Mrs. Hale, the woman displaced by her husband’s conscientious concerns from the bucolic south of England to the industrial northern city of Milton (Manchester), has opinions about Milton and its residents. From the 2004 BBC series based on Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South:

The people here don’t want learning. They don’t want books and culture. It’s all money and smoke. That’s what they eat and breathe.

Not just in 19th-century Milton.