
                           Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell

                                  Mary Barton

                           A Tale of Manchester Life

                                    Preface

Three years ago I became anxious (from circumstances that need not be more fully
alluded to) to employ myself in writing a work of fiction. Living in Manchester,
but with a deep relish and fond admiration for the country, my first thought was
to find a framework for my story in some rural scene; and I had already made a
little progress in a tale, the period of which was more than a century ago, and
the place on the borders of Yorkshire, when I bethought me how deep might be the
romance in the lives of some of those who elbowed me daily in the busy streets
of the town in which I resided. I had always felt a deep sympathy with the
care-worn men, who looked as if doomed to struggle through their lives in
strange alternations between work and want; tossed to and fro by circumstances,
apparently in even a greater degree than other men. A little manifestation of
this sympathy, and a little attention to the expression of feelings on the part
of some of the work-people with whom I was acquainted, had laid open to me the
hearts of one or two of the more thoughtful among them; I saw that they were
sore and irritable against the rich, the even tenor of whose seemingly happy
lives appeared to increase the anguish caused by the lottery-like nature of
their own. Whether the bitter complaints made by them of the neglect which they
experienced from the prosperous - especially from the masters whose fortunes
they had helped to build up - were well-founded or no, it is not for me to
judge. It is enough to say, that this belief of the injustice and unkindness
which they endure from their fellow-creatures taints what might be resignation
to God's will, and turns it to revenge in many of the poor uneducated
factory-workers of Manchester.
    The more I reflected on this unhappy state of things between those so bound
to each other by common interests, as the employers and the employed must ever
be, the more anxious I became to give some utterance to the agony which, from
time to time, convulses this dumb people; the agony of suffering without the
sympathy of the happy, or of erroneously believing that such is the case. If it
be an error that the woes, which come with ever returning tide-like flood to
overwhelm the workmen in our manufacturing towns, pass unregarded by all but the
sufferers, it is at any rate an error so bitter in its consequences to all
parties, that whatever public effort can do in
