A History of Britain 13. Victoria and her Sisters (8 of 29)

A History of Britain

Children were given menial but dangerous jobs, like scavenging cotton fluff from beneath the moving machinery.
As bad as all this was, it was even worse when there were no jobs at all.
In the first years of Victoria's reign, hands were being laid off in tens of thousands.
It would be a woman, Elizabeth Gaskell, who would be the whistle blower, the first of Victoria's sisters to stick her neck out.
Amazingly, her blazing protest took the genteel form of a novel.
But what a book.
When "Mary Barton" was published in 1848, nobody, not even Charles Dickens, had gone as far as Gaskell in looking dead-on at the grim reality of industrial misery.

The middle-class wife of a Unitarian preacher, Gaskell took herself right into the lower depths of the city, to the gin palaces and open sewers, dark reeking alleys, where skin-and-bones children played among the rats.
In "Mary Barton" you didn't just see, you heard working-class Manchester in the pages of literature for the very first time.
To most of her readers, it must have been a language more foreign than French or German.