Elizabeth Gaskell and Manchester:
Identity, Culture and the Modern City
Conference, 19/20/21 July 2005

It is an acknowledged truth that Victorian intellectual society was strongly influenced by classic Greek culture. Some subtle evidence for this is to be found in North and South, with the intention of the recently arrived ex-parson Hale, to read Plato's Republic with his new pupil, Thornton, the hero of the novel.

We can detect structural similarities between North and South and Republic, in that both comprise an outer and an inner layer. In Republic, Plato's intention appears to be to illustrate the way in which people should form a `good' community. This is the outer layer; but in fact his more important point is to show how to make the individual mind `good'. This is the inner layer. His discussion of politics dealing with the community runs parallel with that of philosophy dealing with mind, and the arguments employed for the former are often applied directly to the latter. More conspicuously, Plato's interest is in the human mind rather than human politics. He thus discusses morality extensively and raises the idea of `goodness' to the high altar of his argument.

Similarly Gaskell, in the novel, constructs an almost geometrical contrast between industrial Milton, the `north' and pastoral Helstone, the `south'. There is also within Milton itself a conflict between the mill owners and the workers. The outer layer here is the depiction of the divided world of north and south and the analogously divided world of the mills. Yet what Gaskell portrays is the intricate movement and development of the human minds poised in that disaccord. North and South could hence claim to be a moral story, setting a high value on `goodness', the key word in understanding the workings of the author's mind.

In this paper I shall discuss North and South and Republic in parallel, focusing on the structural similarities and the idea of `goodness'.