This is the second post in a series of blogging the-conference-paper-I'm-not-giving.  For the background, you can read the first post here. 

In North and South, after resigning from the CofE priesthood, Mr Hale takes his family - Mrs Hale, Margaret and servant Dixon - to the growing industrial town of Milton-Northern.  Most commentators read this as Manchester, where, after all, Mrs Gaskell herself lived.  But it doesn't really matter; we're given all the information we need in the name: a mill town in the North.  (And this generic character makes it useful to me for my work on West Yorkshire.) 

Relocating to a grimy, sooty, smelly mill town after the pastoral delights of sweetly southern Helstone proves a shock, to say the least.  Margaret's contrast between idyllic Helstone and gloomy Milton is one of the book's central "North and South" contrasts.  Margaret looks at industrialism and believes that something has gone terribly wrong.  She laments the loss of the rural. 

Such feelings were certainly shared by many.  As British socialism developed over the proceeding half century, one strong strand of thought located the answers to its critique of industrial capitalism in (a certain reckoning of) the rural past. 

Two of the most (to me) fascinating figures in this were Edward Carpenter (1844-1929) and William Morris (1834-1896). 

Earlier this year I finally read Sheila Rowbotham's superb biography of Carpenter (quite probably the first middle-aged British man to wear socks with sandals).  He was an amazing figure, not just in his sandals, but in his whole philosophy.  Briefly a CofE priest, Carpenter gave it up, chucked academic life in, and became a socialist and gay rights campaigner who (generally) practiced what he preached.  For a large chunk of his life lived on the rural outskirts of industrial Sheffield growing veg, skinny-dipping and that sort of thing. 

Famed for his Arts and Crafts designs, Morris also advocated a socialism that celebrated crafts over machines and, in his 1890 novel News From Nowhere, envisaged a post-revolutionary agrarianism.  (He kept his clothes on, though I'm not entirely sure where he stood on the socks-with-sandals question.)

In the 19th century, this 'rural past' position maintained a following within socialist circles.  By the 20th, its advocates would be dismissed as 'cranks'.  That's where I'll be heading, Margaret Hale still in tow, in my next post in this series. 

I'm due to give a paper at the ASAANZ annual conference in Roto-Vegas, but, the finances haven't quite come together for me to be able to make it over there.  The paper's called "Margaret Hale, Industrialism, and the Ancestry of Cranks".  It exists in my head; it's about to exist in a series of blog posts.

Mrs Gaskell wasn't the most creative when it came to titles.  Mary Barton (1848) was about, well, Mary Barton.  And in 1854 she figured her new novel would also be named after it's heroine, Margaret Hale. 

The novel was a Pride and Prejudice for the industrial era.  Mr Darcy became the aloof Northern industrialist, John Thornton; and Elizabeth Bennett, dosed with a political conscience, became Margaret. 

Dickens, who did have the knack of a good title, was serialising the novel for his magazine Household Words.  'Margaret Hale' didn't exactly blow him away.  Rename it, he insisted. 

So Pride and Prejudice became Margaret Hale became North and South. 

Dave Russell has argued that how we think about the North of England today had set by about 1840.  That makes North and South an extraordinarily interesting study of the national divide. 

And I freakin' love Margaret Hale.

Elizabeth Bennett I grew up with.  She was sharp as tacks, had a way with words.  And when, in my teens, a be-wigged Jennifer Ehle brought her to BBC life, she was set firmly as one of my heroes. 

But Margaret Hale does politics.  She's not afraid to have a go at Thornton over how he treats his workers.  She stands up for what she sees as fair, just and good.  She doesn't always get it right, but she throws herself into it.  (Yes, there's also a Beeb adaptation.)

Mrs G had taken a bit of a bashing for Mary Barton.  Many of her readers (and Manchester industrialist acquaintances) evidently found it pretty scathing.  So in North and South she set out to tell a story in which there could be redemption for the industrialist.  Not that industrialism gets off lightly, but, the book really engages with issues for which there are no easy answers.  Margaret Hale comes up against plenty of ethical and political dilemmas. 

David Harvey has an article about intellectual Marxists, workers' rights, car plants in Oxford and Raymond Williams (The link goes to the pdf.  Neat huh?) in which he argues that some of the issues academics are wont to weigh in on are actually best explored in fiction.  He's probably right. 

And if he is, then Margaret Hale is a useful companion for talking about industrial history, about the development of nineteenth-century socialism, and about the North/South divide.  Which is where she and I will be wandering over the next couple of posts. 

John Schwartz reviews William Rosen's The Most Powerful Idea in the World in the NYT

According to the review, Rosen argues that the IR was fundamentally about a realisation of the 'power' of invention and a quickening in the pace of technological innovation.  Schwartz does acknowledge that this is not 'a particularly new interpretation'.  The epilogue is seemingly Rosen's polemic (?) in favour of more invention to solve global problems.

I'm not a fan of the tech fanboy approach to the IR, its more a narrative which speaks to current cultural values than provides historical analysis.