Mary Barton

Down a step into a Berry Street cellar, the brick floor wet with what the street oozes up, a mill hand lies dying of fever while his children ask for bread. John Barton, who has almost nothing himself, pawns his coat to feed them. He is also the man who will draw the lot to murder a mill owner's son. Gaskell will not let those two facts sit apart, and that refusal is the book. Barton carries the workers' petition to London, and Parliament refuses to hear it. His own son died for want of food he could not buy, in a city whose shop windows were full, and the tenderest heart in Manchester turns to opium and rage. She wrote it the year after her own baby died, at her husband's urging, and she knows what a burial club is worth to a man a few weeks behind on his payments. The wrong man is charged, and Mary, who knows whose hand it was, must chase a tide down the Mersey to save him without hanging her father.