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Victoria and Albert's passion for each other was a strictly private matter.
维多利亚与阿尔伯特对彼此的激情是件非常私密的事。
But for countless numbers of Britons in the suffocatingly overcrowded industrial cities, like Manchester, bedroom privacy was an unimaginable luxury.
但是对于无数英国人生活在如曼彻斯特这样拥挤得令人窒息的工业城市，卧室隐私是无法想象的奢侈。
Manchester was the very best and the very worst, taken to terrifying extremes; a new kind of city in the world, the chimneys of industrial suburbs greeting you with columns of smoke.
曼彻斯特是最好的，也是最差的城市，它正走向可怕的极端，一种新型城市，在工业化的郊区迎接你的是烟囱排出的滚滚浓烟。
200,000 drones packed into the hive to make money for the lords of Cottonopolis.
二十万劳工涌进蜂房里，为棉都的贵族赚钱。
An American visitor, taken to Manchester's black spots, saw: Wretched, defrauded, oppressed, crushed human nature lying in bleeding fragments.
一位美国游客在曼彻斯特的阴暗角落看到，可怜的、被欺骗的、压抑的、崩溃的人性绝望地挣扎着求生。
And thanked God for not having been born poor in England.
感谢上帝没出身在英国的贫苦人家。
The cotton mills were brutally demanding task masters. Whole families spent almost all of their working hours tending to the machinery.
棉厂是苛刻而残忍的监工。整个家庭几乎将所有的工作时间都用在机器上了。
Children were given menial but dangerous jobs, like scavenging cotton fluff from beneath the moving machinery.
孩子们被迫从事卑下且危险的工作，如在转动的机器下面清除棉絮。
As bad as all this was, it was even worse when there were no jobs at all.
这已经很糟糕了，但没有工作的时候更糟。
In the first years of Victoria's reign, hands were being laid off in tens of thousands.
在维多利亚统治下的前几年，好几万工人失业。
It would be a woman, Elizabeth Gaskell, who would be the whistle blower, the first of Victoria's sisters to stick her neck out.
正是一位女性，伊丽莎白·盖斯凯尔揭开了这残忍的内幕，她是首位愿挺身而出的维多利亚姐妹。
Amazingly, her blazing protest took the genteel form of a novel. But what a book.
令人惊奇的是，她把她的强烈抗议写成了一本优雅的小说。这是怎样的一本书啊。
When "Mary Barton" was published in 1848, nobody, not even Charles Dickens, had gone as far as Gaskell in looking dead-on at the grim reality of industrial misery.
当《玛丽·巴顿》在1848年出版时，没有人，即使是查尔斯·狄更斯，也没像盖斯凯尔一样完全正确地看清了工业苦难的严酷现实。
The middle-class wife of a Unitarian preacher, Gaskell took herself right into the lower depths of the city, to the gin palaces and open sewers, dark reeking alleys, where skin-and-bones children played among the rats.
身为中产阶级唯一神教派传教士的妻子，盖斯凯尔亲身体验了这座城市的底层生活，低俗的酒馆、敞开的阴沟、黑暗恶臭的小巷，骨瘦如柴的孩子们在老鼠堆中玩耍。
In "Mary Barton", you didn't just see, you heard working-class Manchester in the pages of literature for the very first time.
在《玛丽·巴顿》的字里行间，你不仅首次看到那些景象，也能听见工人阶级在曼彻斯特的呻吟。
To most of her readers, it must have been a language more foreign than French or German.
对于大多数读者，书中的语言肯定比法语或德语更加陌生。
We donnot want dainties, we want bellyfuls. We donnot want their grand houses, we want a roof to cover us from the rain, the snow and the storm.
我们不想要美味佳肴，只求填饱肚子。我们不想要他们的豪宅，只求有一片能替我们遮风挡雨的屋檐。
Ay, and not alone to covers us, but the helpless ones that cling to us in the keen wind and ask us with their eyes why we brought them into the world to suffer.
不对，不只为我们自己，也为那些在刺骨寒风中依偎着我们的无助孩子，他们的眼神仿佛在质问着我们为何要将他们带到这世上遭罪。
By the time you'd finished "Mary Barton", one word, struck like a hammer over and over again, would have lodged in your memory. That word was "Clemmed" -- starved.
当你读完《玛丽·巴顿》后，有个词会像锤子一样不停地敲打你的心，会铭刻在你的记忆里。那个词就是"饥饿"--也就是挨饿。
You say it, and you call up the entire knife-edge world of struggling to survive that Elizabeth Gaskell had created.
说一遍，就会想起伊丽莎白·盖斯凯尔描述的那生活在刀尖、挣扎着生存的社会。
Elizabeth Gaskell believed that honest graphic social reporting could make a difference.
伊丽莎白·盖斯凯尔相信真实的社会报告可以起作用。
She wrote to her cousin: My poor "Mary Barton" Is stirring up all sorts of angry feelings against me in Manchester.
她这样写给她的堂妹：我可怜的《玛丽·巴顿》在曼彻斯特激起了无数针对我的愤怒。
But those best acquainted with the way of thinking and feeling among the poor acknowledge its truth, which is the acknowledgement I most of all desire, because evils being once recognized, are halfway on towards their remedy.
但那些最了解穷人的思考和感受方式的人承认这样的事实，这是我最渴望的，因为恶魔一旦被认出，就离他们的救赎不远了。
