North & South is a British television historical drama programme, produced by the BBC and originally broadcast in four episodes on BBC One in November and December 2004. The serial is based on the 1855 Victorian novel North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell and takes place in the years surrounding the Great Exhibition of 1851.
It follows the story of Margaret Hale (Daniela Denby-Ashe), a young woman from southern England who has to move to the North after her father decides to leave the clergy. The family struggles to adjust itself to the industrial town's customs, especially after meeting the Thorntons, a proud family of cotton mill owners who at first seem to despise their social inferiors. The story explores the issues of class and gender, as Margaret's sympathy for the town mill workers clashes with her growing attraction to John Thornton (Richard Armitage). The novel was adapted for television by Sandy Welch and directed by Brian Percival.
Contents
Plot
Margaret Hale (Daniela Denby-Ashe) and her parents Maria (Lesley Manville) and Richard (Tim Pigott-Smith) live in the idyllic town in Helstone in Hampshire. At the wedding of her cousin, Edith, Margaret is approached by Edith's new brother-in-law, Henry Lennox (John Light). Lennox visits Helstone a while later and proposes marriage to Margaret; she refuses him.
Margaret's father, a clergyman, has long harbored doubts about the doctrines of the Church of England and resigns his position rather than attest to orthodox beliefs as his bishop requires. To avoid gossip, the family move to the (fictional) industrial town of Milton, Darkshire, in the north of England. Thanks to his friend, Mr. Bell (Brian Protheroe), Mr. Hale is able to find a house. Giving lessons as a private tutor provides him a modest income. One of his pupils is local mill-owner John Thornton (Richard Armitage), who gets off to a bad start with Margaret when she witnesses him beating a worker whom he has caught smoking in the mill, which endangers all the workers. Gradually, Margaret gets used to Thornton, but his mother Hannah (Sinéad Cusack) and sister Fanny (Jo Joyner) disapprove of her, believing her haughty and alien to the customs of the North. In the meantime, Margaret attempts to do charitable work among the mill workers and comes into contact with Nicholas Higgins (Brendan Coyle) and his daughter, Bessy (Anna Maxwell Martin), who suffers from byssinosis from exposure to the cotton fibres in the mills. When Bessy became ill at Hamper's Mill, her father moved her to Marlborough Mills, Thornton's mill, because the working environment is better there. In a meeting with fellow mill owners, Thornton says he had a wheel for ventilation installed in all of the rooms of his factory in order to maintain a healthier workforce, despite the fact that it costs a great deal of money. The other industrialists had refused to install a wheel because of the expense.
Margaret's mother is falling ill. Mrs. Hale desires to see her son, Frederick (Rupert Evans), before she dies. Frederick, a naval officer, was involved in a mutiny and he cannot return to England without risking his life. However, without telling her father, Margaret writes to her brother in Cádiz, Spain, to tell him that their mother is dying. Margaret calls on the Thorntons to borrow a water mattress for her mother and is trapped there while the mill workers riot during a strike. When the angry mob threatens John's safety as he confronts them after Margaret's goading, Margaret defends him from the rioters and is injured by a thrown stone.
Cast
Daniela Denby-Ashe as Margaret Hale
Richard Armitage as John Thornton
Tim Pigott-Smith as Mr Richard Hale
Lesley Manville as Mrs Maria Hale
Sinéad Cusack as Mrs Hannah Thornton
Jo Joyner as Fanny Thornton
Brendan Coyle as Mr Nicholas Higgins
Anna Maxwell Martin as Bessy Higgins
Kay Lyon as Mary Higgins
Pauline Quirke as Dixon
Rupert Evans as Frederick Hale
Brian Protheroe as Mr. Bell
John Light as Henry Lennox
Emma Ferguson as Edith Shaw Lennox
Jane Booker as Aunt Shaw
Will Houston as John Boucher
Cherry Alto - Beky
Rhys Jenkins as Street Urchin
Production
Origins
Sandy Welch started adapting Elizabeth Gaskell's 1855 North and South in 2001, making a few changes to emphasise the industrial landscape of the story. Welch's story, for example, begins and ends with the main character Margaret Hale travelling by train, which is not the starting and ending point of the novel (although Gaskell describes the Hales travelling from the South to the North by train). Welch also made the main characters visit the Great Exhibition of 1851. These are changes Welch believed Gaskell would have done "if she'd had the time", since Gaskell had complained of being under pressure to complete the novel by her editor Charles Dickens. In the summer of 2003 Kate Bartlett was brought to the project as a producer and a ten-week period of pre-production started at the beginning of February.
Casting
Daniela Denby-Ashe had not originally auditioned for the role of Margaret Hale but for that of Fanny Thornton, and was not sure she would be participating on the project, but the producers had been looking for the right Margaret for a long time and Denby-Ashe's "directness, energy and charm" as well as the chemistry she had with would-be co-star Richard Armitage proved decisive. Armitage himself had been the first actor to read for the role of John Thornton and even though his performance had impressed producer Kate Bartlett and casting director Jill Trevellick, they still had to see many other possible Thorntons. Three weeks after casting had begun, Trevellick decided to recapitulate the first auditions, realising that Armitage was "perfect".
Filming
Filming took place from the end of April 2004 until July 2004.
Gaskell's fictional town of Milton, Darkshire, was loosely based on Manchester, but the producers decided to shoot many of the town scenes in Edinburgh, which maintains more of its visual and architectural heritage from the industrial Victorian era. Keighley in West Yorkshire became one of the main locations, the cotton mill's exteriors were filmed at Dalton Mill. The scenes inside the mill were shot at Helmshore Textile Museum in Rossendale and Queen Street Mill on the outskirts of Burnley, Lancashire. London was another main location, all the interior scenes were shot at the Ealing Studios in west London and the Great Exhibition scene was shot at Alexandra Palace in North London. Other locations were Selkirk, a town in the Scottish Borders, Burnley in Lancashire, and the Bluebell Railway in Sussex, where the final and the beginning scenes were shot. Additional railway sequences were filmed in Yorkshire, using carriages provided by the Vintage Carriages Trust.
As a costume drama, North & South required substantial work from the art department. In 2005 the serial's production designer Simon Elliot received a British Academy Television Award nomination for Best Production Design.
Music
Martin Phipps composed the score for North & South. The short piano tune is played throughout the whole series in different rhythms. The music is especially loud and clear whenever there is a turning point in the relationship between Margaret and Thornton.
Reception
As the BBC had low expectations for the series, it was not well publicised and went almost unnoticed by critics. Audiences, however, were more receptive; hours after the first episode aired in November 2004, the message board of the programme's website crashed because of the number of visitors the site was receiving, forcing host bbc.co.uk to shut it down. This sudden interest on the serial was attributed to Richard Armitage, a relatively unknown actor, whose portrayal of the emotionally restrained John Thornton drew parallels with Colin Firth's portrayal of Fitzwilliam Darcy on the BBC's 1995 mini-series Pride and Prejudice, and the reception he later received. Armitage himself claims that the series was a success because of the "industrial landscape and the attention [that the series gives] to the working classes and the way they develop". The reaction to the series was a surprise to the BBC, who then decided to release the DVD on 11 April 2005.
North & South was voted "Best Drama" in the BBC drama website's annual poll in 2004. Richard Armitage was voted "Most Desirable Drama Star" and "Best Actor", Daniela Denby-Ashe was voted "Best Actress" and three different scenes were voted as the year's "Favourite Moments", with the final scene winning the number one spot.
