ABSTRACT
‘The good end happily and the bad end unhappily: that is what fiction means,’ said Wilde’s Miss Prism. The idea behind Miss Prism’s remark is of course that of ‘poetic justice’, and also includes its antithesis, the idea of the conventional ‘sad’ ending, like the death of Richardson’s Clarissa, or of Dickens’s Little Nell. She was behind the times; forty-four years earlier Elizabeth Gaskell struck the deathblow at this convention of the novel, with North and South. Despite the superficial fact that a small part of North and South seems to adhere to this view in the shape of the novel, the vital and original parts are those that, while not merely documenting life, do represent man’s experience as difficult and recalcitrant material, for which any neat or obvious moral or social pattern, with obvious moral or social lessons to be drawn, or solutions to its difficulties, are both hard to find and difficult to achieve. When one has said that the heroine Margaret Hale eventually marries the man she eventually loves, John Thornton, one has said virtually all that conforms to the usual expectations of what will happen in such a story, to such a range of characters as Elizabeth Gaskell creates. Nowhere else is there any correlation between virtue, worth, strength of character and material worldly reward or happiness. Margaret’s brother Frederick is never cleared of the charge of leading a mutiny. Even John Thornton himself, man of honour, worth, and strength though he is, has more hardship than happiness, and his final success, in being put financially on his feet with Margaret’s money, is good fortune rather than reward. It could be put more positively conversely: that every character of any value, who is capable of suffering, suffers, from chance, or economic pressure, or physical sickness and death, or the misfortunes of loved ones. Virtually the only exception is Margaret’s cousin Edith, happily married to her Captain Lennox at Corfu, who, after her wedding in the first chapter, does not appear again until the end, though news of her, and letters, recur like a shining thread in the dark rich pattern of the story proper.
