Welcome to a snapshot from my Literature and Art dissertation: an immersive installation of a Victorian drawing room based on the 1854 Industrial novel North and South.
I recreated the drawing room from Thornton's home in the Northern Industrial town of Milton (near Manchester).
Margaret Hale and John Thornton are the main characters from the serialised novel, which Charles Dickens encouraged Elizabeth Gaskell to write and publish within his magazine Household Words.
Married to a unitarian priest and living in Lancashire after moving to the North, Gaskell understood the vast divide between Northern and Southern people.
Like writers such as Friedrich Engels, Gaskell understood the depravity in the industrial towns, but she also witnessed the strength of character and determination of those same oppressed people.
It was this struggle upon which she based her novels of hope, class conflicts, workers rights, and romance which blossoms despite the hardship.
The BBC series of North and South is available to watch, in boxsets and various streaming services.