North and South as novel of ideas, for better or worse

I've gone as far as I care to w/ Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South (1855), which is +half-way through this 1,000-ebook page novel, and I give her credit for one of the few works of fiction of its day to truly try to comprehend and convey the plight of the working classes in the so-called Industrial Revolution. Her account of the unsuccessful workers' strike takes a page right out of Engels, but she's not a blind idealist, either - she allows the factory owner, Mr. Thornton, to have his say as well, and, in the section I just finished reading, she has one of the strike leaders - Higgins - distraught about the death of his young daughter, to engage in quite a debate with the lapsed clergyman, Mr. Hale, about workers' rights and the right to strike for higher wages. Higgins more than holds his own - though he, too, is a bit of an idealist, supporting the strike but not any resort to violence (fair enough, but I suspect - and maybe Gaskell would reveal this in later chapters? - that the strikers who began hurling rocks were incited, even hired, by the factory owners to break up the solidarity among the workers. So Gaskell's is a novel of ideas, and they were ideas seldom touched on by her contemporary novelists who seldom portrayed working-class characters other than as comic foils or objects of condescending charity and pity. But I wish it were ... a better novel, for all that. The will she/won't she plot about Margaret Hale and her displeasure w/, even loathing of, Thornton, who is in love with her, and the melodramatic subplot about brother Frederick, charged w/ mutiny for which if captured he would be hanged, who is summoned back to England to visit his mother on her deathbed - these plot devices just feel tedious and attenuated. In other words, I wish I were more engaged with the characters and their troubles. It's not that this is an abstract, intellectual novel by any means, but it feels to me that Gaskell's strength lies in developing dialectics and arguments and less in character development, plot nuance, and style. 

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