Mary Barton : A Tale of Manchester Life

from atimco

Mary Barton is, like Elizabeth Gaskell's more famous novel North and South, set in a manufacturing town and is concerned with the wide inequities between the working and master classes. Published in 1848, this is Gaskell's first novel and sets the stage for the major concerns she would highlight ...

from lit_chick

2011, AudioGO Audiobooks, Read by Juliet Stevenson Mary Barton is set in 1840s working-class Manchester. The young heroine, who lives alone with her hardened and bitter trade-unionist father, John, has attracted the attention of two suitors. Jem Wilson, also working class, is an intelligent, hard...

from arubabookwoman

I enjoyed this depiction of the life of a factory girl in Manchester in the mid 19th century. It portrayed all classes of society, and clearly depicted the travails of the working class, and the privileges of the factory owner. Mary was a lovely character, developing from a naive young girl to a ...

from Herenya

Mary Barton is all about the difficulties confronting the working class in Manchester in the 1840s in "a period of industrial unrest and extreme deprivation". There is much that one could say about this (and much that I shall say if I write essays on it) but this is more a reader's opinion than a...

from wiremonkey

A contemporary of Dickens, Gaskell portrays the horrors of the disenfranchised poor working class.Although she can't get away from the prejudices of her own time (she tends to talk about the poor as if they were a different species and is all amazement and wonderment when they are able to reatian...