Chapter I. General information about Elizabeth Cleghorn Stevenson

Conclusion
In the novel, the hungry working-class characters are presented as starving individuals worthy of sympathy and victims of circumstances rather than victims of their own failing morals; they are rational agents consciously planning to use hunger and voluntary starvation as a means of control and a weapon in their conflict with the millowners. The discourse of hunger in the novel also reveals differences within the working class regarding economic power, and hungerstriking in the novel is also a gesture of solidarity with the more deprived mill workers. Although hunger and animality are linked in North and South, the representations of the hungry poor as near animals are fewer; yet hunger is seen as a threat which could indirectly but potentially lead to a working-class uprising.
The representations of middle-class food consumption reveal differences within the class; the difference between the industrial middle class, the Thorntons, and the traditional middle class, the Hales, is also the difference between possessing economic capital or cultural capital. These capitals are used in social performance to establish and control class identities and when criticising the lavishness of the Thorntons’ dinner table Margaret Hale is implicitly controlling the class body. More explicit control is nevertheless exercised by the middle-class characters over working-class consumption. When Margaret tries to prevent the working-class Nicholas Higgins from drinking, she is explicitly controlling his consumption of alcohol, and the working-class body as a whole. Nicholas Higgins‘s drinking, which is presented as an occasional lapse caused by mental and physical distress rather than a vice with moral and social consequences, brings out the role of women, first of his daughter Bessy and then of Margaret Hale, as the controlling power. Similarly, when the new vicar of the Hales’ former home Helstone and his wife advise the working-class parishioners on how and what to eat and drink they are controlling their consumption. Further, although Mr. Thornton‘s scheme of collective food consumption is presented as partly an act of goodwill and partly an effort to increase work efficiency, it is nevertheless another explicit form of controlling working-class food consumption and another means to construct and reconstruct the class body.
In the narrative, fruits are used as sexual and romantic metaphor; they symbolise
Margaret‘s relationships with both Henry Lennox and Mr. Thornton. The pears in the Helstone garden symbolise not only Henry Lennox‘s romantic and sexual interest in Margaret but also her fall from innocence with the realisation that she is ripe to be consumed. On the other hand, the pear that Mr. Hale so deliberately peels and consumes in the garden represents not only his last moments of Edenic idyll but also that of his wife‘s and daughter‘s and their last moments of innocence before the fall which follows. The baskets of fruit that Mr. Thornton gives as gifts not only invite an allegorical reading of the evolving relationship between Margaret and Thornton but are also expressions of his feelings for her; they eventually transform him from a conventional representative of economic capital and bad taste into a possessor of what is considered good, or even legitimate, taste and thus a suitable mate for Margaret, the epitome of cultural capital. As such, the baskets of fruit are used by Mr Thornton to control and successfully redefine social and cultural boundaries. A more prosaic gift of food is given in Sylvia’s Lovers where a basket of sausages offered as a gift is used as an expression of compassion and as a definition of a social community. At the same time, it also articulates the female protagonist‘s dormant romantic feelings towards the recipient.