"How am I to dress up in my finery, and go off and away to smart parties, after the sorrow I have seen to-day?"

Returning to my native Derbyshire after a brief sojourn in the South, I could not but notice the large signs to “The NORTH” as we crawled along the M5. Something about the use of capitals suggests fear-mongering: why not go all out and write “Here be Hippogriffs”?

Someone who knew better than most the impact of the historical North/South divide was Elizabeth Gaskell. Born in London in 1810 but brought up in Cheshire, she later moved to Manchester, where she lived for the rest of her life and married a well-known church minister. She was a devoted wife, mother…and author.

Gaskell’s most famous novel, North and South, hones in on the moment in history when the North, as a result of intense industrialisation, begins to impinge on the Southern consciousness. Margaret Hale, from the fictional southern town of Helston, is abruptly uprooted to Milton – a Manchester by any other name; John Thornton, played by a suitably brooding Richard Armitage in a recent adaptation, is one of the mill-owners of the North. However, it would be all too easy to argue that Gaskell’s novel embodies the North / South divide, or that it was proof positive that life in the North really was grim.

Enter Charles Dickens. Dickens was a great supporter of Gaskell: he recognised her talent and indeed North and South was published in the magazine he edited, Household Words. Dickens too is famous for his social novels which, aside from the wonderfully imaginative character names and unbelievably long sentences, also boast (although “boast” is perhaps not entirely appropriate) some of the most vivid and horrifying descriptions of life on the streets, in the prisons and in the workhouses…of the South. Things were not grim “up North”, then: they were just grim, full stop.

Gaskell’s novel does, of course, force its readers to look at the poverty and deprivation behind the cotton and riches of the North. But it also destroys the myth of the North / South divide. Margaret’s misery comes not from living in the Northern mill town, but from her loneliness, her mother’s illness, her still-raw sense of poverty: the list goes on. Her happiness, at the end of the novel, comes not from a return to the South, but from finding a friend, a kindred spirit and, finally (PLOT SPOILER) a husband in the form of John Thornton. The book can be – and has been – read as a crass morality tale in which the North and the South finally learn to overcome their differences and get on: Gaskell is more subtle than that. The book is not a lesson in overcoming differences but rather puts forward the theory that no such differences exist.