ABSTRACT
In the autumn of 1896, Talbot Baines, grandson of the Liberal, nonconformist 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 selfgovernment, and oppose centralisation.'4 For those living in the South of England, Baines argued that 'many of them still feel that, collectively, the points of contrast to be met with in the North of England produce an atmosphere as really, if not as profoundly, distinct from that of their own native districts as is the atmosphere of one of the continental nations.'5 These supposed differences in attitudes and perspectives of the geographical halves of England have been summed up by Donald Home in terms of metaphors:
In the Northern Metaphor Britain is pragmatic, empirical, calculating, Puritan, bourgeois, enterprising, adventurous, scientific, serious, and believes in struggle ...
