ABSTRACT
In choosing the theme and title of North and South for her second condition of England novel, published in 1855, Elizabeth Gaskell gave prominence to a fissure in the English national psyche which was a matter of increasing contemporary debate, and which jndeed had already provided an important undercurrent to her previous social novel, Mary Barton, published seven years before. In the earlier book a vital hinge to the plot was provided by the encounter of John Barton, Manchester working man, trade unionist and Chartist (and in many respects the novel's prime subject), with London and the national parliament. Having placed all his hopes on persuading Parliament to redress the grievances of the industrial workers of the northern towns, and having been peremptorily rebuffed, John Barton returned to Manchester broken by the encounter. To the extent that he could bring himself to talk about the experience, he acknowledged that London was 'a fine place', even if its grand palaces were balanced by 'holes o' iniquity and filth, such as Manchester knows nought on', and its grand carriages by policemen who 'can't say their a's and i's properly' and who struck the working men for frightening the carriage horses. But above all, Barton could not escape from the rejection of the workmen's appeal: 'As long as I live, our rejection that day will bide in my heart; and as long as I live I shall curse them as so cruelly refused to hear us; but I' II not speak of it no more'. 1
Interestingly, Gaskell develops the scene, after a second reminiscence of the 'foreignnesses' of London, by having one of Barton's friends in an attempt to raise his spirits, recite Samuel Bamford's far from joyful poem, 'God Help the Poor'. The juxtaposition is suggestive; Bamford, Napoleonic-era radical and witness of Peterloo, feted working-class autobiographer, Lancashire poet and dialect writer of the first half of the nineteenth century, was a likely model for Gaskell's Barton.2 Moreover, in Bamford, we are presented with an almost unparalleled opportunity to consider the character, the complexities
Manchester Guardian presented him rather as 'a fine specimen of an English working man' (a characterization echoed by one recent publication which presents him as 'above all things a great Englishman'). 18 Given that, as Richard Holt has recently pointed out, 'North and South, despite being powerful images, had only partial and intermittent public resonances', Bamford's regionalism was always in play with the other facets of his identity. 19 The question we must ask of Bamford is perhaps not whether or even how far he saw himself as a 'Northerner', but rather what place the idea of himself as a Lancastrian or Northerner had in his overall sense of himself. Nevertheless, if we are to find a strong seam of northern identity anywhere in the first half of the nineteenth century, we would certainly expect to find it here.
