Mary Barton (Broadview Literary Texts)

About this book

Mary Barton first appeared in 1848 and has since become one of the best known novels on the condition of England part of a nineteenth-century British trend to understand the enormous cultural economic and social changes wrought by industrialization. Gaskells work had great importance to the labour and reform movements and it influenced writers such as Charles Dickens Thomas Carlyle and Charlotte Bront. The plot of Mary Barton concerns the poverty and desperation of Englands industrial workers. Fundamentally however it revolves around Marys personal conflicts. She is already divided between an affection for an industrialists son Henry Carson and for a man of her own class Jem Wilson. But Marys conflict escalates when her father a committed trade unionist is asked to assassinate Henry who is the son of his unjust employer.