"Both Carlyle and Charles Dickens were admirers of Mrs Gaskell and Mary Barton. For although there had been "social realist" novels before, there had been nothing quite like this... Nothing escapes her steely attentiveness: the gin palaces, the open sewers, even the sad little patches of wild flowers hanging on to scraps of dirt amidst the smoke and grime. For the first time, too, in the pages of Mary Barton the polite middle-class reader in Herne Hill or Bath could hear the voice of working-class Manchester... "Clemmed" – starved – is the word that strikes like a hammer blow over and over again in Mary Barton."