[In the following excerpt, Hopkins explores the conditions surrounding the composition and publication of Mary Barton.]

It is unnecessary to assume at this juncture that had it not been for the loss of her child, Mrs. Gaskell might never have become a writer. There are signs that she was interested in authorship before she turned to it as assuagement of her sorrow. But this personal bereavement and her husband's suggestion may have brought into sharper, more immediate focus yearnings which, owing to the domestic responsibilities of her early married life, she may have felt, in a professional sense, scarcely possible of realization. For although a little over a year later, a fresh source of distraction came in the birth of her last child, Julia Bradford, in September of 1846, from the latter part of 1845 on she seems to have turned her attention seriously to composition. In the next two years she must have found periods for absorbing, uninterrupted work in order to have produced three stories and a full-length novel by 1847. Thus William's suggestion that she try to write a novel must have been planted in fertile soil.

It is significant that Mrs. Gaskell's first impulse had been to write of country life, and that she was deflected from this purpose by the pressure of the misery about her which seemed to offer dramatic possibilities. In the Preface to Mary Barton she says:

… Living in Manchester, but with a deep relish and fond admiration for the country, my first thought was to find a frame-work for my story in some rural scene; and I had already made a little progress in a tale, the period of which was more than a century ago, and the place on the borders of Yorkshire, when I bethought me how deep might be the romance in the lives of those who elbowed me daily in the busy streets of the town in which I resided.

It would be interesting to know whether this tale with the scene on the borders of Yorkshire was the one that fifteen years later materialized in the novel, Sylvia's Lovers. However this may be, the story was clearly not one of the three that she must have been working on at the same time that she was plotting her novel. These came out before the novel and they do not at all resemble the tale described in the Preface. They were published in William Howitt's newly established organ, Howitt's Journal of Literature and Popular Progress: “Libbie Marsh's Three Eras,” June 15th, 1847; “The Sexton's Hero,” August 28th, 1847; and “Christmas Storms and Sunshine,” January 1st, 1848. They were all printed over the signature, “Cotton Mather Mills.” In thus publishing her stories, Howitt was maintaining his earlier and strongly expressed faith in her talent. Moreover, these three tales were collected and published in book form, in 1848, at whose instance is not known, with the title, Life in Manchester, still under the pseudonym, Cotton Mather Mills.

The choice of this odd pen name may have been dictated by what the author was reading at the time. She may have been looking into the subject of witchcraft persecutions in New England. Some years later this became the theme of her very fine story, “Lois the Witch.” The figure of Cotton Mather could not have failed to stand out in her impression of that dark era, and so she may have joined his name to “Mills,” as indicative of the milieu of two of her tales, to make up a pseudonym that she felt would furnish a safe disguise. But this is mere conjecture. It is true, however, that for the first few years of her authorship Mrs. Gaskell, like other Victorian lady novelists, was chary of having her identity known, even among intimate friends.

The chief claim to notice possessed by these little stories is their revelation of the writer's deep and genuine concern for the lot of the humble people about her. All of this early work bears the imprint of her personal sorrow.¹ And, in consideration of the author's upbringing and the Victorian predilection for literature that elevated, it is highly moral. It illustrates the principles of renunciation and reconciliation in a manner that has long since gone out of style. But in both style and spirit it harmonized exactly with the purposes of Howitt's Journal. The editorial address to “Friends and Readers,” printed in the first number, states that the Journal aimed to promote “the entertainment, the good, and advancement of the public. … Above all, it shall be our anxious care that not a word or sentiment shall appear in this Journal which the most refined individual may not read aloud in the family circle, or which we might not freely introduce to our children.” Such claims to merit, Victorian criticism of contemporary fiction is found to advance over and over.

Howitt's Journal was a short-lived precursor of Dickens' far more successful magazines, Household Words and All the Year Round, which also aimed to amuse, inform, and, at the same time, elevate public taste and morals. To these journals Mrs. Gaskell afterwards became a frequent contributor. So if to our a-moral epoch she often seems over-moral, particularly in her early work, it must be remembered that in this respect she was scarcely more at fault than the best of her contemporaries.

It was very natural that while Mrs. Gaskell was at work on her novel, she should look for critical advice to the Howitts. In her autobiography, Mary Howitt writes, apropos of her husband's having received from its author the sketch, “Clopton House,” some years earlier:

This led to the production of the beautiful story of Mary Barton, the first volume of which was sent in MS. to my husband stating this to be the result of his advice. We were delighted with it, and a few months later, Mrs. Gaskell came up to London to our house with the work completed. Everybody knows how rapturously it was received; and from that time she became one of the favourite writers of fiction.

This statement is scarcely an exaggeration. With Mary Barton Mrs. Gaskell leaped into fame, and the Howitts no doubt felt pride in the making of so promising an author. There is no contradiction in the assertion that she began to write novels at her husband's suggestion and that she got her start from the Howitts. Both are true; her head was full of stories, and all she needed was a little encouragement, from whatever source, to set her off. Indeed the Howitts had a more intimate part in the launching of this first novel than Mrs. Howitt admits here. For it was William Howitt who actually sent the manuscript to Chapman and Hall and arranged the business agreement, proposing to the author that if she objected to confiding her name to them “in strict confidence … we must see whether they will be satisfied to have it made in the name of ‘Cotton Mather Mills.’” But as she will, he hopes, write many other works, “it would be well for them to be known as the works of a lady.” Yet whatever the name was that Mrs. Gaskell agreed to for the title-page, it never saw the light, her suggestion reaching the publishers too late to get in. But as Mr. Chapman wrote her on October 23rd, 1848: “… it is a matter of little consequence, for judging from the notices, the book is likely to make its way unassisted by anything but its own merits”—an opinion that must have been immensely reassuring to the naturally anxious author.

Judging from the correspondence between Mrs. Gaskell, her sponsors, and her publishers, Mary Barton seems to have been accepted by the first firm to whom it was offered. Thus there is probably no truth in the old story that the book went the rounds of the London publishers until it found a sympathetic reader in John Forster, then critic for Chapman and Hall.² On January 9th, 1848, Mary Howitt wrote the author after completing the reading of the manuscript: “We immediately sent it to Chapman and Hall, but we have heard nothing. Publishers are slow. We will, however, ‘poke them up.’”

As a result of this poking up, no doubt, Forster got around to reading the manuscript whose merit he was quick to recognize. He advised his firm to accept it. So Chapman and Hall bought the copyright for the modest sum of £100. And Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life, in two volumes, was issued on October 25th, 1848.

To repeat: with the publication of this novel Mrs. Gaskell, though for some time to be familiar to her readers only as “the authoress of Mary Barton,” at once became a celebrity. Why should this book have brought its writer such immediate applause? In 1848 Elizabeth Gaskell, as an author, was entirely unknown, and the novel as a vehicle for the airing of current social ills, was, in that century, an almost unexplored field. The social novel was looked at rather askance because it dealt with matters of controversy and with subjects that were taboo in the family circle. The Athenaeum, for example, in its issue for October 21st, 1848, in a very favourable review of Mary Barton, raises the question, however, as to “how far it may be kind or wise or right to make fiction the vehicle for a plain, matter of fact exposition of social evils.” But there were intrepid women who thought it both wise and right to use fiction as a means of dragging these ugly subjects into the foreground. In 1840 Mrs. Frances Trollope had attempted it in The Life and Adventures of Michael Armstrong the Factory Boy, and Mrs. Tonna (“Charlotte Elizabeth”), the same year, in Helen Fleetwood, both unfortunately, with very lame results. In 1845 Disraeli's Sybil had made more of a stir by its meretricious cleverness and the political prestige of its author. As Anne Thackeray Ritchie remarked later, referring to Mary Barton, the novel which had once been a toy, became a sword with which to fight the cause of the oppressed. The role was not a new one for fiction, but a revival, on more realistic lines, of that impulse towards reform in the late eighteenth century that produced an outcropping of sentimental novels of purpose by Day, Inchbald, Godwin, and others, under the banner of Rousseau. The observations of Mrs. Ritchie and the Athenaeum show how completely by 1848 those ardent calls for the redress of human wrongs had been forgotten.

But the advent of Mrs. Gaskell's novel was to prove a happy conjunction of the book and the hour. It is not going too far to say that Mary Barton made the social novel respectable. Mrs. Trollope was vague and uninformed on actual conditions in the factories. Mrs. Tonna, while better informed, injured the cause by explosions of vitriolic rhetoric against the whole industrial system. In both books the characters are wooden and impossible. Sybil, for all its brilliance, betrayed Disraeli's heart as lying in politics rather than in the distresses of the poor as human beings. Dickens' Hard Times was yet to come—an honest effort to plead a just cause, but weakened by gross exaggeration. Mary Barton was the first novel to combine sincerity of purpose, convincing portrayal of character, and a largely unprejudiced picture of certain aspects of industrial life. Modern studies on the Industrial Revolution, when placed beside this book, show that Mrs. Gaskell is, on the whole, trustworthy.

The action covers the years, 1839-42, the period of the “hungry 40's,” a time in which the wretchedness of the working classes probably surpassed any in the history of the nation. Viewed in a hundred years of perspective, the situation presents an appalling paradox. England was at peace with her neighbours, but at home she was the scene of bitter class hatreds and consequent violence. The decades after the Napoleonic wars had left her free to expand her empire, to make notable progress in the extension of political democracy at home, to build up such a body of foreign trade, to perfect so many mechanical inventions as to make her the richest country in the world. At the same time, she was left free to produce a population, the mass of which was living in ignorance, poverty, and squalor.

While destitution afflicted the agricultural labourers of the period who were suffering from the successive Enclosure Acts of the preceding century, which had little by little deprived them of their small holdings, it struck hardest at the proletariat in the centres of industry, who were caught in a network of profound social change, the meaning of which they did not understand. Believing that their only redress was through violence, they began, in some districts, to smash the machines that seemed to be depriving them of their bread and beer. An iniquitous chain of cause and effect was being created. The rapid growth of industry attracted to the towns unemployed farm labourers, driven by want, who helped to swell a population already too large for its quarters. City planning, where it existed, just as today, lagged far behind technological advance. Although today's snarls differ in some respects from those created by the overgrown factory towns of a century ago, there is still the ever-present iniquity of the slum. While the employers lived in the better districts on the edge of congested areas, inadequate transportation facilities obliged the employees and their families to crowd about the mills. The crude dwellings in the narrow, unpaved streets and courts that spawned in the shadow of the factories, with little light and no sanitation, and often underground were “human rabbit-warrens,” infested with dirt, disease, and crime. “Until 1838 neither Manchester nor Birmingham had even functioned politically as incorporated boroughs: they were man heaps … not organs of human association.” While the more intelligent few among the workers found some solace for their drab existence in evangelical religion or scientific interests that led to the establishment of mechanics' institutes, the majority took their diversion in sex and gin.

Both social philosophers and legislators were aware, in varying degrees, of the economic inequalities existing between the upper classes and the proletariat, particularly the gulf between the prosperous manufacturers and their dependent employees. One deterrent to any fundamental amelioration of the intolerable condition was the fatal assumption that the gulf was inevitable. The new capitalistic order which had been growing in strength since the mid-eighteenth century, found powerful justification of its position in the doctrine of laissez-faire or Economic Liberalism. Social, political, and economic phenomena are governed by laws just as the world of nature is controlled. Hence, the natural order should be allowed to prevail in the conduct of human institutions. Production, profit, employment, wages will find their proper level unassisted. Indeed, one of the chief causes of human misery is interference, in the form of restrictions—artificial laws that men insist on injecting into natural economic operations. Remedial legislation, therefore, will not improve the lot of the poor. Any attempt to equalize the distribution of wealth would be offset by the normal disparity between the population increase and the means of subsistence. The “subsistence wage” is the natural wage in industrial society. Any attempt to raise wages would result in a vicious circle: increase of population and inevitable return to poverty and misery. The weight of authority in the pronouncements of such writers as Adam Smith, Malthus, Ricardo, and the Mills, father and son, entrenched these ideas in the minds of many persons, whether they were actuated by self-interest or by an honest belief that they were working for the benefit of society.

Nevertheless, owing to that artificial interference theoretically believed to interrupt natural processes, some remedial measures had been effected; notably, the Reform Bill of 1832 and the Poor Law of 1834. And even during the first half of the century there was factory legislation in regard to inspection of mills, better sanitary conditions, the ten-hour day, and discouragement of child labour. Yet much remained to be done. The inhumanity of the situation was attacked on grounds religious, social, and aesthetic. Catholics and Protestants (both Anglicans and Dissenters) raised their voices against the mechanistic factor in laissez-faire logic that saw the employee as a mere cog in a machine, and against a doctrine that encouraged the increase of wealth in a single class rather than in the entire nation, the majority of whom were living below the subsistence level. Under the banner of Christian Socialism, F. D. Maurice, Kingsley, and Thomas Hughes helped to improve housing conditions in London and to establish workmen's associations and cooperatives. And the sheer ugliness of the Industrial Revolution, as well as its disregard for the worth of the individual, provoked eloquent assaults from Dickens, Carlyle, and Ruskin who fought against the evils of a materialistic society that offered no spiritual compensation.

Mary Barton should be read as a product of this age of transition in which western civilization was gradually turning from an agricultural to an urban basis—perhaps the chief social transformation in human history, before our present age. Though a simple story, it is a faithful mirror of the wretchedness of the industrial masses—their spiritual unrest, their physical discomfort—a wretchedness born partly of their own ignorance, but more of forces beyond their control and largely unintelligible to them. The author, herself, could have realized but dimly the ultimate meaning of the turmoil of her generation. Yet that she was aware of the conflicting currents of political and social thought and some of the remedial achievements is reflected in the colours of her story. It is a tempered study in realism, not a cartoon. In spite of her modest disavowal of an acquaintance with economic theory, in the Preface: “I know nothing of Political Economy or theories of trade. I have tried to write truthfully: and if my accounts agree or clash with any system, the agreement or disagreement is unintentional”—in spite of this denial, there are indications in this book and elsewhere that she was not entirely ignorant of current economic doctrines. What she does mean here is that her concern is not with theories but with facts—the tragic contrast, whatever the cause, between the life of the well-to-do masters and that of the men and their families; what she was seeing with her own eyes, day by day. And she had been observing this disparity for sixteen years. “I told the story according to a fancy of my own,” she wrote a friend, “to really see the scenes I tried to describe, (and they were as real as my own life at the time) and then to tell them as nearly as I could, as if I were speaking to a friend over the fire on a winter's night and describing real occurrences.”

Mary Barton does not take us into the mill but into the workers' dwellings, into the cramped, rickety houses in unpaved courts, into the dismal cellars where the sewage seeps through the walls on to the stone floors, where children are born and die of starvation, and adults, of typhus and tuberculosis. It shows us the impact of the mill as a system on the minds of the operators. It makes articulate the misery of those who believe that repeated rebuff from their masters has left them only the dangerous remedy of violence.

“And what good have they [the rich] ever done me that I should like them?” asked Barton [who can see but one horn of the dilemma] … “If I am sick do they come and nurse me? If my child lies dying (as poor Tom lay, with his white wan lips quivering, for want of better food than I could give him), does the rich man bring the wine or broth that might save his life? If I am out of work for weeks in the bad times, and winter comes, with black frost, and keen east wind, and there is no coal for the grate, and no clothes for the bed, and the thin bones are seen through the ragged clothes, does the rich man share his plenty with me, as he ought to do, if his religion wasn't a humbug? … Don't think to come over me with th' old tale, that the rich know nothing of the trials of the poor; I say, if they don't know, they ought to know. We're their slaves as long as we can work; we pile up their fortunes with the sweat of our brows, and yet we are to live as separate as if we were in two worlds.”

The industrial thread of the story receives its impetus from the Chartists' futile attempt, in 1839, to put their grievances before Parliament. Government, they believed could not know of their plight; else it would do something. Behind this decision lay a three years' business depression which had thrown men out of work and sent soaring the prices of even the barest necessities. “They only wanted a Dante to record their sufferings.” On the eve of departure, the men gather around Barton, a member of the delegation from Manchester, to tell him what to say:

“Well, there's many a thing I'd like yo to speak on to the Parliament people. Thou'lt not spare 'em, John, I hope. Tell 'em our minds; how we're thinking we'n been clemmed [starved] long enough, and we donnot see whatten good they'n been doing, if they can't give us what we're all crying for sin' the day we were born. …”

“Bless thee, lad, do ask 'em to make th' masters to break th' machines. There's never been good times sin' spinning-jennies came up.”

“Machines is th' ruin of poor folk,” chimed in several voices.

“For my part,” said a shivering, half-clad man, who crept near the fire, as if ague-stricken, “I would like thee to tell 'em to pass th' Short-hours Bill.”

And so on. Barton starts off, full of hopes and commissions.

The bitter disillusionment that results from the failure of the march on London aggravates the general, deep-seated distrust of the men for the masters. This feeling is sharpened into actual hatred among the more violent by the announcement of a fresh cut in wages, with no explanation given them for the legitimacy of the action. Fomented by a labour agitator from London, unwise Trades Union leaders call a strike of the power-loom weavers, which is followed by sympathetic strikes among other branches of the cotton industry. The operators promptly call in knob-sticks (strikebreakers) and the turn-outs (strikers) as promptly attack them. A parley of masters and men, because of the irreconcilable tempers of the contestants, results only in failure. The demands of the operatives provoked by the unreason of desperation are extravagant; foolishly, they will not compromise. Their stand serves but to harden the growing antagonism of the operators. During this meeting, the particularly insulting conduct of young Carson, junior partner of his father in one of the principal factories, goads the men to criminal resolve. Lots are drawn, and John Barton gets the assassin's ballot. Thus the logic of events that leads to the murder of Carson becomes plausible.

Into the industrial pattern is effectively woven the love theme. Mary Barton, the assassin's daughter, flattered by the glittering but dishonourable attentions of Harry Carson, saves herself by realizing before it is too late, that her true affection is for Jem Wilson, a young mechanic of her own class who has been devoted to her since childhood. The test for her comes when she is forced to choose between informing on her father, of whose guilt she is aware, or sacrificing her innocent lover. In choosing to save Wilson, she makes a normal and the only reasonable decision. And in the death of her father from natural causes she is spared consequences that otherwise would have been almost unbearably tragic for her. Thus in tying the two plot threads together at a point crucial to them both the author practised a dramatic economy not always to be found in a first novel.

While the writer occasionally reverts to the staple of romance, as in the fire at Carson's mill and the trial of Jem Wilson for a murder he did not commit, these incidents are vividly realized. And the chief characters are for the most part well conceived. The steps in John Barton's deterioration—the succession of defeats that drive him, an honest labourer respected by his neighbours, down the road of embitterment to murder and to his own death from a combination of starvation and remorse—are made inevitable. He is a truly tragic figure. And the titular heroine, in the end, is seen to be a girl not without some complexity. The enchanting prospect of becoming a lady, the wife of Mr. Carson, with all the amenities of social position, for the time being fills her mind with engrossing desire and dulls her sensibilities to the pleadings of a worthier if humbler man. The turn in her feeling, the revelation which shows her where her affections really lie, is analysed simply but with skill. From an apparent trifler, Mary grows into a responsible woman, and in her defence of her lover she shows the stuff she is really made of. The critics who objected to Mary because she is inconsistent and doesn't for some time know her own mind, forgot that human nature is full of inconsistency.

Yet there is a fault in Mary, not a moral but an artistic one, that did not get removed from the final version. Although the title directs that Mary should bear the responsibility of the central figure, she does not step forward in this role until the latter part of the story. It is significant that Mrs. Gaskell had originally given her book the title of John Barton: “Round the character of John Barton,” she wrote a friend, “all the others formed themselves; he was my hero, the person with whom all my sympathies went.” He was the only one drawn from life, she says.³ She put him in different circumstances, “but the character, and some of the speeches are exactly a poor man I know.” And some years later she made the enlightening admission that the title was changed by request of her publishers. Chapman and Hall, taking the safe and conservative position, no doubt felt that a murderer was not exactly what the public, in that day, would look for in the hero of a novel intended for family reading. Confronted with this problem, the author cleverly saw Mary as a key to the resolution. This necessitated some quick shifting of emphasis; Mary had to be pushed more into the foreground. When this happens, Mary becomes alive—in the latter part of the story, when she begins to know her own heart. But the scar left by this major operation remains. Mary in the first part of the book is still a decidedly minor figure, a rather negligible personality, hardly capable of assuming the major role the author was required to make her play in the solution of the tragic issue.

In conceding to her publishers' demands, in this, her first novel, Mrs. Gaskell acted in significant contrast to her way with publishers after she became a seasoned writer. Then, when disagreements on critical matters arose, she often stood her ground, usually with reason. Chapman and Hall should have known that it was dangerous to require a novelist to swap horses in midstream. And it was unfortunate that Mrs. Gaskell felt constrained to sacrifice to expediency her sense of artistic rightness. For she had not named her novel unadvisedly. All her creative impulse had revolved around John Barton. As he was her hero at first, he remains the hero, in spite of the change in title, and always the most interesting of the characters. From the beginning of her career, when she took her writing seriously, Mrs. Gaskell gave it much anxious care, as testified by many letters to her friends and publishers. Notwithstanding this remark in a personal letter, “The whole tale grew up in my mind as imperceptibly as a seed germinates in the earth, so I cannot trace back now why or how such a thing was written, or such a character or circumstance introduced,” she does not mean that she had written in a spontaneous, effortless way, with little attention to plan or revision. She once told Mrs. Ritchie that she always worked out a complete pattern before starting a story. A statement that is borne out, as far as it affects Mary Barton, by an earlier draft of this novel which differs markedly in the names of some of the characters and in the nature of some of the incidents from the forms they take in the final version.

The denouement, as far as it affects Barton, is sometimes objected to by modern critics for what they call its sentimentality: the reconciliation allowed to take place between the murderer and the father of the man he has killed. But in the light of instances of forgiveness accorded to enemies that have been reported during the second world war, the reconciliation between Carson and Barton can hardly be said to falsify human conduct. What the incident does suffer from is multiplication of its theme throughout Mrs. Gaskell's work; she overdoes the reconciliation motif. And the reason is not far to seek. A deep-rooted tenet in her social philosophy was her belief in the capacity of human beings to rise above their passions and meet on a plane of rational intercourse. She believed that Christian ethics could and should be made to work. And so, in censuring Carson's grim determination that the law shall do its worst upon the slayer of his not wholly innocent son, she says: “True, his vengeance was sanctioned by law, but was it the less revenge? Are ye worshippers of Christ? or of Alecto? Oh, Orestes! you would have made a very tolerable Christian of the nineteenth century.” Seldom is she so bitterly ironical.

Barton, who, in committing the murder, had intended “to intimidate a class of men known only to those below them as desirous to obtain the greatest quantity of work for the lowest wages—at most to remove an overbearing partner from an obnoxious firm, who stood in the way of those who struggled as well as they were able to obtain their rights,” when confronted by the elder Carson, sees him for the first time as an individual, a man, like himself, sorrowing for the loss of his only son. “Now he knew that he had killed a man, and a brother—now he knew that no good thing could come out of this evil, even to the sufferers whose cause he had so blindly espoused.”

After Barton's death, when Carson's mind has cleared, the author brings him and Job Legh, the most intelligent of her labour characters, together in a calm interchange of views on their respective grievances. The producer, Mr. Carson explains, using the familiar argument, cannot produce for the sake of giving employment when there is no market for his goods. Under such conditions capital suffers as much as labour. Old Job replies, striking directly at the centre of the trouble as the men see it:

Not as much, I'm sure, sir; though I'm not given to Political Economy, I know that much. … I never see the masters getting thin and haggard for want of food; I hardly ever see them making much change in their way of living, though I don't doubt they've got to do it in bad times. But it's in the things for show they cut short; while for such as me, it's in the things for life we've to stint …

I'm loth to vex you, sir, just now; but it was not the want of power I was talking on; what we all feel sharpest is the want of inclination to try and help the evils which come like blights at times over the manufacturing places, while we see the masters can stop work and not suffer. If we saw the masters try for our sakes to find a remedy,—even if they were long about it … we'd bear up like men through bad times.

Since Mrs. Gaskell is not sentimental here, she does not allow this interview to usher in a complete and immediate regeneration of industrial society in Manchester. Neither Mr. Carson nor Job Legh entirely convinces the other, yet they part with much better feeling than when they met; and the meeting was the beginning of a change:

Many of the improvements now in practice in the system of employment in Manchester owe their origin to short, earnest sentences spoken by Mr. Carson. Many and many yet to be carried into execution, take their birth from that stern, thoughtful mind, which submitted to be taught by suffering.

No discussion of Mary Barton would be complete without mention of some of the minor characters. Old Alice Wilson, the washer-woman, whose sweet serenity and Christian fortitude sustain her in all affliction. Her querulous sister-in-law, Jem's mother, who is at once pathetic and comical. Job Legh, a level-headed, astute observer of events—wearer by trade, a self-taught naturalist by “profession.” We come to know them through their racy Lancashire dialect as they gather together, loyal to each other through thick and thin, enjoying a rare holiday in the fields which they must walk miles to reach, or crowded in their mean dwellings, trying in their simplicity to talk some sense into life's muddles, now submitting in patience, now rebelling in sullen defiance. They are drawn with a blend of pathos and quiet humour, with a sympathy that is, however, tinged with the realization that the blame for the impasse into which men and masters have stepped does not rest wholly with the masters.

But it was just this espousal of the proletarian cause that in the judgment of laissez-faire economy made the book dangerous. Not only is the story told entirely from the workers' point of view, insisted the supporters of capital, but the labourers are all represented as more sinned against than sinning, and the manufacturers as a class are drawn utterly unregardful of their men's rights as human beings. Thus the reading public will get a very false impression of the employer-employee relationship in industry. This was pretty generally the attitude of the conservative press: the Edinburgh Review, the British Quarterly Review, the Manchester Guardian, the Prospective Review. On the other hand, the Athenaeum, the Eclectic Review, Fraser's Magazine, the Christian Examiner, as spokesmen for labour, praised the book unreservedly for its fidelity to the facts in its presentation of the masters and men relationship. But both sides commended the accurate depiction of living conditions among the poor, the British Quarterly, which carried the longest and the most emphatic diatribe against the industrial aspects of the book, admitting, if a little extravagantly, that “the pathos of some of the scenes is hardly excelled by anything that exists in our language.”

The ablest polemic directed against the novel was William Rathbone Greg's article in the Edinburgh Review for April, 1849. While second to none in his admiration of the literary qualities of the book, he attacks with considerable acumen the author's economic position. An apologist for capital and for laissez-faire, in respect to the natural adjustment of wages and the inevitability of poverty, he charges Mrs. Gaskell with the sin of special pleading. The poor, he says, have only themselves to blame for their miseries; their plight results from their own improvidence. Hence the problem is not an economic but a moral one. Mary Barton is, therefore, “pervaded by one fatally false idea which seems to have taken possession of the writer's mind … that the poor are to look to the rich, and not to themselves for relief and rescue from their degraded condition and social misery. An impression more utterly erroneous, or more lamentably mischievous, it is difficult to conceive.”

If the novelist was disturbed at the time by these strictures, she subsequently found much to admire in her censor. In a letter, written in 1854, introducing him to M. Emile Souvestre, she speaks of him as an “old friend of mine,” and explains that he is “a distinguished writer in our Edinburgh Review. … For instance he reviewed and abused Mary Barton, and we are none the less friends.”

In a letter to Miss Ewart, daughter of a Liberal M.P., Mrs. Gaskell makes it quite clear that she had thought she was writing of particular instances, not of conditions in general:

… I can only say that I wanted to represent the subject in the light in which some of the workmen certainly consider to be true; not that I dare to say is the abstract absolute truth.

That some of the men do view the subject in the way I have tried to represent, I have personal evidence. … No one can feel more deeply than I how wicked it is to do anything to excite class against class; and it has been most unconscious if I have done so … no praise could compensate me for the self-reproach I shall feel if I have written unjustly.

Thus she evidently saw that in spite of conscientious efforts to be fair to both sides, in the judgment of some, she had been too biased in favour of industry's victims. In North and South, her next industrial novel, while never losing sight of the claims of poverty, she tells her story from the manufacturers' point of view.

All told, however, the reception of Mary Barton must have been immensely gratifying to the family at 121 Upper Rumford Street. The “fan mail” that reached the author through her publishers, as well as by less direct channels, came from some of the most distinguished of her contemporaries: Landor, Whewell (Master of Trinity), Jowett (Master of Balliol), F. D. Maurice, Ruskin, Kingsley, Mrs. Browning, A. P. Stanley, the Earl of Shaftesbury (noted as a philanthropist), Eliza Cook (editor of the Journal that went by her name), Samuel Bamford (author of Passages in the Life of a Radical), W. E. Foster (active in the colonization movement as a solution for unemployment), the aged Maria Edgeworth (in a letter written just a month before her death)—all, while not overlooking the faults in the book, give it strong endorsement. “My own father,” writes Mrs. Ritchie, “and Dickens, and Carlyle, and Kingsley, and all the leading critics of those days recognised [in Mary Barton] her great gifts at once and with warm plaudits.” Among the tributes most valued by the author must have been this letter from Carlyle; writing from Chelsea in 1848, he says:

Dear Madam,

(For I catch the treble of that fine melodious voice very well)—We have read your book here, my wife first and then I; both of us with real pleasure. A beautiful, cheerfully pious, social, clear and observant character is everywhere recognizable in the writer, which sense is the welcomest sight any writer can show in his books; your field is moreover new, important, full of rich material (which, as is usual, required a soul of true opulence to recognize them as such.) The result is a Book deserving to take its place above the ordinary garbage of Novels—a book which every intelligent person may read with entertainment. I gratefully accept it as a real contribution (about the first real one) toward developing a huge subject, which has lain dumb too long. … Speech or literature … could hardly find a more rational function, I think, at present. You will probably give us other books on the same matter; and Mary Barton, according to my auguries of its reception here, is likely to procure you sufficient invitation. May you do it well and even better! Your writing is already very beautiful, soft, clear, and natural. On the side of veracity, or devout earnestness of mind, I find you already strong. May you live long to write good books.

T. Carlyle.⁴

Not a little of the sensation created by Mary Barton sprang from mystery surrounding its authorship. Who wrote it? Chapman and Hall and Mrs. Gaskell were in conspiracy to keep this important question dark. “Am I at liberty,” writes Chapman, on the eve of publication, “to tell your name to anyone? Dickens or Carlyle should they ask? I should like to be prepared on this point and will if you wish it, preserve a profound mystery.” Greg and Carlyle detected the feminine hand; Miss Edgeworth hazarded Harriet Martineau. The Athenaeum and the Inquirer assumed it written by a man. It became a topic of drawing-room conversations. Mrs. Gaskell herself must have got much amusement out of thus fooling her public. It is said that soon after the book came out, she was visiting at Knutsford, and when the subject of the authorship was introduced, she innocently took part in the discussion. But in spite of her efforts to keep the secret even from intimate friends, it would leak out: “I did write it,” she acknowledged to Miss Ewart, “but how did you find out? I do want it to be concealed if possible, and I don't think anybody here has the least idea who is the author.” And Emily Winkworth is sure she knows. Writing to her sister, Catherine, on November 3rd, 1848, she says:

What do you think? I'm positive Mary Barton, a Story of Manchester Life, is by Mrs. Gaskell! I got hold of it last night going to bed, and knew by the first few words it was hers—about Green Heys Fields and the stile she was describing to me the other day;—but we haven't talked a word about it yet, and I don't mean to say I guess it, till I have said all I want about it first. The folks here know it I am sure—they all turned so silent when I began to talk about it at breakfast time, and Mrs. Gaskell suddenly popped down under the table to look for something which I'm sure wasn't there. It is exquisitely written, makes one cry rather too much, that is all; the little bits of description perfect; the dialogue, too, extremely clever, humorous here and there. It was finished a year ago the preface says, and begun three years ago—no doubt to help her take her thoughts off her poor lost baby.

Catherine must have read this letter with high interest, because she had already, without knowing the authorship, written a long review of Mary Barton (thirty pages octavo, in manuscript), on the significance of the book both as “an intellectual treat and as a stimulant to moral energy.”

But even after the secret was out, Mrs. Gaskell for some time continued to be known on the title-page of her novels simply as “The Authoress of Mary Barton.” And by this phrase she is often alluded to in the letters and conversations of friends. It became her ticket of admission into liberal and literary circles. Women of social conscience—Mary Cowden Clarke, Eliza Dawson Fletcher, the Swedish novelist (Fredrika Bremer), and others eagerly sought the acquaintance of “the authoress of Mary Barton.” The excitement caused by the novel at home spread across the Channel, not only to Sweden but to France and elsewhere, and over the sea to America. Much of this came after the author's lifetime, the echoes lingering on in the form of reprints and new editions, as late as 1947. But she got enough of the stir to realize that in embarking on the career of a novelist she was making no mistake. Her literary début was a brilliant contrast to that of poor Anthony Trollope, who, in the words of his biographer, Michael Sadleir, had had the chagrin only the year before, of seeing his first novel, The MacDermotts of Ballycloran, “come stillborn from the press.”

Notes

1. An unsigned review of Mrs. Gaskell's work in the British Quarterly Review, 1867, pp. 399-420, is an excellent example of the Victorian conception of one criterion of literary merit and the function of the novel. Starting with a quotation from La Bruyère, to the effect that when an author lifts your spirit and inspires you with noble and courageous feelings, you know that the work is good and made by a master hand, the writer finds this sentiment particularly applicable to the work of Mrs. Gaskell: “Under her guidance we are always taken into cleanly company, and need never feel ashamed to say where we have been.”

   The modern reaction to this piece of sentimentalism is amusingly expressed by Sadleir in his biography, Anthony Trollope, p. 158: “Novels were not mere literature in 1854; they were—or were expected to be—pulpits or lecture desks or fog horns of private prejudice. If since then they have advanced in critical estimation, the credit is as much Trollope's own as that of any other writer … [by] proving that the genuine novel writer should be an artist, and not a governess, a parson or an agitator.” In her later work Elizabeth Gaskell was certainly moving in this same emancipated direction.

2. The story that Mary Barton was sent to “nearly all the publishers in London” is told by Elizabeth Barrett Browning in a gossipy letter to her friend Miss Mitford. Mrs. Browning found much power in the novel: … “she can shake and she can pierce”, but it offended the poet's artistic taste because it is a “class book” and because it is lacking in beauty. In taking this sentimental view of realism in fiction, the letter is characteristic of its time. (See The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Edited by Frederic G. Kenyon, London, 1897, vol. I, pp. 471-72.)

3. In spite of Mrs. Gaskell's assertion that John Barton was the only figure intentionally drawn from life, the novelist was accused of dramatizing, in Barton's murder of young Carson, the murder of young Thomas Ashton of Pole Bank, Werneth (name? MS., illegible) on the night of January 3, 1831. The Ashton family blamed Mrs. Gaskell for reviving the incident, declaring that Ashton's sister, Mrs. T. B. Potter, fainted when she read the incident in the novel because she recognized the victim as her brother. When the Manchester Public Library was opened in 1852, Mrs. Gaskell wrote Sir John Potter (son of Mrs. T. B. Potter), who was associated with the founding of the library, that she wanted to give a copy of Mary Barton to the library but before doing so, she wished to know whether the gift would be distasteful to the family. Her sincere expression of regret and her denial of any intention of making capital out of the murder of a manufacturer by a trade unionist (pointing out that similar incidents had occurred in Glasgow about the same time) should have been sufficient, and were, to absolve the novelist from the Potters' charge against her. The correspondence may be found in “Autograph Letters in the Sir John Potter Collection on the Opening of the Manchester Public Library, 2d Series, 1852.” Miss Haldane, Elizabeth Gaskell, etc., pp. 41-42, prints Mrs. Gaskell's letter.

4. Carlyle's letter in praise of Mary Barton, dated “8th Nov. 1848” is in the John Rylands Library, Rylands English MSS. 730 (14). It is printed by Miss Haldane, Mrs. Gaskell, etc., pp. 47 f.

Bibliography

[Gaskell, Elizabeth.] Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life. In Two Volumes. London: Chapman and Hall. 1848

Haldane, Elizabeth C. H. Mrs. Gaskell and her Friends. London: (80) Hodder & Stoughton, 1931. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1931.