Mary Barton (Oxford World's Classics) - Softcover

Gaskell, Elizabeth

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0192835106 ISBN 13: 9780192835109

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 1998

Synopsis

This is Elizabeth Gaskell's first novel, a widely acclaimed work based on the actual murder, in 1831, of a progressive mill owner. It 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. Set in Manchester, between 1837-42, it paints a powerful and moving picture of working-class life in Victorian England.

About this title

From the Publisher:

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From the Back Cover:

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. Gaskell’s work had great importance to the labour and reform movements, and it influenced writers such as Charles Dickens, Thomas Carlyle and Charlotte Brontė.

The plot of Mary Barton concerns the poverty and desperation of England’s industrial workers. Fundamentally, however, it revolves around Mary’s personal conflicts. She is already divided between an affection for an industrialist’s son, Henry Carson, and for a man of her own class, Jem Wilson. But Mary’s conflict escalates when her father, a committed trade unionist, is asked to assassinate Henry, who is the son of his unjust employer.

About this edition

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0192835106
• ISBN 13: 9780192835109
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 544
• Editor: Wright Edgar