The social realism and politics of Gaskell's North and South

Yesterday I posted on what Elizabeth Gaskell is not (not Dickens, not Hardy, not Eliot, et al.), and today I note something that her novel North and South (1855) is: a precursor to Zola, in that it's one of the few Victorian novels that takes on socio-economic issues as a major topic. It's not a "realist" novel a la Germinal, but it's far more socially engaged than, say, Dickens's most political and topical novel, Hard Times, which in the end is primarily a critique of an educational system that focuses on the practical and useful. That's a topic in N and S as well, but I was pleased and surprised to see how directly EG takes on political topics, starting about 200 pp into the novel. UP to a point, we see, mainly through the perspective of the 19-year-old Margaret, that life in the northern industrial city of Milton (i.e., Manchester?) is unhealthy (horrible atmosphere and dirt and grime everyone), nonaesthetic (ugly factories and warehouses and drab housing quarters for all), and grimly pragmatic (a general belief that business and commerce are the essence of modern life and that there's no need for young people to study the classics). But things really heat up when Mr. Thornton, who is essentially protector and sponsor of the Hale family (Margaret's family) that has relocated to Milton, visits and the discussion turns to politics. The factory workers are planning a strike for higher wages, which Thornton, a factory owner, argues that they don't deserve and that he can't afford; Margaret takes the position that the workers should share equally in the prosperity of the factory - she's a proto-Frederic Engels! - which puts her at odds w/ Thornton and puts her father in an uncomfortable position as mediator. To EG's credit, though she doesn't flesh this out, we see in Margaret the evolution of a consciousness: On arrival in Milton she had no sense of how workers lived or what their life struggles may have entailed, but after she befriends a working-class family, the Higginses, who are suffering from poverty and disease, she begins to understand the injustices in her society and to speak out on this topic; I suspect that as the novel progresses she becomes more directly involved in class politics - though how much will she truly risk? How deep is her commitment? How much is truly radical ideas and how much is sentimentality and condescension? Can she truly break w/ her class and w/ her family? 

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