““consciousness. Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848) and North and South (1855), Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley (1849), George Eliot’s Silas Marner (1861) and many other such literary portrayals appeared in these years to testify to this growing attention. A novel might have been written about the travails of Davitt’s life too. As a child he was employed in the cotton industry, working in the local mills that resounded to the din of vast and deafening spinning machines that regularly nipped off workers’ limbs and scalps; in 1857, Davitt himself lost an arm to one of these machines and was dismissed from the works without compensation. In his teens, he managed to acquire an education””
