Mary Barton
A Manchester family loses its income when the mills stop, and the novel follows what hunger does to politics. Gaskell wrote it after visiting the poorest districts of the city, and the early chapters read like reportage: courts, cellars, a woman giving birth in a room with no fire.
It is a first novel and sometimes a clumsy one, with a murder plot that sits awkwardly beside the social observation. But the awkwardness is revealing. Gaskell wanted to explain Chartism to readers who feared it, and she did it by making the Chartists specific people with addresses and debts.
Public-domain status
First published in 1848. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; Elizabeth Gaskell died in 1865, so this work has been free to republish there since 1936.
Read the text free
- Project Gutenberg, ebook no. 2153 — plain text, EPUB and Kindle, checked by us
- Internet Archive — scanned editions and free audiobooks
- Open Library — edition history and borrowable copies
Keep reading
- Bleak House — Charles Dickens, 1853
- Oliver Twist — Charles Dickens, 1838
- New Grub Street — George Gissing, 1891
- The Way We Live Now — Anthony Trollope, 1875
- Manchester — the city behind the books
- Reading lists — 19 ways through the collection
Find a print edition on Amazon · As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases. Disclosure