Mary Barton

A Manchester mill-worker's daughter, a murdered master's son and a father driven into the Chartist movement by hunger. Gaskell wrote it after her own baby died, to have something to do, and the mill-owners of Manchester never forgave her for it. It was among the first English novels to take the industrial poor seriously as people. Fifty-nine plates drawn from Fildes and Millais and their peers, spanning 1800 to 1927, gather the faces of the poor, the sick and the overlooked that Gaskell was among the first to set at the centre of an English novel.