Mary Barton
In Manchester in the hungry forties a mill worker's daughter is courted by a young engineer of her own class and, in secret, by the mill owner's son, while her father, broken by a failed strike and by the deaths in his own house, carries the Chartists' petition to London and comes back with nothing. When one of the masters is shot, the two courtships and the two classes end up in the same courtroom. Gaskell wrote it in grief after losing her son, and it stands with Disraeli's industrial fiction as the founding text of the condition-of-England novel.
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Lineage
- parallels ↑ Sybil
- ↓ Sybil
- ↓ North and South
Attributes
Archetype (Jung / Campbell)
Plot structure
Symbol / motif
Conflict
Culture / tradition
Closest analogues
- 68% · 15 shared
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- 56% · 11 shared