By the end of the novel, he has taken some initial steps to forging a relationship with his workers that’s more cooperative and less antagonistic. Thornton, for instance, seems to have two sides to him: the cold and calculating manufacturer, and the man who brings fruit to Margaret’s ill mother. What does it mean to live well and be a good person within this brutal system? Mr. Hunger, rage, strikes, fluctuations in trade, wild speculations, and shifting, uncertain social positions are all a part of this northern town the Hales now live in.Īlong with portraying some of these societal changes, the author, Elizabeth Gaskell, explores the personal changes as well. Margaret is horrified to witness workers living in grinding poverty and dying from the cotton fluff they’ve inhaled. The novel’s upheavals also come from the cotton mills of England’s Industrial Revolution. By the time he stops being so distasteful, there are enough misunderstandings and intervening events to keep them apart for a while. In the coming months, Margaret struggles to understand a new culture, suffers the deaths of people close to her, and meets John Thornton, a young industrialist who initially inspires distaste. Hale starts working as a tutor, meaning that he and his family slide down in social rank. The family moves from a lovely, sleepy village in the south of England to a polluted industrial town in the north, where Mr. The main character, Margaret Hale, is the teenaged daughter of a vicar who decides he can’t be a vicar anymore and leaves the church.
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