Audiobook · read by volunteers
Mary Barton
Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell (1810–1865)
Read by Lucy Burgoyne (1950-2014), Lee Ann Howlett, Wendy Belcher, Kim S, Dawn, Maire Rhode, senshisteph, Anna Dailey, ayngelwing, Sibella Denton · 38 chapters · 15 h 57
About the book
Manchester in the 1830s and 1840s is a city of mills and cellars, where the rich and the poor live a few streets apart and hardly know each other. Mary Barton, a mill worker’s daughter, is pulled between two admirers and then into a crisis that threatens her father and the man she loves. Elizabeth Gaskell’s first novel looks hard at hunger, strikes, sickness and the anger of working people, yet it never loses sight of the family at its centre. Gaskell writes with compassion for characters on both sides of the divide and a sharp eye for everyday detail. The thirty-eight chapters, read by ten LibriVox volunteers, run for around sixteen hours. If you like Victorian fiction that cares about real lives and social questions, this is a powerful and moving place to begin.
Introduction
Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell lived from 1810 to 1865 and was one of the leading English novelists of the Victorian age. She went on to write Cranford, North and South and a life of her friend Charlotte Brontë. Mary Barton, published in 1848, was her first novel; it appeared anonymously and was an immediate success, and Dickens soon invited her to write for his magazine Household Words. It is set in Manchester during the 1830s and 1840s and dwells on the hardships of working people in a time of industrial change, unemployment and sharp inequality.
Gaskell lived in Manchester as the wife of a minister, and she knew the people and districts she describes. That closeness gives the book its authority. It belongs to the group of social novels, sometimes called industrial novels, that tried to bring the conditions of working people to the attention of a middle-class readership. Its subtitle, A Tale of Manchester Life, makes the aim plain.
The novel mixes domestic drama, romance and political tension, and some of its sections turn on trade disputes and the bitterness they provoked. Its dialect passages, which show how people actually spoke, are one of its lasting interests, as is its attempt to understand rather than condemn.
The recording has thirty-eight chapters, divided among ten LibriVox volunteers, and lasts about sixteen hours. It is a substantial listen, but the chapters are well shaped and can be taken a few at a time. Today it remains valuable as both a gripping story and a window on a city and a society in the middle of enormous change.
Public domain
Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell died in 1865: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text