North and South: Color Illustrated, Formatted for E-Readers
Elizabeth Gaskell, Leonardo
eBook
(HMDS printing press, Sept. 4, 2015)
How is this book unique? Formatted for E-Readers, Unabridged & Original version. You will find it much more comfortable to read on your device/app. Easy on your eyes.Includes: 15 Colored Illustrations and BiographyNorth and South is a social novel by English writer Elizabeth Gaskell. Along with Wives and Daughters (1865) and Cranford (1853), it is one of her best known novels and has been adapted for television twice, in 1975 and 2004. The latter version renewed interest in the novel and gained it a wider audience.Whereas Gaskell's first novel Mary Barton (1848) views relations between employers and workers from the perspective of the working poor, North and South is more balanced, focusing as well on the thinking of the employers.North and South is set in the fictional industrial town of Milton in the North of England. Forced to leave her home in the tranquil rural south, Margaret Hale settles with her parents in Milton where she witnesses the brutal world wrought by the industrial revolution and employers and workers clashing in the first organised strikes. Sympathetic to the poor whose courage and tenacity she admires and among whom she makes friends, she clashes with John Thornton, a cotton mill manufacturer who belongs to the nouveaux riches and whose contemptuous attitude to workers Margaret despises.Gaskell based Milton on Manchester, where she lived as the wife of a Unitarian minister.North and South previously appeared in 20 weekly episodes from September 1854 to January 1855 in Household Words, edited by Charles Dickens. During the same period, Dickens dealt with the same theme in Hard Times, also a social novel, published in the same journal from April to August 1854.Dickens' Hard Times — which shows Manchester in a negative light and satirises it (as Coketown) — challenged Elizabeth Gaskell and complicated the writing of her novel. She had to ascertain, for instance, that Dickens would not write about a strike. Gaskell found the time pressure and technical constraints of serialised fiction particularly trying. She wanted to write 22 episodes, but was "compelled to desperate compression" to limit the story to 20. North and South was not as successful as Hard Times. On 14 October 1854, after six weeks, sales dropped enough that Dickens complained of Gaskell's lack of flexibility (intractability), resisting demands for conciseness. He found the story "wearisome to the last degree".