Elizabeth Gaskell’s
Mary Barton (1848) represents class conflict between mill and factory owners and their working-class employees in the northern English manufacturing city of Manchester at the tail end of the Industrial Revolution (c. 1760–1840). Gaskell’s later serial novel
North and South (1854–1855) also represents class conflict in a northern English industrial town. Gaskell was personally acquainted with the more famous Victorian novelists Charles Dickens (1812–1870) and Charlotte Brontë (1816–1855); in fact, Gaskell wrote the first biography of Charlotte Brontë,
The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857). As such, it seems possible that
Mary Barton may have influenced Dickens’s representation of the working poor in
Hard Times (1854), while Brontë’s stubborn and self-determining eponymous heroine in
Jane Eyre (1847) may have influenced Gaskell’s portrayal of spirited young women in her subsequently published novels. In addition to these possible influences, Gaskell explicitly alludes in
Mary Barton to William Shakespeare’s history play
Henry IV, Part I (c. 1597), Mary Shelley’s proto-science fiction novel
Frankenstein (1818), and the poetry of radical Samuel Bamford (1788–1872), indicating that Gaskell had read and may have been influenced by all these writers.