Before Elizabeth Gaskell's famous North and South and Cranford, there was Mary Barton. Set in Manchester England in the mid-nineteenth century, Mary Barton was revolutionary in the way it tackled the relationship between poor mill workers and the wealthier manufacturers. This first book by Elizabeth Gaskell delves into the desperate lives of the working poor in Northern England, much in the way Dickens shone light on London's lowest classes. In Gaskell's eyes, prostitutes are selfless, murderers are penitent, and the poor are heroes.