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.