Highlighted socio-economic plight of working class amid the

industrialization of England
The rapid transformation of Britain into an industrial society prompted Elizabeth Gaskell, 
among other Victorian Age writers, to expose the difficult plight of the working class.
In Dickens’ Hard Times (1854), the millworker hero, Stephen Blackpool, faces ostracism
after his refusal to join the millworkers’ union. Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and
South (1855) uses the viewpoint of Margaret Hale, an emigrant from southern England to a
northern industrial city, to address the plight of millworkers.
The novelists of the later Victorian era, were not entertainers and reformers, as were their elders.
Instead, they were more serious composers with greater involvement in the deeper passions of
life particularly love.
Moreover, their main concern was with the rural England, which was being destroyed by
industry and commerce rather than the city working class and its masters, the mill-owners etc.
They depicted the tragedy of transition from the agrarian way of life to the industrial order.
1. Shift From Industrialism & Utilitarianism
Another change that took place in the English novel around the year 1860, was the shift in its
focus from the city with its industrialism and utilitarianism to the village with its vision of
destruction under the threat of the new scientific rationalism and evolutionism, which started
new ethics and human relations inspired by the Darwinian concepts of “struggle for
existence” and “survival of the fittest”.   
These new ideas made the novelists, including Gaskell, look at human society from a new
perspective as an evolutionary process of human nature, society and civilization, growing on the
Darwinian principles.

2. Class struggle

Class struggle is one of the most important themes in Gaskell’s novels. Gaskell explores the
question of whether masters and men can truly work together or whether they are to be at
fundamental odds throughout their existence. It seems for the first half of the novel that they are
to be forever opposed. The striking workmen feel taken advantage of and despise their inhumane
masters, whereas the masters scoff at their workmen and deride them for not understanding the
marketplace. IN her novel, North and South, she finally demonstrate that it is possible for these
two warring classes to work together. Gaskell is thus sympathetic to the working class but not
entirely hostile to the the masters; she believes that equanimity is possible.
3. Questioned the fallouts of unfettered capitalism

Gaskell knew that the consequences of unfettered capitalism are misery for the majority and
antagonism between rich and poor. Her novels show those consequences, and investigate what
might best do the fettering: charity, government intervention, unionization. Like today, changing
labor-market and employment practices were raising new questions about what employers owe
workers and what workers owe one another. To read “Mary Barton” and “North and South”
today is to encounter these questions as they were first asked in a recognizably modern capitalist
framework, when such a framework felt new and strange.

Social and sexual Problems highlighted in Gaskell Novels

Elizabeth Gaskell's novels offer a detailed portrait of the lives of many strata
of Victorian society, including the very poor. Her first novel Mary Barton (1848) deals with
relations between employers and workers, but its narrative adopted the view of the working poor
and describes the "misery and hateful passions caused by the love of pursuing wealth as well as
the egoism, thoughtlessness and insensitivity of manufacturers". In North and South (1854–55),
her social novel, Elizabeth Gaskell returns to the precarious situation of workers and their
relations with industrialists, focusing more on the thinking and perspective of the employers.

For Gaskell, “social work” was enacted within the literary work, but also in conjunction with actual
philanthropic activity. In Mary Barton (1848) and Ruth (1853), Elizabeth Gaskell calls attention to the
ways in which the author – adept at narrative construction – can intercede when social mores lead to
cultural scripts of poverty, prostitution, and death. Her “fallen women” are victims of oppressive
discursive structures that propel them toward ruin rather than reform.

Changed perspectives about prostitution and fallen women

Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel Ruth (1853) challenged the stereotypes projected onto the fallen woman in
nineteenth century England. The prime moral figure, Mr. Benson, a clergyman in the story, cares for
Ruth and provides for her with the help of his sister. Their kindness to a woman who would have been
considered an outcast argues for a different response to sin than what society suggested. This eventually
led not only to social reform, but also legal, as her work helped repeal the Contagious Diseases Act in
1886 (Watt 1). This had long lasting implications for women’s emancipation movement (Hamilton 27).
The novel’s influence on Butler shows how literature can challenge, on moral grounds, people’s
reactions to those less fortunate, as well as motivate practical change in the forms of social and legal
activism and reform.