power, wealth and property:
"Don't think to come over me with the old tale, that the rich know nothing of the trials of the poor. I say, if they don't know, they ought to know. We are their slaves as long as we can work; we pile up their fortunes with the sweat of our brows; and yet we are to live as separate as if we were in two worlds; ay, as separate as Dives and Lazarus, with a great gulf betwixt us" (Barton, 1970, 45).
This gulf is the heart of the book. It is, in Gaskell's view, as she portrays it in this book, a gulf which will not easily be bridged, if ever. Accordingly, the suffering created by that gulf can be brought to an end only by extreme measures, if at all. Although the book moves toward suggestions of radicalism, the reader must wonder to what lengths the author would go to right socioeconomic wrongs. Nevertheless, the Bartons' lives are shaped and ruined
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