"North and South is a novel by Elizabeth Gaskell that appeared as a twenty-two-part weekly serial from September 1854 through January 1855 in the magazine Household Words, edited by Charles Dickens (who in those pages had just finished serializing Hard Times), and then with Chapman and Hall as a book, in two volumes, in 1855. Gaskell had originally titled the novel Margaret Hale, but agreed to the publisher's suggestion of the more topically suggestive North and South, alluding to the contrast between the way of life in the industrial north of England and agricultural south.Besides including scenes of industrial strife, North and South is a courtship-and-marriage story with richly complex elements including class conflict, religious doubts, maternal struggles, and naval mutiny. Gaskell's heroine, Margaret Hale, grows up in a country parish town in the south, but when her father renounces the Church, he uproots his family, and Margaret finds herself facing a new life in the fiction...