Mary Barton

Mary Barton is the first novel by Elizabeth Gaskell, published by Chapman and Hall in 1848 and set among the mill workers and mill owners of industrial Manchester in a decade of strikes, hunger and bad trade.

Mary is the daughter of a disillusioned trade unionist, and her story is bound up with her attempt to make a better life for herself and her father. She rejects her working-class suitor, Jem Wilson, in the hope of marrying Henry Carson, the son of a mill owner, and then Henry is shot dead in the street and Jem becomes the chief suspect. Mary is left painfully torn between the two men and between the two lives they stand for, and the novel follows her attempts to undo the damage before it is too late.

Gaskell dramatises the class divisions of the 1840s through personal tragedy rather than argument, giving the crowded courts and lodging houses of the city the attention a novel of manners would give a drawing room. At the centre of its political charge is the portrait of Mary's father, John Barton, an embittered and courageous activist whose grief and anger are treated with the same seriousness as the courtship plot.