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Allusion
Explanation and Analysis—Individuals vs. Crowds:
The novel uses the motif of individuals versus crowds to suggest that as long as people see each other primarily as groups or classes, they'll tend to be wary or even antagonistic toward one another; it's only through individual, personal connections, the novel suggests, that genuine regard, much less social progress, becomes thinkable.
When Margaret is a newcomer to Milton, she feels overwhelmed each time she finds herself caught in the crowd of workers leaving the mills. The crush of people, and the common people's frank, inquisitive, and often teasing manner throws her off guard and doesn't endear Milton to her, especially compared to the quieter, more genteel settings she's used to. But when particular individuals—Bessy and Nicholas Higgins—emerge from the crowd one day and strike up a conversation with her, and she begins to get to know them as individuals, her attitude about the working class as a whole gradually changes, too.
Similarly, in Chapter 50, Nicholas Higgins and Thornton learn to see each other as individuals, instead of as just representatives of antagonistic classes (worker vs. employer):
Once brought face to face, man to man, with an individual of the masses around him […] they had each begun to recognize that ‘we have all of us one human heart.’
Note that Romantic poets frequently wrote against Victorian-era economic theorists, hence the allusion here to a line from William Wordsworth's poem "The Old Cumberland Beggar." The allusion—about everyone having "one human heart"—underscores the novel's point that when people get to know each other as individuals, they ideally come to recognize their common humanity.
Near the end of the book, in Chapter 51, Thornton even states the conviction that:
no mere institutions … can attach class to class as they should be attached, unless the working out of such institutions bring the individuals of the different classes into actual personal contact.
This statement reflects a notable change in Thornton's view of the relationship between classes. Earlier in the novel, he seems unable to conceive of that relationship in anything but the most combative, even warlike terms. Yet, now, he advocates for the classes to be "attached" through "personal contact." Significantly, this change of view comes about, in large part, through his personal contact, even friendship, with Higgins and leads to Thornton conducting his business with greater human sensitivity.
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