title: Our Mutual Friend

text: Most etiquette manuals addressed such things as calling cards, the duration of the call, and what was acceptable to say and do during a visit. One of the most popular etiquette books was Isabella Beeton's "Book of Household Management", which was published in 1861. In this book, Beeton claims that a call of fifteen to twenty minutes is "quite sufficient" and states, "A lady paying a visit may remove her boa or neckerchief; but neither her shawl nor bonnet." In Gaskell's novel Cranford , the expectation of such short meetings is followed with the comment that "Of course no absorbed subject was ever spoken about. We kept ourselves to short sentences of small talk, and were punctual to our time."


title: Our Mutual Friend

text: Etiquette books were constantly changing themes and ideas, so this also distinguished who was an "insider" and who was an "outsider."


title: Our Mutual Friend

text: A major symbol is the River Thames, which is linked to the major theme of rebirth and renewal. Water is seen as a sign of new life, and associated with the Christian sacrament of Baptism. Characters like John Harmon and Eugene Wrayburn end up in the river, and come out reborn. Wrayburn emerges from the river close to death, but is ready to marry Lizzie, and to avoid naming his attacker to save her reputation. He surprises everyone, including himself, when he survives and goes on to have a loving marriage with Lizzie. John Harmon also appears to end up in the river through no fault of his own, and when Gaffer pulls a body dressed like Harmon out of the waters, Harmon adopts the alias of John Rokesmith. This alias is for his own safety and peace of mind; he wants to know that he can do things on his own, and does not need his father's name or money to make a good life for himself.


title: Our Mutual Friend

text: Dickens uses many images that relate to water. Phrases such as the "depths and shallows of Podsnappery," and the "time had come for flushing and flourishing this man down for good", are examples of such imagery. Some critics see this as being used excessively.


title: Our Mutual Friend

text: Aside from examining the novel's form and characters, modern critics of "Our Mutual Friend" have focused on identifying and analysing what they perceive as the main themes of the novel. Although Stanley Friedman's 1973 essay "The Motif of Reading in "Our Mutual Friend"" emphasises references to literacy and illiteracy in the novel, Friedman states, "Money, the dust-heaps, and the river have been seen as the main symbols, features, that help develop such themes as avarice, predation, death and rebirth, the quest for identity and pride. To these images and ideas, we may add what Monroe Engel calls the 'social themes of "Our Mutual Friend"—having to do with money-dust, and relatedly with the treatment of the poor, education, representative government, even the inheritance laws.'"


title: Our Mutual Friend

text: According to Metz, many of the prominent themes in Dickens's earlier works of fiction are intricately woven into Dickens's last novel. She states, "Like "David Copperfield", "Our Mutual Friend" is about the relationship between work and the realization of self, about the necessity to be 'useful' before one can be 'happy.' Like "Great Expectations", it is about the power of money to corrupt those who place their faith in its absolute value. Like "Bleak House", it is about the legal, bureaucratic, and social barriers that intervene between individuals and their nearest neighbours. Like all of Dickens's novels, and especially the later ones, it is about pervasive social problems—poverty, disease, class bitterness, the sheer ugliness and vacuity of contemporary life."


title: Our Mutual Friend

text: At the time of its original serial publication, "Our Mutual Friend" was not regarded as one of Dickens's greatest successes, and on average fewer than 30,000 copies of each instalment was sold. Though "The New York Times", of 22 November 1865, conjectured, "By most readers ... the last work by Dickens will be considered his best," direct evidence of how readers responded to Dickens's novels is scarce. Because Dickens burned his letters, the voices of his nineteenth-century serial audiences remain elusive. Thus, evidence of the reactions of his Victorian era readers must be obtained from reviews of "Our Mutual Friend" by Dickens's contemporaries.


title: Our Mutual Friend

text: The first British periodical to print a review of "Our Mutual Friend", published 30 April 1864 in "The London Review", extolled the first serial instalment, stating, "Few literary pleasures are greater than that which we derive from opening the first number of one of Mr Dickens's stories" and ""Our Mutual Friend" opens well".


title: Our Mutual Friend

text: In 1866 George Stott found the novel flawed: "Mr Dickens must stand or fall by the severest canons of literary criticism: it would be an insult to his acknowledged rank to apply a more lenient standard; and bad art is not the less bad art and a failure because associated, as it is in his case, with much that is excellent, and not a little that is even fascinating."


title: Our Mutual Friend

text: Dickens had his fans and detractors just like every author throughout the ages, but not even his most strident supporters like E. S. Dallas felt that "Our Mutual Friend" was perfect. Rather, the oft acknowledged "genius" of Dickens seems to have overshadowed all reviews and made it impossible for most critics to completely condemn the work, the majority of these reviews being a mixture of praise and disparagement.


title: Our Mutual Friend

text: In November 1865 E. S. Dallas, in "The Times", lauded "Our Mutual Friend" as "one of the best of even Dickens's tales," but was unable to ignore the flaws. "This last novel of Mr Charles Dickens, really one of his finest works, and one in which on occasion he even surpasses himself, labours under the disadvantage of a beginning that drags ... On the whole, however, at that early stage the reader was more perplexed than pleased. There was an appearance of great effort without corresponding result. We were introduced to a set of people in whom it is impossible to take an interest, and were made familiar with transactions that suggested horror. The great master of fiction exhibited all his skill, performed the most wonderful feats of language, loaded his page with wit and many a fine touch peculiar to himself. The agility of his pen was amazing, but still at first we were not much amused." Despite the mixed review, it pleased Dickens so well that he gave Dallas the manuscript.


title: Our Mutual Friend

text: Many critics found fault with the plot, and in 1865, "The New York Times" described it as an "involved plot combined with an entire absence of the skill to manage and unfold it". In the "London Review", in the same year, an anonymous critic felt that "the whole plot in which the deceased Harmon, Boffin, Wegg, and John Rokesmith, are concerned, is wild and fantastic, wanting in reality, and leading to a degree of confusion which is not compensated by any additional interest in the story" and he also found that "the final explanation is a disappointment." However, the "London Review" also thought, that "the mental state of a man about to commit the greatest of crimes has seldom been depicted with such elaboration and apparent truthfulness."


title: Our Mutual Friend

text: Many reviewers responded negatively to the characters in "Our Mutual Friend". The 1865 review by Henry James in "The Nation" described every character as "a mere bundle of eccentricities, animated by no principle of nature whatever", and condemned Dickens for a lack of characters who represent "sound humanity". James maintained that none of the characters add anything to the reader's understanding of human nature, and asserted that the characters in "Our Mutual Friend", were "grotesque creatures", who did not represent actual existing Victorian types.


title: Our Mutual Friend

text: Like James, the 1869 article "Table Talk" in "Once a Week" did not view the characters in "Our Mutual Friend" as realistic. The article asks: "Do men live by finding the bodies of the drowned, and landing them ashore 'with their pockets allus inside out' for the sake of the reward offered for their recovery? As far as we can make out, no. We have been at some trouble to inquire from men who should know; watermen, who have lived on the river nigh all their lives, if they have seen late at night a dark boat with a solitary occupant, drifting down the river on the 'look out,' plying his frightful trade? The answer has uniformly been 'No, we have never seen such men,' and more, they do not believe in their existence."


title: Our Mutual Friend

text: The reviewer in the "London Review" in 1865 denounced the characters of Wegg and Venus, "who appear to us in all the highest degree unnatural—the one being a mere phantasm, and the other a nonentity." However he applauded the creation of Bella Wilfer: "Probably the greatest favourite in the book will be—or rather is already—Bella Wilfer. She is evidently a pet of the author's, and she will long remain the darling of half the households of England and America." E. S. Dallas, in his 1865 review, concurred that "Mr Dickens has never done anything in the portraiture of women so pretty and so perfect" as Bella.


title: Our Mutual Friend

text: Dallas also admired the creation of Jenny Wren—who was greeted with contempt by Henry James—stating that, "The dolls' dressmaker is one of his most charming pictures, and Mr Dickens tells her strange story with a mixture of humour and pathos which it is impossible to resist."


title: Our Mutual Friend

text: In an 1867 "Atlantic Monthly" article entitled "The Genius of Dickens", critic Edwin Percy Whipple declared that Dickens's characters "have a strange attraction to the mind, and are objects of love or hatred, like actual men and women."


title: Our Mutual Friend

text: In October 1865 an unsigned review appeared in the "London Review" stating that "Mr Dickens stands in need of no allowance on the score of having out-written himself. His fancy, his pathos, his humour, his wonderful powers of observation, his picturesqueness, and his versatility, are as remarkable now as they were twenty years ago." But like other critics, after praising the book this same critic then turned around and disparaged it: "Not that we mean to say Mr Dickens has outgrown his faults. They are as obvious as ever—sometimes even trying our patience rather hard. A certain extravagance in particular scenes and persons—a tendency to caricature and grotesqueness—and a something here and there which savours of the melodramatic, as if the author had been considering how the thing would 'tell' on the stage—are to be found in "Our Mutual Friend", as in all this great novelist's productions."


title: Our Mutual Friend

text: Edwin Whipple in 1867 also commented on the sentiment and pathos of Dickens's characters, stating, "But the poetical, the humorous, the tragic, or the pathetic element is never absent in Dickens's characterization, to make his delineations captivating to the heart and imagination, and give the reader a sense of having escaped from whatever in the actual world is dull and wearisome."


title: Our Mutual Friend

text: However, in 1869 George Stott condemned Dickens for being overly sentimental: "Mr Dickens's pathos we can only regard as a complete and absolute failure. It is unnatural and unlovely. He attempts to make a stilted phraseology, and weak and sickly sentimentality do duty for genuine emotion." Still, in the manner of all the other mixed reviews, Stott states that "we still hold him to be emphatically a man of genius."


title: Our Mutual Friend

text: The "Spectator" in 1869 concurred with Stott's opinion, writing "Mr Dickens has brought people to think that there is a sort of piety in being gushing and maudlin," and that his works are heavily imbued with the "most mawkish and unreal sentimentalism", but the unsigned critic still maintained that Dickens was one of the great authors of his time.


title: Our Mutual Friend

text: G. K. Chesterton, one of Dickens's critics in the early 20th century, expressed the opinion that Mr Boffin's pretended fall into miserliness was originally intended by Dickens to be authentic, but that Dickens ran out of time and so took refuge in the awkward pretence that Boffin had been acting. Chesterton argues that while we might believe Boffin could be corrupted, we can hardly believe he could keep up such a strenuous pretence of corruption: "Such a character as his—rough, simple and lumberingly unconscious—might be more easily conceived as really sinking in self-respect and honour than as keeping up, month after month, so strained and inhuman a theatrical performance. ... It might have taken years to turn Noddy Boffin into a miser; but it would have taken centuries to turn him into an actor." However, Chesterton also praised the book as being a return to Dickens's youthful optimism and creative exuberance, full of characters who "have that great Dickens quality of being something which is pure farce and yet which is not superficial; an unfathomable farce—a farce that goes down to the roots of the universe."


title: Our Mutual Friend

text: In his 1940 article "Dickens: Two Scrooges", Edmund Wilson states, ""Our Mutual Friend," like all these later books of Dickens, is more interesting to us today than it was to Dickens's public. Certainly the subtleties and profundities that are now discovered in it were not noticed by the reviewers." As a whole, modern critics of "Our Mutual Friend", particularly those of the last half century, have been more appreciative of Dickens's last completed work than his contemporary reviewers. Although some modern critics find Dickens's characterisation in "Our Mutual Friend" problematic, most tend to positively acknowledge the novel's complexity and appreciate its multiple plot lines.


title: Our Mutual Friend

text: In November 2019, BBC Arts included "Our Mutual Friend" on its list of the 100 most influential novels.


title: Our Mutual Friend

text: In his 2006 article "The Richness of Redundancy: "Our Mutual Friend,"" John R. Reed states, ""Our Mutual Friend" has not pleased many otherwise satisfied readers of Dickens's fiction. For his contemporaries and such acute assessors of fiction as Henry James, the novel seemed to lack structure, among other faults. More recently, critics have discovered ways in which Dickens can be seen experimenting in the novel." Reed maintains that Dickens's establishment of "an incredibly elaborate structure" for "Our Mutual Friend" was an extension of Dickens's quarrel with realism. In creating a highly formal structure for his novel, which called attention to the novel's own language, Dickens embraced taboos of realism. Reed also argues that Dickens's employment of his characteristic technique of offering his reader what might be seen as a surplus of information within the novel, in the form of a pattern of references, exists as a way for Dickens to guarantee that the meaning of his novel might be transmitted to his reader. Reed cites Dickens's multiple descriptions of the River Thames and repetitive likening of Gaffer to "a roused bird of prey" in the novel's first chapter as evidence of Dickens's use of redundancy to establish two of the novel's fundamental themes: preying/scavenging and the transformative powers of water. According to Reed, to notice and interpret the clues representing the novel's central themes that Dickens gives his reader, the reader must have a surplus of these clues. Echoing Reed's sentiments, in her 1979 article "The Artistic Reclamation of Waste in "Our Mutual Friend"," Nancy Aycock Metz claims, "The reader is thrown back upon his own resources. He must suffer, along with the characters of the novel, from the climate of chaos and confusion, and like them, he must begin to make connections and impose order on the details he observes."


title: Our Mutual Friend

text: In his 1995 article "The Cup and the Lip and the Riddle of "Our Mutual Friend"", Gregg A. Hecimovich reaffirms Metz's notion of reading the novel as a process of connection and focuses on what he sees as one of the main aspects of Dickens's narrative: "a complex working out of the mysteries and idiosyncrasies presented in the novel." Unlike Dickens's contemporary critics, Hecimovich commends Dickens for "Our Mutual Friend"'s disjunctive, riddle-like structure and manipulation of plots, declaring, "In a tale about conundrums and questions of identity, divergence of plots is desirable." Hecimovich goes on to say that in structuring his last novel as a riddle-game, Dickens challenges conventions of nineteenth-century Victorian England and that the "sickness" infecting Dickens's composition of "Our Mutual Friend" is that of Victorian society generally, not Dickens himself.


title: Our Mutual Friend

text: Harland S. Nelson's 1973 article "Dickens's "Our Mutual Friend" and Henry Mayhew's "London Labour and the London Poor"" examines Dickens's inspiration for two of the novel's working class characters. Nelson asserts that Gaffer Hexam and Betty Higden were potentially modelled after real members of London's working class whom Mayhew interviewed in the 1840s for his nonfiction work "London Labour and the London Poor." Unlike some of Dickens's contemporaries, who regarded the characters in "Our Mutual Friend" as unrealistic representations of actual Victorian people, Nelson maintains that London's nineteenth-century working class is authentically depicted through characters such as Gaffer Hexam and Betty Higden.


title: Our Mutual Friend

text: While novelist Henry James dismissed the minor characters Jenny Wren, Mr Wegg, and Mr Venus as "pathetic characters." in his 1865 review of the novel, Gregg Hecimovich in 1989 refers to them as "important riddlers and riddlees." Hecimovich suggests that, "Through the example of his minor characters, Dickens directs his readers to seek, with the chief characters, order and structure out of the apparent disjunctive 'rubbish' in the novel, to analyze and articulate what ails a fallen London ... Only then can the reader, mimicking the action of certain characters, create something 'harmonious' and beautiful out of the fractured waste land."


title: Our Mutual Friend

text: Some modern critics of "Our Mutual Friend" have been overall more critical of the novel's characters. In her 1970 essay ""Our Mutual Friend": Dickens as the Compleat Angler," Annabel Patterson declares, ""Our Mutual Friend" is not a book which satisfies all of Dickens's admirers. Those who appreciate Dickens mainly for the exuberance of his characterization and his gift for caricature feel a certain flatness in this last novel". Deirdre David claims that "Our Mutual Friend" is a novel through which Dickens "engaged in a fictive improvement of society" that bore little relation to reality, especially regarding the character of Lizzie Hexam, whom David describes as a myth of purity among the desperate lower-classes. David criticises Dickens for his "fable of regenerated bourgeois culture" and maintains that the character Eugene Wrayburn's realistic counterpart would have been far more likely to offer Lizzie money for sex than to offer her money for education.


title: Sorbus aucuparia

text: Sorbus aucuparia, commonly called rowan (UK: /ˈrəʊən/, US: /ˈroʊən/) and mountain-ash, is a species of deciduous tree or shrub in the rose family. It is a highly variable species, and botanists have used different definitions of the species to include or exclude trees native to certain areas; a recent definition includes trees native to most of Europe and parts of Asia, as well as northern Africa. The range extends from Madeira, the British Isles and Iceland to Russia and northern China. Unlike many plants with similar distributions, it is not native to Japan.


title: Sorbus aucuparia

text: The tree has a slender trunk with smooth bark, a loose and roundish crown, and its leaves are pinnate in pairs of leaflets on a central vein with a terminal leaflet. It blossoms from May to June in dense corymbs of small yellowish white flowers and develops small red pomes as fruit that ripen from August to October and are eaten by many bird species. The plant is undemanding and frost hardy and colonizes disrupted and inaccessible places as a short-lived pioneer species.


title: Sorbus aucuparia

text: The fruit and foliage have been used in the creation of dishes and beverages, as a folk medicine, and as fodder for livestock. Its tough and flexible wood has traditionally been used for woodworking. It is planted to fortify soil in mountain regions or as an ornamental tree and has several cultivars.


title: Sorbus aucuparia

text: "Sorbus aucuparia" occurs as a tree or shrub that grows up to between in height. The crown is loose and roundish or irregularly shaped but wide and the plant often grows multiple trunks. A trunk is slender and cylindrical and reaches up to in diameter, and the branches stick out and are slanted upwards. The bark of a young plant is yellowish gray and gleaming and becomes gray-black with lengthwise cracks in advanced age; it descales in small flakes. Lenticels in the bark are elongated and colored a bright ocher. The plant does not often grow older than 80 years and is one of the shortest-lived trees in temperate climate. The wood has a wide reddish white sapwood and a light brown to reddish brown heartwood. It is diffuse-porous, flexible, elastic, and tough, but not durable, with a density of in a dried state. The roots grow wide and deep, and the plant is capable of root sprouting and can regenerate after coppicing.


title: Sorbus aucuparia

text: The compound leaves are pinnate with 4 to 9 pairs of leaflets on either side of a terete central vein and with a terminal leaflet. There are paired leaf-like stipules at the base of the petiole. The leaves are up to long, wide, and arranged in an alternate leaf pattern on a branch, distinguishing them from those of ash, "Fraxinus excelsior", which are opposite and without stipules. The leaflets are elongated-lanceolate in shape, long, and wide with a sharply serrated edge, and have short stems or sit close to the central vein except for the outermost leaflet. Leaflets are covered in gray-silvery hairs after sprouting but become mostly bare after they unfold. Their upper side is dark green and their underside is a grayish green and felted. Young leaflets smell like marzipan when brayed. The leaflets are asymmetrical at the bottom. The foliage grows in May and turns yellow in autumn or a dark red in dry locations.


title: Sorbus aucuparia

text: The buds are often longer than and have flossy to felted hairs. These hairs, which disappear over time, cover dark brown to black bud scales. The terminal buds are oval and pointed and larger than axillary buds, which are narrow, oval and pointed, close to the twig, and often curved towards it.


title: Sorbus aucuparia

text: The species is monoecious. It reaches maturity at age 10 and carries ample fruit almost every year. The plant flowers from May to June (on occasion again in September) in many yellowish white corymbs that contain about 250 flowers. The corymbs are large, upright, and bulging. The flowers are between in diameter and have five small, yellowish green, and triangular sepals that are covered in hairs or bare. The five round or oval petals are yellowish white and the flower has up to 25 stamens fused with the corolla to form a hypanthium and an ovary with two to five styles; the style is fused with the receptacle. The flowers have an unpleasant trimethylamine smell. Their nectar is high in fructose and glucose.


title: Sorbus aucuparia

text: Its berry are round pomes between in diameter that ripen from August to October. The fruit are green before they ripen and then typically turn to orange or scarlet in color. The sepals persist as a black, five-pointed star on the ripe fruit. A corymb carries 80 to 100 pomes. A pome contains a star-shaped ovary with two to five locules each containing one or two flat, narrow, and pointed reddish seeds. The flesh of the fruit contains carotenoids, citric acid, malic acid, parasorbic acid, pectin, provitamin A, sorbitol, tannin, and vitamin C. The seeds contain glycoside.


title: Sorbus aucuparia

text: Fossils of "Sorbus aucuparia" have been described from the fossil flora of Kızılcahamam district in Turkey, which is of early Pliocene age.


title: Sorbus aucuparia

text: The binomial name "Sorbus aucuparia" is composed of the Latin words "sorbus" for service tree and "aucuparia", which derives from the words "avis" for "bird" and "capere" for "catching" and describes the use of the fruit of "S. aucuparia" as bait for fowling. The plant is commonly known as rowan and mountain-ash, and has also been called Amur mountain-ash, European mountain-ash, quick beam, quickbeam, or rowan-berry. The names rowan and mountain ash may be applied to other species in "Sorbus" subgenus "Sorbus", and mountain ash may be used for several other distantly related trees. The species is not closely related to either the true ash trees (genus "Fraxinus"), which also carry pinnate leaves, or the species "Eucalyptus regnans", also called mountain ash, native to Tasmania and Victoria in southeastern Australia.


title: Sorbus aucuparia

text: The common name mountain ash dates from the 16th century. It was first used by John Gerard in 1597, translating it directly from the then botanists' Latin "Montana fraxinus"


title: Sorbus aucuparia

text: It can be found in almost all of Europe and the Caucasus up to Northern Russia and Siberia, but it is not native to Southern Spain, Southern Greece, Sardinia, the Balearic Islands, the Azores, and the Faroe Islands. The species was introduced as an ornamental species in North America. It is widespread from plains to mountains up to the tree line where it grows as the only deciduous tree species among krummholz. In the Alps it grows at elevations of up to . "S. aucuparia" appears north of the boreal forest at the arctic tree line; in Norway, it is found up to the 71st parallel north.


title: Sorbus aucuparia

text: It has naturalized in America from Washington to Alaska and eastward in Canada and the northeast of the US very successfully.


title: Sorbus aucuparia

text: "S. aucuparia" is an undemanding species and can withstand shade. It is frost hardy and can tolerate winter dryness and a brief growing season. The plant is also resistant to air pollution, wind, and snow pressure. It mostly grows on soil that is moderately dry to moderately damp, acidic, low on nutrients, sandy, and loose. It often grows in stony soil or clay soil, but also sandy soil or wet peat. The plant grows best on fresh, loose, and fertile soil, prefers average humidity, and does not tolerate saline soil or waterlogging. It can be found in light woodland of all kinds and as a pioneer species over fallen dead trees or in clearcuttings, and at the edge of forests or at the sides of roads. The seeds germinate easily, so the plant may appear on inaccessible rock, ruins, branch forks, or on hollow trees.


title: Sorbus aucuparia

text: The tallest "S. aucuparia" in the United Kingdom stands in the Chiltern Hills in South East England. This exceptional specimen is tall and has a trunk diameter of . In Germany, an unusually large specimen is located near Wendisch Waren, a village in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. This tree stands at more than tall, is around 100 years old, and has a diameter of . The tallest known specimen in Ireland is an tall specimen at Glenstal Abbey, County Limerick.


title: Sorbus aucuparia

text: The species is pollinated by bees and flies. Its seeds are not digested by birds and are thus propagated by being passed intact in their droppings. The fruit are eaten by about 60 bird species and several mammals. They are liked particularly by thrushes and other songbirds, and are also eaten by cloven-hoofed game, red fox, European badger, dormouse, and squirrel. The fruit are eaten by migratory birds in winter, including Bohemian waxwing, spotted nutcracker, and redwing. Cloven-hoofed game also excessively browse foliage and bark. The plant roots can be found in symbiosis with arbuscular mycorrhizal and less commonly with ectomycorrhizal fungi.


title: Sorbus aucuparia

text: It is usually later superseded by larger forest trees. In Central Europe it often grows in association with red elderberry, goat willow, Eurasian aspen, and silver birch. The plant is highly flammable and tends not to accumulate plant litter.


title: Sorbus aucuparia

text: Other species of the genus "Sorbus" easily hybridize with "S. aucuparia" and hybrid speciation can result; hybrids include "Sorbus × hybrida", a small tree with oval serrated leaves and 2 to 3 pairs of leaflets, which is a hybrid with "Sorbus × intermedia", and "S. thuringiaca", a medium-size tree with elongated leaves and 1 to 3 pairs of leaflets that are sometimes fused at the central vein, which is a hybrid with "S. aria".


title: Sorbus aucuparia

text: The main pests for "S. aucuparia" are the apple fruit moth "Argyresthia conjugella" and the mountain-ash sawfly "Hoplocampa alpina". The rust fungus "Gymnosporangium cornutum" produces leaf galls. The leaves are not palatable to insects, but are used by insect larvae, including by the moth "Venusia cambrica", the case-bearer moth "Coleophora anatipennella", and leaf miners of the genus "Stigmella". The snail "Cornu aspersum" feeds on the leaves. The plant can suffer from fire blight.


title: Sorbus aucuparia

text: The fruit of "S. aucuparia" were used in the past to lure and catch birds. To humans, the fruit are bitter, astringent, laxative, diuretic and a cholagogue. They have vitamin C, so they prevent scurvy, but the parasorbic acid irritates the gastric mucosa. Pharmacist Mannfried Pahlow wrote that he doubted the toxicity of the fruit but advised against consuming large amounts. The fruit contain sorbitol, which can be used as a sugar substitute by diabetics, but its production is no longer relevant. "Sorbus aucuparia" fruits have been used in the traditional Austrian medicine internally (as tea, syrup, jelly or liqueur) for treatment of disorders of the respiratory tract, fever, infections, colds, flu, rheumatism and gout.


title: Sorbus aucuparia

text: Fresh fruit are usually not tasty, but they can be debittered and made into compote, jelly, jam, a tangy syrup, a tart chutney, or juice, as well as wine and liqueur, or used for tea or to make flour. Fruit are served as a side dish to lamb or game. Debittering can be accomplished by freezing, cooking, or drying, which degrades the parasorbic acid. The fruit are red colored in August but usually only harvested in October after the first frost by cutting the corymbs. The robust qualities of "S. aucuparia" make it a source for fruit in harsh mountain climate and Maria Theresa, ruler of the Habsburg monarchy, recommended the planting of the species in 1779.


title: Sorbus aucuparia

text: A more palatable variety, named "Sorbus aucuparia" var. "dulcis" Kraetzl, or var. "edulis" Dieck, or var. "moravica" Dippel, was first discovered in 1810 near Ostružná in the Hrubý Jeseník mountain range of Northern Moravia and became widespread in Germany and Austria the early 20th century. Its leaves are larger and pointed, only the front part of the leaflets is serrated, and they have darker bark, larger buds and larger fruit. Similar non-bitter varieties found in Southern Russia were first introduced in Central Europe in 1900 as 'Rossica' and 'Rossica Major', which has large fruit up to in diameter.


title: Sorbus aucuparia

text: Two widespread cultivars of the Moravian variety are 'Konzentra' and 'Rosina', which were selected beginning in 1946 by the Institut für Gartenbau Dresden-Pillnitz, an agricultural research institute in Saxony, from 75 specimens found mostly in the Ore Mountains, and made available in 1954. Fruit of the more widely used 'Konzentra' are small to medium-sized, mildly aromatic and tart, easier to transport because of their thicker peel, and used for juicing, while fruit of 'Rosina' are larger, sweet and tart, and aromatic, and candied or used in compote. The two cultivars are self-pollinating, yield fruit early, and the sugar content increases while the acid content decreases as the fruit ripen. 'Beissneri' is a cultivar with reddish foliage and bark and serrated leaves. Other edible varieties originate in and are named after Klosterneuburg, Lower Austria.


title: Sorbus aucuparia

text: Russian botanist Ivan Vladimirovich Michurin began in 1905 to crossbreed common "S. aucuparia" with other species to create fruit trees. His experiments resulted in the cultivars 'Burka', 'Likjornaja', 'Dessertnaja', 'Granatnaja', 'Rubinovaja', and 'Titan'. Other "S. aucuparia" hybrids planted in Western Europe beginning in the 1980s include 'Apricot Queen', 'Brilliant Yellow', 'Chamois Glow', 'Pink Queen', and 'Salmon Queen'.


title: Sorbus aucuparia

text: The leaves were fermented with leaves of sweet gale and oak bark to create herb beer. Fruits are eaten as a mash in small amounts against lack of appetite or an upset stomach and stimulate production of gastric acid. In folk medicine they are used as a laxative, against rheumatism and kidney disease, and as a gargled juice against hoarseness.


title: Sorbus aucuparia

text: The wood is used for cartwright's work, turner's work, and woodcarving. Wood can be used from trees as young as 20 years. The sapwood is golden and white, while the heart-wood is brown. In almost treeless regions it is used as firewood. The leaves are sometimes used as fodder for livestock while the fruit are used against erysipeloid infections in domestic pigs and goats. Bark of the plant was used to dye wool brown or red. Honey from the flowers is strongly aromatic and has a reddish color.


title: Sorbus aucuparia

text: It is also used as an ornamental plant in parks, gardens, or as an avenue tree. Ornamental cultivars include 'Asplenifolia', which has divided and sharply serrated leaflets, 'Blackhawk', which has large fruit and dark green foliage, 'Fastigiata', which has an upright columnar form, 'Fructu Luteo', which has orange yellow fruit, 'Michred', which has brilliant red fruit, 'Pendula', which is a weeping tree, and 'Xanthocarpa', which has orange yellow fruit.


title: Sorbus aucuparia

text: ‘Sheerwater Seedling', an upright and slender cultivar, and 'Wisley Gold' with yellow fruits, have received the Royal Horticultural Society's Award of Garden Merit.


title: Sorbus aucuparia

text: In the "Prose Edda", the Norse god Thor saves himself from a rapid river created by the giantess Gjálp by grabbing hold of a rowan, which became known as "Thor's protection".


title: Sorbus aucuparia

text: In English folklore, twigs of "S. aucuparia" were believed to ward off evil spirits and witches. The plant was called "the witch" in England and dowsing rods to find ores were made out of its wood. Twigs were used to drive cattle to the pasture for the first time in spring to ensure their health and fertility. The wooden shafts of forks and other farm implements were constructed from the species to protect farm animals and production from witches' spells. In weather lore, a year with plentiful rowan fruit would have a good grain harvest but be followed by a severe winter.


title: Sorbus aucuparia

text: In Scottish folklore, boughs of rowan were traditionally taken into cattle byres in May to protect livestock from evil, and rowan trees were planted in pastures for similar purposes.


title: Sorbus aucuparia

text: "S. aucuparia" is used in the coats of arms of the German municipalities Ebernhahn, Eschenrode, and Hermsdorf, and of the Vysočina Region of the Czech Republic. Rowan is part of the coat of arms of the Metropolitan Borough of Wigan and the logo of both Wigan Athletic and Wigan Warriors.


title: Dillon Francis

text: Francis was born in Los Angeles to an American father and a Serbian-Croatian mother. Francis has stated that his father, Robert Drew Francis, is an "alternative medicines doctor." He has made a recurring Internet joke about being unable to find his father. Francis has stated that he was very sheltered growing up, claiming that he did not know any swear words until he was 15. He also claims he could not watch TV unless he watched at least two hours of "Sesame Street" a day.


title: Dillon Francis

text: Francis first rose to fame after gaining the attention of American producer Diplo and eventually collaborating on the song "Que Que", with featured Latin-pop artist Maluca. His song "Masta Blasta", originally a 130 BPM house track, was edited after inspiration from Dutch musician Munchi and eventually ended up as the moombahton track. In 2010, Francis released his "Swashbuckler" EP on Play Me Records. In 2012, he also released two singles "I.D.G.A.F.O.S." and "Bootleg Fireworks (Burning Up)". He has released works on multiple labels including Dim Mak Records, Mad Decent and Owsla.


title: Dillon Francis

text: In February 2012, Francis became the first moombahton artist to achieve the number-one spot atop the Beatport releases chart with the release of his extended play "Something, Something, Awesome." In late 2012, he embarked on his "Wet & Reckless" tour across North America, as well as supporting the English electronic-music trio Nero on their "Welcome Reality" tour and English musician Flux Pavilion on his Standing on a Hill tour.


title: Dillon Francis

text: In 2013, he announced a headlining "Wurld Turr" across the US and Canada, as well as confirming that his debut album would be released in 2013 before later experiencing various delays. He was announced as one of MTV Clubland's Artists to watch in 2013, alongside acts such as Kill the Noise and Otto Knows. Francis was labeled by MTV as an "artist to watch" as of September 9, 2013. Francis performed at music festivals including Camp Bisco, Electric Daisy Carnival, Coachella, TomorrowWorld, Ultra and Electric Zoo. Francis also created the comedy production duo Meowski666 alongside Kill the Noise. In October 2013, he was announced as number 73 in the DJ Mag Top 100 poll.


title: Dillon Francis

text: In 2014, his major label debut album, "Money Sucks, Friends Rule", landed on Rolling Stone's "Top Electronic Albums of 2014" list and featured collaborators such as Twista, Brendon Urie of Panic! At The Disco, Major Lazer, and more. His single "Get Low" with DJ Snake was released on February 11, 2014. On March 22, 2014, Francis announced via his official Twitter account that his debut album, entitled "Money Sucks, Friends Rule", would be released on October 28, 2014, on Mad Decent and Columbia Records. In August, Dillon released his second single off of the album, which was a collaboration with Sultan + Ned Shepard featuring The Chain Gang of 1974. Beginning in February 2014, Francis embarked on the Friends Rule Tour supporting his debut album. Dates for the tour were booked through January 16, 2015, in 18 different cities across the United States.


title: Dillon Francis

text: On January 1, 2015, Francis revealed to Australian radio station Triple J that he was working on a sketch show pilot for MTV. Francis stated that the show was set to go into production in January 2015. On June 28, 2015, Francis announced his EP "This Mixtape Is Fire", which would mark a return to his moombahton roots. The EP features collaborations from Skrillex, Calvin Harris, Chromeo, Bro Safari, and Kygo with James Hersey, along with a remix of "I Can't Take It" from his album "Money Sucks, Friends Rule" by Party Favor. He released the first track from the EP, "Bruk Bruk (I Need Your Lovin')" the same day. "This Mixtape Is Fire" peaked at number one on "Billboard's Top Dance/Electronic Albums chart.


title: Dillon Francis

text: In 2016, he released three new singles: "Need You" in collaboration with Nghtmre, "Candy" in collaboration with GTA and Snappy Jit, and "Anywhere" with vocals by Will Heard.


title: Dillon Francis

text: The music video of his single "Not Butter" won the Berlin Music Video Awards in 2016, while its director, Brandon Dermer, took the 2nd place for the "Best Director" category.


title: Dillon Francis

text: On April 5, 2017, Francis released another single "Say Less" in a collaboration with rapper G-Eazy. A few days after the release, Francis made it official through a live stream that he had parted ways with Columbia Records mutually and was looking forward to release music as an independent artist. He has also revealed to his fans that he will be releasing an album as an independent artist and also stated that he would return to his moombahton roots.


title: Dillon Francis

text: Francis has created different personalities or alter egos, including "Emo Preston". Francis performed as "Emo Preston" at Emo Nite in Los Angeles in 2017.


title: Dillon Francis

text: In 2018, Dillon returned to his moombahton roots with the release of the Spanish-language studio album, "WUT WUT". The album went on to earn Francis a Latin American Music Award nomination and Latin Grammy nomination respectively for the song, "Sexo" with Residente and iLe. On February 21, he released the single "We The Funk" in a collaboration with Fuego. On April 13, he released the single "Sexo" in a collaboration with Residente and iLe. "Sexo" was nominated for Best Short Form Music Video at the Latin Grammys and the Latin American Music Awards for Favorite Video.


title: Dillon Francis

text: On May 9, he released the single "BaBaBa (Vete Pa'Ya)" in a collaboration with Young Ash. On July 12, he released the single "Never Let You Go" featuring De La Ghetto. In August, he remixed Martin Solveig's single "My Love". He also was one of the headliners for Hard Summer Music Festival in August 2018. On September 12, he released the single "White Boi" featuring Lao Ra. "Wut Wut" is Francis' second studio album, released through IDGAFOS on September 28, 2018.


title: Dillon Francis

text: He also appeared in the first season of "Taskmaster US" alongside Lisa Lampanelli, Freddie Highmore, Ron Funches and Kate Berlant.


title: Dillon Francis

text: Dillon Francis released a seven-episode comedy series titled "Like and Subscribe" in 2018, available exclusively on Funny or Die and Amazon Video. The show follows Skyy Goldwynne (Dillon Francis), Hollywood's biggest manager who locks 4 of his influencer clients in a house with a camera crew.


title: Dillon Francis

text: On December 7, 2018, Francis released "LFGD" featuring Chris Melberger as part of Astralwerks' compilation album with livestreamer Ninja, "Ninjawerks Volume 1".


title: Dillon Francis

text: On January 25, 2019, he released the single "Lost My Mind" in collaboration with Alison Wonderland, and embarked on the Lost My Mind Tour in the beginning of the year throughout the United States.


title: Dillon Francis

text: Francis also contributed to the soundtrack of "" with "Catchy Song", featuring rappers T-Pain and That Girl Lay Lay. Following the first film's "Everything Is Awesome", the song principally features the repeated phrase "This song's gonna get stuck inside your head!" According to songwriter Jon Lajoie, he found "Everything Is Awesome" "extremely catchy" and wanted to outdo the song by "dialing the song up to 11".


title: White feather

text: The white feather is a widely recognised propaganda symbol. It has, among other things, represented cowardice or conscientious pacifism; as in A. E. W. Mason's 1902 book, "The Four Feathers". In Britain during the First World War it was often given to males out of uniform by women to shame them publicly into signing up. In the United States armed forces, however, it is used to signify extraordinary bravery and excellence in combat marksmanship.


title: White feather

text: The use of the phrase "white feather" to symbolise cowardice is attested from the late 18th century, according to the "Oxford English Dictionary". The OED cites "A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue" (1785), in which lexicographer Francis Grose wrote "White feather, he has a white feather, he is a coward, an allusion to a game cock, where having a white feather, is a proof he is not of the true game breed". This was in the context of cockfighting, a common entertainment in Georgian England.


title: White feather

text: Shame was exerted upon men in England and France who had not taken the cross at the time of the Third Crusade. "A great many men sent each other wool and distaff, hinting that if anyone failed to join this military undertaking they were only fit for women's work". Wool played an important role in the medieval economy, and a distaff is a tool for spinning the raw material into yarn; the activities of textile production were so firmly associated with girls and women that "distaff" became a metonym for women's work.


title: White feather

text: At the start of World War I, Admiral Charles Fitzgerald, who was a strong advocate of conscription wanted to increase the number of those enlisting in the armed forces. Therefore he organized on 30 August 1914 a group of thirty women in his home town of Folkestone to hand out white feathers to any men that were not in uniform. Fitzgerald believed using women to shame the men into enlisting would be the most effective method of encouraging enlistment. The group that he founded (with prominent members being Emma Orczy and the prominent author Mary Augusta Ward) was known as the White Feather Brigade or the Order of the White Feather.


title: White feather

text: While the true effectiveness of the campaign is impossible to judge, it spread throughout several other nations in the empire. In Britain, it started to cause problems for the government when public servants and men in essential occupations came under pressure to enlist. That prompted Home Secretary Reginald McKenna to issue employees in state industries with lapel badges reading "King and Country" to indicate that they were serving the war effort. Likewise, the Silver War Badge, which was given to service personnel who had been honourably discharged by wounds or sickness, was first issued in September 1916 to prevent veterans from being challenged for not wearing uniform. Anecdotes from the time indicate that the campaign was unpopular among soldiers, not least because soldiers who were home on leave could find themselves presented with feathers.


title: White feather

text: One example was Private Ernest Atkins, who was on leave from the Western Front. He was riding a tram when he was presented with a white feather by a girl sitting behind him. He smacked her across the face with his pay book and said, "Certainly I'll take your feather back to the boys at Passchendaele. I'm in civvies because people think my uniform might be lousy, but if I had it on I wouldn't be half as lousy as you".


title: White feather

text: Private Norman Demuth, who had been discharged from the British Army after he had been wounded in 1916, received numerous white feathers after he returned from the Western Front. In "Forgotten Voices of the Great War", Demuth is quoted as saying:


title: White feather

text: "Almost the last feather I received was on a bus. I was sitting near the door when I became aware of two women on the other side talking at me, and I thought to myself, 'Oh Lord, here we go again'. One lent forward and produced a feather and said, 'Here's a gift for a brave soldier. I took it and said,'Thank you very much- I wanted one of those.' Then I took my pipe out of my pocket and put this feather down the stem and worked it in a way I've never worked a pipe cleaner before. When it was filthy I pulled it out and said, 'You know, we didn't get these in the trenches', and handed it back to her. She instinctively put out her hand and took it, so there she was sitting with this filthy pipe cleaner in her hand and all the other people on the bus began to get indignant. Then she dropped it and got up to get out, but we were nowhere near a stopping place and the bus went on quite a long way while she got well and truly barracked by the rest of the people on the bus. I sat back and laughed like mad."


title: White feather

text: Supporters of the campaign were not easily put off. A woman who confronted a young man in a London park demanded to know why he was not in the army. "Because I am a German", he replied. He received a white feather anyway.


title: White feather

text: Occasionally injured veterans were mistakenly targeted, such as Reuben W. Farrow who after being aggressively asked by a woman on a tram why he would not do his duty, turned around and showed his missing hand causing her to apologize.


title: White feather

text: Perhaps the most misplaced use of a white feather was when one was presented to Seaman George Samson, who was on his way in civilian clothes to a public reception being held in his honour for having been awarded the Victoria Cross for gallantry in the Gallipoli campaign.


title: White feather

text: Roland Gwynne, later the mayor of Eastbourne (1929–1931), received a feather from a relative. That prompted him to enlist, and he would receive the Distinguished Service Order for bravery.


title: White feather

text: The writer Compton Mackenzie, then a serving soldier, complained about the activities of the Order of the White Feather. He argued that "idiotic young women were using white feathers to get rid of boyfriends of whom they were tired". The pacifist Fenner Brockway said he received so many white feathers that he had enough to make a fan.


title: White feather

text: In contrast, the white feather has been used by some pacifist organizations as an icon of abstinence from violence.


title: White feather

text: In the 1870s, the Māori prophet of passive resistance Te Whiti o Rongomai promoted the wearing of white feathers by his followers at Parihaka. They are still worn by the iwi associated with that area, and by Te Ati Awa in Wellington. They are known as "te raukura", which literally means the red feather, but metaphorically, the chiefly feather. They are usually three in number, interpreted as standing for "glory to God, peace on earth, goodwill toward people" (Luke 2:14). Albatross feathers are preferred but any white feathers will do. They are usually worn in the hair or on the lapel (but not from the ear).


title: White feather

text: Some time after the war, pacifists found an alternative interpretation of the white feather as a symbol of peace. The apocryphal story goes that in 1775, Quakers in a Friends meeting house in Easton, New York were faced by a tribe of Indians on the war path. Rather than flee, the Quakers fell silent and waited. The Indian chief came into the meeting house and finding no weapons he declared the Quakers as friends. On leaving he took a white feather from his quiver and attached it to the door as a sign to leave the building unharmed.


title: White feather

text: In the United States, the white feather has also become a symbol of courage, persistence, and superior combat marksmanship. Its most notable wearer was US Marine Corps Gunnery Sergeant Carlos Hathcock, who was awarded the Silver Star medal for bravery during the Vietnam War. Hathcock picked up a white feather on a mission and wore it in his hat to taunt the enemy. He was so feared by enemy troops that they put a price on his head. Its wear on combat headgear flaunts an insultingly-easy target for enemy snipers.


title: White feather

text: "The Four Feathers" (1902), an adventure novel, by A. E. W. Mason, tells of Harry Feversham, an officer in the British Army, who decides to resign his commission the day before his regiment is dispatched to fight in Sudan (the 1882 First War of Sudan, leading to the fall of Khartoum). Harry's three fellow officers and his fiancée conclude that he is resigning to avoid fighting in the conflict, and each send him a white feather. Stung by the criticism, Harry sails to Sudan, disguises himself as an Arab, and looks for the opportunity to redeem his honour. He manages this by fighting a covert war on behalf of the British, saving the life of one of his colleagues in the process. On returning to England he asks each of his accusers to take back one of the feathers.


title: White feather

text: The 1907 P. G. Wodehouse novel "The White Feather" is a school story about cowardice and the efforts a boy goes to redeem himself by learning the sport of boxing.


title: White feather

text: "Rilla of Ingleside" (1921) by Lucy Maud Montgomery, the penultimate book in her Anne of Green Gables series, sees Anne Shirley's son, Walter Blythe, enlist in the First World War after receiving a white feather in the mail; he subsequently dies in battle.


title: White feather

text: "The Man Who Stayed at Home", a 1914 play by J. E. Harold Terry and Lechmere Worrall, was renamed "The White Feather" when staged in North America. The title character is a British secret agent who is falsely perceived to be a coward for his refusal to enlist as a soldier.


title: White feather

text: In "The Camels are Coming" (1932), the first collection of Biggles stories, Biggles is handed a white feather by a young woman while on leave in civilian clothes, who is later taken aback to find that he is one of the Royal Flying Corps' leading pilots.


title: White feather

text: In Pat Barker's 1991 novel "Regeneration", the character Burns is given two white feathers during his home leave from Craiglockhart War Hospital.


title: White feather

text: In the 1997 book Jingo (novel), citizens of Ankh-Morpork are handed white feathers for not enlisting to fight in the impending war against Klatch.


title: White feather

text: In the children's novel "Birds of a Feather" (2004) by Jacqueline Winspear, four young girls take it upon themselves to hand out feathers to young men not in uniform in an effort to shame them into enlisting on Britain's side in The Great War.


title: White feather

text: In the 2015 graphic novel "", Christabel Pankhurst is depicted encouraging women to hand white feathers to every young man they see out of uniform. Persephone Wright, the protagonist of the story and heretofore a staunch supporter of Pankhurst's Votes for Women campaigns, rejects the idea on ethical grounds, saying "a man who's been shamed into service isn't a volunteer at all".


title: White feather

text: The Order of the White Feather was the inspiration for the Weddings Parties Anything song "Scorn of the Women", which concerns a man who is deemed medically unfit for service when he attempts to enlist, and is unjustly accused of cowardice.


title: White feather

text: In 1983, new wave band Kajagoogoo released their debut album called "White Feathers", whose opener was the title track, a light-hearted allegory for weak people, whereas the final track, "Frayo", had a political flavour, referencing cowardice as the cause for an unchanging war-torn world.


title: White feather

text: In 1985, progressive rock band Marillion released an anti-war song called "White Feather" as the ending track to their album Misplaced Childhood.


title: White feather

text: In 2009, "White Feather" was released as the third single from the Wolfmother album entitled "Cosmic Egg".


title: White feather

text: The novel "The Four Feathers" has been the basis of at least seven feature films, the most recent being "The Four Feathers" (2002), starring Heath Ledger. It was also parodied in the "Dad's Army" episode "The Two and a Half Feathers".


title: White feather

text: In the 1980 BBC TV series "To Serve Them All My Days", David Powlett-Jones, a shell-shocked Tommy, takes a position in a boys' school. Suspecting that fellow teacher Carter may be avoiding war duty, he muses, "I'd give a good deal to know whether he's really got a gammy knee", to which an acerbic colleague responds, "I suppose we couldn't get some chubby cherub to give him the white feather" as a means of accusing the suspected malingerer.


title: White feather

text: The 2000 Canadian miniseries, "", includes a scene in which Anne Shirley's fiancé, Gilbert Blythe, receives a white feather from a young woman, despite the fact he is a medical doctor and therefore one who provides an essential service at home. He eventually does enlist, and much of the plot deals with Anne searching for him when he's declared missing in action. As noted above, in the original novels, it is Anne and Gilbert's son, Walter, who enlists after receiving a feather.


title: White feather

text: In the short-lived 2007 British period drama "Lilies", the brother of the protagonists is discharged from the military during World War I after his boat sinks and he is one of a handful of shell-shocked survivors. Billy gets sent and given numerous white feathers for his perceived cowardice, and begins to hallucinate them choking him. This is a recurring theme throughout the series.


title: White feather

text: In the 2010 Australian film "Beneath Hill 60" about real-life soldier Oliver Woodward, Woodward, before enlisting, receives several feathers to which he jokingly states, "Just a few more feathers, and I'll have a whole chicken."


title: White feather

text: In the first episode of the second season of "Downton Abbey", a pair of young women interrupt a benefit concert to hand out white feathers to the men who have not enlisted, before being ordered out by an angry Earl of Grantham.


title: White feather

text: In the 2021 film "The King's Man", Conrad is given a white feather to shame him into enlisting in the British Army.


title: White feather

text: DC Comics' spoof superhero team the Inferior Five includes a cowardly archer named White Feather. He was intended as a reference to DC Comics' more heroic character Green Arrow and similar "super archer" characters.


title: North and South (Gaskell novel)

text: North and South is a social novel published in 1854–55 by English writer Elizabeth Gaskell. With "Wives and Daughters" (1865) and "Cranford" (1853), it is one of her best-known novels and was adapted for television three times (1966, 1975 and 2004). The 2004 version renewed interest in the novel and attracted a wider readership. Initially, Gaskell wanted the novel to be titled after the heroine, Margaret Hale, but Charles Dickens, the editor of Household Words, the magazine in which the novel was serialised, insisted on "North and South".


title: North and South (Gaskell novel)

text: Gaskell's first novel, "Mary Barton" (1848), focused on relations between employers and workers in Manchester from the perspective of the working poor; "North and South" uses a protagonist from southern England to present and comment on the perspectives of mill owners and workers in an industrialising city. The novel is set in the fictional industrial town of Milton in the north of England. Forced to leave her home in the tranquil, rural south, Margaret Hale settles with her parents in Milton. She witnesses the brutal world wreaked by the Industrial Revolution, seeing employers and workers clashing in the first strikes. Sympathetic to the poor (whose courage and tenacity she admires and among whom she makes friends), she clashes with John Thornton: a "nouveau riche" cotton-mill owner who is contemptuous of his workers. The novel traces her growing understanding of the complexity of labour relations and their influence on well-meaning mill owners and her conflicted relationship with John Thornton. Gaskell based her depiction of Milton on Manchester, where she lived as the wife of a Unitarian minister.


title: North and South (Gaskell novel)

text: "North and South" originally appeared in 20 weekly episodes from September 1854 to January 1855 in "Household Words", edited by Charles Dickens. During this period Charles Dickens dealt with the same theme in Hard Times (also a social novel), which was published in the same magazine from April to August 1854.


title: North and South (Gaskell novel)

text: "Hard Times", which shows Manchester (the satirical Coketown) in a negative light, challenged Gaskell and made the writing of her own novel more difficult; she had to ascertain that Dickens would not write about a strike. Gaskell found the time and technical constraints of serialised fiction particularly trying. She had planned to write 22 episodes but was "compelled to desperate compression" to limit the story to 20. "North and South" was less successful than "Hard Times". On 14 October 1854, after six weeks, sales dropped so much that Dickens complained about what he called Gaskell's "intractability" because she resisted his demands for conciseness. He found the story "wearisome to the last degree".


title: North and South (Gaskell novel)

text: The novel's title (imposed by Dickens) focuses on the difference in lifestyle between rural southern England, inhabited by the landed gentry and agricultural workers, and the industrial north, populated by capitalist manufacturers and poverty-stricken mill workers; the north–south division was cultural and geographical. The story centers on haughty Margaret Hale, who learns to overcome her prejudices against the North in general and charismatic manufacturer John Thornton in particular. Gaskell would have preferred to call the novel "Margaret Hale" (as she had done in 1848 for her novel "Mary Barton"), but Dickens prevailed. He wrote in a 26 July 1854 letter that "North South" seemed better, encompassing more and emphasising the opposition between people who are forced by circumstances to meet face-to-face.


title: North and South (Gaskell novel)

text: Working on the final chapters of the novel in December at Lea Hurst, Florence Nightingale's family home near Matlock in Derbyshire, Gaskell wrote that she would rather call her novel "Death and Variations" because "there are five dead, each beautifully consistent with the personality of the individual". This remark, although probably a joke, emphasises the importance of death in the story. Death affects Margaret profoundly, gradually encouraging her independence; this allows Gaskell to analyse the character's deep emotions and focus on the social system's harshness in the deaths of Boucher and Bessy.


title: North and South (Gaskell novel)

text: Chapman & Hall (London) first published the novel in 1855 as two volumes of 25 and 27 chapters each. Chapman & Hall issued a second edition in 1855 due to the presence of two paragraphs from Volume II, Chapter xix in Volume II, Chapter xxii. To align the pagination, the second edition adds an extra paragraph in Volume II, Chapter xxiii. That year, Harper and Brothers published it in New York and Tauchnitz published the more-complete second edition in Leipzig as part of a "Collection of English Writers". Many editions were published during Gaskell's lifetime.


title: North and South (Gaskell novel)

text: The text of the book, particularly the ending, differs significantly from that of the serialised episodes. Gaskell included a brief preface saying that due to the restrictive magazine format, she could not develop the story as she wished: "Various short passages have been inserted, and several new chapters added". She tried to evade the limitations of a serialised novel by elaborating on events after the death of Mr. Hale and adding four chapters: the first and last chapters and two chapters on the visits by Mr. Bell to London and by Margaret and Mr. Bell to Helstone. This edition also adds chapter titles and epigraphs. The preface concludes with a quotation from the conclusion of John Lydgate's Middle-English fable, "The Churl and the Bird" (spelling modernised).


title: North and South (Gaskell novel)

text: Loreau and Mrs. H. of Lespine, "with the authorisation of the Author", translated the novel into French using the first revised edition. It was published in Paris by Hachette in 1859, and reprinted at least twice: in 1860 as "Marguerite Hale (Nord et Sud)" and in 1865 as "Nord et Sud".


title: North and South (Gaskell novel)

text: Nineteen-year-old Margaret Hale has lived for almost 10 years in London with her cousin Edith and her wealthy Aunt Shaw, but when Edith marries Captain Lennox, Margaret happily returns home to the southern village of Helstone. Margaret has refused an offer of marriage from the captain's brother Henry, an up-and-coming barrister. Her life is turned upside down when her father, the local pastor, leaves the Church of England and the rectory of Helstone as a matter of conscience; his intellectual honesty has made him a dissenter. At the suggestion of Mr. Bell, his old friend from Oxford, he settles with his wife and daughter in Milton-Northern (where Mr. Bell was born and owns property). The industrial town in Darkshire (a textile-producing region) manufactures cotton and is in the middle of the Industrial Revolution; masters and workers are clashing in the first organised strikes.


title: North and South (Gaskell novel)

text: Margaret initially finds the bustling, smoky town of Milton harsh and strange, and she is upset by its poverty. Mr. Hale (in reduced financial circumstances) works as a tutor; one of his pupils is the wealthy and influential manufacturer John Thornton, master of Marlborough Mills. From the outset, Margaret and Thornton are at odds with each other; she sees him as coarse and unfeeling, and he sees her as haughty. He is attracted to her beauty and self-assurance, however, and she begins to admire how he has risen from poverty.


title: North and South (Gaskell novel)

text: During the 18 months she spends in Milton, Margaret gradually learns to appreciate the city and its hard-working people, especially Nicholas Higgins (a union representative) and his daughter Bessy, whom she befriends. Bessy is ill with byssinosis from inhaling cotton dust, which eventually kills her.


title: North and South (Gaskell novel)

text: A workers' strike ensues. An outraged mob of workers breaks into Thornton's compound, where he has his home and his factory, after he imports Irish workers as replacements. Thornton sends for soldiers, but before they arrive, Margaret begs him to talk to the mob to try to avoid bloodshed. When he appears to be in danger, Margaret rushes out and shields him; she is struck by a stone. The mob disperses, and Thornton carries the unconscious Margaret indoors.


title: North and South (Gaskell novel)

text: Thornton proposes; Margaret declines, unprepared for his unexpected declaration of love and offended by assumptions that her action in front of the mob meant that she cares for him. Thornton's mother, wary of Margaret's haughty ways, is galled by Margaret's rejection of her son.


title: North and South (Gaskell novel)

text: Margaret's brother Frederick (who lives in exile as he is wanted for his part in a naval mutiny) secretly visits their dying mother. Thornton sees Margaret and Frederick together and assumes that he is her lover. Leonards, Frederick's shipmate, later recognises Frederick at the train station. They argue; Frederick pushes Leonards away, and Leonards dies shortly afterwards. When the police question Margaret about the scuffle, she lies and says she was not present. Thornton knows that Margaret lied, but in his capacity as magistrate, declares the case closed to save her from possible perjury. Margaret is humbled by his deed on her behalf; she no longer merely looks down on Thornton as a hard master, but begins to recognise the depth of his character.


title: North and South (Gaskell novel)

text: Nicholas, at Margaret's behest, approaches Thornton for a job and eventually obtains one. Thornton and Higgins learn to appreciate and understand each other.


title: North and South (Gaskell novel)

text: Mr. Hale visits his oldest friend, Mr Bell, in Oxford. He dies there, and Margaret returns to live in London with Aunt Shaw. She visits Helstone with Mr. Bell and asks him to tell Thornton about Frederick, but Mr Bell dies before he can do so. He leaves Margaret a legacy which includes Marlborough Mills and the Thornton house.


title: North and South (Gaskell novel)

text: Thornton faces bankruptcy, due to market fluctuations and the strike. He learns the truth about Margaret's brother from Nicholas Higgins and comes to London to settle his business affairs with Margaret, who is his new landlord. When Margaret offers to lend Thornton some of her money, he realises that her feelings towards him have changed, and he again proposes marriage. Since she has learned to love him, she accepts.


title: North and South (Gaskell novel)

text: In her introduction to "The Cambridge Companion to Elizabeth Gaskell" (2007), a collection of essays representing current Gaskell scholarship, Jill L. Matus stresses the author's growing stature in Victorian literary studies and how her innovative, versatile storytelling addressed the rapid changes during her lifetime. It was not always that way; her reputation from her death to the 1950s was dominated by Lord David Cecil's assessment in "Early Victorian Novelists" (1934) that she was "all woman" and "makes a creditable effort to overcome her natural deficiencies but all in vain".


title: North and South (Gaskell novel)

text: Contemporary reviews were critical, similar to those of "Mary Barton". A scathing, unsigned critique in "The Leader" accused Gaskell of making errors about Lancashire which a resident of Manchester would not make and said that a woman (or clergymen and women) could not "understand industrial problems", would "know too little about the cotton industry" and had no "right to add to the confusion by writing about it".


title: North and South (Gaskell novel)

text: After reading the fifth episode, Charlotte Brontë believed that it was only about the church and "the defence of those who in conscience, disagree with it and consider it their duty to leave". However, Brontë acknowledged that her friend "understands the genius of the North". Although Richard Holt acknowledged some interest in the novel in "The Critical Review", he complained that its plot is disjointed and the characters change by leaps and bounds "in the manner of kangaroos". George Sand said that the novel could interest a gentleman while being accessible to a young woman.


title: North and South (Gaskell novel)

text: Gaskell's novels, with the exception of "Cranford", gradually slipped into obscurity during the late 19th century; before 1950, she was dismissed as a minor author with "good judgment and feminine sensibilities". Archie Stanton Whitfield wrote that her work was "like a nosegay of violets, honeysuckle, lavender, mignonette and sweet briar" in 1929, and Cecil said that she lacked the "masculinity" necessary to properly deal with social problems. However, the tide began to turn in Gaskell's favour when, in the 1950s and 60s, socialist critics like Kathleen Tillotson, Arnold Kettle and Raymond Williams re-evaluated the description of social and industrial problems in her novels, and—realising that her vision went against the prevailing views of the time—saw it as preparing the way for vocal feminist movements.


title: North and South (Gaskell novel)

text: In the early 21st century, with Gaskell's work "enlisted in contemporary negotiations of nationhood as well as gender and class identities", "North and South", one of the first industrial novels describing a conflict between employers and workers, is seen as depicting complex social conflicts and offering more satisfactory solutions through Margaret Hale: spokesperson for the author and Gaskell's most mature creation.


title: North and South (Gaskell novel)

text: The change in title of Gaskell's fourth novel from "Margaret Hale" to Dickens' suggested "North and South" underscores its theme of modernity versus tradition. Until the end of the 18th century, power in England was in the hands of the aristocracy and landed gentry based in the south. The Industrial Revolution unsettled the centuries-old class structure, shifting wealth and power to manufacturers who mass-produced goods in the north. Cities such as Manchester, on which Gaskell modelled her fictional Milton, were hastily developed to house workers who moved from the semi-feudal countryside to work in the new factories. The south represents the past (tradition): aristocratic landowners who inherited their property, collected rent from farmers and peasants and assumed an obligation for their tenants' welfare. The north represents the future (modernity): its leaders were self-made men like Gaskell's hero, John Thornton, who accumulated wealth as working, middle-class entrepreneurs. In their view, philanthropy or charity – giving something for nothing – was a dangerous imbalance of the relationship between employers and employees (which was based on the exchange of cash for labour).


title: North and South (Gaskell novel)

text: Rebellion against an authority seen as unfair is woven throughout the story. Established institutions are seen as inhumane or selfish, and therefore fallible; Mr. Hale breaks with the church on a matter of conscience, and Frederick Hale participates in a mutiny against the navy and is forced into exile because the law would hang him for what he considered a just cause. His rebellion parallels the strike by workers who take up the cause to feed their children. Both are impotent and engaged in a struggle (a war, in the eyes of the workers) whose terms are dictated by those who maintain their power by force: the law and the mill masters. Margaret rebels in ways that express her liberty: ignoring social proprieties and challenging authority by lying to the police to protect her brother, from whom she learns that arbitrary, unjust, and cruel power can be defied not for oneself but on behalf of the unfortunate. Even Mrs. Hale rebels in her own way; she is "prouder of Frederick standing up against injustice, than if he had been simply a good officer".


title: North and South (Gaskell novel)

text: The theme of power is also central. Thornton represents three aspects of power and the authority of the ruling class: a manufacturer respected by his peers (economic power), a magistrate (judicial power) and someone who can summon the army (political power) to quell the strike. There is energy, power and courage in the struggle for a better life by Milton's residents. Margaret demonstrates power in her verbal jousting with Thornton, forcing him to reflect on the validity of his beliefs and eventually change his view of workers from mere providers of labour to individuals capable of intelligent thought. When she reaches age 21, Margaret takes control of her life, resolves to live as she chooses, and learns how to manage wealth inherited from Mr. Bell.


title: North and South (Gaskell novel)

text: The notion of separate spheres dominated Victorian beliefs about gender roles, assuming that the roles of men and women are clearly delineated. Public life (including work) is within the masculine domain, and private life (domesticity) is within the feminine. The expression of feelings is considered feminine, and aggression is seen as masculine. Resolving conflict with words is feminine, and men are likely to resort to physical resolution (including war). The mistress of the home is the guardian of morality and religion and "The Angel in the House". The public sphere is considered dangerously amoral and, in the work of authors such as Dickens, disasters ensue when characters do not conform to contemporary standards.


title: North and South (Gaskell novel)

text: This notion is questioned in "North and South". In Margaret Hale, the separation is blurred and she is forced by circumstances to assume a masculine role, organising the family's departure from Helstone and assuming much of the responsibility for the family in Milton (including encouraging her father). She carries the load alone, behaving like a "Roman girl" because Mr. Hale is weak and irresolute. When Higgins slips away and her father trembles with horror at Boucher's death, Margaret goes to Mrs. Boucher, breaks the news of her husband's death, and cares for the family with dedication and efficiency. She summons her brother Frederick, a naval officer who is crushed with grief at the death of his mother. To protect her brother, Margaret later lies about their presence at the train station on the day of his departure.


title: North and South (Gaskell novel)

text: Thornton and Higgins, while not denying their masculinity, demonstrate compassion. Higgins in particular, whom Thornton considers among "mere demagogues, lovers of power, at whatever costs to others", assumes the responsibility for raising the Boucher children and embodies maternal tenderness (lacking in Mrs. Thornton) and strength (not possessed by Mrs. Hale) and dignity. Gaskell endows John Thornton with tenderness (a soft spot, according to Nicholas Higgins). Although Thornton's pride hides this capacity from public view, he shows it in his affection for his mother and his quiet attention to the Hales. He expresses it more obviously when he later develops relations with his workers beyond the usual cash-for-labour, builds a canteen for the workers, and sometimes shares meals with them. Margaret and Thornton's evolution eventually converges and, after learning humility, they are partially freed from the shackles of separate spheres; he develops friendly relations at the mill, and she asserts her independence from her cousin's life. Margaret initiates their business meeting, which he interprets as a declaration of love. In the final scene, she controls the financial situation and he reacts emotionally. They now meet as man and woman, no longer the manufacturer from the north and the lady from the south. The blurring of roles is also evident among the workers, many of whom (like Bessy) are women.


title: North and South (Gaskell novel)

text: Certain family relationships are emphasised (Margaret and her father, Higgins and Bessy, Mrs. Hale and Frederick), all interrupted by death. The tie between Thornton and his mother is particularly deep and, on Mrs. Thornton's side, exclusive and boundless: "her son, her pride, her property". Ordinarily cold, she tells him: "Mother's love is Given by God, John. It holds fast for ever and ever". Parent-child relationships are often metaphors for relations between employers and workers in Victorian literature. In chapter XV, "Men and Master", Margaret rejects this paternalistic view (expressed by Thornton) as infantilising the worker. She favours, instead, helping workers grow and become emancipated. Friendships between people of different social classes, education and cultural backgrounds (between Mr. Hale and Thornton, Margaret and Bessy, and Thornton and Higgins) prefigure Gaskell's desired human relations which blur class distinctions. Margaret performs "lowly" tasks and Dixon becomes a confidante of Mrs. Hale, who develops a relationship of respect, affection, and understanding with the maid.


title: North and South (Gaskell novel)

text: Gaskell, the daughter, and wife of a pastor, did not write a religious novel, although religion plays an important role in her work. Unitarians interpreted biblical texts symbolically, rather than literally. They did not believe in original sin or that women were guiltier or weaker than men, and were more liberal than Methodists, Anglicans or Dissenters. "North and South" presents a typical picture of Unitarian tolerance in one evening scene: "Margaret the Churchwoman, her father the Dissenter, Higgins the Infidel, knelt down together". The Thorntons do not invoke religion as the Hales do, although Mrs. Thornton reads Matthew Henry's "Exposition of the Old and New Testaments". Although the re-institution in 1850 by Pope Pius IX of a Roman Catholic hierarchy in England was generally strongly condemned, Gaskell has an open mind about Catholicism and Frederick Hale converts to his Spanish wife's religion.


title: North and South (Gaskell novel)

text: Biblical references appear in several forms. Chapter VI cites the Book of Job, ii. 13); there is an allusion to the elder brother in the Parable of the Prodigal Son, and Margaret paraphrases the definition of charity ("that spirit which suffereth long and is kind and seeketh not her own") from the First Epistle to the Corinthians. However, Gaskell cautions against misuse; Bessy Higgins reads the Apocalypse to cope with her condition and interprets the parable of Dives and Lazarus so simplistically that Margaret counters vigorously: "It won't be division enough, in that awful day, that some of us have been beggars here, and some of us have been rich—we shall not be judged by that poor accident, but by our faithful following of Christ". Margaret and Thornton follow a path of conversion which leads to reconciliation, acknowledging their "unworthiness". Margaret, who has the longest way to go, is crushed by guilt from her lie and by shame from being debased in Thornton's eyes. Francis de Sales encourages her to seek "the way of humility", despite Mr. Bell's attempts to minimise and rationalise her lie as told in a panic. Thornton, on the brink of ruin like Job, tries not to be outraged while his mother rebels against the injustice of his situation ("Not for you, John! God has seen fit to be very hard on you, very") and gives fervent thanks for the "great blessing" his existence gives her.


title: North and South (Gaskell novel)

text: The influence of Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice" on "North and South" is frequently noted. In "The Politic of Stories in Victorian Fiction" (1988), Rosemarie Bodenheimer writes that she prefers to study the novel's relationship with Charlotte Brontë's "Shirley" but sees in the "description of strong domestic qualities" and "social optimism" an industrial "Pride and Prejudice". Patricia Ingham also compares "North and South" to "Shirley". Ann Banfield compares "North and South" to "Mansfield Park" for two reasons: Margaret Hale, like Fanny Price, is transplanted in a place she conquers, and the novel is built on an opposition of places on a larger scale.


title: North and South (Gaskell novel)

text: The novel has three beginnings, two of them illusory: the first is the wedding preparation in London, the second the heroine's return to Helstone and the third (often considered the real start of the story) narrates the departure for Milton in chapter seven. The first chapters, according to Martin Dodsworth, are false leads of what the novel is about rather than the author's clumsiness; they tell the reader what the story is "not" about. Bodenheimer interprets the early chapters not as false starts but as demonstrating Gaskell's theme of societal and personal "permanent state(s) of change" and integral to the novel. The early chapters in different places have been interpreted as presenting a theme of mobility. In moving from one place to another Margaret better understands herself and the world, advancing Gaskell's intention to place her in the public sphere.


title: North and South (Gaskell novel)

text: The opening chapters of "North and South" indicate an apparent novel of manners in the style of Jane Austen, with preparations for the marriage in London of a silly bride and a lively, intelligent heroine; in the country village of Helstone (a fictional place in the English county of Hampshire), a bachelor in search of fortune (Henry Lennox) woos – and is rejected by – Margaret. Deirdre David, in "Fictions of Resolution in Three Victorian Novels" (1981), suggests that Margaret's abandonment of London society indicates that she is out of place in the south and her adjustment to the north is plausible.


title: North and South (Gaskell novel)

text: Gaskell's novel of manners has the broader context of an industrial novel about the north-west of England, where young girls (like Bessy) die of "cotton consumption"; capitalists disregard legal obligations, and workers refuse prophylactic facilities, instigate strikes and foment riots. It can be criticised, as by Martin Dodsworth, for giving the love affair precedence over the industrial context and for dwelling on the emotional conflict between Margaret and Thornton. However, "North and South" is not simply an industrial "Pride and Prejudice" Margaret acquires stature and a public role, challenging the Victorian idea of separate spheres. She befriends Bessy Higgins (a young, working-class woman), gradually abandons her aversion to "shoppy people" and, recognising Thornton's qualities, crosses social classes to consider herself "not good enough" for him. Although the novel ends in Harley Street (where it began), Margaret's estrangement from the vain, superficial world of her cousin Edith and Henry Lennox is emphasised by her choice of Thornton and Milton.


title: North and South (Gaskell novel)

text: As the chapter titles "First Impressions", "Mistakes", "Mistakes Cleared Up", "Mischances" and "Atonement" indicate that "North and South" is peppered with Margaret's blunders and problematic situations with other characters which create misunderstandings. Some of Margaret's blunders stem from ignoring customs, some from not understanding them and still others from rejecting Milton's social customs (such as a frank, familiar handshake). Other characters fail to carry out important actions: Dixon does not tell Margaret that Thornton attended her mother's funeral, and Mr. Bell dies before he can explain to Thornton why Margaret lied. Margaret feels misunderstood, unable to take control of her life and explain a world she does not understand.


title: North and South (Gaskell novel)

text: Other gaffes are due to Margaret's ignorance; accustomed to London's chic salons, she is unaware that she is seen as wearing her shawl "as an empress wears her drapery" and serving tea with "the air of a proud reluctant slave". She receives marriage proposals awkwardly: Henry Lennox's declaration of love is "unpleasant" and makes her uncomfortable, and she feels "offended" and assaulted by John Thornton's proposal. Margaret naively believes that the rioters can be negotiated with and is unaware that she and her brother, Frederick, resemble a loving couple on a train-station platform (O'Farrell, 1997, p. 68). Bodenheimer sees this "mistakenness" as purposeful: "In its every situation, whether industrial politics or emotional life, traditional views and stances break down into confusing new ones, which are rendered in all the pain of mistakenness and conflict that real human change entails". Perhaps this is why Margaret's blunders do not always have negative consequences; when she admits she is disappointed that Thornton has refused to hire Higgins, she is ashamed that he hears her remark. Thornton reconsiders, eventually offering Higgins a job. In the final chapter, she does not seem to realise that a "simple proposition" to bail out the factory (a business arrangement) could hurt Thornton's pride or be seen as shocking from a "lady". Bodenheimer interprets scenes like this as "deep confusion in a time of personal change and revision" which brings the lovers together.


title: North and South (Gaskell novel)

text: The first description of Marlborough Mills in Chapter XV is through Margaret's eyes and thoughts, and the omniscient narrator delves into the inner thoughts of her main characters and occasionally interjects her observations. Thornton "thought that he disliked seeing one who had mortified him so keenly, but he was mistaken. It was a stinging pleasure to be in the room with her ... But he was no great analyser of his own motives, and was mistaken as I have said". The narrative sometimes slips into free indirect discourse; Mrs. Thornton silently calls Margaret's embroidery of a small piece of cambric "flimsy, useless work" when she visits the Hales.


title: North and South (Gaskell novel)

text: Bodenheimer believes that the narrator is interested in the psychology of her characters: their inner selves, how their contentious interactions with others subconsciously reveal their beliefs and how the changes they experience reflect their negotiation of the outside world. also focuses on Gaskell's depiction of "interiority" (the psychic process), expressed in dreams and trances such as Thornton's dream of Margaret as a temptress or the rioters' "trance of passion". The phrase "as if" appears over 200 times, suggesting Gaskell's reluctance to appear too definitive in her narration: "Bessy, who had sat down on the first chair, as if completely tired out with her walk" and "[Thornton] spoke as if this consequence were so entirely logical". The phrase is primarily used when exploring the characters' sensations and feelings: "As if she felt his look, she turned to him"; "He had shaken off his emotion as if he was ashamed of ever giving way to it", and "She lifted up her head as if she took pride in any delicacy of feeling which Mr. Thornton had shown". Gaskell uses it when exploring the unconscious process that allows Thornton, whose suffering in love disturbs his composure and control of his feelings, to communicate with Higgins: " ... and then the conviction went in, as if by some spell, and touched the latent tenderness of his heart".


title: North and South (Gaskell novel)

text: According to Bodenheimer, "North and South" narrative may sometimes appear melodramatic and sentimental ("But, for all that—for all his savage words, he could have thrown himself at her feet, and kissed the hem of her garment" in chapter 29)—particularly in the riot scene—but she sees Gaskell's best writing as "done with the unjudging openness to experience" which the author shares with D. H. Lawrence. Jill L. Matus finds Gaskell's vocabulary "Gothicised" in its descriptions of the characters' agonised inner life—their responses to suffering and pain—which may appear melodramatic out of context. However, "the language of shock and horror is absorbed into the realist texture of the novel's narration" and is consistent with the extreme conditions of the novel's external world.


title: North and South (Gaskell novel)

text: A number of 19th-century authors were interested in native dialects: Scottish for Sir Walter Scott, Irish for Maria Edgeworth. Gaskell, influenced by her husband's work, did not hesitate to give her Milton workers Mancunian expressions and vocabulary without going as far as Emily Brontë's transcription of Yorkshire pronunciation or Dickens' Yarmouth fishermen in "David Copperfield". She developed a reputation for the skilful use of dialect to indicate status, age or intimacy between speakers.


title: North and South (Gaskell novel)

text: Margaret's adaptation to the culture is demonstrated through language. When her mother reproaches her for using Milton's vulgar provincialisms (such as "slack of work"), Margaret replies that since she lives in an industrial city, she must speak its language when called on to do so. She cites a word which may be vulgar but which she finds expressive ("knobstick") and uses a local term ("redding up" – tidying) to Boucher's small children: "redding up the slatternly room". Gaskell begins each chapter with a poetic quote to accentuate a relevant theme, such as interior conflicts ("My heart revolts within me, and two voices / Make themselves audible within my bosom"—"Wallenstein", chapter XVIII), duality ("On earth is known to none / The smile that is not sister to a tear." Elliott, chapter XXI), courtship, duty, suffering, steadfast courage, honesty, time and change.


title: North and South (Gaskell novel)

text: Gaskell lived during the period of upheaval which followed the Industrial Revolution, and was aware of the difficult conditions of daily life and the health problems suffered by the workers of Manchester. "North and South" has been interpreted by Roberto Dainotto as "a kind of apocalyptic journey into the inferno of the changing times—modern poverty, rage, desperation, militant trade unionism and class antagonism". The strike described in "North and South" resembles the Preston strike, which occurred the year before the novel was published. The strike's slogan was "ten per cent and no surrender", and it was led by George Cowell and Mortimer Grimshaw. Lasting nearly seven months (from September 1853 to April 1854), it was ultimately unsuccessful.


title: North and South (Gaskell novel)

text: The strike is described in detail, with intelligent leaders like Higgins, the desperate violence and savagery of the rioters, and the reactions of both sides. Through the eyes of Margaret, a horrified, compassionate outsider, Gaskell illustrates the social misery of the slums Margaret visits, misery occasionally documented in parliamentary papers (blue books) with suggestive illustrations which resulted in the Factory Act of 1833.


title: North and South (Gaskell novel)

text: Gaskell uses a cause of conflict between masters and workers (the installation of ventilators in the carding rooms) to illustrate the greed of one and the ignorance of the other, making social progress difficult, and calls attention to anti-Irish prejudice in a city where the Irish are a small minority. She exposes the beliefs and reasoning of manufacturers in Thornton's defence of a theory approaching social Darwinism: capitalism as naturally (almost physically) obeying immutable laws, a relentless race to progress in which humanity is sacrificed; the weak die, whether they are masters or workers. Mrs. Thornton expresses the middle-class view of the working class as "a pack of ungrateful hounds".


title: North and South (Gaskell novel)

text: "North and South" belongs to the canon of "condition of England" novels (also known as social-problem, industrial or social novels) which analyse Victorian social realities, offering "first-hand detailed observations of industrialism, urbanism, class, and gender conflicts". It attempts to answer questions posed by contemporary changes positioning itself between the individual worker freedom championed by John Stuart Mill (author of "The Claims of Labor", published in the "Edinburgh Review" in 1845) and developed by Thornton in Chapter 15 and the responsibility of employers to their employees promoted by John Ruskin and Arthur Helps. It represents a certain paternalism, challenging the cutoff between public and private spheres, freedom and responsibility, workplace and family life, trying to define a balance in relations between employers and workers. Through Margaret and her father, Gaskell criticises the autocratic model which infantilises workers and is defended by Thornton (who does not feel accountable to his workers for his actions or decisions). She advocates for an authority which takes into account the needs of workers, a social and economic contract as advocated by John Locke in "Two Treatises of Government", where masters and workers are in solidarity. After the strike, Thornton finally acknowledges that "new forms of negotiation between management and labor are part of modern life"; the strike, which ruined him, was "respectable" because the workers depend on him for money and he depends on them to manufacture his product.


title: North and South (Gaskell novel)

text: In the class struggle which victimises some (such as Boucher and Bessy), Gaskell does not offer definitive conflict resolution: Thornton's hope for strikes, for instance, is that they no longer be "bitter and venomous". He and Higgins reach a level of understanding beyond a "cash nexus" through Margaret's "ongoing involvement in the process of social change" by urging communication between masters and workers. If the holders of economic power agree to talk to their workers, to consider them as human beings (not tools of production), it may not eliminate social conflicts but will reduce their brutality. The protagonists experience personal transformations which unite them in the end, what Stoneman calls a "balanced emancipation".


title: North and South (Gaskell novel)

text: According to Catherine Barnes Stevenson, Gaskell may have found women doing factory work problematic; she often referred to "masters and men" and used one dying factory worker (Bessy) to represent women workers, who constituted more than half the factory workers at the time. Stevenson wrote that Gaskell's relative silence on female factory workers may reflect her struggle with the "triumph of the domestic ideology" by the middle class of the mid-1800s. Gaskell hints at the difficulties families such as the Hales have keeping female domestic workers (like Dixon) in their proper – subordinate – place and becoming like members of the family (blurring class differences), a scenario facing industrial workers as well.


title: North and South (Gaskell novel)

text: In the first television adaptation (in 1966), Richard Leech played Mr. Thornton and Wendy Williams played Margaret Hale.


title: North and South (Gaskell novel)

text: In the second television adaptation (in 1975), Patrick Stewart played Mr. Thornton and Rosalie Shanks played Margaret Hale. Tim Pigott-Smith, who played Mr. Hale in the 2004 adaptation, played Frederick (his son) in the 1975 version.


title: North and South (Gaskell novel)

text: In 2004 the BBC aired "North & South", a four-episode serial with Daniela Denby-Ashe and Richard Armitage in the lead roles. Sandy Welch wrote the screenplay, and Brian Percival directed.


title: North and South (Gaskell novel)

text: Intended as a pastiche of Gaskell's work, the novel "Nice Work" by David Lodge, was published in 1988. A "Sunday Express" Book of the Year winner, it was adapted as a television series by the BBC in 1989.


title: Gung Ho (film)

text: Gung Ho (released in Australia as Working Class Man) is a 1986 American comedy film directed by Ron Howard and starring Michael Keaton. The story portrayed the takeover of an American car plant by a Japanese corporation (although the title is an Americanized Chinese expression, for "work" and "together").


title: Gung Ho (film)

text: Most of the movie was filmed on location in the Pittsburgh area with additional scenes shot in Tokyo and Argentina.


title: Gung Ho (film)

text: In fictional Hadleyville, Pennsylvania, the local auto plant, which supplied most of the town's jobs, has been closed for nine months. Former foreman Hunt Stevenson (Keaton) goes to Tokyo to try to convince the Assan Motors Corporation to reopen the plant. The Japanese company agrees and, upon their arrival in the U.S., they take advantage of the desperate work force to institute many changes. The workers are not permitted a union, are paid lower wages, are moved around within the factory so that each worker learns every job, and are held to seemingly impossible standards of efficiency and quality. Adding to the strain in the relationship, the Americans find humor in the demand that they do calisthenics as a group each morning and that the Japanese executives eat their lunches with chopsticks and bathe together in the river near the factory. The workers also display a poor work ethic and lackadaisical attitude toward quality control.