Mary Barton - Softcover

Gaskell, Elizabeth

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0460015982 ISBN 13: 9780460015981

Publisher: Dutton Adult, 1972

Synopsis

In these days of 'a living wage for all', shorter working hours and protective measures for workers, 'Mary Barton' is a glimpse into a very different England. Social historians may outline the life of a city such as Manchester in the eighteen-fourties, but it is in novels like 'Mary Barton' with its factual portrayal of the privations experienced by the operatives, when England was being transformed from a rural into an industrial society, that a true picture emerges. Mrs Gaskell is not campaigning. Chartist ideals were far from her mind. She held a simple creed: that men should be 'treated as brethren and friends by their employers'. It was a thing worth trying and until it was attempted there could be no industrial peace.

About this title

From the Publisher

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From the Back Cover

Mary Barton first appeared in 1848, and has since become one of the best known novels on the ‘condition of England,’ part of a nineteenth-century British trend to understand the enormous cultural, economic and social changes wrought by industrialization. Gaskell’s work had great importance to the labour and reform movements, and it influenced writers such as Charles Dickens, Thomas Carlyle and Charlotte Brontė.

The plot of Mary Barton concerns the poverty and desperation of England’s industrial workers. Fundamentally, however, it revolves around Mary’s personal conflicts. She is already divided between an affection for an industrialist’s son, Henry Carson, and for a man of her own class, Jem Wilson. But Mary’s conflict escalates when her father, a committed trade unionist, is asked to assassinate Henry, who is the son of his unjust employer.

About this edition

• Publisher: Dutton Adult
• Publication date: 1972
• ISBN 10: 0460015982
• ISBN 13: 9780460015981
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 372