ABSTRACT
In the autumn of 1896, Talbot Baines, grandson of the Liberal, non-conformist
founder of the Leeds Mercury Edward Baines, published a series of articles in
The Times on the North of England. In its introduction to the first article, the
newspaper summed up popular thought on the matter by stating that ‘North
of the Trent, it is often suggested are found most of the backbone and manly virtues
of the country: south of that line exists what amount of good is consistent with
somewhat invertebrate moral strictures’.2 These mutually interdependent images
of the North and South of England had a long history predating the industrial
revolution – some have even claimed to have found early manifestations of North/
South rivalry in the eighth-century writings of the Venerable Bede – but they had
been rekindled and given renewed impetus by the coming of the factory age.3 The
dominant image of the North of England in the nineteenth century had been
expressed in literature ranging from Blake’s dark satanic mills to Dickens’ Coketown
and Gaskell’s Darkshire – most notably by the words of the latter’s John Thornton in
North and South:
We are Teutonic up here in Darkshire in another way. We hate to have laws
made for us at a distance. We wish people would allow us to right ourselves,
instead of continually meddling, with their imperfect legislation. We stand up
for self-government, and oppose centralisation.4
