'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.
In his introduction Maconald Daly discusses Elizabeth Gaskell's first
novel as a pioneering book that made public the great division between
rich and poor - a theme that inspired much of her finest work.