North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell: Free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB Download
North and South
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“Edith!”: the drawing-room opening
But as Margaret half suspected, Edith had fallen asleep. She lay curled up on the sofa in the back drawing-room in Harley Street looking very lovely in her white muslin and blue ribbons. If Titania had ever been dressed in white muslin and blue ribbons, and had fallen asleep on a crimson damask sofa in a back drawing-room, Edith might have been taken for her. Margaret was struck afresh by her cousin’s beauty. They had grown up together from childhood, and all along Edith had been remarked upon by everyone, except Margaret, for her prettiness; but Margaret had never thought about it until the last few days, when the prospect of soon losing her companion seemed to give force to every sweet quality and charm which Edith possessed. They had been talking about wedding dresses and wedding ceremonies; and Captain Lennox, and what he had told Edith about her future life at Corfu, where his regiment was stationed; and the difficulty of keeping a piano in good tune (a difficulty which Edith seemed to consider as one of the most formidable that could befall her in her married life), and what gowns she should want in the visits to Scotland, which would immediately succeed her marriage; but the whispered tone had latterly become more drowsy; and Margaret, after a pause of a few minutes, found, as she fancied, that in spite of the buzz in the next room, Edith had rolled herself up into a soft ball of muslin and ribbon, and silken curls, and gone off into a peaceful little after-dinner nap.
Margaret had been on the point of telling her cousin of some of the plans and visions which she entertained as to her future life in the country parsonage, where her father and mother lived; and where her bright holidays had always been passed, though for the last ten years her aunt Shaw’s house had been considered as her home. But in default of a listener, she had to brood over the change in her life silently as heretofore. It was a happy brooding, although tinged with regret at being separated for an indefinite time from her gentle aunt and dear cousin. As she thought of the delight of filling the important post of only daughter in Helstone parsonage, pieces of the conversation out of the next room came upon her ears. Her aunt Shaw was talking to the five or six ladies who had been dining there, and whose husbands were still in the dining-room. They were the familiar acquaintances of the house; neighbours whom Mrs. Shaw called friends, because she happened to dine with them more frequently than with any other people, and because if she or Edith wanted anything from them, or they from her, they did not scruple to make a call at each other’s houses before luncheon. These ladies and their husbands were invited in their capacity of friends, to eat a farewell dinner in honour of Edith’s approaching marriage. Edith had rather objected to this arrangement, for Captain Lennox was expected to arrive by a late train this very evening; but, although she was a spoiled child, she was too careless and idle to have a very strong will of her own, and gave way when she found that her mother had absolutely ordered those extra delicacies of the season which are always supposed to be efficacious against immoderate grief at farewell dinners. She contented herself by leaning back in her chair, merely playing with the food on her plate, and looking grave and absent; while all around her were enjoying the mots of Mr. Grey, the gentleman who always took the bottom of the table at Mrs. Shaw’s dinner parties, and asked Edith to give them some music in the drawing-room. Mr. Grey was particularly agreeable over this farewell dinner, and the gentlemen stayed downstairs longer than usual. It was very well they did—to judge from the fragments of conversation which Margaret overheard.
“I suffered too much myself; not that I was not extremely happy with the poor dear General, but still disparity of age is a drawback; one that I was resolved Edith should not have to encounter. Of course, without any maternal partiality, I foresaw that the dear child was likely to marry early; indeed, I had often said that I was sure she would be married before she was nineteen. I had quite prophetic feeling when Captain Lennox”—and here the voice dropped into a whisper, but Margaret could easily supply the blank. The course of true love in Edith’s case had run remarkably smooth. Mrs. Shaw had given way to the presentiment, as she expressed it; and had rather urged on the marriage, although it was below the expectations which many of Edith’s acquaintances had formed for her, a young and pretty heiress. But Mrs. Shaw said that her only child should marry for love—and sighed emphatically, as if love had not been her motive for marrying the General. Mrs. Shaw enjoyed the romance of the present engagement rather more than her daughter. Not but that Edith was very thoroughly and properly in love; still she would certainly have preferred a good house in Belgravia, to all the picturesqueness of the life which Captain Lennox described at Corfu. The very parts which made Margaret glow as she listened, Edith pretended to shiver and shudder at; partly for the pleasure she had in being coaxed out of her dislike by her fond lover, and partly because anything of a gipsy or makeshift life was really distasteful to her. Yet had anyone come with a fine house, and a fine estate, and a fine title to boot, Edith would still have clung to Captain Lennox while the temptation lasted; when it was over, it is possible she might have had little qualms of ill-concealed regret that Captain Lennox could not have united in his person everything that was desirable. In this she was but her mother’s child; who, after deliberately marrying General Shaw with no warmer feeling than respect for his character and establishment, was constantly, though quietly, bemoaning her hard lot in being united to one whom she could not love.
The preview stops after the opening paragraphs of chapter 1, and all fifty-two chapters, in both volumes, are in the free download below.
Download Full EPUB1855
~182,000 words (estimated)
Approx. 10.1 hours
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Milton, a northern manufacturing town, and Helstone in the south, in the 1850s
52 chapters in two volumes
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0.86 MB (EPUB) · 1.06 MB (AZW3) · 0.93 MB (KEPUB)
Public domain in the United States
Project Gutenberg #4276 · Standard Ebooks
North and South opens in a Harley Street drawing room, where Margaret Hale watches her cousin Edith marry a soldier. Margaret goes home to Helstone, the Hampshire parsonage where her father is vicar, and within months the family is gone: Mr Hale has lost his faith in the Thirty-Nine Articles, resigned his living, and taken his wife and daughter to Milton-Northern, a cotton town of smoke and machinery. There Margaret meets John Thornton, a mill owner who has made himself out of nothing, and Nicholas Higgins, a union man whose daughter Bessy is dying of the cotton fluff in her lungs. A strike, a riot and a lie told to the police bind them together.
Gaskell wrote the book for Dickens’s Household Words, where it ran as Margaret Hale in 1854 and 1855; Chapman and Hall published it in two volumes the same year, with the title and the ending she wanted. It is a love story and a report on industrial England at once, and its argument is that master and hand have to see each other as men before anything can be settled. Read Wikipedia’s article on North and South for the serial history and the real strike behind it. The text is available via Project Gutenberg #4276 and Standard Ebooks.
North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell: Summary, Characters & Themes
This page is a summary and analysis of North and South, Elizabeth Gaskell’s 1855 novel about a Hampshire clergyman’s daughter who is transplanted to a Lancashire cotton town and taught to see its masters and its hands as people rather than as a problem. Gaskell wrote it in her forties, with Mary Barton and Cranford already behind her, for a magazine that wanted a serial and a publisher that wanted a book. Elizabeth Gaskell had lived in Manchester for two decades, married to a Unitarian minister, and she knew the streets, the mills, the sermons and the funerals she describes. The first title was Margaret Hale, and the subject is the education of its heroine.
Margaret comes back from London to Helstone expecting nothing to change. Then her father, a clergyman who has quietly stopped believing what he preaches, resigns his living, and the family must leave the only home Margaret remembers. In Milton-Northern, among mill chimneys and fog, Mr Hale tutors pupils and Margaret keeps house for an invalid mother. She dislikes the town, dislikes John Thornton on sight, and then watches him face a strike and a mob. When the rioters come for him she throws her arms around him and is struck by a stone, and both of them mistake what that gesture means. The novel follows the mistake to the end, through her mother’s death, a killing at a railway station and a lie that costs Margaret the good opinion of the man she has begun to respect.
The book is built on a contrast that was already a cliché when Gaskell used it. The south is green, slow, hierarchical and poor; the north is black, fast, democratic and rich, or rich for some. Gaskell refuses to let either side win the argument. Helstone is beautiful and also stagnant, a village where a family like the Hales has nowhere to go once the father’s faith fails. Milton is ugly and also alive, a place where a man like Thornton can rise by work and where a young woman like Bessy Higgins can be killed by the dust of her own trade. Cranford, Gaskell’s gentler book about a Cheshire village, is the other side of the same coin.
North and South belongs to the wave of novels that Victorian critics called the Condition of England question. Dickens had published Hard Times in 1854, Disraeli had published Sybil in 1845, and Gaskell herself had published Mary Barton in 1848, a book angrier and more violent than this one. What she adds is balance. Thornton is not a villain and Higgins is not a saint, and the novel’s solution is not legislation but conversation: the mill owner who once spoke of hands as numbers ends by dining with them, and the union man who once cursed all masters ends by asking one for work. Middlemarch and The Mayor of Casterbridge show how other Victorian novelists handled a town and a life.
The novel was a success in 1855 and has been read ever since, though for a long time it was treated as a lesser Mary Barton. The 2004 BBC adaptation, with Daniela Denby-Ashe and Richard Armitage, made it a costume-drama favourite and sent readers back to the book, where they found a harder and funnier novel than television usually allows. Its admirers include critics who value it as the first English novel to take the working class seriously without condescension. It has never been out of print, and the ending still divides its readers. The text here follows Project Gutenberg #4276 and the Standard Ebooks edition, which corrects the 1855 printing and supplies the chapter titles used below.
Historical Context
North and South was written for Household Words, the weekly Dickens edited, and it ran there from September 1854 to January 1855 under the title Margaret Hale. The arrangement was not happy. Dickens cut and rearranged, the instalments were short, and Gaskell, who liked to work slowly and at length, found the deadline brutal. When Chapman and Hall published the novel in two volumes in 1855 she restored her own title, her own chapter divisions and a final chapter that the serial had compressed. The book therefore exists in two versions, and the differences between them are a small lesson in how Victorian serial fiction was made.
Gaskell wrote from the inside of the industrial revolution. She had moved to Manchester in 1832 when her husband became minister of Cross Street Chapel, and she spent the rest of her life there, visiting the poor with him and watching the town double in size. The strike in the novel draws on the Preston strike of 1853 and 1854, which she followed closely, and on the wider dispute between the masters’ associations and the trades unions over wages, hours and the right to organise. The Ten Hours Act of 1847 had limited the working day for women and children, but enforcement was weak and the cotton trade still ran on long hours and cheap hands.
Against Manchester the novel sets Helstone, a Hampshire village based on the countryside of Gaskell’s childhood and on the rural parishes she knew through her father’s family. The south in 1855 was poorer than the north, its agriculture depressed, its labourers angry, its Church of England divided between tractarians, evangelicals and dissenters. Gaskell uses the contrast to ask what a community is for. Helstone has beauty, memory and a settled order, and it cannot keep a doubting clergyman employed; Milton has ugliness, noise and money, and it can make a man like Thornton and kill a woman like Bessy. The novel’s politics live in that double judgment.
Key Characters & Literary Archetypes
- Margaret Hale: In her early twenties when the novel opens, tall, dark, proud and quick to judge. She has been brought up in London with her aunt Shaw and in a Hampshire parsonage, and she carries the manners of the south into a town that has no use for them. Her education is the plot: she learns that Thornton’s hardness is a form of honesty, that Higgins’s bitterness is grief, and that her own compassion can be a kind of vanity. She is at her best when she acts without thinking, as she does during the riot.
- John Thornton: A Milton mill owner in his early thirties who began as a shop-boy and made himself master of Marlborough Mills. He is blunt, proud, self-educated and entirely without small talk, and he runs his mill on the principle that a master must be obeyed and a bargain must be kept. He loves Margaret almost from the moment she snubs him, and his proposal is as awkward as his manners. The strike and the failure of his business test the code he lives by, and the novel lets him keep it.
- Nicholas Higgins: A spinner and a union man, widowed, with two daughters and a son who has run off to sea. He is argumentative, honest, fiercely loyal and an atheist, and he argues with Mr Hale about religion across the sickbed of his daughter Bessy. After the strike fails he cannot find work, and his pride has to bend before he asks Thornton for a place. He becomes the novel’s bridge between master and men, and the friend Margaret needs when her own family falls apart.
- Bessy Higgins: A young mill girl, dying of the fluff she has breathed in at the cards for years. She is devout in a way her father is not, and her visions and hymns give the novel its strangest and most moving pages. Margaret visits her, reads to her and learns from her what the town costs the people who work in it. Her death is one of the book’s quiet catastrophes, and it changes both her father and Margaret.
- Mr Hale: A Hampshire clergyman who has quietly stopped believing in the doctrines he is paid to preach. He resigns his living rather than lie, and the decision costs his wife her health, his daughter her home and himself his place in the world. In Milton he tutors pupils, reads, and drifts into a gentle melancholy. He is a good man and a weak one, and the novel is unusually tender toward both facts.
- Frederick Hale: Margaret’s elder brother, a naval officer who led a mutiny against a brutal captain, was sentenced in his absence and lives in exile in Spain. He cannot come home without risking arrest, and his secret visit to his dying mother sets off the novel’s central catastrophe: a man is killed at a railway station, and Margaret lies to the police to protect her brother. He is brave, warm and careless, and his fate is to be loved at a distance.
Core Literary Themes
- Class, wages and the cash nexus: Gaskell takes the language of political economy seriously and then tests it against bodies. The masters talk of hands, of markets, of the going rate; the men talk of bread, of hours, of the right to combine. The novel stages the argument in scenes rather than speeches: a dinner party where Margaret is told that the Irish will take the men’s work, a strike meeting, a riot in a mill yard, a dead girl who coughed cotton. What Gaskell proposes is not revolution but recognition, and she is honest about how hard recognition is to achieve between people whose interests are opposed.
- North and South as a map of England: The title is a geography and a politics. The south is rural, Anglican, genteel and poor; the north is urban, dissenting, commercial and rich. Gaskell grew up between them, and the novel refuses to make either a paradise. Helstone is a place of roses and old loyalties, and it is also a place where a doubting clergyman has no future and a woman has no work. Milton is a place of smoke and new money, and it is also a place where a man can be destroyed by a bad year. The marriage plot is also a union of the two halves of the country.
- Conscience, doubt and religion: Mr Hale’s resignation is the engine of the plot and the novel’s first moral test. He gives up his living because he cannot preach what he no longer believes, and the honesty destroys his family’s security. Around him Gaskell sets other faiths: Margaret’s practical Christianity, Bessy’s visions, Higgins’s blunt atheism, Mrs Thornton’s stern and unforgiving religion of work. The novel is not pious. It asks what belief is worth when it costs something, and it treats the answer with more sympathy than a tract would.
- Women, work and the marriage plot: Margaret has no profession and no fortune, and the novel is precise about what that means. She keeps house, nurses, writes letters, manages servants and waits for a proposal she does not want. Her two offers, from a barrister and a mill owner, are both proposals to a woman with nothing of her own, and her refusal of the second is an act of self-definition. Gaskell shows how much work women do that is never counted as work, and how a marriage plot can be made to carry an argument about independence.
- Change, loss and the industrial landscape: The Milton of the novel is a place of perpetual motion: chimneys, pistons, whistles, fog, the roar that Margaret hears at night. Gaskell renders the industrial sublime without pretending it is beautiful, and she registers what it destroys as well as what it makes. Helstone, by contrast, is a landscape of memory, and Margaret’s return to it near the end is one of the novel’s most delicate passages. The book knows that the old order is going and that the new one is not yet just, and it holds both losses at once.
Why Download Our Custom E-Reader Edition of North and South?
This edition is made for reading rather than for a shelf. The text is the Standard Ebooks edition of Gaskell’s 1855 novel, with all fifty-two chapters in their original order, the two-volume division kept and the chapter titles as she wrote them. There are no notes in the middle of the page, no modernised spelling and no abridgement. What you download is the whole book, set cleanly, with a table of contents that works on an e-reader rather than only in a browser.
Editions of the novel differ in small ways: a sentence restored, a chapter heading dropped, a spelling quietly Americanised. This one follows the Standard Ebooks text, checked against the early printings, and the chapter list below uses its divisions. If you want to compare a passage with the original transcription, Project Gutenberg #4276 is the obvious place to start, and the two texts agree chapter for chapter.
Three formats are offered, one download each: EPUB for most readers, AZW3 for Kindle, KEPUB for Kobo. All three carry the same text and the same navigation, and none of them is locked. There is no account to create, no sample chapter standing in for the book, and no expiry date on the file. Download it once and it stays on your device, and you can move it to another reader, a phone or a tablet without asking anyone’s permission.
- Based on the Standard Ebooks Edition, via Standard Ebooks, whose editors prepared this text from the Project Gutenberg transcription and checked it against scans of the 1855 printing; their chapter divisions are the ones used in the summaries below, so the numbering on this page matches the book you download. Nothing is cut for length, and the two-volume structure is kept.
- Complete fifty-two-chapter text Both volumes are here entire, from the wedding in Harley Street to the last page in the Lennoxes’ drawing room, with the strike, the inquest and the Helstone epilogue left as Gaskell wrote them. No chapter is folded into another, and no scene is shortened for modern taste.
- EPUB, AZW3 and KEPUB One file per format, so the novel opens on Kindle, Kobo, Apple Books and most other readers without conversion, with a working table of contents, proper chapter breaks and a cover that survives being sent to a device. The files stay small enough for an old reader and complete enough for a new one.
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- Cranford — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
- Middlemarch — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
- The Mayor of Casterbridge — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
Chapter summaries
Fifty-two chapters in two volumes, from the wedding in Harley Street to the last page in London. These twelve summaries follow the Standard Ebooks text in order, and group the shorter chapters where the action runs straight on. Each entry names the chapters it covers and says what happens in them.
- Chapters 1–4 — the wedding; Helstone; Henry Lennox: The novel opens in Harley Street, where Edith is marrying Captain Lennox and Margaret is the quiet cousin in the background. Henry Lennox, the groom’s brother and a rising barrister, proposes and is refused. Margaret goes home to Helstone with her father, and the parsonage is put before us as a small paradise. Then Mr Hale’s doubts surface: he has been reading, thinking and losing his faith, and the household begins to come apart.
- Chapters 5–8 — the resignation; the move north; Milton: Mr Hale resigns his living rather than preach what he no longer believes, and the family must leave Helstone. The farewell is unsparing: the parish, the garden, the old servant Dixon, the villagers who depend on the vicar. They travel north by train to Heston and then to Milton-Northern, where the fog, the smoke and the noise are a shock to everyone but Mr Hale. Margaret sets up a house in Crampton and is homesick for a place that no longer exists.
- Chapters 9–12 — Thornton at dinner; morning calls: Thornton comes to dine with the Hales and talks about his rise from shop-boy to master. Margaret finds him harsh and conceited; he finds her cold and is fascinated. The Thorntons return the call, and Mrs Thornton’s pride and Fanny’s pretensions fill the morning room. Behind the social comedy the strike is forming: Higgins and the union are organising, the masters are refusing to negotiate, and Margaret is beginning to hear both sides.
- Chapters 13–16 — Bessy Higgins; the doctor; the shadow: Margaret visits Bessy Higgins, a mill girl dying of the fluff, and meets her father Nicholas, an atheist who argues with Mr Hale about the next world while his daughter coughs. Mrs Hale’s illness is diagnosed as something worse than low spirits, and the family’s money worries sharpen. Margaret becomes nurse, housekeeper and diplomat, and the novel settles into the rhythm of Milton life: visits, letters, doctors and the mill whistles that mark the hours.
- Chapters 17–20 — the strike; masters and men: The strike arrives. The men gather, the masters hold firm, and Thornton brings in Irish hands to keep the mill running. Margaret is drawn into the argument and is told both that the men are savages and that the masters are tyrants. The Thorntons give a dinner party, and the talk turns on gentlemen, hands and the north’s contempt for the south. Margaret defends her father’s parish and loses her temper, and Thornton watches her do it.
- Chapters 21–24 — the dark night; the riot; the proposal: Walking home from the Thorntons’ dinner, Margaret hears the crowd gathering and reaches Marlborough Mills as the mob surges into the yard. Thornton comes out to face them and she runs between him and the men, throwing her arms around him; a stone strikes her and she is carried inside. The next day Thornton proposes, believing the gesture meant love. Margaret refuses, saying she would have done the same for anyone, and the wound is worse than the one on her head.
- Chapters 25–28 — Frederick; mother and son; Bessy’s death: Mrs Hale, dying, asks to see her son, and Margaret writes to Frederick in Spain. He comes secretly at night, and the family has a few days of happiness in the middle of grief. Mrs Hale dies with both children near her. Meanwhile Bessy Higgins is failing too, and Margaret sits with her; in the novel’s quietest scene, Higgins, Mr Hale and Margaret kneel by the bed and the atheist finds himself praying.
- Chapters 29–32 — a ray of sunshine; the station; the lie: Frederick’s visit ends at Outwood station, where a man named Leonards tries to seize him and is thrown off the platform. Frederick escapes; Leonards dies. Margaret, questioned by the police, denies that she was at the station at all, and Thornton, hearing the denial from the police inspector, stops the inquest rather than expose her. The lie saves her brother and ruins her reputation with the one man whose good opinion she values, and she cannot explain without betraying Frederick.
- Chapters 33–36 — peace; false and true; expiation: Mrs Hale’s funeral, and Thornton’s quiet attendance at it. Margaret is left with her father and a secret. Thornton believes she lied for a lover, and his manner hardens; Mrs Thornton is certain of her unworthiness. The inquest into Leonards’s death is stopped on Thornton’s authority. Margaret visits Higgins, whose union cannot help him now that the strike has failed, and Bessy’s dying becomes the centre of the household.
- Chapters 37–40 — looking south; out of tune; the plan: Mr Hale’s health declines, and Mr Bell, his old friend from Oxford, invites him to visit. Margaret, worn out, begins to think about leaving Milton. Higgins asks Thornton for work and is refused, then slowly finds a way back; the two men begin the conversations that will change them both. Aunt Shaw proposes to take Margaret back to London, and Margaret agrees, though she knows that Harley Street will feel like another exile.
- Chapters 41–45 — Oxford; alone; Margaret’s flittin’: Mr Hale dies suddenly at Oxford, and Margaret is left alone in the world. Mr Bell, his oldest friend, takes charge. Aunt Shaw comes to Milton, hates the town and takes Margaret south to Harley Street, where Edith has a baby and the drawing room is full of old friends. Margaret packs up the Crampton house and says goodbye to Higgins, and the novel’s centre of gravity moves back to London.
- Chapters 46–52 — Helstone again; the will; the roses: Margaret goes back to Helstone with Mr Bell and finds it smaller and sadder than she remembers; she tells him the truth about the station. Bell dies at Oxford, leaving her his fortune, including the Milton property, and she becomes Thornton’s landlady. Thornton has lost his mill in a bad market and refused to risk his creditors’ money on a speculation. In a London drawing room he comes to give up his lease, and the book ends with dead roses and a proposal.
North and South: Frequently Asked Questions
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Part of: Classic fiction · Victorian era
