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Mary Barton

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Overview

'O Jem, her father won't listen to me, and it's you must save Mary! You're like a brother to her'

Mary Barton, the daughter of disillusioned trade unionist, rejects her working-class lover Jem Wilson in the hope of marrying Henry Carson, the mill owner's son, and making a better life for herself and her father. But when Henry is shot down in the street and Jem becomes the main suspect, Mary finds herself painfully torn between the two men. Through Mary's dilemma, and the moving portrayal of her father, the embittered and courageous activist John Barton, Mary Barton (1848) powerfully dramatizes the class divides of the 'hungry forties' as personal tragedy. In its social and political setting, it looks towards Elizabeth Gaskell's great novels of the industrial revolution, in particular North and South.

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Author Information

Bio of Elizabeth Gaskell

English novelist and short-story writer, famed as the first biographer of Charlotte Bronte. Gaskell is known for her narrative which is marked by compassion, and is reflective of her interest in various aspects of society. Her original name was Elizabeth Stevenson and she married William Gaskell in 1832. She started her literary career with the novel Mary Barton, a Tale of Manchester Life. It was anonymously published in 1848 and was instantly successful. After its publication, Charles Dickens requested her to write for his magazine, Household Words. It was in this magazine that her next work Cranford (1853) was published. Gaskell wrote her friend Charlotte Bronte's biography, The Life of Charlotte Bronte in 1857. Gaskell's other works include The Moorland Cottage (1850), North and South (1855), Sylvia's Lovers (1863), and Wives and Daughters (1866).

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Additional Info

Imprint

Penguin Group, Inc.

Filesize

1.27 MB

Number of Pages

464

eBook ISBN

9781429533980

Excerpt from: Mary Barton by Elizabeth Gaskell

almost visibly fluttered into life; and the willows, which that morning had had only a brown reflection in the water below, were now of that tender grey-green which blends so delicately with the spring harmony of colours.

Groups of merry and somewhat loud-talking girls, whose ages might range from twelve to twenty, came by with a buoyant step. They were most of them factory girls, and wore the usual out-of-doors dress of that particular class of maidens; namely, a shawl, which at midday or in fine weather was allowed to be merely a shawl, but towards evening, if the day was chilly, became a sort of Spanish mantilla or Scotch plaid, and was brought over the head and hung loosely down, or was pinned under the chin in no unpicturesque fashion.

Their faces were not remarkable for beauty; indeed, they were below the average, with one or two exceptions; they had dark hair, neatly and classically arranged, dark eyes, but sallow complexions and irregular features. The only thing to strike a passer-by was an a