Mary Barton
Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life was the first novel by English author Elizabeth Gaskell, first published in 1848. The story is set in the English city of Manchester between 1839 and 1842, and deals with the difficulties faced by the Victorian working class.
Plot summary
The novel begins in Manchester, where we are introduced to the Bartons and the Wilsons, two working-class families. John Barton is a questioner of the distribution of wealth and the relations between rich and poor. Soon his wife dies—he blames it on her grief over the disappearance of her sister Esther. Having already lost his son Tom at a young age, Barton is left to raise his daughter, Mary, alone and now falls into depression and begins to involve himself in the Chartist, trade-union movement.Chapter 1 takes place in the countryside where Greenheys is now.
Mary takes up work at a dressmaker's and becomes subject to the affections of hard-working Jem Wilson and Harry Carson, son of a wealthy mill owner. She fondly hopes, by marrying Carson, to secure a comfortable life for herself and her father, but immediately after refusing Jem's offer of marriage she realizes that she truly loves him. She, therefore, decides to evade Carson, planning to show her feelings to Jem in the course of time. Jem believes her decision to be final, though this does not change his feelings for her.
Meanwhile, Esther, a "street-walker," returns to warn John Barton that he must save Mary from becoming like her. He simply pushes her away, however, and she's sent to jail for a month on the charge of vagrancy. Upon her release, she talks to Jem with the same purpose. He promises that he will protect Mary and confronts Carson, eventually entering into a fight with him, which is witnessed by a policeman passing by.
Not long afterward, Carson is shot dead, and Jem is arrested for the crime, his gun having been found at the scene. Esther decides to investigate the matter further and discovers that the wadding for the gun was a piece of paper on which is written Mary's name.
She visits her niece to warn her to save the one she loves, and after she leaves Mary realizes that the murderer is not Jem but her father. She is now faced with having to save her lover without giving away her father. With the help of Job Legh, Mary travels to Liverpool to find the only person who could provide an alibi for Jem – Will Wilson, Jem's cousin and a sailor, who was with him on the night of the murder. Unfortunately, Will's ship is already departing, so that, after Mary chases after the ship in a small boat, the only thing Will can do is promise to return in the pilot ship and testify the next day.
During the trial, Jem learns of Mary's great love for him. Will arrives in court to testify, and Jem is found "not guilty". Mary has fallen ill during the trial and is nursed by Mr. Sturgis, an old sailor, and his wife. When she finally returns to Manchester she has to face her father, who is crushed by his remorse. He summons John Carson, Harry's father, to confess to him that he is the murderer. Carson is still set on justice, but after turning to the Bible he forgives Barton, who dies soon afterward in Carson's arms. Not long after this Esther comes back to Mary's home, where she, too, soon dies.
Jem decides to leave England, where, his reputation damaged, it would be difficult for him to find a new job. The novel ends with the wedded Mary and Jem, their little child, and Mrs. Wilson living happily in Canada. The news comes that Margaret has regained her sight and that she and Will, soon to be married, will visit.
Characters
- Mary Barton – The eponymous character, a very beautiful girl.
- Mrs. Mary Barton – Mary's mother, who dies early on.
- John Barton – Mary's father, a millworker, an active member in trade unions.
- George Wilson – John Barton's best friend, a worker at John Carson's mill.
- Jane Wilson – George Wilson's wife, short-tempered.
- Jem Wilson – Son of George and Jane, an engineer and inventor who has loved Mary from his childhood.
- John Carson – Wealthy owner of a mill in Manchester.
- Harry Carson – Son of John Carson, attracted to Mary.
- Alice Wilson – George Wilson's sister, a pious old washerwoman, herbalist, sick-nurse.
- Margaret Jennings – Neighbour of Alice, blind, a sometime singer, a friend to Mary.
- Job Legh – Margaret's grandfather, a self-taught naturalist.
- Ben Sturgis – An old sailor, who looks after Mary during her stay in Liverpool.
- Will Wilson – Alice's nephew, whom she raised after the death of his parents. A sailor, he falls in love with Margaret.
- Esther – Sister of Mrs. Mary Barton, she is a fallen woman; her function is to pose an awful 'what if' concerning young Mary's fate.
Background and composition
However, it is clear from her preface that the suffering she saw around her was the motivational factor for the content of the novel: "I had always felt a deep sympathy with the care-worn men, who looked as if doomed to struggle through their lives in strange alternations between work and want The more I reflected on this unhappy state of things between those so bound to each other by common interests, as the employers and the employed must ever be, the more anxious I became to give some utterance to the agony which from time to time convulsed this dumb person."
Gaskell's desire to accurately represent the poverty of industrial Manchester is evident in a record of a visit she made to the home of a local labourer. On comforting the family, Hompes records, the "head of the family took hold of her arm and grasping it tightly, said, with tears in his eyes: 'Aye, ma'am, but have ye ever seen a child clemmed to death?'" This question is almost precisely repeated in the mouth of John Barton: "Han they ever have seen a child o' their'n die for want o' food?" in chapter 4.
As well as relying on her own experience, Gaskell is thought to have used secondary sources on which to base the setting of the story, including Kay's The moral and physical condition of the working classes involved in the cotton manufacture in Manchester and Peter Gaskell's The manufacturing population of England. Other details to which Gaskell paid particular attention to ensure the realism of the novel include the topography of both Manchester and Liverpool, the superstitions and customs of the local people and the dialect. In the earliest editions, William Gaskell added the footnotes explaining some of the words specific to the Lancashire dialect, and after the fifth edition, two lectures of his on the subject were added as appendices. It is widely thought that the murder of Harry Carson in the novel was inspired by the assassination of Thomas Ashton, a Manchester mill-owner, in 1831.
Mary Barton was first published as two volumes in October 1848. Gaskell was paid £100 for the novel. The publisher Edward Chapman had had the manuscript since the middle of 1847. He had several recorded influences on the novel, the most prominent of which is probably the change in title: the novel was originally entitled John Barton. Gaskell said that he was, "the central figure to my mind...he was my 'hero'." He also encouraged Gaskell to include chapters 36 and 37, the dialectical glosses added by William Gaskell, a preface and the chapter epigraphs.
The second edition, with Gaskell's corrections, particularly on typographical mistakes when writing the Lancashire dialect, appeared on 3 January 1849. The third edition soon followed, in February. A fourth, without Gaskell's involvement, appeared in October 1850. The fifth edition, from 1854, was the first single volume edition and included William Gaskell's lectures on the dialect. Mary Barton uses the word "wench" a total of 42 times.
Analysis
Genre
One element of the novel that has been a subject of heavy criticism is the apparent shift in genres between the political focus of the early chapters to the domestic in the later ones. Raymond Williams particularly saw this as a failure by the author: the early chapters, he said, are the "most moving response in the literature to the industrial suffering of the 1840s", but in the later, the novel becomes a "familiar and orthodox...Victorian novel of sentiment". Williams suggested that this shift may have been at the influence of her publishers, an idea supported by the title change, which changes the main focus of the reader from the political upheaval John is trying to promote to Mary's emotional journey.However, Kamilla Elliot disagrees with Williams about the weakness of the domestic genre, saying, "It is the romance plot, not the political plot, that contains the more radical political critique in the novel."
Style
It is a subject of some debate whether the first person narrator in Mary Barton is synonymous with Gaskell. On the one hand, the consistent use of tone through the original preface and the novel, and authorial insets like the first paragraph of chapter 5 suggest the Gaskell is directly narrating the story. Contrarily, critics like Lansbury suggest the narrator is too unsympathetic in all Gaskell's Manchester novels to be her own voice:Nothing could be more unwise than to regard the authorial 'I' of the novels as the voice of Elizabeth Gaskell, particularly in the Manchester novels. The narrator has a tendency to engage in false pleading and specious argument, while the workers demonstrate honesty and commonsense.
Hopkins goes so far as to claim that the detail to verisimilitude in the novel made it the first "respectable" social novel, in contrast with the lack of believability in, for example, Disraeli's Sybil or Tonna's Helen Fleetwood.
Prominent in the novel is Gaskell's attempt to reinforce the realism of her representation through the inclusion of "working-class discourses", not only through the use of closely imitated colloquialisms and dialect, but also through "passages from Chartist poems, working class ballads, proverbs, maxims, and nursery rhymes, as John Barton's radical discourse, Ben Davenport's deathbed curses, and Job Legh's language of Christian submission."