“You Have Made Him What He Is”: Irish Laborers and the Preston Strike in Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South

The article examines Gaskell’s novel North and South alongside the Preston labor struggle of 1853—specifically, a consideration of the differences between the historical strike and the 1856 Milton cotton workers strike of her novel. It exposes English and Irish tensions explicitly at work in the labor movements and struggles of Gaskell’s day. Gaskell uses variations on the Preston Strike to enhance the visibility of a growing Irish workforce perpetually marginalized and stoked into frustrated action; she assesses the forced and unequal political Union that makes the Irish the volatile agents we witness in her novel. The novel points specifically to the failed work union efforts in relation to Irish workers as a larger critique of the Act of Union.