One of my recurring conceits or motives—in the literary senses only, to be sure—is that the Victorian Age never really ended; that we are still in the long indecisive Edwardian twilight, looking at modernity. This novel about the social and moral implications of industrialization has evidence both ways. I don't think the sleepy rural village it starts in exists anywhere in England or the US any more, but the moral problems the vicar's daughter finds when they have to move to an ugly manufacturing town are familiar still:
Is there really social mobility for everyone, or is there a class that inherits all the chances of success, even if it isn't guaranteed? How bad can the penalties of poverty be before we're essentially punishing the innocent? Can we afford anything better?
The manufacturers in this town, in the 1850s, threaten to break strikes by moving production to poorer countries; failing that, they bring people in from those countries. The more-or-less enlightened owner explains that his factory has efficient furnaces, so is both cost-effective and less polluting; he also says that had he not built this before the 1847 parliamentary act requiring clean combustion, he would not have done it at all, because not being ordered around is worth more to him than the plain economic advantage. Hmmmm.
The unionizing workers have similarly familiar problems; is it worth the risk to strike, have they the money to feed their poorest families while they do, is it worse to leave unreliable people out of the union or to let them in a loose cannon; can they get the newspapers to report on a strike sympathetically. Can they bear to not strike, if that means they bend the neck? (The 'granite' of these Northern people is important to the novel, usually compared to a more turfish or oxlike durability on the part of the Southerners.)
However, this is a Gaskell novel, so it's basically personal. Vicar's daughter; terrifying mother of 'self-made' man; fat jolly Oxbridge drone; dieaway mother (literally, of course); all here as types & as personalities. It was written for serialization in ' Household Words, which makes it the middlebrow equivalent of maybe a Masterpiece Theater series, or a novel. (Excellence is possible, but will occur in a comfortable framework.)
You would not, I think, be surprised by an outline of the plot. I was surprised by the topicality of the economic problems, and finally by the statement that is probably the philosophy of the book:
'I have arrived at the conviction that no mere institutions, however wise, and however much thought may have been required to organize and arrange them, can attach class to class as they should be attached, unless the working out of such institutions bring the individuals of the different classes into actual personal contact. Such intercourse is the very breath of life. A working man can hardly be made to feel and know how much his employer may have labored in his study at plans for the benefit of his workpeople. A complete plan emerges like a piece of machinery, apparently fitted for every emergency. But the hands accept it as they do machinery, without understanding the intense mental labour and forethought required to bring it to such perfection. But I would take an idea, the working out of which would necesitate personal intercourse; it might not go well at first, but at every hitch interest would be felt by an increasing number of men, and at last its success in working come to be desired by all, as all had borne a part in the formation of the plan; and even then I am sure that it would lose its vitality, cease to be living, as soon as it was no longer carried on by that sort of common interest which invariably makes people find means and ways of seeing each other, and becoming acquainted with each others' characters and persons, and even tricks of temper and modes of speech. We should understand each other better, and I'll venture to say we should like each other more.'
'And you think they may prevent the recurrence of strikes?'
'Not at all...'Which is, I find, remarkably suggestive of the anyone-can-stop-the-line production system that describes in Trust; one that accepts feedback from anyone doing the work, and led to much better production, when there was enough trust.
I doubt that a good hand in 185x thought of a piece of machinery as something not tinkered with by human intent; and I can't believe that any hand ever has thought of the machinery as 'fitted for every emergency'.
Project Gutenberg etext #4276
So wrote clew in Fiction (19th c.).