North and South is the second industrial novel,(sometimes categorized as a social novel) and the fourth overall by English writer Elizabeth Gaskell. With Wives and Daughters (1865) and Cranford (1853), it is one of Elizabeth Gaskell’s best known novels and a television adaptation North & South (TV serial), broadcast of the end of 2004, renewed interest and gained it a wider audience. Her first industrial novel Mary Barton (1848), already dealt with relations between employers and workers, but its narrative adopted the view of the working poor and described the "misery and hateful passions caused by the love of pursuing wealth as well as the egoism, thoughtlessness and insensitivity of manufacturers." In North and South Elizabeth Gaskell returns to the precarious situation of workers and their relations with industrialists, but in a more balanced manner by focusing more on the thinking and perspective of the employers.
North and South is set in the fictional town of Milton, North of England where industrialization was changing the city. The novel has frequently been favourably compared to the similarly-focused Shirley by the better-known novelist and friend of Gaskell, Charlotte Brontë. Forced to leave her home in the tranquil rural south, Margaret Hale settles with her parents in the industrial town of Milton where she witnesses the harsh brutal world wrought by the industrial revolution and where employers and workers clash in the first organized strikes. Sympathetic to the poor whose courage and tenacity she admires and among whom she makes friends, she clashes with John Thornton,a cotton mill manufacturer who belongs to the nouveaux riches and whose contemptuous attitude to workers Margaret despises. The confrontation between her and Mr Thornton is reminiscent of Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy in Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, but in the broad context of the harsh industrial North.
Elizabeth Gaskell was inspired to create the city of Milton based on Manchester, nicknamed Cottonopolis, where she lived. Wife of a Unitarian pastor, she saw religious dissenters and social reformers, who decried the abject poverty of this industrial region. She described the poor in her writings, showing compassion for the oppressed (women and workers).
