Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life (Penguin Classics)

by ElizabethGaskell (Author), Angus Easson (Foreword), Macdonald Daly (Foreword)

• Used

  Hardcover
  1993

  $11.82

• Used

  Paperback
  1996

  $3.25

  Mary Barton(1848),subtitled 'A Tale of Manchester Life',is the first novel by Mrs Gaskell(1810-65).The entirely working-class cast of characters in this novel was then an innovation.The background story is Manchester in the 'hungry forties'and the acute poverty of the unemployed mill-hands. Mary Batson,daughter of an embittered worker,wins the attention of Henry Carson,son of one of the employers.But a group of workmen plot his murder as a warning to his class,and it falls upon Mary's father to perform the deed.Suspicion lies with Mary's working class admirer,Jed,who is tried for his life.Finally,John Barton is driven by guilt to confess.

• Used

  Hardcover
  1994

  $3.25

  This is a tale of Dives and Lazarus, of the comfortable pinnacle and the miserable base of the Victorian social pyramid. It is told, however, without simplification and without hatred.

• New

  paperback
  

  $11.03

  Elizabeth Gaskell's remarkable first novel, Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life portrays a love that defies the rigid boundaries of class with tragic consequences. This Penguin Classics edition is edited with an introduction and notes by MacDonald Daly. 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 Chartist agitator John Barton, Mary Barton 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. Macdonald Daly's introduction discusses Gaskell's first novel as a pioneering work in the recognition of the conditions of the poor and working class; this edition also contains full notes and a chronology of Gaskell's life. Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-65) was born in London, but grew up in the north of England in the village of Knutsford. In 1832 she married the Reverend William Gaskell and had four daughters, and one son who died in infancy. Her first novel, Mary Barton, was published in 1848, winning the attention of Charles Dickens, and most of her later work was published in his journals. She was also a lifelong friend of Charlotte Bronte, whose biography she wrote. If you enjoyed Mary Barton, you might like George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss, also available in Penguin Classics.