North and South (Gaskell, 1855)
From Commonplace Book
Elizabeth Gaskell. North and South. Pub. 1855. Ed. Angus Easson. Oxford World's Classics, 2008.
- Pub serially in Household Worlds 9/1854-1/1855, then in 2 vols by Chapman & Hall 1855
- prefatory note interesting on her perceived constraint by serialized publication in Household Words and subsequent expansion in volume form
- Good for: the novel, industrialization (81ff, 118, 124), and domesticity (compare Shirley (Charlotte Brontë, 1849)); 20, 113, 330-1 bourgeois library and respectability (like Armadale (Collins, 1866));
Contents
General
- 17 desc of M as "so far from regularly beautiful" makes her a sister of Bronte heroines
- 33 Mr Hale leaving Church ministry -- note v good
- 39 Margaret seems justified in her perception of moving in a fortnight to be quite fast -- when the hell did anything in a Victorian novel happen that quickly?!
- 66 repeated theme of Margaret's parents being overly reliant on her "genius for management" (60)
- 76 she "told her mother that she was no longer Peggy the laundry-maid, but MH the lady": class tied to praxis, different activities, even when the same person performs them
- but MH argued there's something essentially ladylike in her through it all
- 81ff good description of the change in industry, the effect of it on day to day life
- 109 Mrs Hale "prouder of Frederick standing up against injustice, than if he had been simply a good officer" -- the maneuverability within class and ideology, not unlike Mr H's nonconformity (and I'd say Gaskell is at least setting up that genetic link btwn father and son's dispositions)
- Ch 15 seems to build on 14 and to really start to develop the antinomies that have been set out btwn north and south, religion and capital, manufacturing and gentry, education and industry, culminating in M's rather incisive statement to Thornton: "I am trying to reconcile your admiration of despotism with your respect for other men's independence of character" (124)
- 197-8 Margaret thinking through her encounter with Thornton - like Isabel archer - are discourses of strength and power how we are to read a rhetoricized sexual attraction?
- 281: how unethical is what Thornton does, using his position to assure no legal inquiry into Margaret being present when her brother commits manslaughter? At minimum it moves the locus of justice from the legal and public to the private and moral sphere of T's own knowledge
- 285 it does lead to M's own moral insight into her falsehood, but this is at least in part a luxury of her class
- ending on the theme of rebellion -- what will Mrs Shaw and Mrs Thornton think?
Theme Tracking
Reading/Writing
- 20 "the well-bound little-read English Classics" in the Helstone parsonage library
- 23 "proper old Italian binding" on an ed of Dante's Paradiso
- 34 Mr Hale quoting a 17c dissenter to justify leaving ministry
- 79 Thornton looking round the Hales' drawing room for the first time: "...and books, not cared for on account of their binding solely, lay on one table, as if recently put down."
- 85: Thornton: his labor and education at odds when growing up
- 113 Mrs Thornton "the classics fine for loiterers" adds a class valence to the value of reading/education as orthogonal to manufacturing respectability
- 199 M reading aloud to dying Bessy
- 234 Edith's "inconsequential" letter doing the work of showing Margaret disconnecting from that world
- 246 gift to light a fire/poet born not made - interesting little entanglement of the domestic and poetic
- 247 the text becomes self reflexive about its melodrama in this chapter through the readerly Mr H
- 262 scene made possible by error in the 'Railway Guide' - Bradshaw's? Lady Audley's Secret (ME Braddon, 1862)
- 269 M reciting bible verses aloud to give herself strength on the way to her mother's funeral
- 330-1 this novel interesting not least because it orients humanistic study against industry and commerce in a way that is readable to us now - "Its the bustle and the struggle they like. As for sitting still, and learning from the pst, or shaping out the future by faithful work done ina prophetic spirit - Why! I don't believe there's a man in Milton who knows how to sit still; and it is a great art." "Milton people, I suspect, think Oxford men don't know how to move. It would be a very good thing if they mixed a little more." (Bell and Mr Hale)
Materiality
- 111-2 materiality of Thornton's mill -- the artificial whiteness cross ref with Dickens' "Paper Mill"
- 209 Mrs T thinking through her anticipation to MH accepting T's proposal via her needlework
Class
- 114: the multiplicity of respectabilities - fashionable London, country clergy, Milton manufacturers -- at odds when the Hales visit the Thorntons
- 242 interesting that MH and Dixon are so worried about keeping Frederick's visit secret once he's inside the house - common sense might say that that's where he'd be safest -- but their suspicion of the new maid who needs to be sent on holiday adds a class and location valence to their domestic suspicion
- 273 interesting again that it's the greengrocer who identifies M as being at the train station when Leonard's dies to the policeman; this still seems to be class discomfort registering itself in the surveillance of the middle classes by the lower
- 267-8 cross class synthesis of feeling in and around Mrs H's funeral: M uses her knowledge of poor women being allowed to go to funerals and express grief to negotiate for her own freedom to do so; Mr H echoes Higgins's religious doubt in grief
Labor/Industry
- 118 M sets up an opposition between factory owner as capitalist and as steward in the biblical sense
- 199-200 Bessy recounting her father's conflict with Boucher - even more fine grained distinctions of groups within, in this case, the working class
- 225-233 Mr H, Margaret, and Higgins discussing class, unions, and faith
- 292 ambivalence about collective forms of organization, here unions, earlier the legal system
- 352 Bell: "Ugh! Cotton and speculations, and smoke, well-cleansed and well-cared-for machinery, and unwashed and neglected hands."
Shakespeare references
- 5 compares Edith to Titania Midsummer Dream
- 7 course of true love running smooth
- 212 epigraph from Dream
- 388 Bell quotes Hamlet saying he's "fat and scant o' breath" and MH says she likes him much more than hamlet
- 414 echo of sonnet 60
