Elizabeth Gaskell's first novel, Mary Barton (1848), took its direct impetus from both public and private concerns. On the one hand, Gaskell was moved, as she states in the novel's preface, by her ‘deep sympathy with the care-worn men’ (MB xxxv) whom she saw daily in the streets of Manchester, and by her commiseration with their sense of bitter injustice that their plight seemed to be ignored by the prosperous, especially by ‘the masters whose fortunes they had helped to build up’ (MB xxxv). She wished to ‘give some utterance to the agony which, from time to time, convulses this dumb people’ (MB xxxvi), and to cause her readers to reflect ‘on this unhappy state of things between those so bound to each other by common interests, as the employers and the employed must ever be’ (MB xxxv–xxxvi).

At the same time, Gaskell was seeking an outlet for her own personal agony: the trauma of losing her son, William, from scarlet fever when he was only nine months old. When she remarks, in Mary Barton: ‘Oh! I do think that the necessity for exertion, for some kind of action (bodily or mentally) in time of distress, is the most infinite blessing’ (MB 288), she is drawing a general principle from her own immediate experience. Significantly, it is through acknowledging that pain – the pain felt at the loss of a child – can cross class boundaries, that the gap between employer and employee (and, for that matter, between reader and working-class character) is temporarily dissolved within this novel.

Mary Barton has customarily been called a social problem novel, and classified alongside, for example, Benjamin Disraeli's Sybil (1845) and Charles Kingsley's Alton Locke (1850). The genre had, however, already established itself as particularly popular among women writers, thanks to works by, for example, Harriet Martineau, Frances Trollope, Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna and Eliza Meteyard. Arguably, because of its charitable, caring implications, it provided an opportunity for women to be able to write about public issues without being openly chided for being ‘unfeminine’. It was certainly a means whereby those with no political representation could hope to influence political decisions. Gaskell's novel deals not with the workplace, but with the effects of urban employment – and, more especially, unemployment – upon the family.