In Mary Barton, Elizabeth Gaskell uses the figure of Esther, Mary's aunt, not just to suggest the pressures which can force awoman into prostitution – the need for money with which to feed her sick daughter, in Esther's case – but to make a plea for understanding this category of woman: ‘To whom shall the outcast prostitute tell her tale?Whowill give her help in the dayof need? Hers is the lepersin, and all stand aloof dreading to be counted unclean’ (MB 185).

Gaskell provided an immediate answer to her apparently rhetorical questions in the short story ‘Lizzie Leigh’ (1850), which centres round a young prostitute rescued by her country mother. Despite stressing the power of one maternal bond, however, Gaskell apparently found it necessary – perhaps for reasons of propriety, perhaps for reasons of pathos – to kill off Lizzie's illegitimate daughter. Ruth, her next novel, published early in 1853, dealt directly with a closely linked social question, the bearing of an illegitimate child, albeit to a woman who in no way could be thought of as a professional prostitute. To some extent, though, Ruth was probably directly prompted by discussion concerning prostitution. In 1850, Gaskell's Manchester friend W. R. Greg published an article entitled ‘Prostitution’ in the Westminster Review, in which he laments that ‘no ruler or writer has yet been found with the nerve to face the sadness, the resolution to encounter the difficulties’ of tackling this subject. Both writer and audience are implied when he claims that ‘it is discreditable to a woman to know of their existence’. In this article, Greg stresses the ‘pure unknowingness’ of young girls who are led on, unwittingly, by more knowing seducers. He emphasizes social double standards, and elaborates on the theme of ‘Lizzie Leigh’, that the prodigal son inevitably meets with far more sympathetic treatment than the prodigal daughter. Not withstanding, he helps to consolidate the dominant narrative of the ‘fallen woman’ who, having taken her first fatal step, inevitably faces an ‘appalling doom’. The plot of Gaskell's novel only partly challenges the inevitability of this narrative in itself: however, the reader's response is manipulated to ensure that we query the justice inherent in assuming such inevitability.