Yet for all the difference in pace, both works are concerned with social change. Milton is young, harsh and rapidly changing, its newness emphasised by being experienced through the consciousness of Margaret Hale, an unwilling emigrant from an older way of life. The action of North and South is undated but evidently meant to be contemporary: it deals with the new industrial town Milton, with the new class groupings of industrial working class and capitalist manufacturer, with the topical issue of strikes. Cranford is a humorous rendering of old-fashioned life in a small rural town: mainly set (there are a few minor inconsistencies in dating) in the 1830s, and glancing back over its characters’ histories as far as the 1780s, it re-creates a quiet and quaint way of genteel life that at first sight may appear static. Cranford (1851–3) and North and South (1854–5) in many ways represent opposite poles of Gaskell’s achievement.
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