"Mary Barton" (AKA "Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester"), the 1848 debut novel of Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell tells of the Victorian working class in Manchester, a city in England, from 1839 to 1842.
"Mary Barton" focuses on political and domestic issues. The title character serves as the first person narrative voice. There are differing views as to whether or not the narrator is the alter ego of the author. Gaskell instils social class and time period realism by using working class dialect and colloquial speech and also with literary references. A good portion of the novel is devoted to comparisons between classes on the opposite ends of the economic spectrum.
"Mary Barton" is a widely acclaimed work based on the actual murder, in 1831, of a progressive mill owner.The novel follows Mary Barton, daughter of a man implicated in the murder, through her adolescence, when she suffers the advances of the mill owner, and later through love and marriage.
