Realism, Pastoral, Family Drama
The genre of North and South is probably one of the most interesting things about this novel. The book actually draws from several genres at once before settling into a type of realism known as "social realism." So let's do a genre breakdown.
The novel starts off with a lot of pastoral elements. In other words, the book idealizes Margaret's life in the country village of Helstone, which is totally heaven on Earth. The grass is green, the birdies are chirping, and it seems as if a little bow-legged fawn will walk up and eat an apple out of Margaret's hand. Sigh!
This fun-in-the-country-sun comes to a screeching halt when the Hales move to the northern town of Milton, though. This change of location brings Margaret into contact with a world she's never seen before. Instead of chirping birds and trickling streams, she encounters puffing smokestacks and workers who are dying from poor working conditions in the town's factories.
Without doubt, it's Gaskell's exploration of the hard lives led of workers that makes this book a work of Realism. Before Realism took off (like an ugly, ugly airplane) in the 19th-century, books tended to focus on idyllic villages like Helstone. Then the Realists, with their smack-you-in-the-face literary sensibilities, came on the scene. Why did this happen? The same reason Milton transformed from a shepherd's paradise with apple orchards to a gritty factory town: the Industrial Revolution.
Gaskell uses the transition from pastoral to realism to help alert her readers to the oppression and suffering that existed in the factories in the north of England. Margaret's dawning awareness of this other, grimier world is supposed to create a similar effect within the reader.
A discussion of the genre of North and South wouldn't be complete without a shout-out to what drives most of the living room dialogue in this novel: family drama. What's the sum of two dead parents, plus one exiled brother, plus one jealous overbearing mother, plus one shallow cousin, plus one benevolent fairy godfather? Yup, it's family drama. 356 pages of sweet, sweet family drama.