Ruth

Complete and unabridged, with 55 full-page plates by Richard Redgrave, George Morland and Thomas Lawrence. A fifteen-year-old dressmaker's apprentice is seduced and abandoned, and a dissenting minister and his sister take her in and pass her off as a widow — a lie that must eventually be paid for by someone. Gaskell, a Manchester minister's wife, published this in 1853; readers burned it, two men ...