North and South (1855) initially appeared, like Cranford, in serial form within Household Words. This was a mode of publication which Gaskell found constraining. She wrote to Anna Jameson in January 1855 that ‘If the story had been poured just warm out of the mind, it would have taken a much larger mould. It was the cruel necessity of compressing it that hampered me’ (L 330–1). Yet Dickens found the novel irritatingly diffuse, complaining, just after he had read the novel's seventh instalment, that ‘Mrs. Gaskell's story, so divided, is wearisome in the last degree’. Certainly, it would not have been possible for the novel's original readers, encountering the progress of the heroine Margaret Hale number by number, to predict how the story was going to develop. Opening in London, North and South at first seems to be a tale of fashionable society; then, as Margaret's father announces that his beliefs no longer allow him to carry out conscientiously the duties of a Church of England parson, the novel appears to engage with issues of religious doubt. This was the impression which Charlotte Bronte¨, at least, carried away with her after finishing the fifth number, writing to her friend: ‘I think I see the ground you are about to take as far as the Church is concerned; not that of attack on her, but of defence of those who conscientiously differ from her, and feel it a duty to leave her fold.’ But the ground shifts again. With the removal of the Hale family to Milton, the novel's central preoccupation with industrial relations becomes increasingly clear: even so, the novel later geographically returns both to London, and to the village of Helstone where Margaret grew up. This topographical mobility emphasizes the fact that Gaskell is not dealing simply with a localized set of problems, but is raising questions of social responsibility which bear on the country as a whole, and on a whole range of human relations.

To some extent, North and South is a riposte to those critics and friends who thought, like W. R. Greg, that Gaskell had placed so much weight on the hardships of the working people in Mary Barton that she had failed to consider in enough detail the difficulties faced by their employers.