Characters
- Mary Barton — The eponymous character, a very beautiful girl.
- Mrs Mary Barton — Mary's mother, who dies early on.
- John Barton — Mary's father, a millworker, active member in trade unions.
- George Wilson — John Barton's best friend, a worker at Harry Carson's mill.
- Jane Wilson — George Wilson's wife, short-tempered.
- Jem Wilson — Son of George and Jane, an engineer and inventor who has loved Mary from his childhood.
- Mr Henry Carson — Wealthy owner of a mill in Manchester.
- Harry Carson — Son of Henry Carson, attracted to Mary.
- Alice Wilson — George Wilson's sister, a pious old washerwoman, herbalist, sick-nurse.
- Margaret Jennings — Neighbour of Alice, blind, a sometime singer, a friend to Mary.
- Job Legh — Margaret's grandfather, a self-taught naturalist.
- Ben Sturgis — An old sailor, who looks after Mary during her stay in Liverpool.
- Will Wilson — Alice's nephew (Jem's cousin), whom she raised after the death of his parents. A sailor, he falls in love with Margaret.
- Esther (last name unknown) — Sister of Mrs Mary Barton, she is a fallen woman and on the periphery for most of the story.
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Famous quotes containing the word characters:
“I cannot be much pleased without an appearance of truth; at least of possibility—I wish the history to be natural though the sentiments are refined; and the characters to be probable, though their behaviour is excelling.”
—Frances Burney (1752–1840)
“The business of a novelist is, in my opinion, to create characters first and foremost, and then to set them in the snarl of the human currents of his time, so that there results an accurate permanent record of a phase of human history.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“Unresolved dissonances between the characters and dispositions of the parents continue to reverberate in the nature of the child and make up the history of its inner sufferings.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)