Mary Barton

Mary Bartonis a powerful, angry story of personal tragedy and social injustice. Its heroine Mary, the daughter of a disillusioned trade unionist, rejects her working-class lover Jem in the hope of marrying the mill owner's son Henry Carson and making a better life. But when Henry is shot and Jem becomes the main suspect, she finds herself painfully torn between the two men. Elizabeth Gaskell's pioneering 1848 novel vividly dramatized the 'hungry forties', and made public the great division between rich and poor.