Forever England: North and South

History ignores what literature does not: ordinary people, families, jobs, humble expectations, the etiquette of simply being alive. So history may divide England into two nations, the industrial North and the agricultural South, but it fails to examine the social and human roots of that notion -- unlike Beryl Bainbridge in this illuminating chronicle of six representative English families, three in the North and three in the South, which defines not only the geographical borders that divide them but also examines the circumstances of birth, class, economic opportunity, and social custom that confine them.