North and South

Because of theological doubts, the Rev. Mr. Hale gives up his living as a Church of England priest. He, his wife, and their daughter, Margaret, leave the idyllic village of Helstone, in Hampshire in the South, and move to Milton, an industrial town in the North. For most of her youth Margaret, now eighteen or nineteen, has been brought up in London by her wealthy Aunt Shaw; she has rejoined her parents only after the marriage of her vivacious but shallow cousin Edith to Captain Lennox. The captain's brother, Henry, a rising barrister, had asked for Margaret's hand but, regarding him as just a friend, she declined his offer. Settling in smoky Milton, the Hale women are troubled by urban dirt and commercial go-getting. Mr. Hale now works as a tutor. His favourite pupil is the important manufacturer, Mr. Thornton. Staying to tea, Thornton debates with the naive, "humanistic" Hales about the condition of the working class, strikes, and the other mill owners.