"Some errors may certainly be detected in the details of your work [Mary Barton], but the wonder is that they are so few in number and so trifling in effect. The dialect I think might, have been given better, and some few incidents set forth with greater effect, but in describing the dwellings of the poor, their manners, their kindliness to each other, their feelings towards their superiors in wealth and station their faults, their literary tastes, and their scientific pursuits, as old Job Legh for example, you have been very faithful; of John Bartons, I have known hundreds, his very self in all things except his fatal crime, whilst of his daughter Mary, who has ever seen a group of our Lancashire factory girls or dress makers either, and could not have counted Mary? Nor is Jem Wilson, and I [am] proud to say it, a solitary character in the young fellows of our working population, noble as he is, but my heart fills as I write, and I cannot go on."