He’s also utterly overcome with love, struck and possessed by love to an overwhelming extent. He handles a devastating failure with great dignity (not that he’s free of turmoil, or frustration and dejection). Thornton becomes more inclined to flexibility and compromise. Their presence in each other’s lives and the upheavals they go through work certain influences on them. At the start of the novel, both she and Thornton are, in their own ways, quite sure of themselves. Margaret tries to do good and be dutiful, not always with success or consistency (which I like, because it’s more realistic than if she were a spotless angel free of all biases or lapses). The nature of change, the influences that work on people’s character, aren’t always straightforward in this book. He’s disposed to it, susceptible to these influences by virtue of his own character. Also, because Thornton has the potential to change in these ways. But the adjustments in perception and attitude are there, in part because of Margaret’s influence (some of his words later in the book echo hers from earlier on), and possibly because Thornton has been taking lessons from the gentle Mr. The book isn’t sentimental about these changes – it’s not like they all become the best of friends and eliminate poverty and disease from the town. By the end of the novel, he has taken some initial steps to forging a relationship with his workers that’s more cooperative and less antagonistic. Thornton, for instance, seems to have two sides to him: the cold and calculating manufacturer, and the man who brings fruit to Margaret’s ill mother. What does it mean to live well and be a good person within this brutal system? Mr. Hunger, rage, strikes, fluctuations in trade, wild speculations, and shifting, uncertain social positions are all a part of this northern town the Hales now live in.Īlong with portraying some of these societal changes, the author, Elizabeth Gaskell, explores the personal changes as well. Margaret is horrified to witness workers living in grinding poverty and dying from the cotton fluff they’ve inhaled.

The novel’s upheavals also come from the cotton mills of England’s Industrial Revolution. By the time he stops being so distasteful, there are enough misunderstandings and intervening events to keep them apart for a while. In the coming months, Margaret struggles to understand a new culture, suffers the deaths of people close to her, and meets John Thornton, a young industrialist who initially inspires distaste. Hale starts working as a tutor, meaning that he and his family slide down in social rank.

The family moves from a lovely, sleepy village in the south of England to a polluted industrial town in the north, where Mr.

The main character, Margaret Hale, is the teenaged daughter of a vicar who decides he can’t be a vicar anymore and leaves the church.

Gaskell north and south sparknotes