Elizabeth Gaskell's first novel depicts nothing less than the great
clashes between capital and labour, which arose from rapid
industrialisation and problems of trade in the mid-nineteenth century.
But these clashes are dramatized through personal struggles. John Barton
has to reconcile his personal conscience with his socialist duty,
risking his life and liberty in the process.
His daughter Mary
is caught between two lovers, from opposing classes - worker and
manufacturer. And at the heart of the narrative lies a murder which
implicates them all. Mary Barton was published in 1848, at a time of
great social ferment in Europe, and it reflects its revolutionary moment
through an English lens.
Elizabeth Gaskell wrote her first
novel about the world in which she lived - Manchester at the height of
the industrial revolution. As the wife of a Unitarian minister she was
solidly middle-class; but she also had close contact with the working
classes around her, sympathised with them, and represented their extreme
distresses in her fiction. She is radical in taking on their dialect,
imagining the realities of their lives, and placing a working woman at
the centre of her fiction.
If to our eyes her vision remains
limited, it was an honest vision, for which she was much criticised in
her own time, by her own class.
Mary Barton - Elizabeth Gaskell
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£2.50