North and South

A southern clergyman's daughter is moved to a northern mill town, where she takes the strikers' side against a master she is beginning to respect. Gaskell wrote it for Dickens's magazine and fought him over the length and the pace all through the serial. The riot at the mill gates is the scene everyone remembers, but the argument about what a wage is goes on for another two hundred pages and does not resolve. Its 81 original illustrations have been carefully restored and coloured for this edition.