Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South: Social Classes, Labour and Romance

Once one has read all of Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters, the natural next step is generally to read Elizabeth Gaskell. She wrote more than one novel. She also wrote a biography of Charlotte Brontë — whom she knew personally. It was the first Brontë biography, and is still read today although critics now consider it to have taken great liberties with the truth. Although Cranford — a gently-paced look at middle-class village life in the 19th century — has also been filmed for TV with Dame Judi Dench and other venerable actors, North and South is perhaps her most enduringly popular novel.

Gaskell was the daughter of a preacher/tutor/gentleman farmer/keeper of records. She ended up marrying a Unitarian minister and moving from rural Cheshire — the land of Cranford — to the industrial city of Manchester. There she mixed socially with members of parliaments, bankers, and literary figures; while she and her husband also undertook many charitable projects. She published novels in serialized form, and short stories, in a magazine that Charles Dickens ran (1850-59): Household Words. The two of them had conflicts of opinion, but for example I am glad that Dickens suggested North and South as the title instead of Gaskell's suggestion: Margaret Hale.

Elizabeth Gaskell, ca. 1860
via Wikimedia Commons

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North and South begins as the heroine, Margaret Hale, returns to the countryside parsonage where her father and mother are living. As a young girl she had been sent to live with London cousins, and now at the age of around 18 she has not seen her only brother Frederick for years, and has not had the closeness to her parents that she would otherwise have had.

Her father, the minister, begins to have doubts about the Anglican Church. Out of principle, he refuses to rise in the ranks of the Church, even though his family would be richer and his wife could climb back toward the aristocratic lifestyle into which she was born. He goes even further and gives up his work in Helstone (where the parsonage lies), stepping out of the Church entirely soon after his daughter returns to the household.

Howard's Lane in Holybourne,
where Elizabeth Gaskell bought a house just before she died

Photograph by Hugh Chevalier
via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0 licence

AS HIS PLACE of self-exile from everyone who knew him before, Mr. Hale chooses Milton, a northern industrial town that is based on real-life 1850s Manchester. By moving so far away, he wants to escape the blame and ignominy that he would face as someone who has 'foolishly' imperiled his financial standing and respectability by offending a major social institution. The wife, despite her long running complaints about Helstone, is aghast; and so is Margaret.

Milton is a grim home. No greenery grows except at the fringes of the expanding city, the streets are bustling, industrial pollution spreads grime through the air and onto the scene, and factory machinery that does the business of the cotton industry renders it, at times, tremendously noisy.

January 2020 in Books: What (I'll) Be Reading Next, Part 2

Zora Neale Hurston, Eatonville, FL
Photograph c. 1940, in the State Library and Archives of Florida
via Wikimedia Commons

UNWISELY I am working at reading farther into the Teilchen-detektoren book about physics, the biography Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson, Ο μεγάλος περίπατος του Πέτρου by Alki Zei, Cavafy's poems and Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, at once. Yet, for inexplicable reasons, the impulse hit to begin reading even more books.

Therefore I'm rereading Anne of the Island, which is one of the sequels to the early 20th-century Canadian children's book Anne of Green Gables. And, more ambitiously, reading the 17th-century French drama Bajazet by Jean Racine for the first time. I don't even know what that play is about, because I'm still reading biographical introductory material and don't want to 'peek ahead.' Of course that makes it more fun: exploring old literature as if it were new and just hatched from the egg is exciting and (hopefully) rewarding.

The Three Escapes of
Hannah Arendt
by Ken Krimstein
Bloomsbury, via
Amazon.com

Lastly, godfather M. gave me a graphic novel about Hannah Arendt: The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt by Ken Krimstein. After Marjane Satrapi's memoir of life during the political revolutions in Iran during the second half of the 20th century, Persepolis, it's the second graphic novel I've ever read. It was published by Bloomsbury in 2018. And I'm glad to have a starting point to approach the philosopher. My mother has read her work and it sounded like not to read it is to miss timely and relevant perspectives.

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Also, I am re-reading North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell. Its existence is, of course, not a great secret amongst fans of classics and literary romance.

North and South, ©BBC (2004)

The BBC adaptation of 2004 has lent it a broader, happy and active readership. Also, on YouTube one can probably still find an older adaptation where Patrick Stewart, predating his Star Trek captainship, strides through the scenes as the tradesman hero.

Amongst the author's other works, Wives and Daughters was depressing and 'domestically claustrophobic' as far as I recall, as well as unfinished. I don't feel like rereading Ruth or Cranford, and I never read Mary Barton or the life of Charlotte Brontë. In short, North and South is my favourite Gaskell work.

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Note Regarding Process: Last year these 'monthly round-up' blog posts appeared with the heading "What We'll Be Reading Next." But this month, new publications are not likely to be discussed and it would be silly to imply that other people must read the same older publications that I am, so I've chosen to use the first person singular instead.

January 2020 in Books: What (I'll) Be Reading

Although I've seen that there are of course interesting new releases, I am going to read 'old' books this January.

One of these new releases is, All the Days Past, All the Days to Come, by Mildred D. Taylor, whose book The Well (about children in the face of racial prejudice) I found excellent.

As the Guardian's books preview of 2020 noted, Anne Brontë's 200th birthday was on January 17th. I'm ambivalent about The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, so if anything I'd reread Agnes Grey. Featuring a heroine who leaves home to teach due to her family's financial position, it helps sap all of the illusions that one had about governess work after reading Jane Eyre.

Charlotte did try to adjust expectations in Shirley, but Charlotte's melodramatic vein weakens the effect of her warnings; you don't — or at least I don't — expect to find 'tiger-like' James Helstones pouncing on governesses regularly. To leap to another book, Mrs. Norris, the aunt of the heroine in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, is so villainous in an unspectacular, quotidian, realistic way that she makes you shudder; I'd say that the families with which Anne's character, Agnes, stays, impress you in that way as well.

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At the beginning of the year I started with an anthology of news analysis and opinion columns from the Manchester Guardian that was published at the end of 2017: The Bedside Guardian 2017.

It was about Brexit, too, of course; the anthology was compiled the year after the hapless referendum. (The opinion columnists' wide-eyed enthusiasm about the Labour Party's chances of fixing things under Jeremy Corbyn was painful to read, although natural because of how badly the 2017 election went for Theresa May, considering what's happened with the most recent election.)

A few writers argue that Britain's socioeconomic fabric is deteriorating rapidly, apart from thriving hotspots like parts of London.

I guess that right-wing newspapers publish viewpoints that the European Union is to blame for this. But the Guardian's analysts tend to argue that British austerity measures, the 'bedroom tax' which has made living in council housing in Britain an even greater burden, financial exploitation by under-regulated industries (e.g. payday loans), and council taxes that are too low to pay for adequate community services, play a greater role.

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A deeper look at Britain's economic woes is Mike Carter's book All Together Now?, which the Guardian's books arm also published in 2017. (I received it free of charge as a reward for being a member; and read it in December.)

In 2016 Carter travelled on foot between Liverpool and London, 'reliving' a labour rights march that his father took in the early 1980s. He explains his fraught relationship with his father, meets strangers and pre-arranged interviewees as he goes, records the battered socioeconomic order in the towns and cities through which he walks, and analyzes the causes.