North & South (TV serial)

North & South
British DVD cover
Written by	Elizabeth Gaskell (novel), Sandy Welch (writer)
Directed by	Brian Percival
Starring	Daniela Denby-Ashe Richard Armitage Sinéad Cusack Jo Joyner
Composer(s)	Martin Phipps
Country of origin	United Kingdom
No. of episodes	4
Production
Producer(s)	Kate Bartlett
Running time	235 min. (4 parts)
Release
Original network	BBC One
Original release	14 November (2004-11-14) – 5 December 2004 (2004-12-05)

North & South is a British television drama serial, produced by the BBC and originally broadcast in four episodes on BBC One in November and December 2004. 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 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 serial is based on the 1855 Victorian novel North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell. It was adapted for television by Sandy Welch and directed by Brian Percival.

Margaret Hale (Daniela Denby-Ashe) and her parents Maria (Lesley Manville) and Richard (Tim Pigott-Smith) move to the (fictional) industrial town of Milton, Darkshire, in the north of England because her father, a clergyman, decides to leave the Church of England and become a Nonconformist. Thanks to his friend, Mr. Bell (Brian Protheroe), he is able to find a house and gains employment as a private tutor. 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, thus endangering 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 working classes, and thus comes into contact with Nicholas Higgins (Brendan Coyle) and his daughter, Bessy (Anna Maxwell Martin), who contracted Pneumoconiosis 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, despite the fact that it costs a great deal of money. The other industrialists had refused to install a wheel because of the expense.