North and South

Elizabeth Gaskell's 1855 novel following Margaret Hale from the soft rural south of England to the industrial north — her encounter with mill workers, strikes, and the industrialist John Thornton — one of the great Victorian industrial novels and a romance.

Dramatizes the human encounter between agricultural and industrial England — North and South's central conflict (the southern clergyman's daughter vs. the northern self-made manufacturer) provides the best Victorian account of how industrialization required not just new economics but new human relationships and moral frameworks.