John Barton’s overpowering thought, which was to work out his fate on earth, was rich and poor; why are they so separate, so distinct, when God has made them all? It is not His will that their interests are so far apart. Whose doing is it?
Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life, published in 1848, was Elizabeth Gaskell’s first novel. That subtitle is telling, for, although the book loosely follows the eponymous heroine’s teenage years and romantic entanglements, perhaps its greatest achievement is its portrayal of working-class life in an industrial town at the time. (Obviously I have no first-hand experience of life as a Victorian weaver but it feels very authentic and reviewers of the time appear to have taken it as such.)
Gaskell was clearly interested in the clash between workers and mill owners (especially the nouveau riche), a subject she was to return to in her better-known North and South. In that novel, the struggles between the classes are filtered through the eyes of Margaret, a member of the southern gentry. In Mary Barton the struggles are not filtered and the suffering of the poor struck me a great deal more directly. I was also surprised by the radicalness of Gaskell’s vision: what sets Mary Barton apart from much other Victorian fiction is its assertion that there are no deserving and undeserving poor, just poor people.
Esther, Mary’s aunt, who hovers like a draggled ghost above the narrative, is a clear example. At the beginning of the novel, when Mary is fourteen and her mother pregnant, pretty and vivacious Esther disappears and it is widely believed she has run off with a mysterious lover. The grief this causes Mary’s mother may contribute to her death in childbirth just a few weeks later. Halfway through the novel, Esther reappears, petitioning Mary’s father John as he walks home one night. She and her little daughter were abandoned by the lover some years ago; when the child became sick poor Esther had no way of earning money for medicine other than prostitution. Now her child is dead, her reputation lost, and she lives a sort of half-life selling herself on the streets and drinking gin. John and other characters disapprove, even despise Esther for what she has become (at first, at least), but her predicament is shown to be entirely derived from desperate poverty and limited options, not vice.
(Engraving of the exterior of a cellar dwelling, 1838; Manchester Libraries; found here. For some reason the pipe-smoking woman is a pleasing sight)
The precariousness of working life is forcefully depicted. When a weaver, Davenport, falls ill with typhus, his family cannot afford coal or food and huddle in a damp, insanitary cellar waiting for death to take them all. If work falls off at the mills, there is simply no money and families starve. If wages are reduced, parents are forced to give what little food they have to their children in the hope of keeping them alive until better times. Child mortality is brisk: no family, not even the very-slightly-better-off ones like the Bartons and the Wilsons, is immune. In the face of this, the workers do their best to support each other. Although Davenport succumbs to his illness, Barton and Wilson give what little money they still have to his family to pay for the burial and feed them. Doors are never locked; the best is always given to visitors; strangers will help each other. (This picture of working-class solidarity is not simplistic: during the strike ‘knobsticks’, or strike breakers, are attacked and even murdered by angry workers.)
(Group of Manchester workers, 1848. James Cox, centre in the front row, surrounded by some of the men he worked with. The photograph was taken circa 1848. James Cox came to Manchester from Ireland in 1846 during the famine years. He first lived near Oxford Road Station, Mary Street, an area known as 'Little Ireland'. He also worked on the Manchester Ship Canal in the later years of the 19th century. Printed on the back: James Whittaker, Fairfield. Manchester Archives; found here)
In contrast, the only wealthy family in the novel – former workers themselves – lives apart from the rest of the town. Their doors are locked and guarded by servants and their hospitality is for their own sort, and by appointment. They are more comfortable, but somehow the way that the weavers drop in on each other, share what they have, invite friends round to tea and then rush to the shops to buy eggs and bacon to serve them is a more appealing way to live. The accumulation of wealth and valuable possessions in comparison is a sort of burden on the rich and dulls their sense of community.
This is demonstrated most clearly when the delegation of striking workers meets the mill owners. The workers represent their community and their demands have moral force: they ask for what is right and just. Most of the mill owners, on the other hand, see their interests as separate from that of the wider society. They do not understand their factories as pooled labour and capital working together, but as their property. While the speech of the workers is impassioned and eloquent, the employers’ words are dry and reveal only their selfishness and fear.
(Manchester in the mid-nineteenth century; found here)
The clash between the classes is reflected more specifically in Mary’s story, her courting by the wealthy Henry Carson and by the foundry worker Jem Wilson, and the brutal murder which is initially believed to be by a rival lover but is in fact politically motivated. The murder and its resolution model Gaskell’s great theme: that we are not so very different and we should trust each other more. In the end, there are two bereaved fathers, each of whom loses a son because of the other’s adherence to class identity over human sympathy.
That class identity is more than politics but also culture is reflected in elements of the novel’s form. As it was intended for a middle-class readership, it contains epigraphs from well-known ‘canonical’ poems alongside the lyrics of Chartist songs, nursery rhymes and working-class ballads. Footnotes explain Lancashire dialect words to a more cosmopolitan audience, often referring to the works of Chaucer as if giving these words a veneer of literary respectability.
Poverty, social injustice and murder are not the cheeriest subjects for fiction and for many of the characters there is to be no conventional happy ending; however, this is a far from nihilistic novel since redemption is available to everyone, even the murderer and the prostitute. And Gaskell’s characters are believable and engaging. If you’d like an alternative to yet another film adaptation of Emma, read this!