Purchase one of 1st World Librarys Classic Books and help support our free internet library of downloadable eBooks. Visit us online at www.1stWorldLibrary.ORG - - I am an old woman now, and things are very different to what they were in my youth. Then we, who travelled, travelled in coaches, carrying six inside, and making a two days journey out of what people now go over in a couple of hours with a whizz and a flash, and a screaming whistle, enough to deafen one. Then letters came in but three times a week: indeed, in some places in Scotland where I have stayed when I was a girl, the...

In the county town of a certain shire there lived (about forty years ago) one Mr. Wilkins, a conveyancing attorney of considerable standing. The certain shire was but a small county, and the principal town in it contained only about four thousand inhabitants; so in saying that Mr. Wilkins was the principal lawyer in Hamley, I say very little, unless I add that he transacted all the legal business of the gentry for twenty miles round. His grandfather had established the connection; his father had consolidated and strengthened it, and, indeed, by his wise and upright conduct, as well as by...

Purchase one of 1st World Library's Classic Books and help support our free internet library of downloadable eBooks. Visit us online at www.1stWorldLibrary.ORG - - It is a great thing for a lad when he is first turned into the independence of lodgings. I do not think I ever was so satisfied and proud in my life as when, at seventeen, I sate down in a little three-cornered room above a pastry-cook's shop in the county town of Eltham. My father had left me that afternoon, after delivering himself of a few plain precepts, strongly expressed, for my guidance in the new course of life on which I...

In this Readers' Guide, Alison Chapman introduces and discusses the patterns of critical attention that Gaskell's work has attracted across the past hundred and fifty years. Beginning with contemporary press and critical reviews, and treatments by the Victorian and early twentieth-century literary establishment, the Guide sets out a background for the most recent and challenging reassessments of these novels, bringing the reader fully up to date on current critical approaches.

This Norton Critical Edition of Gaskell's first novel is based on the 1854 Fifth Edition, the last edition corrected by the author.

"Contexts" includes letters related to Mary Barton's publication as well as Gaskell's reaction to her harshest critics. Ten contemporary reviews reflect the dual nature of the novel's critical reception: one group valuing its eye-opening moral energy and concern for the suffering of the working classes and the other group taking Gaskell to task for the deceptive implications of her perceived flawed reasoning. A section featuring fifteen illustrations...

Mrs. Gaskell was a Victorian short story and novelist. Her biography of Charlotte Bronte is her most famous work. Gaskell's novels portray varied social classes. Gaskell saw and wrote about the problems caused by the gulf between the social classes. She fought for tolerance and better labor conditions. The Moorland Cottage was published in 1850.

RUTH (1853) by Elizabeth Gaskell is a compassionate story of a young woman seduced by a gentleman.

Ruth Hilton is a gently tragic Victorian heroine, the fallen woman who redeems herself by a life of charity, after she is taken in by a pastor and his family and given the veneer of respectability. But it is Ruth's own inner strength of heart, deeds, and moral standing that ultimately reaffirm her.