John Thornton Timeline and Summary

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• John Thornton shows up looking for Mr. Hale after he (Mr.Hale) and his family have moved to Milton. Thornton instead meets with Margaret, who acts very haughtily toward him. He leaves feeling like he doesn't like Margaret very much.
• Over the next few months, Thornton often visits the Hales' house, where he gets into impromptu debates with Margaret over how he should run his factory and treat his workers.
• Meanwhile, a workers' strike happens. Rather than let his employees dictate what he should pay them, Mr. Thornton imports some cheap labor from Ireland to run his factory. His regular workers don't like this strategy (huh, wonder why?) so an angry mob comes to his house.
• Margaret shows up at his house at the same time as the mob and defends him against them. She ends up getting hit in the head with a rock.
• Amazed by Margaret's generosity, Mr. Thornton proposes marriage to her. She refuses, saying that she is too good for him. Thornton is crushed.
• Later on, Thornton sees Margaret walking arm-in-arm with a young man late at night. He doesn't realize that the young man is Margaret's fugitive brother, Frederick. He gets jealous and assumes the young man is Margaret's lover.
• When Thornton later finds out that Margaret has lied to the police about being at the train station with a young man, Thornton covers for her and gets the investigation closed before she can get caught in a lie.
• As time goes on, Mr. Thornton finds out about Margaret's mother's death. He even attends her funeral.
• A worker named Nicholas Higgins come to Thornton looking for a job. Thornton wants nothing to do with him because he's a political agitator, but after finding out that it was Margaret who sent Higgins to him, he reconsiders.
• Before you know it, Thornton has hired Higgins and has started treating his workers a lot more kindly. He even builds a massive dining room onto his factory in order to provide meals to his workers and to eat with them.
• Thornton is devastated when he finds out that Mr. Hale has died and that Margaret will be moving to London. He imagines he'll never see her again.
• After Margaret leaves, Thornton falls on hard times. It turns out that the workers' strike took a bigger bite out of his business than he first thought. Importing the cheap labor from Ireland only led to more delays and loss of revenue. Now he's in deep with his creditors and needs to spend every cent he has to repay them.
• At the last second, his brother-in-law offers him a risky investment opportunity that could make him rich. Thornton makes the moral decision not to risk other people's money. The investment ends up working out and making his in-law look like a genius, but Thornton is still proud that he acted responsibly.
• After Margaret Hale inherits all the property of the recently deceased Mr. Bell, Thornton becomes her tenant. He travels to London in order to seek her permission to sublet his house in order to cover his debts.
• When he sees Margaret in London, Margaret offers him a loan to keep his business going. She has come to respect him deeply, especially since he has become such a friend to workers.