Is what divides us greater than what unites us? If you pay attention to the popular narrative of the day, then the answer sure seems to be an unqualified “Yes.”
If that is your answer, then Elizabeth Gaskell wrote a book just for you.
North and South. Originally published in the 1850s.
Some things really don’t ever change
The 1850s were, to put it mildly, a tempestuous time in Europe. The Communist Manifesto was published in 1848. The complaints were loud: the rich capitalists were appropriating more and more wealth for themselves while the poor working class was getting less and less, living in misery. Democracy was a sham, as the government was simply a tool for the rich to impose their will on the majority.
Sound familiar?
The next time someone tells you how bad things are in modern society, ask if they were better or worse in 1850. And, remember: the rhetoric of the 1850s frequently tipped into bloodshed.
Gaskell walked into the middle of that battlefield, held her head erect, and tried to stare down the warring sides. She did this by writing a novel. A Victorian novel.
It has the frame of a love story. (Obviously—this is a Victorian novel, after all.) Woman from the rural South meets man from industrial North. You instantly know they will get married in the end. They, of course, do not know this until the end.
You have read that plot a million times, so the joy in a novel like this is not the shock of the ending, but the artistry of the story telling.
How does Gaskell’s artistry rate? Well, this isn’t Pride and Prejudice. But then nothing else is Pride and Prejudice. Setting that comparison aside, North and South is really good. If you want to slip into the cozy world of a Victorian novel, and you aren’t in the mood for the charming nature of Dickens, then this novel is perfect.
But, it is not the romance that sets this novel so far apart from its obvious relations. It is the statement on the relationship between the capitalists and the proletariat.
Margaret Hale, our heroine, moves with her parents from a pleasant little rural town in the south to the burgeoning industrial town of Milton in the North. There she meets two people who will frame the story.
Thornton (our hero) is the factory owner, who rose up from humble origins to wealth and position. Higgins, the poor working man, is a widower struggling to earn enough to keep body and soul together. He has an incredibly charming but very sick daughter who, of course you know this instantly, is destined to die in the middle of the novel.
If you imagine reading this novel in 1850, the question the novel must solve is obvious. Will Margaret side with the capitalists or the proletariat? Obviously, she has to pick a side.
The novel was originally published in serial form in Dickens’ own journal, Household Words, so there really was no doubt which side would win out. After all, Dickens is always on Team Proletariat.
The moment of crisis comes. A strike. The union flexes its muscle to protest the capitalists cutting the wages of the working men. Behind closed doors, the capitalists are being hurt by a fall in the prices of the goods they sell, so they no longer can afford the wages they had been paying. (The economic details on all this are a bit, shall we say, sketchy, but we are left with no doubt that the owners really do have to cut the wages.) Of course the capitalists don’t feel any need to explain these market forces to the workers, so they just come across as cold-hearted.
The strike turns violent. Well, a little bit violent. A few rocks are thrown. The capitalists hold out. Irish scabs are brought in. The union breaks. Higgins’ neighbor, who was quite active in the strike, ends up killing himself in despair. Higgins’ neighbor’s wife soon follows. The orphaned kids are farmed out to neighbors. Strike over. Workers beg to get their jobs back.
Victory for the capitalists? Nope. The strike amplified Thornton’s financial problems and so he goes broke.
Who wins? Nobody.
But, along the way, Thornton and Higgins discover something really important. They detest each other, but they both admire our Heroine. And they both realize that if Margaret likes the other one, then maybe, they can, you know, talk with each other. And when they start talking to one another, they realize that they actually have a lot in common. Maybe they should, you know, work together instead of being constantly opposed to one another.
Next thing you know, Thornton has built a dining hall for his workers and occasionally has lunch with them. His business fails anyway.
But, Thornton has a new plan; why not try out new ways of organizing a factory in which the employees and the employers work together? We never learn the details of these possible future “experiments,” but we are left with every expectation that the trial and error of this new way of manufacturing will prove every bit as blissful as the marriage of Margaret and Thornton.
Elizabeth Gaskell thus did something amazing. In Dickens’ very own publication, she argued that in the great class conflict of the day, in the face of the division between the rich employer and the poor workers, conflict hurts everybody.
Just like the conflict between Thornton and Margaret masked the fact that they really did belong together, the conflict between the factory owners and the workers masked the fact that they too need each other. What unites them is vastly bigger than what divides them.
I almost closed by saying: We need a new North and South for today.
But, then I realized, we already have it. Elizabeth Gaskell already wrote the North and South for today. So, the next time you start thinking there are unrepairable divisions and conflicts in society, read it.
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