Thornton thinks that he's a lover. That reflects a deep preoccupation in Elizabeth Gaskell's imagination.

And similarly, we've mentioned the numerous deaths in the novel. And there are many, many deaths of different kinds. The novel is, alongside all of these other considerations, a contemplation of grief and loss, how you can reconstruct your life, make something positive out of suffering. And that is one of the reasons that it differs from other industrial novels. It is an industrial novel,

and it's a very subtle and sophisticated account of the economic and political issues. But it's more than that. It's a novel that engages you emotionally, imaginatively, and continues to do so. Jenny, how distinctive heroine is Margaret Hale? Oh, Margaret is distinctive because she's powerful. In Gaskell's own writing, her heroines, her really popular heroines had been working, class girls. And you're absolutely right.

This is a very personal book. So this is the first time you have a middle-class girl, a vicar's daughter, as it were, taking centre stage. She's queenly. She's proud. She's got lots of set ideas that she has to lose. She's not exactly...

Horty? She's haughty, yes. I don't think she's arrogant because... But she certainly doesn't. does have a sense that her views are superior. Lovely, there's a lovely moment where she first meets

Nicholas Higgins, the worker, and Bessie, the daughter. And she asked Nicholas for what his name is and what his addresses. And Nickas, she might come a visit. And Nicholas said, oh, I'm not sure I want strangers coming to my house. And she doesn't, you know,

this is not, she was used to being as it were the lady of the village who people are terribly glad that they come But Margaret is different because she's middle class, she's passionate, she takes off her bonnet, as it were. She takes the place that Gascold thought women should, which is that if their conscience were stirred, they should speak out.

So in that sense, she's a distinctive heroine. But the novel is about feeling, as you've said, it's about reasoning what the situation, is, but it's also about learning to feel. And so Margaret is interesting in that sense, too, in that she's allowed to be truly passionate. Sunny, Sally Shottlerwood. Let's go back to the south there.

How does Gassel contrast the middle-class men and women of the north with the south? And is there a stage of the book, a point where sympathies go of the writer and expect you to go of the reader from the south to the north? Can you give us the south-north thing? Can we take up the title and play with that for a while? Yes. Not her first title, but still. No, no. Dickens.

Yes. Yes, so we start off in the South in a London drawing room. Margaret is treating it all with somewhat of amusement, so a sense that she is distanced from that rather frivolous society. We also see her in the countryside in Hampshire, loving the country, but later she talks about how, in fact, there's a lot of poverty in the South as well. And so she then comes to the north. She suddenly realizes that this idyll, which becomes Cranford,

is upheld by desperate work in the fields, which is in its way, just as desperate as work in the mills. Yes, yes. But that's later on when she gets that. Yes, but when she comes to Milton, she does... Milton is Manchester. Yes, Milton, Northern. She is horrified by the smoke, the grime, etc.

but she becomes entranced really by the power and the energy and the forthrightness of the people. She walks along the street, which is something she could never have done in London, and men call out to her and women as well, and she's taken her back and then realises that there's something really quite attractive about all this. So almost it's a seduction of Margaret by the north. And so by the end she's got very little to say in favour of the South, a suitor, Henry Lennox, a lawyer, he comes back in again at the end.

And she's really dismissive of him, even though he's helped her try and rescue her brother, Frederick, and allow him to come back to England. But it's a sense that really the energies and the values of the book rest with the North. Why is that? Does she particularise that? Can you say, because of these three things? There's a redefinition of what it is to be a gentleman that happens. happens. Thornton says to her at one point, I won't have any of your gentlemen,

I am a man. And what he means by this is something, he says he won't be defined in his relations to others. He is manly on his own. Well, does he also mean that he doesn't want to pop off and get a country house? And he wants to stay where he has and get on with his job.

Yes, yes. It's very much linked with the values of work and the sense that you are making your own life because the family lost a fortune. he's made it all on his own two feet. So there's those sorts of values as well. Dana, you want to come in. Just to add to that, I think there's also a real sense

that Margaret is instinctively allied to the concepts of independence that are represented in the North. That does go back to Gaskell's Unitarianism, which was a faith that had little to say for authority and the rule of authority. And over and over again in this novel, we see Margaret and others in the novel challenging forms of authority.

And there's that sense that the north is in a position to disrupt traditional forms of authority in a way that the South isn't. And I think that that's one of the major reasons for that shifting balance between the North and the South. Can we just develop that? I think that's, I think that... Come about it just a little bit, Jenny. The conjunction of unitarian faith, working class strife, social justice,

is very tight, isn't it there? Yes, it is. But Gaskell's Unitarianism is, as it were, inclusive as well. So the first thing that's important to the novel, there are different forms of faith in it. is that one must not blame things that go wrong in human life on God. You know, this is not a plague sent by God for our sins or whatever. If things are going wrong, it's up to people to try and put them right.

This depends on feeling, on fellow feeling, which is actually, as it were, a New Testament rather than old eye for an eye. It depends on feeling for other people. So the idea of authority, the challenge to authority is actually a duty, the tremendous emphasis on conscious. Thornton's individualism is wonderful. When he says, I am a man, that is absolutely kind of the dynamic individualism of the manufacture of the new mercantile age.

And she admires that, and that's sexy. I mean, it's a very, very physical, sexy novel. but he too has got to learn to feel, to relax almost, to feel, so that the Unitarian Faith is which is about feeling and inclusiveness and sympathy for others, but also being resolute and standing out to see that if you can change things. And the way that she combines that with the idea of Margaret growing up, I mean the novel was going to be called Margaret Hale. It's Dickens, interestingly, who makes it this north.

South polarisation. It is that Margaret grows up to come to realise this and see all the different ways that people choose to live their lives and begin to see that they can be resolved by fellow feeling.

What is her relationship with other writers? Obviously she had a close and combustible relationship with Charles Dickens. She had a close relationship with Charlotte Bonte whose reputation in a sense she made by writing that wonderful biography of her, and so on. Can you tell us about not only what contemporaries and then those she read and you feel she was influenced by?

Yes. One figure would be another Unitarian Harriet Martineau who'd written a Manchester Strike about 20 years earlier, which also was very sympathetic towards the workers, but in fact ends up with a very Malthusian case saying that actually it is the workers' fault because they're having too many kids. But I think Charlotte Bronte,

is one of the closest influences on her, because prior to Gaskell writing North and South, Bronte had published Shirley, which is less read of her novels, but it was also an industrial novel, set back in the early part of the century of the Luddites, but it combines, again, a relationship between mill owner and woman

and also the class conflict. But interestingly, in Shirley, you find that the women are excluded when there's a riot. They sit up out on the hillside, whereas Margaret Dirk charges in. But there's very much a similar process of education. So Caroline Helston and Shirley gets her lover to read Coriolanus and to understand he's being too proud. So it's exactly the same sort of process. And I think there are also parallels with Jane Eyre,

because in the end, Rochester, the manly man is maimed, and Jane comes into money, and so they're equal at last. And Nandret comes into big money at the end. Exactly. And bails out, Thornton. Yes, yes, a real parallel. And he realizes that her brother's not her lover. Yes, I'm happy ever after that kind of.

Yeah. Yeah. Jenny. Yes, I think the connection with Shirley is really sort of deep. They knew when Gaskill's writing Mary Barton, They know Charlotte Brunt is writing Shirley And they sort of arranged To publish one before the other But it's a very nice touch A little sort of tribute in that

The village that Margaret Hale comes from Is called Helston Which is like to say I'm taking on from Caroline Helfston in Shirley And I'm continuing this growth This woman's growth And as you say These heroines who grow and become powerful

Diana, how subversive do you think North and South was and is? I think it is subversive, certainly was at the time, in a number of different ways. I mean, certainly in terms of gender, we've talked a lot about the force and the energy of Margaret Hale, the way in which she takes command of situations and indeed of the entire novel, which does revolve around her. But also, I think, in the way in which it challenges traditional concepts of social class in relation. to rank. Those are two very different hierarchies in Victorian society. So a clergyman's daughter had rank, though she may not have money. And Margaret has to think through those prejudices and take her

readers with her to disrupt notions of where we stand on a kind of social ladder. But also in the way in which she gives working people a kind of standing and authority which had been really quite unusual in earlier novels.

I won't say that there aren't earlier novels in which that doesn't happen. But Nicholas Higgins is a hero of the novel. He has real statutes.

He's intelligent, he's articulate, he's courageous, he's generous, yes. Yes, he is a union man and he is a factory worker. I think the very fact that he has such a prominent role in the novel makes it subversive. But I'd also go back to the point that you've just made, Jenny, about it's being a very physical novel. It fully acknowledges the life of the body.

It's very good on material life, clothes, for instance. We almost always know what Margaret is wearing. and that may not seem very subversive, but to give that a kind of standing in the arguments of the novel, what people are eating, what they're wearing, what kind of rooms they're living in, is a subtle subversiveness that I think really matters still strikes you when you read the novel.

Sally, the novel was well received, she was well received, and then her reputation began to fall and then plummeted. Can you give us an idea of how that happened? And over the next, well, almost 70, 80 years? Yes. Until we get David Cecil in the 1930s saying Lord David Cecil, who was an arbiter at the time, and for many years afterwards, saying it was a woman

and she tried to be a man but failed, that sort of thing. Yes. I think one of the, that Ross set in when they started to publish her novels under Mrs. Gascoe, made them very safe. and after that I think the novel that really survived with Cranford which again is her safest novel very definitely nothing to disturb you there

lots of bonnets in that lots of bonnets yes not one taken off I don't know oh I think there was one eaten by cow but yes so she faded very much from view and then you get yes David Cecil in the 20s or 30s saying she's everything that is feminine and he meant this in the most derogatory mode but then

there was the rediscovery in the 60s 70s with people coming to think about the industrial novel again and class conflict and then feminist writing after that finding the wonders in Gasco but I think she suffered because

she burnt and asked people to burn so many of her letters and those that survive I think give a partial view and She comes out quite gossipy, and we don't really know what she was reading. So people tend to think that she was an unintellectual figure, whereas I think that's really false. But you had two rebirths, first than part of the growing sort of socialism, social and socialism of the 60s and 70s, and then the feminism, which is growing then, but growing later.

So she had two reinterested. Jenny, do you want to add to that? Yes, I think it's interesting what she's been important for to be. people. I mean, Cranford, which is, as you say, safe only when, if you look at it now from a feminist point of view, of course it's absolutely magnificent

about the support that women can give to each other and how they undermine the world of men. You know, it's a book. But that was a book that was dear to people as a sort of image of Britain so that Cranford was very widely read

in the trenches during the First World War of all things, because that was the country you were fighting for. And in America. And America. And then that new seeing of the industrial past was something. But I think

that now... I'm going to interrupt you. I'm very, very sorry. But we've got to go now. Thank you Jenny, New Lowe, Sally Shottlerth and Tied Perch. Next week we'll be going back 50 million years when the Earth's climate's changed so much. The Arctic was subtropical. Thank you very much for listening.

And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. Now this is a bit where I say, what did we miss out? The issue of rebellion and authority, I think we've touched on it, but we need to consider how it runs right through all the aspects of the plot. Because we have Frederick, who leads a mutiny, rebelling against authority in the Navy. We have Mr. Hale, who decides that he can no longer practice in the church. So we have the religious version of authority. We have the union and Higgins and whether people should go on strike. And we also have Margaret thinking about whether she should rebel

against the role of a female within middle class life. And so all the threads of the novel are brought together in those issues, I think, of rebellion and authority. And even the minor characters rebel, sometimes momentarily. And so the very pious Bessie Higgins, the doomed Bessie with her lung disease, is there's a fascinating moment where she suddenly rebels against everything that she

has been talking about the authority of God and says if it weren't true, you know, I would kill you. Do you remember that? Yes, such a strange, violent moment in the novel. Or Mrs. Hale, who's generally a rather meek

character and doomed, as so many characters are, in the novel, who really rebels against the authority of her husband. and doesn't support him in his views of what his duties are. So there are little sub-thebes that support that overall drive in the novel. I think that's one of the ways in which it shows its relations with Charlotte Bronte's thinking, actually. Yes, I think that's very much there in the writing.

It is a romance and it has a depth through the imagery. So there's a lot of imagery about the civil war, about the manufacturers as Cromwellians, Margaret, as royalists, but also about Oriental despotism and reaction to that, ballads of fight of martial imagery. So there's a sense that there is a continuing fight, and there always will be. Yes.

It's such a clever, novel in the way in which it really does bring together so many narrative drives. It's deeply personal. It's a really gripping, I think, love story. So that if you're reading it without knowing how the plot resolves, you're constantly thinking, oh, you know, this might end very badly. They might not be able to get themselves together. So you keep turning the pages, and that really matters to a novel.

But alongside that are these challenging thoughts about economic issues, political issues, And I agree with Sally. I think they're dealt with in a really much more sophisticated way than she's often been given credit for. And of course, these are issues. If we had had more time, Melvin. If we'd have more time. We do what we do.

We could have talked about the way in which our contemporary challenges and problems and woes and afflictions do find all sorts of reflections in what Gaskell was doing. Certainly, you know, the tension, regional tensions. if you like, but also the question of where, as it were, moral responsibility lies within industry and commerce, the role of different kinds of religion in our lives. All of these things are not dead issues confined to history. They're issues that we're having to deal with in different forms over and over again.

So just thinking about the parallels, the duties of an employer to employing. which is so current today, very much major debates in North and South about whether you treat your workers as children. And if you do, what sort of relationship is it? But I think that what Gaskill does is always take you just that bit further. So it's not a diagram. It's just slightly more complex than you think. So that in the strike, where we're sort of on the side of the poor and the workers,

one problem is that they brought in all this. Irish labour. And then she shows how the Mancunians are really against the Irish. They call them these dirty Irishers and things like that. But she lets us know that the Irish are desperate.

They want work. So she always just takes it that bit further. And it is about that bringing you her readers into the rooms, into the streets, into the things. So you're really, really

close. So it will be like the best kind of film that we have now or the best television series that actually takes you into those streets and makes you identify. Do you remember David Lodge's novel, Nice Work? Which I think televised, wasn't it?

There was a television version. You can see why David Lodge went back to North and South, because the plot of that novel is very, very closely modeled on North and South. For his contemporary take on relations between different cultures as seen, as you say Jenny, from the inside.

It's a very powerful novel. Nice work. So, Northern South has this continuing life in the way that the other industrial novels of the period, like Michael Armstrong Factory Boy, which isn't a bad novel, but it doesn't have that legacy of power, I think. Here you got the producer. And for more podcasts on arts and ideas from the BBC. Follow the link on our website to the best of BBC Radio 3's Free Thinking programme.