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Abstract: Building on previous critical accounts, this article analyses the insufficiently considered role of architecture in Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South and explores its relationship to the text's social, aesthetic and political concerns. Proceeding from an initial discussion of 'invisible architecture, understood as what is unseen or unseeable in the modern city, with reference to Mary Barton and the writing of Friedrich Engels and James Kay-Shuttleworth, the article contends that Marlborough Mills is central to the tensions of the novel, acting as a locus around which the dynamics of industrial Manchester are explored. It also considers moments where architecture is directly mentioned in the novel, including the comparison between Oxford and Milton, as well as Mr Hale's lectures on Ecclesiastical Architecture, which take place at a 'neighbouring Lyceum'. The article ends by arguing that the Manchester Lyceum scho ols, established in the city in 1838, serve as an important lens through which to consider the novel's final rapprochement between Mr Thornton and Mr Higgins.
One of the most prominent critical debates around Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South (1854-55) has concerned the relationship between public and private arenas, sometimes couched in terms of 'domestic and industrial spheres' or 'domestic and public life'1 While critics are generally in agreement that the novel attempts to bring together these two strands, some have argued that the gap between the domestic family and wider society is never overcome; Catherine Gallagher, for example, finds that industrial novels concerned with 'social paternalism and domestic ideology', including North and South, 'assume the separation of the public and private spheres they attempt to integrate', contributing to a crisis in the realist novel. This crisis is understood as the transformation of 'implicit tensions' within realism regarding 'the nature and possibility of human freedom', 'the sources of social cohesion' and 'the nature of representation' into 'explicit contradictions'2 For Christoph Lindner, the key question is the relationship between production and consumption under modern commodity culture, but he similarly argues that these two spheres are held apart, so that while Trollope and Thackeray produce narratives celebrating conspicuous consumption, Gaskell's industrial novels are located 'on the outside looking in', concerned with 'the productive activity that makes Victorian commodity culture possible', producing domestic spaces that are overwhelmingly alienating rather...