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

This paper, developing ideas in work already published, will argue that North and South is Elizabeth Gaskell’s pre-eminent Condition of England Question novel. It is superior to Mary Barton because it shows an understanding of the cultural and historical dynamic of the industrial revolution in a country-wide context. Mary Barton, on the other hand, despite the profundity of response to capitalist industrialism embodied in the delineation of John Barton, is not only weakened by melodrama but by the cultivation of a mode of simple pathos, which results in, for example, a sentimental misrepresentation of Chartism. It could be said that whereas Mary Barton reflects the influence of George Crabbe, in North and South this has been replaced by that of Sir Walter Scott. Scott was the first novelist to relate behaviour to social context and to represent the dynamic of social change, and had, in consequence, a profound influence on the development of the European novel: Balzac, for example, explicitly acknowledged his debt to him.