Circling back to North and South, I have one final comment, which involves another historical footnote:
I really hope Margaret doesn’t invest her entire inheritance in the mill, because she and Mr. Thornton are in for trouble once the Civil War starts. In 1855, Elizabeth Gaskell could not have foreseen what would be coming a mere six years later – The Cotton Famine of 1861-65.
80% of the raw cotton for that trade came from the slave states of the southern USA. In July 1861, that fell to zero, literally overnight. It remained close to zero for the next three years. This can be regarded as the world’s first raw material crisis, and one of the most dramatic periods in Britain’s industrial and economic history.
About 4.5 billion lbs of raw cotton were denied to British manufacturers in the seven years to the end of 1867. This caused massive unemployment in the industry, leading to the Lancashire Cotton Famine. British cotton and the American Civil War – In Conversation with Jim Powell & Meredith Wheeler | Liverpool University Press Blog
Here’s a NY Times newspaper headline from that era:
Margaret and John will have barely gotten the mill up and running again, when disaster will hit. Lancashire Cotton Famine - Wikipedia
I hate to leave them on that note, but alas, as Gaskell wrote in North and South, “the cloud never comes in that quarter of the horizon from which we watch for it.” Let’s hope that Love (plus a comfortable nest egg) Conquers All.
, but my son said right away – “Oh yeah, that was the weather catastrophe that led Mary Shelley to write Frankenstein.”
