Mary Barton

In these days of ‘a living wage for all’, shorter working hours and protective measures for workers, ‘Mary Barton’ is a glimpse into a very different England. Social historians may outline the life of a city such as Manchester in the eighteen-fourties, but it is in novels like ‘Mary Barton’ with its factual portrayal of the privations experienced by the operatives, when England was being transformed from a rural into an industrial society, that a true picture emerges. Mrs Gaskell is not campaigning. Chartist ideals were far from her mind. She held a simple that men should be ‘treated as brethren and friends by their employers’. It was a thing worth trying and until it was attempted there could be no industrial peace.