Things royal and industrial

My punishment for rubbishing "Hard Times" seems to be that I'm now possessed with the spirit of Slackbridge. That I should quarrel with my employer, who suddenly considers "telemarketing" - that's cold-calling to you or me - part of my job description when I was hired as an administrator, and that I should join the union in consequence, may not be that strange. But that I should watch the first episode of the TV adaptation of Gaskell's "North and South" and think "Cut wages to below the level of five years ago? Nah, that's not right, you go on strike lads" - now that really scares me.

I may be too early to tell, but I must admit that so far Gaskell's treatment of the industrial North is more nuanced that Dickens's and fairer that I expected from a "Christian Socialist" (I'm a Christian myself, but I don't care for the combination with "Socialist" at all - in fact I find it insulting, as if people with other political views were automatically bad Christians). The reasoning we get from both sides of the factory owner-worker quarrel is far more sensible than anything Bounderby or Stephen Blackpool came up with, which I agree is not saying much. It is refreshing that the tender-hearted heroine from the South is not always right: in fact she is sometimes blatantly naïve ("and all this for cotton no-one wants to buy!"). But didn't we have the whole "factory owner scarred by years of hardship" plot in Charlotte Brontë's "Shirley"? It irritates me that there has to an "excuse" for the fact that he is not dancing around kissing babies. Maybe what made factory owners of the nineteenth century somewhat edgy was not their own early experiences, but the annoyingness of bleeding-heart authors who swooped in, complained about their town, idealised their workforce and then "wanted some answers" about why things had to be the way they were.

I wonder what kind of early experiences could possibly have counted as an excuse for Henry VIII's style of leadership. Mind you, he's more kindly portrayed in "Wolf Hall" than one might expect, maybe in order to make us see why a sensible man like Wolsey would call him "the sweetest prince in Christendom". I've now read the whole novel and yes, it is good until the very end, though Wolsey is sorely missed after his demise by both Cromwell and the reader. It does suffer a bit from Tudor-novelitis, that is, too many "atmospheric" descriptions. I really don't care what the weather was like or how the trees or the water looked on this-and-this day. Give me another scene with überbitch Anne and her likewise bitchy ladies-in-waiting instead. I confess I thought Cromwell's interest in Jane Seymour, still an obscure (non-bitchy) attendant on Anne and nothing more, somewhat unlikely, but it does provide a cliffhanger. At the end of the novel, Cromwell is planning a visit to the Seymours' place Wolf Hall. We know butter-wouldn't-melt-Jane ended up with the king and not with "Master Secretary". So what happened there? I'll definitely be buying Mantel's next Cromwell book so I can find out.