Seeing this "grim picture of the lower depths of city life" (Uglow 90), motivated her to write her "Condition-of-England" novels. The "events and details in [her] novel[s] clearly mirror the events in Victorian society" (Mendac n. pag.) and her works are nowadays still "generally associated with Manchester by her readers" (Sanders 416). Thus, Gaskell's writings might be regarded as her "explicit contribution to the discussion of.labor disputes" (Williams Scott 28). .
3. Margaret Hale as a social explorer.
3.1 Definition of a social explorer and how Margaret Hale could be considered as one .
The term social (problem) novel dates back from the 1950s (Guy 3) and is applied to "a body of English fiction written in the late 1840's and 1850's" (ibid.). Generally, these novels dealt with the negative side effects of the Industrial Revolution. Their authors intended to "comment on, and stimulate debate about, matters of general public and political concern"(Guy 4). They had a "didactic function" (ibid.) and at-tempted to change "the opinions and prejudices of their readers" (ibid.). Authors such as Charles Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell depicted the miserable living .
conditions of the poor "[um] die oberen und mittleren Schichten dazu zu bringen, sich für die Verbesserung der Situation der Armen einzusetzen" (Nünning 66) and thus, to abandon the "prevailing laissez-faire attitude of the ruling classes" (Pike 6). Hence, the readership was to be informed and aroused at the same time (ibid.).
The authors of social fiction projected the social problems of Victorian society onto individuals in order to draw attention to them. "Social explorers" were generally employed to discover and explore the social conditions within their own country (Nünning 71). North and South's heroine, Margaret Hale, has to discover an "alien environment" (Wright 111) since she was born and raised in England's South and is then forced by exterior circumstances to move to the "energetic anti-gentlemanly world of self-made manufacturers of the North" (Sanders 417).
