Tom’s Big Picture

No, I’m not talking about the cheesy Civil War miniseries with Patrick Swayze. This is a recent miniseries put out by the BBC based on a novel by Elizabeth Gaskell.

A conservative friend of mine recommended it and said: “Don’t rent it, you’re wasting your money. Buy it because your wife is going to love it.” I rented it. We watched it. And I should have bought it since I will be buying it soon.

The movie concerns a minister’s family from South England moving to North England sometime in the mid-1800’s. The minister, a dissenting non-conformist (presumably a closet Presbyterian), refuses to sign a statement swearing ideological allegiance to the Church of England, and thus sacrifices a comfortable living as a parson out of principle. He moves his entire family north to Milton, an industrial mill town full of lowlanders genetically identical to and not unlike America’s own Scots-Irish.

There, his family and his daughter Margaret, the protagonist, must adjust to the very serious and business-like atmosphere of the North, quite unlike the gaiety and frivolity of the South. Romance and drama of course ensue, and I will say no more since the plot is quite intricate. (As an aside, it’s amazing to me how easily my wife keeps up with the twenty-odd characters in the series, their relationships, etc. It’s more than the male mind can handle, so I’m always asking her who this person is again, etc…)

There are so many nice touches in the movie, such as how it deals thoughtfully with the conflicts between the mill-owners and the workers (coming to the realistic conclusion that there is good, evil and plain incompetence among both groups). Or the moment when the main character revisits her old hometown, discussing theology with the new minister who took her father’s place, and finds herself disgusted with the anti-intellectual attitude (in terms of a disdain of serious Bible study) of the then-embryonic liberalism within the Anglican Church.

And apparently many women in Britain went crazy over the male lead character, Thornton, many thinking him superior to even Jane Austen’s Mr. Darcy. It is very similar in plot to Pride and Prejudice, and healthy for it. Both plots are realist romantic, almost anti-romantic in their centering around the serious-minded conservative people who are always cleaning up the messes of the ne’er-do-well “free spirits” around them, always denying themselves for someone else’s sake. The real romance of these plots is their forcing these personalities out of their self-denial for others for a moment and causing them to fall in love despite themselves with someone just like them.

Buy this for your wife for Christmas. It’ll be a hit:

www.amazon.com/North-South-Daniela-Denby-Ashe/dp/B000AYEL6U