Did any other Victorian writer take on the issue of workers' rights to directly?

I appreciate the politics of Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South (1855), unusually forthright for a Victorian novel, with so much of the novel devoted to issues of workers' rights. It's not entirely clear where Gaskell stands on the issue, which is to her credit as a novelist - she captures well the positions of both labor and management - ultimately, I think she sides w/ labor, as the workers during the factory strike, and before the strike for that matter, are truly suffering whereas the factory owners are just defending a system that keeps them in power and in relative comfort - but give Gaskell credit for not making the factory owners, particularly Thornton, piggish or vulgar or unduly affluent, and some of the issues that the owners raise are with us still - the inability to compete w/ cheap foreign labor, for example (ironically, the cheap labor comes from the American factories). Gaskell builds the class conflict into a violent confrontation at the factory gates as the workers rally to protest the importation of cheap labor from Ireland. It's at this dramatic moment, about halfway through the novel, that the social and romantic story lines converge, as factory-owner Thornton, prompted by the heroine, Margaret Hale, who has been moved by the plight and poverty of the workers, bravely confronts the mob - and Margaret throws herself in front of Thornton as the mob charges. For the first time in his life, Thornton - who has been entirely devoted to commerce and not to romance - falls in love, but when he declares his love to Margaret she is outraged - she feels nothing for him, and thinks him to be peremptory in the extreme. Well, if this is truly a "comedy of manners," which I think it is, over the course of the narrative Margaret will have to choose between the 2 suitors, both of whom she's rejected. Maybe Gaskell will surprise me and Margaret will choose another course - independence, to the extent that was possible to one of her class and means in the 1850s? I'm not sure I'll get that far, however, N&S is a novel that I just keep hoping will be better, but it somehow lacks the narrative spark of other surviving Victorian-era fiction: The characters are flat, the plot just jolts along, incident upon incident. It's unusual and has probably endured because of its political and socioeconomic themes - did any other novelists of the time dare to take these on so directly? did any even depict a manufacturing culture, the source of British prosperity in the 19th century, so acutely? - but as literary fiction it's thin gruel; I'll probably read further for a day or w mioght might not hold out for 1,100 ibook pages, sorry.

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