The Victorian era also saw Birmingham featuring as a setting for novelists from outside the town, placing it at the forefront of the fictional representation of industrial England's major urban centres.[67] Five years before Elizabeth Gaskell's 1848 portrayal of Manchester in Mary Barton, and nine years before Charles Dickens' Hard Times was loosely set in Preston, Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna gave a graphic depiction of working life in Birmingham in her 1843 four-part novel The Wrongs of Woman, emphasising the exploitation of women in backstreet factories and the corrosive influence of industrial employment.[68] The anonymously-written 1848 novella How to Get on in the World: The Story of Peter Lawley presented a more optimistic view, showing the positive consequences of learning to read for the poverty-stricken son of a Birmingham nailer.[69] George Gissing's Eve's Ransom of 1894 presented Birmingham as a bustling metropolis of questionable values, with traffic "speedily passing from the region of main streets and great edifices into a squalid district of factories and workshops and crowded by-ways",[70] while Mabel Collins used Birchampton – a thinly disguised Birmingham – as the setting for her gothic novel The Star Sapphire of 1896.[71] Passing references in more widely set fiction also provide evidence of Birmingham's growing significance in the culture of Victorian England.