For students researching and debating the freedom vs. equity value topic, Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel, North and South, is food for thought. The novel, set in 1850, contrasts the traditions and values of the aristocratic south of England with the rapidly industrializing north. In the south people know their place and society is stable. But in the manufacturing towns in the north of England, textile mills are transforming society, offering higher wages but disrupting traditions and social stations. The fast expanding textile industry bring risks too, with busts following booms.
In addition to the novel, the BBC miniseries is now streaming [update March 2023] on Apple TV 
Gaskell (1810-1865) wrote novels that examined social issues and some were deeply critical of industrialization. Her novel North and South, originally serialized by Charles Dickens, compared the rural and aristocratic south of England with the rapidly industrializing north.
North and South has been recommended as an antidote or alternative to the anti-capitalism in many of Dickens’ novels. Gaskell portrays both the labor and business sides of the Industrial Revolution debate sympathetically.
North and South portrays the higher productivity and wages of manufacturing workers. Workers become less deferential to aristocrats as their higher incomes and economic freedoms allow them more food, larger homes, better clothing, and more choice of employment.
At one time, behind the debate was an ideological argument between the critics (especially Marxists) and the defenders of free markets. The critics, or pessimists, saw nineteenth-century England as Charles Dickens’s Coketown or poet William Blake’s “dark, satanic mills,” with capitalists squeezing more surplus value out of the working class with each passing year. The defenders, or optimists, saw nineteenth-century England as the birthplace of a consumer revolution that made more and more consumer goods available to ordinary people with each passing year. The ideological underpinnings of the debate eventually faded, probably because, as T. S. Ashton pointed out in 1948, the industrial revolution meant the difference between the grinding poverty that had characterized most of human history and the affluence of the modern industrialized nations. No economist today seriously disputes the fact that the industrial revolution began the transformation that has led to extraordinarily high (compared with the rest of human history) living standards for ordinary people throughout the market industrial economies. [Source]
North and South gives us a glimpse of the vast spirit of enterprise as cities like Manchester were industrializing. Lots of pollution, but pollution was a by-product of stunning gains in manufacturing productivity, and a stunning fall in the price of cloth and clothing, as new machines could make in hours what hand looms took days and weeks to produce.
The business hero of North and South decides, after building his successful enterprise, to get the education he couldn’t afford or didn’t time for as a young man. He hires a retired minister from the south of England to tutor him. As he learns though evening discussions with his tutor, he also discusses social issues and social justice with the minister’s daughter. She is unhappy to have had to move from her quiet rural life in the south of England to the rude, free-wheeling, chaotic busyness of the industrializing north.
They discuss freedom and equity in the realm of economics. And then they fall in love. What could be better?
