My reading goes in trends. I’m back on the classics at the moment. I finished George Eliot’s Adam Bede over Christmas whilst I was up at my parents’. I was hankering for something similar, and luckily they have shelves stuffed with the classics: they both love them, but I think my Dad’s the old romantic like me. He loves Austen. So do I.
But I’ve read all the Austens, many, many times. I wanted something new and so I thought I’d try Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South: a friend of mine has been raving about the TV adaptation for a while now.
I wasn’t disappointed. It’s a damn good book - completely engaging. It’s been a while since I’ve shouted at the page (come on, Mr Thornton!). But as well as a powerful romance, it’s also a social novel. Set in the mid-1800s in a Lancashire mill town (modelled on Manchester), the story is told through the eyes of new-comer to the town: Miss Margaret Hale, a parson’s daughter from the New Forest. At first horrified by the dirty, industrial town, she comes to see the human face of it by getting to know some of the mill workers – and helps to show this human face to one of the town’s mill owners, Mr Thornton.
The novel was published as a serial in a magazine edited by Dickens, shortly after publication of his own novel, Hard Times, which explores similar themes: the shifting dynamic of labour following the industrial revolution; the rights and responsibilities of employer and employee; and the hard face of capitalism, when remote from knowledge of those it exploits.
It might have been written over 150 years ago, but we’re still struggling with those problems. And they seem even more pressing now, when our commercial reach is global and we are further removed than ever from those who labour to produce what we consume.
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3 comments:
Now you've got me wondering - do I ever shout at the page? Maybe I do. I hope the neighbours don't know better than me...
It's hard to fault your reasoning, and it's sad that for all the progress we're proud of having made, it's still such a shallow achievement. The pollutants have sunk deeper, but still poison the water table. We need to do better, and we need perception like the perception in your post to help get us there.
As always - thanks for reading and for commenting.
Like Eliot, Gaskell is another impressive character I want to get to know better. From the few things I've read so far, it seems she was a humanist, and spent much time working with the poor in Manchester. One of her main goals was to bridge the gap between rich and poor: to get them to speak to each other and try to understand each other. It's a brilliant aim, but sadly one that still hasn't happened. The gap between rich and poor is growing wider. Doom and gloom commentators in the newspapers suggest we're sliding back to a Victorian social model. Clearly it's not exactly analogous, but I do see what they mean - and I think this sort of Victorian social literature is more important than ever. At any rate, reading it in today's political climate makes it seem contemporary, not really historical fiction at all.
That's the understanding I think we need too. As for being more important than ever, and seeming contemporary, I hadn't considered that, but you're definitely onto something. It's your purity of thought again.
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