North and South

By Elizabeth Gaskell

Set in the fictional industrial town of Milton in the North of England, “North and South” is Elizabeth Gaskell’s 1855 novel that contrasts the different ways of life in the two respective regions of England. In the North the emerging industrialized society is sharply contrasted with the aging gentry of the agrarian based South. The plot of “North and South” centers around the main character Margaret Hale, the daughter of a non-conformist minister who moves his family to an industrial town in the North after a split from the Church of England. Here the impact of the industrial revolution can be fully seen as tensions between workers and employers over poor working conditions and the growing divide between the rich industrialists and poor factory workers escalate into violent conflict. Originally serialized between September 1854 and January 1855 in Charles Dickens’s “Household Words”, “North and South” was one of the first and most important social novels to address the changes brought about by the industrial revolution in England. This edition includes an introduction by Adolphus William Ward and a biographical afterword.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Digireads.com Publishing
• Release date: Sep 21, 2020
• ISBN: 9781420976786

Elizabeth Gaskell

Elizabeth Cleghorn Stevenson (Gaskell de casada) nació en Londres en 1810. En 1832 contrajo matrimonio con William Gaskell, ministro unitario, y la pareja se estableció en Manchester, una ciudad sometida a las secuelas de la revolución Industrial. El choque que supuso el contacto con esta sociedad quedaría reflejado en varias de sus novelas: Mary Barton (1848; ALBA CLÁSICA MAIOR NÚM. LIV) o Norte y Sur (1855; ALBA CLÁSICA MAIOR núm. XXIV). En 1857 publicó la Vida de Charlotte Brontë (ALBA CLÁSICA BIOGRAFÍAS, núm. IV), una de las biografías más destacadas del siglo XIX. Otras obras suyas son La casa del páramo (1850; ALBA CLÁSICA, núm. CIV), Cranford (1851-1853; ALBA CLÁSICA, núm. XLII), Cuentos góticos (ALBA CLÁSICA, núm. XCIV), Los amores de Sylvia (1863), La prima Phyllis (1863-1864; ALBA CLÁSICA, núm. CIII), e Hijas y esposas (1864-1866; ALBA CLÁSICA MAIOR núm. XLII), cuyos últimos capítulos dejaría sin concluir a su muerte, acaecida en 1865 en Alton, Hampshire.

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Introduction

North and South has always seemed to me, and seems to me more than ever after a careful reperusal, one of the finest of modern English fictions. Like the great statue of the famous Florentine, it was cast, head and foot, in a single piece—all the metal flowing in from the same fire. Human kindness, the sympathetic sense of contrasts in which resides the essence of true humor, and the burning passion of love—all these, with much else, contributed to the current. And yet, so it chanced, the novel was the first which its authoress wrote bit by bit; just as, by a curious coincidence, Dickens’ Hard Times, which preceded Mrs. Gaskell’s story in the same periodical, and which presents other points of contact with its successor, was the first story ever brought out by him in weekly instalments. It is well known that the inconveniences of the experiment, to which Mrs. Gaskell bears testimony in the Prefatory Note to the original edition, were, according to his wont, stated by Dickens in the most emphatic of terms. The difficulty of the space, he wrote, after a few weeks’ trial, is CRUSHING. Nobody can have an idea of it who has not had an experience of patient fiction-writing with some elbow-room always, and open places in perspective. In this form, with every kind of regard to the current number, there is no such thing. North and South first came out in Household Words, where it appeared in the numbers extending from September 2, 1854, to January 27, 1855. It was first published as a complete work (by Messrs. Chapman and Hall), in two volumes, in 1855, and went through many subsequent editions. A French translation of it, by Mmes. Loreau and H. de l’Espigne, was published in 1859, and, in a second edition, in 1865.

Although it was Sylvia’s Lovers—a work of later date—which Mrs. Gaskell chose for dedication to her husband, he can hardly have taken a deeper interest in any of her books than that with which he watched, and furthered, the production, first of Mary Barton, and then of North and South. Mr. Gaskell’s heart, like his wife’s, was, as has been seen, with the people among whom they dwelt; and the best of his remarkable powers were given to his ministerial work in Lancashire—the sphere of his life’s labours, though not, strictly speaking, his native county. As was written of him after his death by one who had long looked up to him as a teacher of literature, much as he liked Nature and everything that was beautiful in scenery and in art, he was most at home in cities, where he could see and study, and love and guide, the men and women with whom he came into contact. He watched and noted the thoughts and feelings of the Darkshire folk as closely as he traced their ways and forms of speech. It was in 1854, the year in which the publication of North and South opened, that he brought out his two Lectures on the Lancashire Dialect, which were in the same year appended to the fifth edition of Mary Barton. He must at the same time have been pursuing his favorite study of German poetry—and hymnology in particular—among whose fruits were the translations contributed by him to Miss Catherine Winkworth’s Lyra Germanica, of which the first series appeared in 1858. Reminiscences of this study seem to have found their way into one or two of the mottoes prefixed to the chapters of noblest instincts, so too the conditions of the national life North and South, which are borrowed from Mr. Gaskell’s favourites, Rückert, Uhland, and Kosegarten.

In North and South may easily be traced the effects of a perfect union of tastes as well as of affections, which made the companionship of her husband and daughters the greatest happiness of Mrs. Gaskell’s life, and helped to mature in her the knowledge of men’s and women’s hearts—the supreme gift of the writer who undertakes to interpret to others the best, though they may not be the least common, experiences of human life. This book has much to tell of sorrow and suffering; and Miss Edgeworth, had she lived to criticize it, might have been excused for complaining of the number of its death-beds—including those of Mrs. Hale and Mr. Hale, Mr. Bell, Margaret’s generous guardian, and Bessy, her humble friend and admirer. Yet the work is, notwithstanding, the product of a happy mind in a happy mood—and at times this happiness finds expression in passages radiant with beauty, and glorious as testifying to the service of Love the Conqueror. Thus. the force and charm of the personal sentiment with which the story is instinct correspond to what may be called its chief purpose (since a novel with a purpose it remains)—the endeavour to commend reconciliation through sympathy; and this is the solution applied by it to the problems suggested by the nature of the plot and the course of the story.

Most prominent among these problems—though, as will be seen, most felicitously mingled and interfused with difficulties or contrasts of a wholly uncontroversial sort—is the national question as to the relations between masters and men, and the whole social condition of the manufacturing population, to which, in North and South, the authoress of Mary Barton once more addressed herself. If she had in the meantime grown older, calmer—and why should we not say wiser?—without becoming untrue to herself and her which affected this question had undergone an unmistakable modification. During the six years, or thereabouts, which passed between the writing of Mary Barton and that of North and South, a change had come over the movement for advancing and improving the condition of the working population, more especially in the manufacturing districts of Lancashire and other parts of the North.

In the first place, few movements involving the interests and affecting the sentiments of large classes of the population are able to escape the common fate of being followed by periods of reaction. The triumph of the agitation against the Corn Laws, which went to the very root of the sufferings of the working-classes, had been complete; and the philanthropic activity of Lord Ashley, and of those who acted with him, had since his return to Parliament in 1847 been chiefly directed to matters of a less controversial character than the practices of the factories and the pits. Moreover, about this time the condition of the Irish population, which went on rapidly from worse to worse, had begun to absorb a large share of attention and munificence. Finally, the revolutionary movements, which shook the Continent of Europe in the years 1848 and 1849, though they left England virtually unaffected, could not but leave behind them in a large part of English society a mingled sense of repugnance and relief. After the failure of the Chartist demonstration in London of April, 1848, the cause which it had intended to advance seemed for many years dead in this country; the Chartist conference held in Manchester early in 1851 was attended by the representatives of not more than four localities; nor was it till 1855 that another attempt was made in the same town to revive the agitation. In general, although notwithstanding the gradual collapse of the Whig Government there was no question of any permanent acceptance by the nation of a Conservative policy, still less of any return to Protectionist principles, yet a period of compromise and tranquillity was at hand in home affairs and internal legislation, which covered both the building of the temple of peace in 1851 and the opening of the gates of war in 1854. Finally, it must not be overlooked that in the manufacturing districts during these years the employed had become more accustomed to, and more expert in, the use of their readiest and most effective weapon of offence, as well as of defence, against their employers; and that strikes (though none seems to have been attempted on a large scale in Manchester between 1848 and 1854) were becoming more frequent in the manufacturing districts at large.

The reaction to which the above and other contemporary causes contributed could not but exercise an influence upon that group of English writers of prose-fiction who had shown so genuine and so special an interest in the condition of our working-classes; who had insisted so strongly on the justice as well as on the expediency of hearing both sides of the questions at issue; and who, whether from a national, a humanitarian, or a Christian point of view, had pleaded that justice should be done to the needs of the employed not less than to the claims of the employers, and that masters and men should meet each other as friends, not as foes.

It so happened that early in the year 1854 Dickens and Mrs. Gaskell, with whom his literary relations had of late been so intimate, each set out upon the composition of a story of which the scene was to be laid in the manufacturing districts, and which, under whatever conditions, could not fail to address itself to the perennial question of the relations between capital and labour—or, better perhaps, for much is involved in the choice of phrase, of the relations between masters and men. Dickens, though his wondrous activity of mind, his breadth of human sympathy, and his hatred of social injustice, could not but excite in him an interest in the manufacturing districts and their population—to which, as in The Chimes and The Old Curiosity Shop, he had already given expression more passionate than convincing—possessed no intimate knowledge either of the North or of the manufacturing classes in general; indeed, neither his upbringing, nor his experience (except incidentally)—nor again, his reading and his tastes—had brought him into close contact with this particular class of our population. In this year, 1854, when he was revolving the story Hard Times, which was (though somewhat late) to present the full deliverance of his mind on the condition of our manufacturing districts, he traveled to Preston, where at the time there was a strike, to catch what he could of the spirit of the conflict, and of its influence upon those concerned in it. But he was much disappointed with what he saw, or rather with what he did not see; and, having ascertained that the people sit at home and mope, went off himself to witness an indifferent performance of Hamlet at the theatre. Even genius cannot satisfactorily report or reproduce what it only imperfectly understands. Dickens’ intuitive perception of this truth will not be held to derogate from the characteristic candor and generosity of a passage in a letter which, four months later, he addressed to Mrs. Gaskell, with the general design of whose new story he must by this time have become acquainted:

I have no intention of striking. The monstrous claims at diminution made by a certain class of manufacturers, and the extent to which the way is made easy for working-men to slide down into discontent under such hands, are within my scheme; but I am not going to strike, so don’t be afraid of me. But I wish you would look at the story yourself, and judge where and how near I seem to be approaching what you have in your mind. The first two months of it will show that.

While, from the nature of the case, the publication of the successive portions of Hard Times, which appeared in Household Words from April 1 to August 12, 1854, could not have exercised any but a quite incidental influence upon the composition of Mrs. Gaskell’s story, internal evidence shows the latter to have been written in absolute independence of Dickens’ work. Thus, while it would be impertinent to offer here any general criticism of what can hardly be described as the earlier of the two works except by reason of their dates of publication, even a comparison between the pair seems superfluous. Yet the almost simultaneous treatment, by two eminent writers in close mutual touch, of themes which, though not identical, in many respects cover each other, is something more than a curiosity in literary history, and should not be lost sight of by critics desirous of applying a comparative treatment. Is it going too far to say that in Hard Times Dickens, whose creative power had then only just passed its zenith, sought to illustrate social conceptions fervently cherished by him by means of types drawn only in part from spheres within his own intimate knowledge; while Mrs. Gaskell sought to harmonize personal and social contrasts in conditions of life that came home to her with an intimate and familiar force? However this may have been—and we may be sure that no such conclusions were tried by her with her great friend—nothing could have been more delightful, and nothing more magnanimous, than the spirit in which Dickens applauded every stage in the progress of a story which he welcomed as an ornament, not only to his journal, but to the literature of English fiction. As far back as May 3, 1853, when he must have been revolving in his mind the first notions of the story for which out of a wealth of proposed titles he at last selected the name of Hard Times, he wrote to her as to the subject, doubtless communicated to him in general terms, of her proposed story:

"The subject is certainly not too serious, so sensibly treated. I have no doubt that you may do a great deal of good by pursuing it in ‘Household Words.’ I thoroughly agree in all you say in your note. I have similar reasons for giving it some anxious consideration, and shall be greatly interested in it. Pray decide to do it. I am sure you may rely on being widely understood and sympathized with."

A month later he had the first portion of the story in his hands, and wrote back with cordial warmth:

I have read the MS. you have had the kindness to send me, with all possible attention and care. I have shut myself up for the purpose, and allowed nothing to divide my thoughts. It opens an admirable story, is full of character and power, has a strong suspended interest in it (the end of which I don’t in the least foresee), and has the very best marks of your hand upon it. If I had more to read, I certainly could not have stopped, but must have read on.

And, in July, when Mrs. Gaskell appears to have consulted him as to the name of her story, he, instead of preferring a title which would have obscured any suggestion of a competition with his own story, unhesitatingly advised:

"North and South appears to me to be a better name than Margaret Hale. It implies more, and is expressive of the opposite people brought face to face in the story."

And, finally, in January, 1855, when the last installment of the story had reached him, he wrote:

Let me congratulate you on the conclusion of your story: not because it is the end of a task to which you had [no doubt because of the special conditions of publication] conceived a dislike (for I imagine you to have got the better of that delusion by this time), but because it is the vigorous and powerful accomplishment of an anxious labour. It seems to me you have felt the ground thoroughly firm under your feet, and have strided on with a force and purpose that must now give you pleasure. I shall still look forward to the large sides of paper, and shall soon feel disappointed if they don’t begin to reappear.

The scheme (to borrow Dickens’ word) of Mrs. Gaskell’s own story no doubt conformed itself to a wish, which may have been only half conscious though at the same time most genuine on her part, to find an opportunity for rectifying whatever misapprehensions might have arisen as to the real purpose—for purpose there had been—with which she had written Mary Barton. Yet her object in sending forth North and South to take its place by the side of her early masterpiece was by no means, as has been at times loosely suggested, to balance her previous advocacy of the claims of one class by showing what was to be said in favor of the other. Beyond a doubt, she desired to assert her sincere wish to be fair to both masters and men; and in North and South she succeeded better in the endeavor than she had in Mary Barton. The tones of her censor-in-general themselves were hushed into accents of the most complacent, if still self-controlled, satisfaction.

It is, wrote Mr. W. R. Greg, "no compliment to say that your book has been my constant companion since I saw you; I only finished it last night. But I have been in society every day, and could only snatch time for a chapter before going to bed at night. Last night, however, I was home early and resolved upon a treat; so sat up till 1 o’clock, and came to an end, and was sorry when I had done it. I find no fault in it, which is a great deal for a critic to say, seeing that one inevitably gets the habit of reading in a somewhat critical spirit. I do not think it as thorough a work of genius as Mary Barton—nor the subject as interesting as Ruth—but I like it better than either; and you know how, in spite of my indignation, I admired the first. I think you have quite taken the right tone, and the spirit and execution of the whole is excellent. The characters are all distinct, and kept distinct to the last, and the delineation is most delicate and just. Now you are, I know, so used to full and unmodified eulogy that I daresay my appreciation will appear faint, scanty, and grudging. Indeed it is not so; if you knew how painfully scrupulous I am (not as a matter of conscience, but of insuperable instinct) in matters of praise to keep within the truth—you would read more real admiration in my cold sentences than in the golden opinions of more demonstrative ones."

Like her critic, Mrs. Gaskell in North and South had no other desire than that of perfect fairness. Once more, she accorded the recognition which was its due to the heroic element perceptible in the conduct of the workmen, when persistently holding out together even to the disadvantage of their individual interests—that’s what folk call fine and honourable in a soldier, and why not in a poor weaver chap? On the other hand, she cast no glamor round their unreasonableness in thought and in action, and exhibited them as clinging to their prejudices even where pernicious to themselves—like the men who didn’t like working in places where there was a wheel, because they said as how it made ’em hungry, at after they’d been used to swallowing fluff, to go without it, and that their wage ought to be raised if they were to work in such places. In Nicholas Higgins she drew to the life the best kind of Lancashire operative; and the pitifulness of the likeness was attested by the great engineer, Sir William Fairbairn, who knew more than most men of Manchester workshops, and who wrote to Mrs. Gaskell:

Poor old Higgins, with his weak consumptive daughter, is a true picture of a Manchester man. There are many like him in this town, and a better sample of independent industry you could not have hit upon. Higgins is an excellent representative of a Lancashire operative—strictly independent—and is one of the best characters in the piece.

But she depicted with no less force and fidelity the fanaticism of unreason in the personage of Higgins’ bête noire, the unlucky Boucher—whose folly, dealing destruction to his nearest and dearest as well as to himself, his comrade was to requite by a self-sacrificing care for the suicide’s widow and children.

But the companion picture to that of the working man typical of the best characteristics of his class—the picture of a master who, with the roots of his own strength in his native ground, aware of his power and jealous of all interference with its legitimate exercise, yet comes gradually to realize the whole of his duty towards his workmen—this was for the first time deliberately essayed by Mrs. Gaskell in North and South. In her first novel old Mr. Carson is, towards the end of his career, brought to an insight into the significance of all that remains to be done in order to humanize the personal relations between employer and employed. In North and South the whole course of the story, whose most dramatic scene has shown the master and his men face to face in all but internecine conflict, makes us understand how its hero, Mr. Thornton, a man of true Lancashire metal, possessed of a firm will, a clear head, and a true heart, gradually finds for himself the true solution of a problem of which he has come to understand the conditions in their entirety. The intuition of Margaret, his soul’s love, has from the first, in the midst of her ignorance, insisted upon this solution. Through her Mr. Thornton comes to know Higgins; through Higgins his fellow-workmen; and in the end the simple and self-evident conclusion, God has made us so that we must be mutually dependent, is acknowledged true on both sides; and we may look forward to this recognition bringing forth fruit, though not always in the same amplitude—some an hundred-fold, some sixty-fold, some thirty-fold.

At the same time—and the process illustrates the wonderful evolutionary force proper to the ideas of a really creative imagination—the theme of Mary Barton, thus enlarged and expanded into that of North and South, in the latter novel advances into a quite new phase.{1} The antagonism, it has been well said by a critic whom I make no apology for quoting once more,{2} of which we are here called upon to take note, is not so much the antagonism of capital and labour, as that between ancient and modern civilisations. The agricultural, patriarchal, easy-going, idyllic South is opposed to the feverish energy and severe austerity of the North. We have here a profound contrast, which has become an essential part of English life, and a theme fertile in developments—moral, artistic, and economic. Mrs. Gaskell deserves credit for having so clearly seized and so subtly delineated certain aspects at all events of this antithesis. And, it may be added, she contrives with admirable skill to do justice to both parts of the picture, and to show the weak spots in the social life of both Northerners and Southerners—town folk and country folk. The ways of the manufacturing districts of the North are, as might be expected, described with a kindly truthfulness with which the most susceptible sensibility could hardly find fault, even though time may have softened some of the colors, or cast some varied hues over the characteristically colorless background of the picture. A single chapter (Looking South) suffices to remind us how the simple life of the southern village, as well as the more complicated life of the busy northern town, has not only its shortcomings, but its trials and temptations. And, ultimately, Margaret, the refined and ardent heroine of the tale, after she has in spite of herself learnt to understand the truth and tenderness that light up the darkness of the North, has only to revisit the southern home, in comparison with which every other spot once seemed to her hard and prosaic-looking, in order, even in its old enchanting atmosphere, to see clearly and judge justly.

The distinguished French critic just cited by me conjectures that Mrs. Gaskell put a good deal of her heart into the contrast which in North and South she endeavored to depict—a contrast which no true painters of English life, from Chaucer to Dickens, has failed to introduce into his pictures. M. Cazamian can hardly be wrong in asserting that the days of her childhood and youth at Knutsford, and her school-time at Stratford-on-Avon, had familiarised her with the irresistible attractions of English country-life. But his logical conclusion that, suddenly transplanted, she might very well have felt all the repugnance which Manchester excites, is rather of the high primal kind. It ignores one of the most characteristic of her gifts—a saving gift, one might almost call it—which she owed, partly to the varied personal experience of her earlier life (not all of which was spent among green hedgerows and in ministers’ gardens), but chiefly to the swiftness of her imaginative powers and to the serene catholicity of her humor. Thus she could at all times enter, not only quickly but fully, into quite different and mutually contrasting aspects of life and its surroundings; and I cannot imagine her at any time to have had to do battle in her own mind with those prejudices which to Margaret Hale were the source, at first of so much pride, and then of so much anguish. Thus North and South, among its many distinctive merits, possesses that of a fairness of judgment which is the result, not of balanced antipathies, but of a most comprehensive sympathy. The personal reminiscences in the book are, to all seeming, few and far between. In Mr. Hale, the high-minded clergyman who, irresolute in small things, relinquishes his living and his clerical work for conscience’ sake, there may be (as has been suggested) distinguishable some features of Mrs. Gaskell’s father, William Stevenson, in his relations to the religious ministry. And the character and experiences of Frederick, the exiled first-born child, for whom his poor dying mother yearns with all the strength of her weakness, may in some measure, like those of Peter in Cranford, have been suggested by the mysterious story of John Stevenson, Mrs. Gaskell’s own brother. But the figure of Frederick is of secondary importance only; and, in the eyes of most readers, good Mr. Hale’s religious difficulties are likely to occupy a less prominent place in the story than they perhaps did in the design of Mrs. Gaskell, and certainly in the judgment of Charlotte Bronte. Writing, presumably, of the fine chapter in which Mr. Hale announces his decision to his daughter, that staunch conservative Churchwoman says in a letter to her friend:

The subject seems to me difficult; at first I groaned over it: if you had any narrowness of views or bitterness of feeling towards the Church or her clergy, I should groan over it still; but I think I see the ground you are about to take as far as the Church is concerned: not that of attack on her, but of defence of those who conscientiously differ from her, and feel it a duty to leave her fold. Well—it is good ground, but still rugged for the step of fiction. Stony—thorny will it prove at times, I fear.

Since Mr. Hale’s time, it should be remembered, some of the outward obstacles to such a course as that pursued by him have been removed; and, with the growth of a tolerance which is not due to indifference only, has grown an unwillingness to interfere, even by a comment which would sometimes not be wholly unwelcome, between a sincere thinker and his conclusions.

The construction of North and South may in my judgment be rightly described as almost faultless. There is not an incident in the story which does not bear upon its progress. There is no dissipation of interest; and the attention of the reader is kept throughout in perfect suspense. Dickens, it will be remembered, could not in the least foresee the ending of the plot. This ending is most admirably devised, though exception might perhaps be taken with a detail or two in the way which is found for Mr. Thornton out of his final difficulties. The action at large is carried on among a group of characters, all of which are kept perfectly distinct from one another, and are at the same time thoroughly interesting in themselves. I have already touched on the admirable delineations of the working men, and of Bessy Higgins, with her spiritual yearnings for a peace which is not of this world, and her human love of change for the sake of change—so that she can ever find an excuse for her father’s lapses into drinking. At the other end of the social scale are the Lennoxes and Aunt Shaw—the shadows of a season, cheerfully limited and entirely contented with their limitations. Of them Henry Lennox, Margaret’s first lover, is a subtle variety—clever enough for anything, except for an insight into his own fatal limitation—self.

About Margaret, whom there are few heroines to equal in fiction—in that of our own times Ethel Newcome alone deserves to rank beside her—there is a quite extraordinary charm; and the transformation in her on which the story turns is worked out with equal power and delicacy. One can almost see her, as poor Bessy saw her in a dream, coming swiftly towards me, wi’ yo’r hair blown back wi’ the very swiftness o’ the motion, a little standing off like; and the white shining dress on yo’ve getten to wear; or in the moment of anguish, confronted with her real lover and his passion, her head, for all its drooping eyes, thrown a little back, in the old proud attitude. If, after the arrival of the Hales at Milton, Margaret’s prejudice against tradesmen is a little overdone, though the talk about gentlemen is perfectly natural, there is not a false tone or a wrong color at any subsequent stage of the story of the long assay. And thus at the end, after all has seemed over, and she and her poor heart have, in the words—surely of St. Francois de Sales—read by her, found their only refuge in humble submission to the Divine mercy, she is vouchsafed the supreme earthly happiness of learning that the love concealed in that heart is returned.

The character of Thornton, whose nature is the complement of Margaret’s, is drawn with no less force and consistency. I belong to Teutonic blood, he says; it is little mingled in this part of England to what it is in others: we retain much of their language; we retain more of their spirit; we do not look upon life as a time for enjoyment, but as a time for action and exertion. Our glory and our beauty arise out of our inward strength, which makes us victorious over material resistance, and over greater difficulties still. He is an admirable type of the best of the Lancashire master manufacturers of his day: upholding the principle of independence for both masters and men; hating Parliamentary or other State interference; and very much averse from giving reasons where he claims a right to give orders. But in the story he interests us for something beyond his views of industry or of life, and besides the action into which he unhesitatingly translates those views. It would be difficult to find in fiction an equally simple, striking, and true picture of a strong man under the spell of a great passion—a passion worthy of himself.

These two great figures stand in an environment which partly enables us to understand them both, partly accentuates particular sides of the contrasts which are harmonized between hero and heroine. Mrs. Thornton is effective on the whole, but in her austerity, a trifle Dickensian—or may one venture to say, stagey? When Margaret refuses her son, this rather alarming mother-in-law in posse showed her teeth like a dog for the whole length of her mouth; and when she in her turn reproves the young foreigner with supposed levity of conduct, she describes her son as this Milton manufacturer, his great heart scorned as it was scorned. The truth is that the mothers of self-made men, and sometimes of other persons of importance, have almost as hard a time of it in fiction as some of them have in real life. Mr. Hale, as has already been said, belongs to his times, and is a very attractive example of them—more so perhaps than the excellent Mr. Bell, who with his common-room wit and his bottle of port for luncheon, would have shocked the more delicate idiosyncrasies of even the contemporaries of Robert Elsmere. But how life-like and clear-cut every one of these figures is, including that of Mrs. Hale’s own maid, Dixon, a perfectly new variety in Mrs. Gaskell’s exquisite collection of serving-women—aristocratic in her tastes, vulgar in her soul, rising quite superior to her unlucky master’s theological scruples, but not above edifying the listening Milton maid-of-all work by her talk about the Harley Street establishment and true of heart withal!

The success of North and South was unequivocal. While, owing to the very fact of its fairness of spirit and evenness of judgment, it was the last sort of book to create what is called a sensation, it was destined to become a favorite of all classes, and of many generations, and is unlikely to lose the hold it has gained over the lovers of the best kind of fiction. For the commanding interest of this inimitable story is truly human; and no art could be more triumphant than that with which its varied contrasts are harmonized, and its central conflict is ended.

ADOLPHUS WILLIAM WARD

1906.

Preface to Original Edition

On its appearance in ‘Household Words,’ this tale was obliged to conform to the conditions imposed by the requirements of a weekly publication, and likewise to confine itself within certain advertised limits, in order that faith might be kept with the public. Although these conditions were made as light as they well could be, the author found it impossible to develope the story in the manner originally intended, and, more especially, was compelled to hurry on events with an improbable rapidity towards the close. In some degree to remedy this obvious defect, various short passages have been inserted, and several new chapters added. With this brief explanation, the tale is commended to the kindness of the reader;

‘Beseking hym lowly, of mercy and pité,

Of its rude makyng to have compassion.’

Chapter I. ‘Haste to the Wedding’

‘Wooed and married and a’.’

‘Edith!’ said Margaret, gently, ‘Edith!’

But, as Margaret half suspected, Edith had fallen asleep. She lay curled up on the sofa in the back drawing-room in Harley Street, looking very lovely in her white muslin and blue ribbons. If Titania had ever been dressed in white muslin and blue ribbons, and had fallen asleep on a crimson damask sofa in a back drawing-room, Edith might have been taken for her. Margaret was struck afresh by her cousin’s beauty. They had grown up together from childhood, and all along Edith had been remarked upon by every one, except Margaret, for her prettiness; but Margaret had never thought about it until the last few days, when the prospect of soon losing her companion seemed to give force to every sweet quality and charm which Edith possessed. They had been talking about wedding dresses, and wedding ceremonies; and Captain Lennox, and what he had told Edith about her future life at Corfu, where his regiment was stationed; and the difficulty of keeping a piano in good tune (a difficulty which Edith seemed to consider as one of the most formidable that could befall her in her married life), and what gowns she should want in the visits to Scotland, which would immediately succeed her marriage; but the whispered tone had latterly become more drowsy; and Margaret, after a pause of a few minutes, found, as she fancied, that in spite of the buzz in the next room, Edith had rolled herself up into a soft ball of muslin and ribbon, and silken curls, and gone off into a peaceful little after-dinner nap.

Margaret had been on the point of telling her cousin of some of the plans and visions which she entertained as to her future life in the country parsonage, where her father and mother lived; and where her bright holidays had always been passed, though for the last ten years her aunt Shaw’s house had been considered as her home. But in default of a listener, she had to brood over the change in her life silently as heretofore. It was a happy brooding, although tinged with regret at being separated for an indefinite time from her gentle aunt and dear cousin. As she thought of the delight of filling the important post of only daughter in Helstone parsonage, pieces of the conversation out of the next room came upon her ears. Her aunt Shaw was talking to the five or six ladies who had been dining there, and whose husbands were still in the dining-room. They were the familiar acquaintances of the house; neighbours whom Mrs. Shaw called friends, because she happened to dine with them more frequently than with any other people, and because if she or Edith wanted anything from them, or they from her, they did not scruple to make a call at each other’s houses before luncheon. These ladies and their husbands were invited, in their capacity of friends, to eat a farewell dinner in honour of Edith’s approaching marriage. Edith had rather objected to this arrangement, for Captain Lennox was expected to arrive by a late train this very evening; but, although she was a spoiled child, she was too careless and idle to have a very strong will of her own, and gave way when she found that her mother had absolutely ordered those extra delicacies of the season which are always supposed to be efficacious against immoderate grief at farewell dinners. She contented herself by leaning back in her chair, merely playing with the food on her plate, and looking grave and absent; while all around her were enjoying the mots of Mr. Grey, the gentleman who always took the bottom of the table at Mrs. Shaw’s dinner parties, and asked Edith to give them some music in the drawing-room. Mr. Grey was particularly agreeable over this farewell dinner, and the gentlemen staid down stairs longer than usual. It was very well they did—to judge from the fragments of conversation which Margaret overheard.

‘I suffered too much myself; not that I was not extremely happy with the poor dear General, but still disparity of age is a drawback; one that I was resolved Edith should not have to encounter. Of course, without any maternal partiality, I foresaw that the dear child was likely to marry early; indeed, I had often said that I was sure she would be married before she was nineteen. I had quite a prophetic feeling when Captain Lennox’—and here the voice dropped into a whisper, but Margaret could easily supply the blank. The course of true love in Edith’s case had run remarkably smooth. Mrs. Shaw had given way to the presentiment, as she expressed it; and had rather urged on the marriage, although it was below the expectations which many of Edith’s acquaintances had formed for her, a young and pretty heiress. But Mrs. Shaw said that her only child should marry for love,—and sighed emphatically, as if love had not been her motive for marrying the General. Mrs. Shaw enjoyed the romance of the present engagement rather more than her daughter. Not but that Edith was very thoroughly and properly in love; still she would certainly have preferred a good house in Belgravia, to all the picturesqueness of the life which Captain Lennox described at Corfu. The very parts which made Margaret glow as she listened, Edith pretended to shiver and shudder at; partly for the pleasure she had in being coaxed out of her dislike by her fond lover, and partly because anything of a gipsy or make-shift life was really distasteful to her. Yet had any one come with a fine house, and a fine estate, and a fine title to boot, Edith would still have clung to Captain Lennox while the temptation lasted; when it was over, it is possible she might have had little qualms of ill-concealed regret that Captain Lennox could not have united in his person everything that was desirable. In this she was but her mother’s child; who, after deliberately marrying General Shaw with no warmer feeling than respect for his character and establishment, was constantly, though quietly, bemoaning her hard lot in being united to one whom she could not love.

‘I have spared no expense in her trousseau,’ were the next words Margaret heard. ‘She has all the beautiful Indian shawls and scarfs the General gave to me, but which I shall never wear again.’

‘She is a lucky girl,’ replied another voice, which Margaret knew to be that of Mrs. Gibson, a lady who was taking a double interest in the conversation, from the fact of one of her daughters having been married within the last few weeks. ‘Helen had set her heart upon an Indian shawl, but really when I found what an extravagant price was asked, I was obliged to refuse her. She will be quite envious when she hears of Edith having Indian shawls. What kind are they? Delhi? with the lovely little borders?’

Margaret heard her aunt’s voice again, but this time it was as if she had raised herself up from her half-recumbent position, and were looking into the more dimly lighted back drawing-room. ‘Edith! Edith!’ cried she; and then she sank as if wearied by the exertion. Margaret stepped forward.

‘Edith is asleep, Aunt Shaw. Is it anything I can do?’

All the ladies said ‘Poor child!’ on receiving this distressing intelligence about Edith; and the minute lap-dog in Mrs. Shaw’s arms began to bark, as if excited by the burst of pity.

‘Hush, Tiny! you naughty little girl! you will waken your mistress. It was only to ask Edith if she would tell Newton to bring down her shawls: perhaps you would go, Margaret dear?’

Margaret went up into the old nursery at the very top of the house, where Newton was busy getting up some laces which were required for the wedding. While Newton went (not without a muttered grumbling) to undo the shawls, which had already been exhibited four or five times that day, Margaret looked round upon the nursery; the first room in that house with which she had become familiar nine years ago, when she was brought, all untamed from the forest, to share the home, the play, and the lessons of her cousin Edith. She remembered the dark, dim look of the London nursery, presided over by an austere and ceremonious nurse, who was terribly particular about clean hands and torn frocks. She recollected the first tea up there—separate from her father and aunt, who were dining somewhere down below an infinite depth of stairs; for unless she were up in the sky (the child thought), they must be deep down in the bowels of the earth. At home—before she came to live in Harley Street—her mother’s dressing-room had been her nursery; and, as they kept early hours in the country parsonage, Margaret had always had her meals with her father and mother. Oh! well did the tall stately girl of eighteen remember the tears shed with such wild passion of grief by the little girl of nine, as she hid her face under the bed-clothes, in that first night; and how she was bidden not to cry by the nurse, because it would disturb Miss Edith; and how she had cried as bitterly, but more quietly, till her newly-seen, grand, pretty aunt had come softly upstairs with Mr. Hale to show him his little sleeping daughter. Then the little Margaret had hushed her sobs, and tried to lie quiet as if asleep, for fear of making her father unhappy by her grief, which she dared not express before her aunt, and which she rather thought it was wrong to feel at all after the long hoping, and planning, and contriving they had gone through at home, before her wardrobe could be arranged so as to suit her grander circumstances, and before papa could leave his parish to come up to London, even for a few days.

Now she had got to love the old nursery, though it was but a dismantled place; and she looked all round, with a kind of cat-like regret, at the idea of leaving it for ever in three days.

‘Ah Newton!’ said she, ‘I think we shall all be sorry to leave this dear old room.’

‘Indeed, miss, I shan’t for one. My eyes are not so good as they were, and the light here is so bad that I can’t see to mend laces except just at the window, where there’s always a shocking draught—enough to give one one’s death of cold.’

Well, I dare say you will have both good light and plenty of warmth at Naples. You must keep as much of your darning as you can till then. Thank you, Newton, I can take them down—you’re busy.’

So Margaret went down laden with shawls, and snuffing up their spicy Eastern smell. Her aunt asked her to stand as a sort of lay figure on which to display them, as Edith was still asleep. No one thought about it; but Margaret’s tall, finely made figure, in the black silk dress which she was wearing as mourning for some distant relative of her father’s, set off the long beautiful folds of the gorgeous shawls that would have half-smothered Edith. Margaret stood right under the chandelier, quite silent and passive, while her aunt adjusted the draperies. Occasionally, as she was turned round, she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror over the chimney-piece, and smiled at her own appearance there-the familiar features in the usual garb of a princess. She touched the shawls gently as they hung around her, and took a pleasure in their soft feel and their brilliant colours, and rather liked to be dressed in such splendour—enjoying it much as a child would do, with a quiet pleased smile on her lips. Just then the door opened, and Mr. Henry Lennox was suddenly announced. Some of the ladies started back, as if half-ashamed of their feminine interest in dress. Mrs. Shaw held out her hand to the new-comer; Margaret stood perfectly still, thinking she might be yet wanted as a sort of block for the shawls; but looking at Mr. Lennox with a bright, amused face, as if sure of his sympathy in her sense of the ludicrousness at being thus surprised.

Her aunt was so much absorbed in asking Mr. Henry Lennox—who had not been able to come to dinner—all sorts of questions about his brother the bridegroom, his sister the bridesmaid (coming with the Captain from Scotland for the occasion), and various other members of the Lennox family, that Margaret saw she was no more wanted as shawl-bearer, and devoted herself to the amusement of the other visitors, whom her aunt had for the moment forgotten. Almost immediately, Edith came in from the back drawing-room, winking and blinking her eyes at the stronger light, shaking back her slightly-ruffled curls, and altogether looking like the Sleeping Beauty just startled from her dreams. Even in her slumber she had instinctively felt that a Lennox was worth rousing herself for; and she had a multitude of questions to ask about dear Janet, the future, unseen sister-in-law, for whom she professed so much affection, that if Margaret had not been very proud she might have almost felt jealous of the mushroom rival. As Margaret sank rather more into the background on her aunt’s joining the conversation, she saw Henry Lennox directing his look towards a vacant seat near her; and she knew perfectly well that as soon as Edith released him from her questioning, he would take possession of that chair. She had not been quite sure, from her aunt’s rather confused account of his engagements, whether he would come that night; it was almost a surprise to see him; and now she was sure of a pleasant evening. He liked and disliked pretty nearly the same things that she did. Margaret’s face was lightened up into an honest, open brightness. By-and-by he came. She received him with a smile which had not a tinge of shyness or self-consciousness in it.

‘Well, I suppose you are all in the depths of business—ladies’ business, I mean. Very different to my business, which is the real true law business. Playing with shawls is very different work to drawing up settlements.

‘Ah, I knew how you would be amused to find us all so occupied in admiring finery. But really Indian shawls are very perfect things of their kind.’

‘I have no doubt they are. Their prices are very perfect, too. Nothing wanting.

‘The gentlemen came dropping in one by one, and the buzz and noise deepened in tone.

‘This is your last dinner-party, is it not? There are no more before Thursday?’

‘No. I think after this evening we shall feel at rest, which I am sure I have not done for many weeks; at least, that kind of rest when the hands have nothing more to do, and all the arrangements are complete for an event which must occupy one’s head and heart. I shall be glad to have time to think, and I am sure Edith will.’

‘I am not so sure about her; but I can fancy that you will. Whenever I have seen you lately, you have been carried away by a whirlwind of some other person’s making.’

‘Yes,’ said Margaret, rather sadly, remembering the never-ending commotion about trifles that had been going on for more than a month past: ‘I wonder if a marriage must always be preceded by what you call a whirlwind, or whether in some cases there might not rather be a calm and peaceful time just before it.’

‘Cinderella’s godmother ordering the trousseau, the wedding-breakfast, writing the notes of invitation, for instance,’ said Mr. Lennox, laughing.

‘But are all these quite necessary troubles?’ asked Margaret, looking up straight at him for an answer. A sense of indescribable weariness of all the arrangements for a pretty effect, in which Edith had been busied as supreme authority for the last six weeks, oppressed her just now; and she really wanted some one to help her to a few pleasant, quiet ideas connected with a marriage.

‘Oh, of course,’ he replied with a change to gravity in his tone. ‘There are forms and ceremonies to be gone through, not so much to satisfy oneself, as to stop the world’s mouth, without which stoppage there would be very little satisfaction in life. But how would you have a wedding arranged?’

‘Oh, I have never thought much about it; only I should like it to be a very fine summer morning; and I should like to walk to church through the shade of trees; and not to have so many bridesmaids, and to have no wedding-breakfast. I dare say I am resolving against the very things that have given me the most trouble just now.’

‘No, I don’t think you are. The idea of stately simplicity accords well with your character.’

Margaret did not quite like this speech; she winced away from it more, from remembering former occasions on which he had tried to lead her into a discussion (in which he took the complimentary part) about her own character and ways of going on. She cut his speech rather short by saying:

‘It is natural for me to think of Helstone church, and the walk to it, rather than of driving up to a London church in the middle of a paved street.’

‘Tell me about Helstone. You have never described it to me. I should like to have some idea of the place you will be living in, when ninety-six Harley Street will be looking dingy and dirty, and dull, and shut up. Is Helstone a village, or a town, in the first place?’

‘Oh, only a hamlet; I don’t think I could call it a village at all. There is the church and a few houses near it on the green—cottages, rather—with roses growing all over them.’

‘And flowering all the year round, especially at Christmas—make your picture complete,’ said he.

‘No,’ replied Margaret, somewhat annoyed, ‘I am not making a picture. I am trying to describe Helstone as it really is. You should not have said that.’

‘I am penitent,’ he answered. ‘Only it really sounded like a village in a tale rather than in real life.’

‘And so it is,’ replied Margaret, eagerly. ‘All the other places in England that I have seen seem so hard and prosaic-looking, after the New Forest. Helstone is like a village in a poem—in one of Tennyson’s poems. But I won’t try and describe it any more. You would only laugh at me if I told you what I think of it—what it really is.’

‘Indeed, I would not. But I see you are going to be very resolved. Well, then, tell me that which I should like still better to know what the parsonage is like.’

‘Oh, I can’t describe my home. It is home, and I can’t put its charm into words.’

‘I submit. You are rather severe to-night, Margaret.

‘How?’ said she, turning her large soft eyes round full upon him. ‘I did not know I was.’

‘Why, because I made an unlucky remark, you will neither tell me what Helstone is like, nor will you say anything about your home, though I have told you how much I want to hear about both, the latter especially.’

‘But indeed I cannot tell you about my own home. I don’t quite think it is a thing to be talked about, unless you knew it.’

‘Well, then’—pausing for a moment—‘tell me what you do there. Here you read, or have lessons, or otherwise improve your mind, till the middle of the day; take a walk before lunch, go a drive with your aunt after, and have some kind of engagement in the evening. There, now fill up your day at Helstone. Shall you ride, drive, or walk?’

‘Walk, decidedly. We have no horse, not even for papa. He walks to the very extremity of his parish. The walks are so beautiful, it would be a shame to drive—almost a shame to ride.’

‘Shall you garden much? That, I believe, is a proper employment for young ladies in the country.’

‘I don’t know. I am afraid I shan’t like such hard work.’

‘Archery parties—pic-nics—race-balls—hunt-balls?’

‘Oh no!’ said she, laughing. ‘Papa’s living is very small; and even if we were near such things, I doubt if I should go to them.’

‘I see, you won’t tell me anything. You will only tell me that you are not going to do this and that. Before the vacation ends, I think I shall pay you a call, and see what you really do employ yourself in.’

‘I hope you will. Then you will see for yourself how beautiful Helstone is. Now I must go. Edith is sitting down to play, and I just know enough of music to turn over the leaves for her; and besides, Aunt Shaw won’t like us to talk.’

Edith played brilliantly. In the middle of the piece the door half-opened, and Edith saw Captain Lennox hesitating whether to come in. She threw down her music, and rushed out of the room, leaving Margaret standing confused and blushing to explain to the astonished guests what vision had shown itself to cause Edith’s sudden flight. Captain Lennox had come earlier than was expected; or was it really so late? They looked at their watches, were duly shocked, and took their leave.

Then Edith came back, glowing with pleasure, half-shyly, half-proudly leading in her tall handsome Captain. His brother shook hands with him, and Mrs. Shaw welcomed him in her gentle kindly way, which had always something plaintive in it, arising from the long habit of considering herself a victim to an uncongenial marriage. Now that, the General being gone, she had every good of life, with as few drawbacks as possible, she had been rather perplexed to find an anxiety, if not a sorrow. She had, however, of late settled upon her own health as a source of apprehension; she had a nervous little cough whenever she thought about it; and some complaisant doctor ordered her just what she desired,—a winter