Mary Barton by Elizabeth Gaskell

Mary Barton by Elizabeth Gaskell

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.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781840226898
ISBN 10	1840226897
Title	Mary Barton
Author	Elizabeth Gaskell
Series	Wordsworth Classics
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Wordsworth Editions Ltd
Year published	2012-08-08
Number of pages	448
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable