Elizabeth Gaskell spoke of the ‘unhappy state of things’ in her debut novel, Mary Barton and explored the issue again in her later work North and South. She was one of a number of authors concerned with the divide between the rich and poor. Contemporaries such as Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, Charles Kingsley, Fanny Trollope and Harriet Martineau shared her concerns in novels such as Hard Times, Bleak House, Shirley and Michael Armstrong: Factory Boy. So what answers
