North and South

Margaret Hale's father, a country clergyman, has a crisis of conscience and gives up his parish, and the family moves from the gentle south of England to Milton, a fictionalized Manchester, where the money is in cotton and the air is grey with it. Margaret arrives disdainful of trade and everyone in it, John Thornton included — a mill owner she meets, argues with, and can't stop arguing with for the rest of the book. Gaskell wrote the novel to put both sides of an industrial dispute in the same room and make neither one simply right: Thornton's workers strike for wages he genuinely can't pay without ruining himself, and nobody in the book — not Margaret, not Thornton, not the strikers — gets to be the story's obvious hero.

It ran in Dickens' magazine Household Words through 1854 and 1855; Gaskell revised and expanded it substantially for the two-volume book publication that followed later in 1855. She knew the Manchester she was writing about firsthand — her husband was a Unitarian minister there for decades — and the novel's strike scenes and mill-owner economics read like the work of someone who had actually sat in these rooms, not looked in from outside.

Bibliomancer restores the 1855 text exactly as Gaskell wrote it.