North and South

In Our Time: Culture

BBC

History

4.5 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 9 March 2017

⏱️ 49 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Elizabeth Gaskell's novel North and South, published in 1855 after serialisation in Dickens' Household Words magazine. It is the story of Margaret Hale, who was raised in the South in the New Forest and London's Harley Street, and then moves North to a smokey mill town, Milton, in Darkshire. As well as Margaret's emotional life and her growing sense of independence, the novel explores the new ways of living thrown up by industrialisation, and the relationships between 'masters and men'. Many of Margaret Hale's experiences echo Gaskell's own life, as she was born in Chelsea and later moved to Manchester, and the novel has become valued for its insights into social conflicts and the changing world in which Gaskell lived.

With

Sally Shuttleworth Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford

Dinah Birch Pro-vice Chancellor for Research and Professor of English Literature at the University of Liverpool

And

Jenny Uglow Biographer of Elizabeth Gaskell

Producer: Simon Tillotson.

Transcript

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0:47.0	Hello in 1854 Charles Dickens published a serialized novel North and south by Elizabeth Gascal.
0:54.4	It tells the story of Margaret Hale, forced to leave her rural childhood home in the south of England
0:59.2	and live among the polluted cotton mills and Milton to the north a version of Manchester
1:03.8	with countless workers in unspeakable slums
1:06.6	caught up in strikes and riots she overcomes her prejudice and learns to prefer her
1:10.4	new life to her old
1:12.4	Gascal lived in Manchester and knew her subject well.
1:15.6	More than any other writer of her time, her novels brought the reality of industrial life
1:19.3	to a southern reading public, and she's now seen as one of the great writers of her century.
1:24.4	With me to discuss North and South by Elizabeth Gascal and Salish Shuttleworth, Professor of English
	...

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