Cinders and Smoke

Exploitation and strike: Milton’s laissez-faire world

“You and your ilk are blessed with the riches wrung from our very bones, the muscles of the damned.
“You see us as nothing more than the animals you need to make the cloth you sell to pay for your houses and drink. You would cast us off in an instant and damn us for being lazy if age and injury kept us from working all out.
“Miss Hale considers us men.” Nicholas Higgins to John Thornton in Cinders and Smoke

A river of yarn cuts Milton in two. On one side: mill owners rest secure in their wealth…and confident that the government will send the militia to put down “revolution.” On the other: workers secure only in knowing that every day is one day closer to the grave, be it from fluff burrowing into their lungs or slow starvation sapping their strength as they work longer for less.

The men of the mills did the only thing they could: they went out on strike. Trouble brewed when the masters imported Irish labor to fill their places at the water frames and looms.

Into this world step three who seek the middle path: Marlborough Mills’ master John Thornton, vicar’s daughter Margaret Hale, and union leader Nicholas Higgins. A dinner at the master’s house is interrupted by a riot that injures Miss Hale—and plunges Thornton into an emotional night. Yet the unexpected counsel of one man guides him to a denouement that draws him toward the light and shapes his future.

“…every pulse beat in him as he remembered how she had come down
And placed herself in foremost danger,—could it be to save him?”
Chapter XXII, North and South

Much like Elizabeth Gaskell’s magisterial North and South, Cinders and Smoke is a romance wrapped in Victorian social commentary. This 12,500-word novelette is set in the same universe as the author’s Bennet Wardrobe Series.