After I’d had a tooth extracted last week I spent time watching my favourite films and series. One of those is the BBC dramatization of Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel North & South (1855).
Margaret Hale, a young woman from the South moves with her family to a town called Milton in the industrial North after her father leaves the clergy, on a matter of “conscience”. This is incomprehensible to his wife, Mrs Hale, who struggles to come to terms with the local customs, environs, and bad air quality. Shortly after the move, her health worsens and she succumbs to respiratory disease.
The novel explores the issues of class and gender and the social and geographical divide between the middle-class Southerners and the mostly self-made industrialists of the North. During the course of the story, Margaret Hale and the cotton mill owner John Thornton learn to overcome their prejudices and to value each other’s strengths. By the end, of course, they have fallen deeply in love and marry.
In the first episode Mr Hale shows his wife a letter from the bishop in which he is asked to officially reaffirm his faith. Mrs Hale reads.
Mrs Hale: Is this all? „I ask that all rectors in the diocese of the New Forrest reaffirm their belief in the book of common prayer.“
Mr Hale: Yes, there, exactly! The affrontery! The man is ten years our junior. He tries to treat us all like children.
Mrs Hale: But this is a formality, surely… to reaffirm.
Mr Hale: My conscience will not let me. I can and have lived quietly with my doubts for some years now but I cannot swear publicly to doctrines I am no longer sure of. We men of conscience have to make a stand.
Mrs Hale: We?
Mr Hale: Yes, there are others who have doubts. We all agreed we could not reaffirm.
Mrs Hale, rising from the sofa: Are you telling me that all the rectors of the New Forest have decamped to industrial towns?
Mr Hale: Well… some thought it possible to yield…but I did not.
Mrs Hale: How many? How many refused?
Mr Hale, pleading: I could not avoid this. I was forced into this. You must understand.
Mrs Hale: I understand.
She gathers all her strength to stop herself from having an emotional outburst.
I understood that the very worst must have happened, that you had lost your faith or that you felt that God had wished you to teach his word in these new places, that some very great matter must have happened to make you uproot us all, dragging us up to this godforsaken place.
Mr Hale: Maria.
Mrs Hale: You gave up your livelihood, our source of income, on a formality.
Mr Hale: It was not like that, Maria. Really, it is not like that. I already have work, teaching. And I will find more… and, maybe, I will discover that is my real vocation after all.
Mrs Hale: The people here don‘t want learning. They don‘t want books and culture. It‘s all money and smoke, that‘s what they eat and breathe.”
Here’s a fanmade trailer: https://www.pinterest.de/pin/169448004714120988/