Content Warning: This guide describes and discusses the source text’s treatment of child loss and domestic abuse.

The first-person authorial narrator of Mary Barton discusses her life in Manchester and her observation of people of all classes there. She says this has inspired her to write the novel, which she does not intend to take a specific side in the contemporaneous arguments about the working class. Instead, the novel will show the realistic struggles of the working classes in manufacturing towns like Manchester.

John Barton and George Wilson, two mill workers and neighbors, spend a summer day with their families in the country just outside of Manchester. Barton’s wife, Mary, is pregnant. She is distressed as her sister Esther has recently gone missing. Just before her disappearance, Esther hinted that one day she would come for the Bartons’ daughter, Mary, and make her a lady. Mrs. Barton has been especially nervous since the death of her young son, Tom. The Bartons’ teenage daughter Mary has tried to cheer them up since Tom died. John Barton tells George Wilson about his disdain for the upper classes and how he only trusts other poor men.