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.
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