This final act is especially poignant, as the narrator says “Margaret the Churchwoman, her father the Dissenter, Higgins the Infidel, knelt down together. Thornton for not seeking revenge on the workers (page 228, “I like him for it”), then the previously quoted comment, and finally to ask Higgins to join in family prayer. Hale only speaks three times: first to encourage her daughter’s approval of Mr. 3 Elizabeth Gaskell, whose husband and father were Unitarian Ministers, would no doubt have been familiar with Priestley’s writing and was known to hold strong Unitarian opinions, 4 so the statement of the protagonist’s father in this key scene of the novel holds special weight.ĭuring Margaret’s long conversation with Higgins on the rights and obligations of workers and masters, Mr. This statement directly mirrors the sentiment of Unitarian theology of the 19 th century as primarily defined by 18 th century scientist and philosopher Joseph Priestley, who famously described the Trinity as foremost of the corruptions of Christianity. Hale’s reasoning is found during his discussion with Margaret and Higgins, when he states that “your Union in itself would be beautiful, glorious, -it would be Christianity in itself-if it were but for an end which affected the good of all, instead of that of merely one class as opposed to another” (229). Hale’s decision to leave the church due to “painful, miserable doubts” (35) 2 concerning church doctrine constitutes the one event in the novel in which a sympathetic character directly chooses to avoid discourse on a dichotomous relationship: unlike characters confronting issues of labor relations or personal integrity, he refuses to foster discussion or challenge authority figures on these unspecified religious issues.Ī key insight into Mr. However, it also addresses a change of values and reasoning that otherwise would be left hanging by the death of Mr. Thornton manifests the confluence of her compassion and her business sense, binds these seemingly dichotomous elements together. The ending of the novel, in which a proposal to loan money to a newly benevolent Mr. 1 In almost all cases, Margaret does not so much choose sides as acknowledge mutually dependent and beneficial relationships.
Thornton, and even between her conflicting views of her own intelligence. North and South is a novel defined by the resolution of binary conflicts: heroine Margaret Hale is presented with a number of divisions of sympathy, between industrialists and the working class, between conflicting views of Mr.
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