Assassination of Thomas Ashton

The assassination of Thomas Ashton, a British industrialist and mill-owner, took place at around 7:00 p.m. on 3 January 1831. Ashton was shot dead by striking workers in Manchester as a warning to their employers. The attack occurred in the midst of the rising tensions of the Victorian era due to the Industrial Revolution and the subsequent emergence of the Chartist and trade-union movements to combat the extreme poverty of major industrial cities such as Manchester at the time.

The assassination is widely considered to have inspired Elizabeth Gaskell's first novel, Mary Barton (1848). Gaskell, however, denied that she had based the book on Ashton's death.