SOURCE: Clapp, Alisa M. “Texts Which Tell Another Story: Miscommunication in Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton.” Michigan Academician 27, no. 1 (January 1995): 29-37.

[In the following essay, Clapp examines differing levels of miscommunication in Mary Barton, including disjunction between individuals and groups in the novel, as well as between the author and the reader.]

“I have tried to write truthfully …”

Elizabeth Gaskell, Preface to Mary Barton¹

Though they are works of fiction, novels have historically been judged by rigorous standards of representational accuracy. Nowhere is this more true than with those works of the early Victorian period which purported to convey factual information of contemporary social issues to the masses, the so-called “industrial novels” of the 1840s and 1850s.² The debate concerning representational accuracy flourished particularly around one such prominent novel at this time, Elizabeth Gaskell's popular Mary Barton (1848). These debates raise serious questions of a written text's ability to communicate accurately and successfully with its readers. I will argue that this anxiety stems from the novel itself where various kinds of texts all fail to bring about healthy communication.

Gaskell's self-acknowledged goal in Mary Barton was to unite the classes by showing successful class communication. A middle-class resident of industrial Manchester during the “hungry forties,” she witnessed first-hand the distresses of the working class, attributing such poverty not as much to the employers' callousness as to their ignorance. She, then, would “give utterance to the agony which … convulses this dumb people” as she writes in her Preface, writing primarily to inform a middle-class readership though lower classes would read it, too.³ The conditions of the industrial working class are shown through two families—the Bartons and the Wilsons—each of whom loses family members due to poverty. John Barton retaliates by killing the employer's son, Harry Carson, and when young Jem Wilson is accused of the murder, his sweetheart Mary Barton spends much of the novel attempting to exonerate him while her father, racked with hate and guilt, wastes away and dies.

As this paper's epigram suggests, Gaskell herself was anxious to justify the accuracy of her portrayals. In a letter, for instance, she emphasizes how John Barton's character was “exactly a poor man I know,” that the scenes were “real as my own life at the time,” and that she “tried to tell them as nearly as I could.”⁴ Opinions of Gaskell's success at representational accuracy were mixed from the beginning, however, with some contemporary reviews praising the accurate account and others criticizing the exaggeration of working-class conditions.⁵ The debate has continued into our own century with Kathleen Tillotson claiming a “wider impartiality, a tenderer humanity” for the novel,⁶ while Raymond Williams criticizes the unrealistic, middle-class “fear of violence” from the lower classes which pervades the pages.⁷

Several recent readings, then, have begun to consider the problems of communication as stemming from the text itself, specifically in its incompatible literary genres: for example, Catherine Gallagher argues that the characters' melodramatic reactions to social ills impede social action until the end,⁸ while Amanda Anderson qualifies this: the prostitute Esther is never seen outside melodrama and her subsequent “unreadable” appearances throughout belie written communication's ability to prompt social action.⁹ Thus, the issue of language's inability to communicate objective reality—intricately tied with authorial subjectivity, class biases, and literary constraints—is readily exemplified in the various historical reactions to Mary Barton, prompting recent criticism's exploration of communication on the textual level. This issue of miscommunication between author and reader, then, complicates the goals of the socially minded novelist.

Indeed, the anxieties about the success of language and written communication appear to have haunted Gaskell herself and are found, I argue, within the actual texts in her own text. These “texts” can be defined as either (1) documents committed to paper in written form, such as professional documents, Biblical texts, and letters; (2) pictorial texts, such as caricatures and valentines; or (3) oral communications also transmitted within a written tradition, such as ballads and broadsides. However, due to class barriers, gender politics, and linguistic inadequacies these texts cause “miscommunications”—i.e., misunderstandings and schisms—between and even among classes, which thwart any potential for language to clarify and heal social ills. Often these failures in written language threaten oral communication by extension.¹⁰ Containing no models of healthy written communication, then, Gaskell's own text falters as well. In short, Gaskell's text may avow one thing but its subtexts tell another story, that of Gaskell's unconscious anxiety about the success of all written communication.

From the first, Gaskell suggests class tension to be due, in large part, to barriers in written documents, and she roots this in historical fact by alluding to the “People's Charter,” a charter drafted by working-class unions in 1838 which demanded such reforms as universal male suffrage.¹¹ Through John Barton, a starving factory worker turned political activist, Gaskell shows the frustration of the working class when Parliament refused to accept the People's Charter in 1839. Interestingly, Gaskell blames this failure specifically on a gap in communication between the classes, with the ruling class shunning the lower classes' uneducated use of language: “Parliament had refused to listen to the working men, when they petitioned, with all the force of their rough, untutored words …” (112). Thus, the Charter and what it represents—the inability of the upper and lower classes to communicate sympathetically through the written word—becomes a paradigm for the fictional texts in the novel.

Such include the novel's legal texts which distance the middle-class lawyers from their lower-class patrons whom they are supposedly serving. For instance, both John's daughter, Mary, and their friend Mrs. Wilson receive subpoenas to appear in court, but these “mysterious” and incomprehensible documents use upper-class terminology which only confuses these lower-class characters (301). The poor cannot understand these texts completely; furthermore, neither can they challenge them. And even though Mary's friend Job has some legal knowledge, still, when he sends a message to Mr. Bridgenorth, the lawyer, during the court session, the lawyer finds it “almost illegible” (388). This illegibility is not handwriting alone: Job's letter, though quickly written with “trembling hands,” is probably illegible more in its improper lower-class style, suggested by the colloquial manner of Job's speech. Between both of these legal writings—courtroom notes and subpoenas—Gaskell is suggesting the miscommunication between classes; neither able to read the writing of the other, especially when set in inhuman, legal terms like the subpoena.

Another professional text found in the novel is the infirmary order which Mr. Wilson tries to obtain from Mr. Carson to save the life of his friend Mr. Davenport. The distance between employer and employee is harshly evident when Carson unfeelingly gives Wilson an outpatient order when an emergency order was required (79); this, obviously, is not soon enough to save Davenport, who dies that day. Also, when Mary needs a doctor's order to excuse Mrs. Wilson from attending the trial, the doctor initially misunderstands her; finally agreeing to write an excuse, he says: “Come to me for the certificate any time; that is to say, if the lawyer advises you. I second the lawyer; take counsel with both the learned professions—ha, ha, ha” (322). His callous joking and alignment with a professional peer rather than a poor family in need ripens the class tension in the novel. In both cases, then, the upper classes control the documents which provide medical relief—and hatred, not healing, is the result.

Gaskell also uses another text—a drawing—which inflames the feud between rich and poor. This is unusual, given the universality of pictorial texts. Gertrude Himmelfarb describes the “democratizing” effect that illustrations, from books to fliers, had on the reading public, since both lower and higher classes came away with similar impressions (of a character's looks, for instance).¹² However, such democracy becomes anarchy when Carson's son, Harry, draws a caricature of the poorer workers who have come to bargain with the employers. His drawing, depicting the workers' delegation as a mass of scrawny-looking men, causes a good laugh among his upper-class friends who catch the allusion to high literature (a quote from Henry IV), reinforced by the picture itself. This text falls into the wrong hands, though, hands which were not supposed to grasp its meaning. But these workers do, because of the picture of themselves: “The heads clustered together, to gaze at and detect the likenesses” (219). Ultimately, this perverted form of democratic communication results in Harry's death; he is “killed for making a joke” as Gallagher puts it,¹³ since the workers vow revenge on Carson. This theme is made doubly poignant since this very same drawing is ripped to become the slips of paper when Barton and his men draw lots to pick the assassin; it becomes literally Carson's death warrant as the workers anonymously communicate their intent with each other—and violently communicate their anger to the upper class.

The one text which is privileged above the others as having unifying power is the Bible, with both Alice and Jane Wilson deriving spiritual comfort from Biblical texts. However, John Barton reads only upsetting parallels with his society within its pages. For example, in the first scene of the novel, Barton first introduces the rich-man/poor-man theme by alluding to the parable of Dives and Lazarus: “we are to live as separate as if we were in two worlds; ay, as separate as Dives and Lazarus, with a great gulf betwixt us: but I know who was best off then” (8). Indeed Lazarus, the poor man, was better off in heaven than Dives, the rich man, in hell. Actually, in Luke the “great gulf betwixt” mentioned is this gap between heaven and hell, but Barton sees the socially-constructed gulf between rich and poor as just as permanent.

The Bible plays a part in the clash between classes again in the climactic ending. John, quivering before the hardened Carson, spontaneously cries out, “I did not know what I was doing … forgive me the trespass I have done!” (432). But Carson retorts by perverting the Lord's Prayer: “Let my trespasses be unforgiven, so that I may have vengeance for my son's murder” (433) and he leaves the house, unreconciled with Barton. But once home he reaches for his Bible, reading the Gospel “almost greedily, understanding for the first time the full meaning of the story” (436). Simultaneously, John Barton reveals his own neglect of the Bible, since society's actions didn't “square wi' th' Bible” (438). Neglected by both men for years, the Bible has been unable to save them from lives of selfishness and despair, respectively. So, despite its privileging in the novel, the Bible itself results in miscommunication. And these men's recognition of this comes too late for them actually to make amends, except for one brief moment that unconscious Barton will never know: “Mr Carson stood in the door-way … ‘Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive them that trespass against us.’ And when the words were said, John Barton lay a corpse in Mr Carson's arms” (438).

This ending may be read sentimentally as ideal, and it is ideal since a written text provides the stimulus to Carson's actual conversion which promotes a direct encounter between enemies who may reach a fleeting reconciliation. However, this attempt at class reconciliation is not convincing enough to overcome the futile class communications of the rest of the novel. Besides, how effective is communication to a dead man?

That different classes have difficulty communicating in the novel is not surprising given Gaskell's intent to address such real-life tensions; but that positive communication is never shown, even at the end, is surprising. But what is even more problematic is that healthy written communication fails to take place even within the protagonists' own lower class.

Such is true of the written communication between family and friends, as represented by valentines and letters. In the first place, valentines, the most visually symbolic of loving discourse, become perverted throughout the novel. For instance, in order to identify herself to Jem, Esther refers to a valentine she once sent him, yet Jem fails to remember this act of kindness, though it is one of the few such acts we know of her before her fall (187). And a large portion of the plot hinges on a valentine “all bordered with hearts and darts” that Mary possesses. As she suspects it came from Jem she originally does not treasure it as he would like (129). Instead, she uses it as scratch paper on the back of which she copies a poem, ironically entitled “God help the poor,” depicting the forgotten, unloved poor of the streets: Job encourages Mary to copy the verses, saying that the “more they're heard and read the better” (129). But this dissemination of social commentary never occurs, at least not in conventional form. Instead, John Barton ponders this poem over and over, which begins to breed hatred in him against the rich. Eventually, John does send the valentine and poem to the upper class, Harry Carson specifically, but in a perverted way: as wadding in his gun when he murders Carson (the darts on it are only too ironic). When Esther finds a piece of this valentine by the scene of the crime, the text on it—Mary's name and address in Jem's handwriting—falsely implicate them. But the story that this valentine now tells, to Mary's eyes only once Esther brings it to her, is one of her own father's guilt (she finds the rest of the torn valentine—that “terrible piece of paper”—in her father's coat [285]). So, although Margaret Homans suggests the power of this direct encounter between Esther and Mary, she also notes its juxtaposition “with the return of a letter that brings men's dangerous, murderous passions closer to home.”¹⁴ Thus we see love gone sour by this perverted use of a valentine—a sign of love—used as an aid to murder and as the means of incriminating a loved one. Like the caricature, this text has fallen into the wrong hands, enlightening others of what they wished not to know.

Additionally, the novel is filled with letters, yet successful communication, implied by their inclusion, fails to take place. Letters are lost in the mail or lost by the recipient, are never sent or not given to the person who needs them, carry people away from loved ones, or contain unwanted, embarrassing, or misleading information. For instance, Alice Wilson haunts the post office awaiting a letter from her nephew Will which never comes, only to have him turn up in person. When a letter does arrive, it is a disappointing one, calling him back to the navy. Mary receives “passionate” letters from the rich Mr. Carson which prove embarrassing and unwanted, and none from her true love, Jem; yearning to write to Jem she is dissuaded since “men … like to have a' the courting to themselves”—so the woman becomes mute (166). The one letter of Jem's contained within the novel is not to her, though it might have been, containing his sincere feelings for her. And during Mary's illness, Jem waits impatiently for a letter about her, but Job doesn't even think of writing. When letters do arrive at their destination, they usually contain bad news: of the death of Job's daughter and Alice Wilson's approaching death, for example.

In most cases, the direct encounter is more successful than any attempt at written communication. So it is no wonder when Mary decides to chase Will down in person, because “to the chances of a letter she would not trust” (299). Such problematic uses of letters might implicate the British postal service, yet an American, Otis Clapp, in his 1878 book on the subject, shows that between 1839 and 1854, England's postal system had far surpassed America's in terms of efficiency.¹⁵ Thus, Gaskell's anxious inclusion of so many misplaced letters seems to be a comment not on the state of the postal system but on the power of written communication. The ending truly is an ideally happy one—much like Barton and Carson's reconciliation—since Margaret and Will's letters do reach Mary and Jem all the way in Canada and they contain good news about their marriage and upcoming visit to Canada (another direct encounter). Yet, given the problems with letters throughout, this ending only falsely solves the problem, more likely being a symptom of what was bothering Gaskell, rather than a cure.

As the example of Mary's refusal to write to Jem shows, gender-specific problematic communication has ramifications in Mary Barton. If it is not proper for women to express their feelings in letters, then sung texts are another outlet. Such is true of bashful Margaret who displays more of her true feelings to Will through singing then she ever will in person; however, Will, though charmed with her voice, misses her meaning. Women only, it seems, have a special insight into their songs: Alice imparts her love of her childhood countryside in a ballad to Mary and Margaret, and Margaret imparts her concern for the poor when singing to them “The Oldham Weaver,” the pathos of which leaves Alice teary-eyed and Mary breathless.

Ballads and songs in Mary Barton quickly enter the realm of written communication because it is their literary texts which are highlighted: Gaskell includes the lyrics to most songs, sometimes inserting as many as seven stanzas, as with the “The Oldham Weaver.” This ballad was the best known of the Jone o'Grinfilt adventure poems about hand-loom weavers who had become displaced and impoverished with the advent of the power loom. In her book The Industrial Muse, Martha Vicinus describes the ballad as “a magnificently laconic description of the hand-loom weaver's situation at the time. In many ways this song is the summation of all protest against the new conditions brought by industrialization.”¹⁶ Thus, Margaret's song represents a class-conscious attempt to deal with economic hardships, especially as befell weavers like John Barton. Unfortunately, this song never leaves the innocuous community of women. Admittedly, Margaret does obtain a job singing at the Mechanics Institute to an audience of higher-class as well as working-class men, and so one might imagine these songs as a significant bridge between classes. However, no longer is Margaret singing politically grounded songs like the “Oldham Weaver” which she enjoyed with her female community but rather songs like “The Siller Crown” and “What a single word can do”—songs about clothes and love, respectively (110). Relegated by her male employers and audience to such romantic, “feminine” songs, Margaret and her social commentary are muted.

Further, men's monetary award only threatens to distance the rising star from her fellow working-class friends. Margaret's tease to Mary of making her a “lady's maid” when she becomes rich thus has serious implications (110). Further, Job uses Margaret to show off to Will, as if she were one of his specimens of natural history (180); through this means, Margaret is successfully restrained from further musical communication since she quickly charms Will and settles down to married life. But the communication barriers shown between genders, especially with musical texts, still remain.

Finally, the lower class as a whole is even shown to be divided by a text in the case of a broadside hawked throughout the streets giving “an account of the bloody murder, the coroner's inquest, and a raw-head-and-bloody-bones picture of the suspected murderer, James Wilson” (269). Broadsides—ballads or tales printed on sheets of paper and hawked, read, or recited aloud in the streets—were one of the few means by which the predominantly illiterate working class obtained news and gossip. They also acted as a unifying device, bringing the poor together against the rich since broadsides' heroes were often common people standing up to the richer classes.¹⁷ Interestingly, the brief glimpse of broadsides in Mary Barton reveals not class bonding, but class separation since “Mary heard not; she heeded not” (269). The news cannot reach Mary and she herself refuses to acknowledge the information it conveys about her lover. Furthermore, the broadside is treacherous in its exposure and mockery of a fellow worker for all the people to hear and see, especially in the “raw-head-and-bloody-bones picture.” Now the caricature of the poor is drawn by the poor itself: the poor-hero-vs.-rich-villain theme is suddenly perverted.

Ultimately, all attempts at written communication are thwarted throughout Mary Barton: between rich and poor, between friend and neighbor, between lover and loved one, between father and daughter. So the obscure smaller texts within this greater text tell a different story than Gaskell apparently intended: that written language and communication are hopelessly inadequate in resolving class tensions and personal tensions.

Notes

1. Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton, ed. Edgar Wright. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), xxxvi; all subsequent references to Mary Barton are to this edition.

2. Besides Mary Barton, these novels include Benjamin Disraeli's Sybil (1846), Charles Kingsley's Alton Locke (1850), Charles Dickens' Hard Times (1854), and Gaskell's North and South (1854-55). For a full study of these novels, see Catherine Gallagher's The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction: Social Discourse and Narrative Form 1832-1867 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985).

3. Many employers passed the novel out to their workers; see Winifred Gérin, Elizabeth Gaskell: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 91-92.

4. Gaskell, letter of May 1849, in The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell, ed. J. A. V. Chapple and Arthur Pollard (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1967), 82; see also 827.

5. Two representative reviews include one from the Literary Gazette of 28 October 1848 which reads: Mary Barton is “a vivid and complete picture of a state of society hitherto only known by scraps … It is the true picture of the condition of all ranks in the manufacturing capital, Manchester …”; while another review from the British Quarterly Review of 1 February 1849 states that the “author of ‘Mary Barton’ has also, in our judgment, done very great injustice to the employers … The distresses of the labouring poor are set forth in ample detail, and we cannot regard that as a fair picture of the state of society …” See Angus Easson, Elizabeth Gaskell: The Critical Heritage (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), 61-191, for further examples.

6. Kathleen Tillotson, Novels of the Eighteen-Forties (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954), 202.

7. Raymond Williams, Culture and Society: 1780-1950 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958), 90.

8. Gallagher, Industrial Reformation, 62-87.

9. Amanda Anderson, Tainted Souls and Painted Faces: The Rhetoric of Fallenness in Victorian Culture (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1993), 108-26.

10. For discussions of failed speech in Mary Barton, see Patsy Stoneman, Elizabeth Gaskell (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 78-79, and Jenny Uglow, Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1993), 202-3.

11. See Gallagher for a discussion of the centrality of Chartism to the industrial novel genre, especially 6, 31-32, 202.

12. Gertrude Himmelfarb, The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984), 41-49.

13. Gallagher, Industrial Reformation, 69.

14. Margaret Homans, Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in Nineteenth-Century Women's Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 234.

15. Otis Clapp, British and United-States Post-Offices Compared (Boston: Committee of Publishers, 1878), 3-8.

16. Martha Vicinus, The Industrial Muse: A Study of Nineteenth Century British Working-Class Literature (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1974), 49.

17. Ibid., 9-10.

Bibliography

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Clapp, Otis. British and United-States Post-Offices Compared. Boston: Committee of Publishers, 1878.

Easson, Angus, ed. Elizabeth Gaskell: The Critical Heritage. London and New York: Routledge, 1991.

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———. Mary Barton. (1848). Edited by Edgar Wright. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987.

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