Mary Barton

@ Ragereader

(5 stars)

dahszil

Your criticism of the first reader is petty and trivial. You know all the readers do this for free. And their unselfish work is provided free to all of us. If you don't like the readers than go and buy the chapters whose readers you dislike and seemingly with quite amount of malice. Lucy Burgoyne is a good mature UK reader. Her accent, dialect and tone I find charming. I listen to community radio stations who have internet across the British Isles. England by itself still has many dialects or accents. Here in the US our speech has become almost homogenized. Its either southern or mid atlantic states. the only exceptions would be older new yorkers and boston. Oh yes there is a small area in lower western New York State, Olean NY area. It is interesting, it is sort of a mixture of old NYC accent combined with southern, imho. I think a decent person restricts their criticisms to the author,writing style, characters, that sort of thing. I must confess i once or twice to criticize readers before i thought about what these wonderful volunteers do. Technical problems i thought was something to have a critique about. But librivox and IA are far from being adequately funded. Perhaps we should donate to some readers a better microphone or whatever. I do know a directional mic is better than the usual omnidirectional mic. But I am sure most readers are in economic difficulty like most of us under this globalized, rich get richer, poor get poorer type of capitalism. And this book reminds me that we today are being driven back to the huge wealth inequality of Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell's and Dicken's time. chapter 15: the allusion of uneducated working men in anger as becoming heartless like the monster that Dr.Frankenstein created. No, on the contrary Glaskell is wrong here. It was Dr.Frankenstein who was heartless, cruel(and cowardly). It was the world at that time, who confused beauty for goodness and thus the cruelty and homicidal fury against the monster with a "good heart" who like an abused child, becomes a violent abuser itself. This is analogous to the cruel rich and corrupted politicians who are responsible for their cruel treatment and exploitation of poor and workers, which naturally leads to the workers malice towards their cruel and selfish oppressors and exploiters. History has shown us, for all of the DIcken's style writers compassion, change and charity do little for a workers better quality of life and getting their fair share of their labors. No it was the workers struggles of the late 19th and early 20th century that gave them, and boosted the middle class, a better quality of life, not from the masters of industry and commerce. Even famous reform leaders of the mid 20th century like Franklin Delano Roosevelt in America and William Beveridge in Great Britain were driven by the millions in organized labour and the progressive middle class. Progressive Social reform is always led from the grass roots, from the bottom of the ediface. If somehow there were never workers or any other type of progressive movements like ecology, Today children would still be working 12 hour shifts in factories and the world's ecology mostly a thing of the past right here in the "west". Since Reagan and Thatcher we the people are getting pushed backed to Dicken's epoch. Today the struggle is that over production and consumption is so damaging our climate that mankind(gender neutral)may become extinct before this century is over. upadate: of course this is fiction, but i really wonder if people expressed their emotions so freely in the 19th century? And even more so the keeping in of emotion. Could it be that Gaskell and others of her genre are magnifying reality? although i must say that in our day where people in general seem like automatons only expressing quite crude emotions and only just a few types:anger, an aggressive manic type of laughing or just casual aplomb. i think we today should express more variations of emotions especially tender kindness and letting our tears flow more often. anger in relatively decent people is an outlet for pain which should be replaced by tears and crying for relief. dahszil male usa

Accents, English, Class, Oh My!

(4 stars)

TLocke

in listening to these books, and reading reviews, it is a bit of a reminder how homogenized and sanitized much of our media has become. There is an option here on Audiovox read by a Manchester man, if this reader doesn't suit. In US moving and mixing HAS flattened out accents, though East Coast still has people (older) and areas (poorer) where accents and even word meaning changes. A friend from Savannah, GA was sent to a dialect coach to lose her drawl as a upper level manager in NY, she was often asked to speak so "they can hear your accent". Her superior had strongly suggested it, she is now a Jr VP, and reclaimed it. As to mispronunciations, I SO appreciate the readers, a few word are like a gnat, a bit annoying, and leaves a choice of staying or moving off to different room.

Very good

(5 stars)

Barbie Chyqa

Before Ruth, there was Mary Barton. This is a much better story than that wad of depression. But, as always, Elizabeth Gaskell's commentary and critique of the English class system is severely limited by religion. You see it in every work of hers set in an industrial town. Any efforts the working class makes to try and get their due she criticises with Scripture, not understanding or not wanting to believe that Scripture was made to reinforce this kind of system. I wonder if she'd ever have escaped this rote if she'd lived longer.

@ dahszil

(0 stars)

librivoxbooks

Thanks for defending readers, but please quit lecturing reviewers when they post about a bad reader. They're allowed to post such things on the Archive site, and people find it useful to know if a reader has a strong accent or some other characteristic that might make it hard for me to listen. :) (TriciaG)

Great story

(5 stars)

ally

Everyone did a great job reading lady who read the first chapter and anther one in the book.... It was so bad i had to skip it... But other then that amazing read and great story.

excellent story, difficult understanding readers

(3 stars)

KK

It is a long, historical fiction, excellent story. There are some readers who are difficult to hear or understand due to either sound quality or diction.

(5 stars)

Elaine

I live this book; one of my favourite and well read by the volunteers here on LibriVox ; well done to you all and thankyou so much for your time

(4.5 stars)

A LibriVox Listener

Awesome book, most readers are amazing too, but sadly some are really hard to understand.