How Elizabeth Gaskell’s industrial romance became a surprise TV hit
Michael Hogan picks the TV classics that you can now rediscover
Actor Richard Armitage is in a professional purple patch. He’s not only appearing in Uncle Vanya on the West End stage but, this week, stars in the addictive new Netflix drama
The Stranger, adapted from Harlan Coben’s bestselling thriller.
However, it was a more classic novel that provided Armitage’s first leading television role: the BBC adaptation of Elizabeth Gaskell’s 1855 tale of romance across the class and geographical divide. A sort of Pride and Prejudice for the industrial age, the four-parter featured steam trains rather than coaches and horses, but saw similar passions stirring between its spirited protagonists.
Daniela Denby-Ashe shines as middle-class rural southerner Margaret Hale, forced to relocate reluctantly to grimy Milton in the evocatively named northern county of Darkshire. Here on the rain-slicked cobblestones, she first encounters local cotton mill owner
John Thornton (Armitage) when he’s violently beating one of his workers – but all is not as it appears. At first, these polar opposites loathe each other, but love eventually blossoms.
The couple had genuine chemistry and proved a hit with viewers, which took the BBC by surprise – it had low expectations of the series, so hardly promoted it. Still, word of mouth spread, and when the finale ended on an eagerly awaited kiss, so many fans flooded the BBC’s online messageboards that they crashed. Armitage was hailed as “Britain’s newest heart-throb” and his brooding hero drew frequent parallels to Colin Firth’s Mr Darcy a decade previously.
With its Lancastrian locations, striking workers and epic social sweep, this was a rare portrayal of an industrial landscape in television period drama, which tended to be dominated by the “big four” of Austen, Eliot, Hardy and Dickens. It renewed interest in the unfashionable Gaskell. Another of her works, Cranford, followed it on to the BBC three years later.
Did you know? Screenwriter Sandy Welch changed the source material by having characters visit the Great Exhibition of 1851. She believed Gaskell herself would have made this improvement if she hadn’t been under deadline pressure from her editor – a certain Charles Dickens.