Product Description

Mary Barton, the daughter of disillusioned trade unionist, rejects her working-class lover Jem Wilson in the hope of marrying Henry Carson, the mill owner’s son, and making a better life for herself and her father. But when Henry is shot down in the street and Jem becomes the main suspect, Mary finds herself painfully torn between the two men. Through Mary’s dilemma, and the moving portrayal of her father, the embittered and courageous activist John Barton, Mary Barton (1848) powerfully dramatizes the class divides of the ‘hungry forties’ as personal tragedy. In its social and political setting, it looks towards Elizabeth Gaskell’s great novels of the industrial revolution, in particular North and South.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #72718 in Books
• Published on: 2003-10-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 464 pages

Sally Mitchell, Temple University
"Another splendid edition from Broadview with the usual high standard of helpful footnotes."

From the Publisher
The Broadview Editions series is an effort to represent the ever-changing canon of literature in English by bringing together texts long regarded as classics with valuable, lesser-known literature. Newly type-set and produced on high-quality paper in trade paperback format, the Broadview Editions series is a delight to handle as well as to read.

Each volume includes a full introduction, chronology, bibliography, and explanatory notes along with a variety of documents from the period, giving readers a rich sense of the world from which the work emerged.

About the Author
Elizabeth Gaskell (1810 - 65) was born in London, but grew up in the north of England. In 1832 she married the Rev. William Gaskell. Published in Dickens' Household Works and a lifelong friend of Charlotte Bronte, Gaskell's finest novel is North and South, also published by Penguin. Macdonald Daly is Lecturer in Modern Literature at Nottingham University. He has also edited DH Lawrence's Sons and Lovers and Kangaroo for Penguin Classics.

Customer Reviews

Poignant Victorian social comment.
Gaskell`s first novel "Mary Barton" (1848) is a tragedy set in nineteenth century Manchester. The plot revolves around the eponymous heroine, and her choice of lover, on one hand ,wealthy Henry Carson, and on the other, a working- class family friend,Jem Wilson.The central theme,however, is the yawning chasm between the lifestyle of the prosperous, and that of the poverty-stricken.Gaskell paints a very bleak picture of death,endemic disease and misery, and those familiar with Engel`s "Condition of the Working Class in England" will be treading a familiar path.Allied to social and political comment, elements which lead to a virtual banning of the book upon publication,there is the melodrama of the Victorian romantic novel in all its glory, and some genuinely moving moments, handled with great skill and sensitivity.Ultimately a message of "the masters suffer as well" comes through but Mary Barton has many miles of misery to walk through before she can walk out into the sunshine.

Nothing to trouble the bourgeoisie.
If you come to Mary Barton looking for the sort of strident social comment and exploration of self-deceit and its consequences that run through much of Dickens' output, you'll be disappointed. It's not hard to see how this book provoked some measure of outrage on publication for its modest admission that there were negative consequences to the capitalist system in the UK; but this ostensibly revolutionary position is much undermined by Gaskell's uncompromising call to embrace Christian morality, with its easy acceptance of social and political inequality, as a solution.
There is nothing in the book seriously to worry the ruling elite; rather the opposite. While painting as bleak a picture of living conditions in the industrial north as, I would imagine, propriety and her sense of taste allowed, Gaskell stops a long way short of suggesting anything like revolution or even any meaningful realignment of the prevailing social order. Perhaps ironically, given her long connection with non-conformity, her solution is grounded in thinking unlikely to upset the average Tory, and comes down to the ultimate value, for the masters in particular, of a bit of enlightened self-interest. This might be summarised in the context of Mary Barton as: batter the poor and they will kill your sons; patronise them and they will tug their forelocks from here to eternity. In spite of the frequent and easy critical comparisons, Gaskell is no Engels.
So what of the story? A lot of virtuous poor people experiencing the trials of life and death, in between demonstrating the classlessness of ambition, vanity, spite and the price of too much obedience. Esther had the potential to evolve into a seriously interesting character, as did John Barton himself, although Gaskell dropped them as soon as they began seriously to challenge her interpretation of the all-embracing goodness of Christian ethics. This means we get far too little of Esther in the wake of her rash and outrageous move away from the family home in search of something indefinably better; just a Sunday school lecture on the evils of prostitution and drink, and the belief that there is at least some iota of good in all of us as long as we allow it to blossom in an explicitly Christian context. Likewise John Barton, once he finds himself obliged to turn to radical politics in search of a remedy to the injustices he sees and experiences, is more or less condemned to the margins; demonised, as good as, for refusing to believe in Gaskell's God and the ultimate value of enduring what He sends. Gaskell works this out without irony.
Against these two is ranged a parade of figures either already deeply immersed in God's essential goodness and the virtue that lies in submitting to His will, or heading that way at speed. Even the eccentric autodidact Job Legh is a true believer, and devotes the bulk of his intellectual energy to beetles rather than alleviating the plight of the people that surround him; and there is little to suggest that any implication of the futility of resistance that surrounds this position might be deliberate. Mary's enticing humanity, her easily understandable temptation to go with money before love as a way out of her wretched condition, is squarely attacked - and punished - for its vanity: there's to be no 'Who wants to be a millionaire?' solution to this social conundrum. It's a line that might just be acceptable had equal attention been given to the corrupting potential of wealth and the power to tyrannise that it can sustain, and to the moral decrepitude of those who are thus seduced; not least, Harry Carson. There are hints at this, modest as the monotonously blushing cheeks of Gaskell's virgins, but little more. In the end, we are encouraged to conclude that there is much more evil in rebelling against a fundamentally unjust system than there is in allowing the system to by off deep objections with tokens.
The ending is as treacly as any concocted by the youthful Dickens: worthy couple, sweetly integrated into society, and with strong hints of further social advancement on the near horizon in reward for lives led in a manner of which the bourgeoisie would approve. Given that Gaskell was in her late thirties when she wrote Mary Barton and would already have seen enough to have sown at least a seed of socio-political radicalism in her consciousness this is, in itself, remarkable. Because of its willingness to fall back on a terribly acceptable paradigm as the solution to a terribly unacceptable problem, I found Mary Barton finally unsatisfying. The book has neither a strong enough story to compensate for Gaskell's sugary moralising, nor is its moral dictum convincing enough to justify her clunky, lumbering plot.

Interesting but more ham-fisted than Gaskell's later works
There are two strong messages in the book, both of which made me very uncomfortable. Firstly, the working classes should put their faith in God rather than trying to bring about social change - particularly through trade unionism. Secondly, whilst the 'masters' should look towards helping their workers and building a relationship of trust, they shouldn't try too hard to feed them if times were bad.

With the exception of Mary and her father John, the characters in the book are pretty much black and white - Jem is good and decent who is allowed a moment's dark thoughts before quickly becoming good and decent again and Henry Carson is a wrong 'un from the start - vain, silly and happy to destroy Mary's honour and character without thinking of the consequences (all of which means that his death seems a little too convenient). Mary herself is shown as a woman happy to flirt without thinking of the consequences and whilst we know why she's happy to encourage Henry Carson (and I particularly liked the role played by her 'friend' Sally who happily acts as intermediary as she's getting paid well), she doesn't realise that he has no intention of marrying her. I did think that she was very much a cliched Victorian heroine - dithering, strong only when it suited the plot and heavily reliant on men. John Barton was far more interesting - his lack of faith in God and misplaced faith that politicians would listen to the will of the working class and try to help contributing to the desperation both of him and the trade unionists, so that you can readily believe why he'd be driven to murder as being the only way of trying to get the masters to listen.

There's a good use of Lancashire dialect throughout the book, which is interesting and doesn't detract from the story (where there are non-obvious dialect words used, the Penguin edition footnotes the same to give a meaning) and there's plenty of dramatic moments - including a fire at a factory, the return of Henry Carson's body to his parents and Mary's dash down the Mersey to stop Jem's alibi witness setting sail for America. However's there's also a lot of sentimentality, including Mary's friend Margaret, who's tragically going blind and Jem's aunt Alice, a good woman who ends up suffering a stroke. All of this means that it won't be a book for everyone and I suspect that it will be of most interest to fans of Gaskell's other works and those interested in social and political conditions of the time.