ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the experience of social change as it reveals itself in the work of Mrs. Gaskell, a nineteenth century novelist. It suggests that the flaws inherent in the genre of the social-problem novel are a direct result of the novelists' failure to deal really honestly with the social experiences their novels are intended to portray. Mrs. Gaskell's Mary Barton, indeed, seems to owe a great deal of her prominence to the wishes of Mrs. Gaskell's publishers, Chapman and Hall, that the novel should have a love-story running through it. Although Mrs. Gaskell turned away from the industrial scene in the work following on from Mary Barton, she returned to it again in North and South. Actually North and South has the bones of a great tragedy in it, and alone of her contemporaries Mrs. Gaskell was in the position to write it.
