MARY BARTON (Annotated)

Mary Barton (1848) is a searching social novel set in industrial Manchester during the "hungry forties," tracing the lives of working-class families amid unemployment, Chartist agitation, class estrangement, and moral crisis. Combining domestic realism, melodramatic suspense, and documentary attention to urban poverty, Gaskell constructs both a murder plot and a compassionate inquiry into the cond...