The Trying Times of Industrial Manchester

Factory owners engage in daily feasts with their families, whereas the hard-working factory workers barely get by with enough daily bread to feed their families once a week. These are the times of the working class life in industrial Manchester. As Elizabeth Gaskell portrays in Mary Barton, the hardships the working class had to endure on a daily basis were numerous and never-ending. There is a great divide between the rich and the poor. Those of wealth are portrayed as the power bearers, and those of the working class struggle to rely on the bare necessities of life to find comfort and happiness. Issues of poverty, class-divisions, death, as well as family, are prevalent throughout the novel. These factors influence the lives of the working class, and are revealed in Mary Barton through the depiction of the roles of women, the hardships of the working class men, and of the power hungry wealthy men who take for granted those workers that provide them their every need.
Women have...