Manchester
Manchester was the first city to be described as industrial in the modern sense, and the novels that made it visible were written by a woman who lived there. Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton and North and South take strikes, wages and mill accidents as subjects rather than background, and Dickens set Hard Times in a town modelled on Preston.
The John Rylands Library holds one of the great collections of early printed books and manuscripts in Britain, founded by a cotton merchant and his wife. Its reading rooms are a reminder that the wealth behind nineteenth-century literature and the wealth behind nineteenth-century mills often came from the same families.
A library to check
- John Rylands Research Institute and Library — catalogues and digital collections, open to readers online
Books connected to Manchester
- Mary Barton — Elizabeth Gaskell, 1848. The first industrial novel in English, written from inside the streets it describes.
- North and South — Elizabeth Gaskell, 1855. The best-balanced novel about the industrial dispute, with a heroine who has to learn what she is looking at.
- Hard Times — Charles Dickens, 1854. Dickens compressed into a fable, and the sharpest Victorian attack on education as accountancy.
A note on accuracy
We describe literary connections and public collections, not street addresses, opening hours or ticket prices. Those change and we cannot verify them for every reader. Follow the institution's own site for current visiting information.