Smoke or no Smoke? Questions of Perspective in North and South

Abstract

As coal and steam power transformed Britain’s physical and social landscape, the industrial fiction which emerged in the 1840s chronicles the upheavals taking place, regarding environmental conditions and personal relations. Such narratives tend to be set in an improbable locale, the grimy manufacturing town with its foul air and thick smog.North and South (1855), Elizabeth Gaskell’s second novel dealing with “Condition of England” issues, contrasts various milieus in the Victorian heyday of industrial supremacy. When the northern manufacturing centre is set against the rural south of the title, the polarity is not as sharp as might be expected. If the factory town is smoke-blackened and polluted by disease—bearing air and water, material progress is shown in a largely positive light, as the novelist can be felt striving for balance—a consequence of the hostile reception of Mary Barton by a number of industrialists. The emphasis is on opportunity and a certain exultation in the harnessing of inanimate matter. The novelist underplays the more sinister aspect of Milton’s environmental features and manufacturers are not explicitly held accountable for industrial waste. For all its smoke and grime, the bustling factory town compares not unfavourably with the backwardness of rural England, the idle drawing-room life of London or torpid Oxford academia. Individual responses to the environment, especially air quality, are shown to be subjective and Milton’s noxious air is consistently presented as perceived unpleasantness. Gaskell’s imagery is ambivalent too—even her smoking chimneys are less threatening than those of Dickens (Hard Times 1854). The novelist’s primary concern is how men relate to their environment and to one another as they find their way in new circumstances. Companionship is the force of the industrial metropolis and lack of oxygen is redeemed by wealth of social intercourse. Acknowledging interdependence and improving personal relationships (“the very breath of life”) is more vital than wholesome, unpolluted air.