How great literature can change your life

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Tuesday

Yesterday I explained how Elizabeth Gaskell’s 1854 novel North and South is helping me imagine the interior life of my great-grandmother Eliza Scott. Today I apply the novel to the other side of my family and to people I actually knew—my grandfather Bob Strehlow and his son and my uncle Rob Strehlow. I thought of them and their construction company as I read about Gaskell’s account of John Thornton, as cotton mill owner.

The Strehlows helped run a family business—Jobst and Sons—that in its heyday built some of the main buildings in Peoria, Illinois, including much of Bradley University. They did high quality work, and one reason for their success was their good relations with their unionized workforce. One of my brothers, who worked for the company one summer, saw up close the high standards demanded by the union overseers.

I don’t want to be pollyannish about this. Contract negotiations were tough—I sometimes would hear my grandfather complaining about the union—and I’m sure there was fire on both sides. Yet when Jobst and Sons ran into difficulties in the 1990s, I saw the union doing everything it could to help salvage the company. There was self-interest at play, of course—the union members would suffer with the closing of the company—but the letter of endorsement also evinced respect for the management. Unfortunately, union concessions and good will were not enough and, unable to obtain the loans they needed, this 150-year family company went under.

I thought frequently of Jobst and Sons and its relationship with its

workers as I followed Thornton’s progress in North and South. Early in the novel, before he has experienced Margaret’s softening influence, he has an entirely top-down approach to running his company. And to be frank, I recognize some of my relatives’ own self-confidence and imperial manner in an early conversation with Margaret, who has just passed on a worker complaint that “the masters would like their hands to be merely tall, large children—living in the present moment—with a blind unreasoning kind of obedience.” Thornton doesn’t altogether reject the characterization:

Well, in the Platonic year, it may fall out that we are all—men, women, and children—fit for a republic; but give me a constitutional monarchy in our present state of morals and intelligence. In our infancy we require a wise despotism to govern us. Indeed, long past infancy, children and young people are the happiest under the unfailing laws of a discreet firm authority. I agree with Miss Hale so far as to consider our people in the condition of children, while I deny that we, the masters, have anything to do with the making or keeping them so. I maintain that despotism is the best kind of government for them; so that in the hours in which I come in contact with them I must necessarily be an autocrat. I will use my best discretion—from no humbug or philanthropic feeling, of which we have had rather too much in the North—to make wise laws and come to just decisions in the conduct of my business—laws and decisions which work for my own good in the first instance—for theirs in the second; but I will neither be forced to give my reasons, nor flinch from what I have once declared to be my resolution. Let them turn out! I shall suffer as well as they: but in the end they will find I have not bated nor altered one jot.

However, after Margaret introduces Thornton to Higgins—a union worker not afraid to speak his mind but also with a deep integrity—Thornton begins to move to a position not unlike (I believe) that taken by my relatives. Regular talks with Higgins open up a new perspective:

 And by-and-bye, he lost all sense of resentment in wonder how it was, or could be, that two men like himself and Higgins, living by the same trade, working in their different ways at the same object, could look upon each other’s position and duties in so strangely different a way. And thence arose that intercourse, which, though it might not have the effect of preventing all future clash of opinion and action, when the occasion arose, would, at any rate, enable both master and man to look upon each other with far more charity and sympathy, and bear with each other more patiently and kindly. Besides this improvement of feeling, both Mr. Thornton and his workmen found out their ignorance as to positive matters of fact, known heretofore to one side, but not to the other.

We see this relationship bear fruit in a meal plan that Thornton envisions. By this time, however, he has learned enough from Higgins to know that he shouldn’t impose the plan without listening to his workers. And they, after first suspiciously rejecting it, suggest a few alterations and then embrace it. Thornton, meanwhile, has enough humility to stay out of their way. Here’s his account:

But it was not till provisions grew so high this winter that I bethought me how, by buying things wholesale, and cooking a good quantity of provisions together, much money might be saved, and much comfort gained. So I spoke to my friend—or my enemy—the man I told you of—and he found fault with every detail of my plan; and in consequence I laid it aside, both as impracticable, and also because if I forced it into operation I should be interfering with the independence of my men; when, suddenly, this Higgins came to me and graciously signified his approval of a scheme so nearly the same as mine, that I might fairly have claimed it; and, moreover, the approval of several of his fellow-workmen, to whom he had spoken. I was a little ‘riled,’ I confess, by his manner, and thought of throwing the whole thing overboard to sink or swim. But it seemed childish to relinquish a plan which I had once thought wise and well-laid, just because I myself did not receive all the honour and consequence due to the originator. So I coolly took the part assigned to me, which is something like that of a steward to a club. I buy in the provisions wholesale, and provide a fitting matron or cook.

The reward is that, eventually, the workers begin asking him to dine with them:

[O]ne day, two or three of the men—my friend Higgins among them—asked me if I would not come in and take a snack. It was a very busy day, but I saw that the men would be hurt if, after making the advance, I didn’t meet them half-way, so I went in, and I never made a better dinner in my life. I told them…how much I enjoyed it; and for some time, whenever that especial dinner recurred in their dietary, I was sure to be met by these men, with a ‘Master, there’s hot-pot for dinner to-day, win yo’ come in?’ If they had not asked me, I would no more have intruded on them than I’d have gone to the mess at the barracks without invitation.

From these interactions he gets insights into the workings of his operation that he would otherwise miss. When his interlocutor wonders whether the workers will hide their opinions in his presence, Thornton tells him that

 you are hardly acquainted with our Darkshire fellows, for all you’re a Darkshire man yourself. They have such a sense of humor, and such a racy mode of expression! I am getting really to know some of them now, and they talk pretty freely before me.

This leads him (and Gaskell, for whom he is at this point a spokesperson) to articulate a new kind of relationship between owners and workers. If one is to get buy-in from the workers, one must share with them the reasons for the decisions that get made. To do so, “the individuals of the different classes [must be brought] into actual personal contact.”

Showing a worker “how much his employer may have labored in his study at plans for the benefit of his workpeople,” Thornton goes on to say, “is the very breath of life.” Coming up with “a complete plan” on one’s own, he notes, is like imposing upon them a machine that appears fitted for every emergency: they will never understand “the intense mental labor and forethought required to bring it to such perfection.”

On the other hand, if workers are involved in the planning process, “its success in working [will] come to be desired by all, as all had borne a part in the formation of the plan.” In fact, once all come to have an investment in the plan, they all will

find means and ways of seeing each other, and becoming acquainted with each others’ characters and persons, and even tricks of temper and modes of speech. We should understand each other better, and I’ll venture to say we should like each other more.

Does this mean, asks the member of Parliament who is querying Thornton about this vision, that strikes will be no more? The mill owner won’t go that far:

Not at all. My utmost expectation only goes as far as this—that they may render strikes not the bitter, venomous sources of hatred they have hitherto been. A more hopeful man might imagine that a closer and more genial intercourse between classes might do away with strikes. But I am not a hopeful man.

As Thornton is saying all this, his business is on the verge of bankruptcy. But because of his new management philosophy, he gets the same response from some of his workers that my uncle got from his. He informs Margaret of this:

Suddenly, as if a new idea had struck him, he crossed over to where Margaret was sitting, and began, without preface, as if he knew she had been listening to all that had passed:

“Miss Hale, I had a round-robin from some of my men—I suspect in Higgins’ handwriting—stating their wish to work for me, if ever I was in a position to employ men again on my own behalf. That was good, wasn’t it?”

“Yes. Just right. I am glad of it,” said Margaret, looking up straight into his face with her speaking eyes, and then dropping them under his eloquent glance.

This is comparable to Darcy confessing to Elizabeth that she was right in her earlier assessment of him. In fact, North and South owes a lot to Pride and Prejudice—Margaret even accuses Thornton of not being a gentleman in her first rejection of his marriage proposal—and the ultimate outcome is mostly the same. In the earlier novel, however, a landed gentleman looks to a woman with mercantile relations (the Gardeners) to build a vibrant future whereas this time it is the man who is in trade. Meanwhile Margaret, the daughter of a women with gentry background, needs life in a mill town (Milton) to step into her full powers.

Which means that she’s not so much Elizabeth Bennett as Anne Elliot in Persuasion: passing up a chance to return to her ancestral Kellynch Hall as Mr. Elliot’s wife, Anne instead chooses the uncertain role of a sailor’s wife. Oh, and Margaret is also like Jane Eyre in that she suddenly inherits a fortune and uses it to help the man she loves, saving Thornton’s factory.

There’s one other point of connection I have. As a Strehlow, my mother could have married any number of wealthy Peoria denizens, lived on the posh West Moss Avenue (as many of my relatives did), been a member of the country club, and lived the high life. Instead, like Margaret’s mother, she chose an academic man, along with a considerably lower standard of living. In fact, Mr. Hale, with his intellectual integrity and his passion for learning, is a lot like my father. While Mrs. Hale complains incessantly about her comedown in the world, however, my mother saw marrying my father as the best decision of her life.  

Follow-up note: My uncle was so traumatized by the bankruptcy that there are three days erased from his memory as he suffered a deep depression. Because of his skill set, however, he went on to have a very successful second career as an engineer consultant. Thornton too (before Margaret loans him her money) is offered some lucrative management jobs. He insists, however, that he will take them only if he can continue his “experiments” in enlightened management-worker relations, which sours his prospects.