Margaret Hale moves with her upper-class family to a provincial industrial town in northern England. There she becomes involved in the lives of local factory workers and union members, at one point even participating in a strike. A stormy and difficult romantic relationship with a factory owner, John Thornton, ends happily after Thornton changes his mind about the rights of his workers and begins to treat them with respect. In NORTH AND SOUTH, written in 1854, Gaskell--like Dickens--sought to expose the social problems created by the Industrial Revolution.