People are not nice, nor do they have the time for leisure activities. Writing almost 100 years after Austen, Gaskell’s North and South is a smoky world filled with hardship. If Jane Austen excelled at critiquing the gentry and upper class, at showing the foils of societal constructs of how to live and behave-especially when it came to women, Elizabeth Gaskell excelled at showing the troubles of the rising low and middle classes. Some want their children to be better instructed than they themselves have been. Some want resolutely to learn, though they have come to man’s estate. ‘A private tutor!’ said Margaret, looking scornful: ‘What in the world do manufacturers want with the classics, or literature, or the accomplishments of a gentleman?’ ‘Oh,’ said her father, ‘some of them really seem to be fine fellows, conscious of their own deficiencies, which is more than many a man at Oxford is.
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