[In the following essay, Jordan discusses literary quotations and allusions in Gaskell's novel, concentrating on elements of Gothic discourse that appear after the murder of Harry Carson.]

Raymond Williams has said of Mary Barton (1848) that it is ‘the most moving response in literature to the industrial sufferings of the 1840s’. But he sees also that there was ‘a point, in its writing, at which the flow of sympathy, the combination of sympathetic observation and of a largely successful attempt at imaginative identification’, was arrested. Mrs. Gaskell has her hero, ‘the person with whom all my sympathies went’, commit murder:

… John Barton, a political murderer appointed by a trade union, is a dramatization of the fear of violence which was widespread among the upper and middle classes at the time, and which penetrated, as an arresting and controlling factor, even into the deep imaginative sympathy of a Mrs. Gaskell … The imaginative choice of the act of murder and then the imaginative recoil from it have the effect of ruining the necessary integration of feeling in the whole theme.¹

However John Lucas has suggested that there is interest and pleasure in Mrs. Gaskell's novels beyond the integrating flow of sympathy:

The fact is that there is a marvellously anarchic force at work in Mrs. Gaskell's fiction. The official side of her, liberal, pious, incuriously middle-class, pleads for a very complacent notion of reconciliation, and tries to fashion art so as to reveal its pattern. But an endlessly rewarding unofficial side keeps pushing this pattern away, revealing different patterns of inevitability, of antagonisms, misunderstandings, hatred.²

I want to look at this ‘side’ of Mary Barton not as a single ‘point’ at which the flow of sympathy is arrested but as the irruption into the text of discourses other than that of sympathetic observing realism. There are very many quotations and allusions in the text which have been well studied in Michael Wheeler's The Art of Allusion in Victorian Fiction³: the association of the working-class characters with Burns, popular ballads and radical poetry and of Harry Carson with Shakespearean tags; and in particular the excessive reliance on biblical allusions, most marked in the modulation of both Barton and the elder Carson from Old Testament vengefulness to New Testament charity. I wish, in that respect, only to draw attention to one odd but important biblical allusion he has missed: ‘the Scorpion’. But my first and more extended concern is with the ‘Gothic’, as a discourse arguably more alien to a realistic presentation of nineteenth-century Manchester: as Michael Wheeler says, the ‘steady flow’ of biblical allusions ‘serves as a kind of continuo in the novel’. In a recent study of Mrs. Gaskell, Angus Easson draws a contrast between her ‘not uncritical’ sympathy for the trades unions and the representation of them by other novelists as secret societies consolidated by skull and dagger initiation rituals: ‘she is … aware that industrial problems are not a matter of skulls and oaths but of flesh and blood’.⁴ Professor Easson's reading of the novel in terms of coherent realistic character study and development makes little of the generally felt change in mode after Harry Carson's death, the mode announced by the face of the Carson's servant in chapter eighteen: ‘It was blanched to a dead whiteness; the lips compressed as if to keep within some tale of horror; the eyes distended and unnatural. It was a terror-stricken face’. I wish to trace the emergence of this mode in the earlier part of the novel, noting discrepancies precisely in terms of treating the working-class response to industrial problems not only realistically but as a matter of skulls and oaths; a matter of terror.

Before his journey to London as a delegate to present the Chartist National Petition, John Barton, though always impressively stern, is relatively chatty and open. Chapter eight presents a nicely observed little scene of domestic comedy: Jem Wilson, come to court Mary, is entertained by her father instead, with talk of wages, unions and industrial accidents. Comic realism provides an effective forum for Barton's sense of the need for action to control ‘the masters’, and for the facts which make his case:

‘… by far th' greater part o' th' accidents as comed in, happened in th' last two hours o' work, when folk getten tired and careless. Th' surgeon said it were all true, and that he were going to bring that fact to light.’

Jem was pondering Mary's conduct; but the pause made him aware he ought to utter some civil listening noise; so he said,

‘Very true’.

‘Ay, it's true enough, my lad …’

A different way of presenting Barton is foreshadowed on his return from London in chapter nine. Mary, alone at home, hears a fumbling at the door: ‘There stood—could it be? yes it was, her father.’ Her lonely anxious situation and the moment of suspense, so crudely handled, suggest that ‘it’ might just as well have been a Gothic spectre. This possibility is strengthened in chapter ten, as a contrast with chapter eight shows. Then, Barton had been presented with realistic specificity ‘smoking his pipe by the fire while he read an old Northern Star borrowed from a neighbouring public house.’ We may presume that his seat, his pipe, his paper were habitual, but there we see him quite clearly, on one characteristic occasion. In chapter ten he is again ‘near the fireplace (from habit)’ but we may now see him either ‘smoking or chewing opium’. The clear picture is blurred by the alternative choice of image. I shall return later to this seat by the fireplace, from which both the realistic Barton and the fire are significantly removed in the course of the novel. What follows has the recurrent unspecific suspense of Gothic fiction:

Oh, how Mary loathed that smell! And in the dusk, just before it merged into the short summer night, she had learned to look with dread towards the window, which now her father would have kept uncurtained; for there were not seldom seen sights which haunted her in her dreams. Strange faces of pale men, with dark glaring eyes, peered into the inner darkness, and seemed desirous to ascertain if her father were at home. Or a hand and arm (the body hidden) was put within the door, and beckoned him away. He always went. And once or twice, when Mary was in bed, she heard men's voices below, in earnest, whispered talk.

They were all desperate members of Trades' Unions, ready for any thing; made ready by want.

The influence of the tale of terror on Mrs. Gaskell's presentation of John Barton is confirmed by two allusions in chapter fifteen, neither of which is very clearly remembered or acknowledged. At the beginning of this chapter Barton is described as suffering ‘a long period of bodily privation; of daily hunger after food’, while he is also mentally mortified: the rejection of the Chartist petition has destroyed his hopes for government intervention to alleviate the suffering of the Manchester poor. The analogy Mrs. Gaskell chooses for his ‘monomania’ is extraordinary:

… so haunting, so incessant, were the thoughts that pressed upon him. I have somewhere read a forcibly described punishment among the Italians, worthy of a Borgia. The supposed or real criminal was shut up in a room, supplied with every convenience and luxury; and at first mourned little over his imprisonment. But day by day he became aware that the space between the walls of his apartment was narrowing, and then he understood the end. Those painted walls would come into hideous nearness, and at last crush the life out of him.

And so day by day, nearer and nearer, came the diseased thoughts of John Barton. They excluded the light of heaven, the cheering sounds of earth. They were preparing his death.

The analogy between the pressing in of the walls and the pressing in of obsessive thoughts is straightforward enough: the inappropriateness of the context, ‘supplied with every convenience and luxury’ as against ‘daily hunger’, seems not to occur to the writer. What makes it even stranger is that she has herself supplied this inappropriate convenience and luxury; it is not in the half-remembered source. Harvey Peter Sucksmith has shown that this was probably William Mudford's The Iron Shroud, published in Blackwood's Magazine in 1830, and reprinted in Glasgow, possibly in 1840, as The Iron Shroud; or Italian Revenge.⁵ At one point in this tale the prisoner is provided with a different pitcher and rather better food, but this is hardly ‘luxury’. Mr. Sucksmith thinks it unlikely that Mrs. Gaskell had read Poe's The Pit and the Pendulum, which had Mudford's story as its source: it was published in 1843 but not included in his 1845 Tales. However, Poe's prison does have ‘painted walls’, like Barton's imaginary one and unlike Mudford's which is of iron; but it is in Spain not Italy, and squalid not luxurious.⁶ This specific if misremembered allusion supports the hints in the style, that even before the murder Barton is beginning to be associated with Gothic terror; and that when she is using this mode Mrs. Gaskell is concerned with effect not consistency, that she is dominated by vague fears rather than successful imaginative identification. Although it is implied that Barton's mental suffering makes his condition worse than the bodily privation which he shares with others of his class, my earlier quotation from chapter ten should indicate that the Gothic mode is not merely used as a correlative for Barton's consciousness, his obsession and later his guilt. It is also a way of feeling about ‘desperate members of Trades' Unions’.

The confusion of sympathy and fear, of the real and the fantastic, is very marked in the second textual allusion in chapter fifteen, which follows closely on the Italian torture chamber analogy. It is preceded by an argument addressed by the writer to the reader, on the topic of reality and dream:

It is true, much of their [Barton's thoughts] morbid power might be ascribed to the use of opium. But before you blame too harshly this use, or rather abuse, try a hopeless life, with daily cravings of the body for food. Try, not alone being without hope yourself, but seeing all around you reduced to the same despair, arising from the same circumstances; all around you telling (though they use no words or language), by their looks and feeble actions, that they are suffering and sinking under the pressure of want. Would you not be glad to forget life, and its burdens? And opium gives forgetfulness for a time.

It is true they who thus purchase it pay dearly for the oblivion; but can you expect the uneducated to count the cost of their whistle? Poor wretches! They pay a heavy price. Days of oppressive weariness and langour, whose realities have the feeble sickliness of dreams; nights, whose dreams are fierce realities of agony; sinking health, tottering frames, incipient madness, and worse, the consciousness of incipient madness; this is the price of their whistle. But have you taught them the science of consequences?

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?

And so on into the problems and mysteries of life, until, bewildered and lost, unhappy and suffering, the only feeling that remained clear and undisturbed in the tumult of his heart, was hatred to the one class and keen sympathy with the other.

But what availed his sympathy? No education had given him wisdom; and without wisdom, even love, with all its effects, too often works but harm. He acted to the best of his judgement, but it was a widely-erring judgement.

Barton's use of opium is appropriate both to the Gothic mode and to social realism: it was the anodyne of the working-class poor as well as of De Quincey. It is for and about the poor, represented by Barton, that Mrs. Gaskell engages in argument with ‘you’, the reader, who is assumed to be neither an opium addict nor in want and despair. The use of opium is provoked by circumstances and should not be blamed ‘too harshly’ by those who are not in such circumstances; it gives forgetfulness. But the price of opium is a confusion of reality and dream: ‘Days … whose realities have the feeble sickliness of dreams; nights, whose dreams are fierce realities of agony’. This dissolution of the boundaries of reality and dream has the effect, in Barton, of producing his monomania: one single clear idea, the separation of rich and poor. His ‘hatred to the one class and keen sympathy to the other’ is seen as unwise and ‘widely-erring’, part of the ‘incipient madness’ brought on by opium.

There's one contradiction here: what is said to be a merging of boundaries produces a very clear sense of a boundary. There's another contradiction, clearer and more important, between this argument and the whole text. Much of the emotive force of Mrs. Gaskell's narrative comes from her own intense consciousness of unjust separation; the consciousness she attributes to Barton. The effect of chapter six, coping with the miserable death of the pious Methodist Davenport, is achieved by the way it moves continually from the lives of the poor to the lives of the rich: the structuring of the episode makes a point about injustice which needs no exterior affirmation. If she had not, as narrator, shared Barton's obsession, she could not have rendered it with such force. To say this is to reassert the contradiction between ideology and the presented narrative reality which appears so clearly in chapter three: ‘I know that this [what she has presented] is not really the case; and I know what is the truth in such matters’ [which, however, she does not present]. In her argument in chapter fifteen she presents Barton's consciousness as in the grip of fantastic horror and monomania, and thereby herself dissolves the boundaries between class-consciousness and mental illness. The allusion to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818), which follows, suggests that her own class-consciousness has moved her from reality and realism to a more fantastic way of feeling and writing, even while she pretends to argue reasonably:

The actions of the uneducated seem to me typified in those of Frankenstein, that monster of many human qualities, ungifted with a soul, a knowledge of the difference between good and evil.

The people rise up to life; they irritate us, they terrify us, and we become their enemies. Then, in the sorrowful moment of our triumphant power, their eyes gaze on us with a mute reproach. Why have we made them what they are; a powerful monster, yet without the inner means for peace and happiness?

The change from the earlier ‘you’ addressed to the reader, to the first person plural, indicates how unmisgivingly Mrs. Gaskell identifies herself and her readers as belonging to the same class. ‘The people’ are not ‘us’, they are monstrous, Other. Again her memory is at fault: clearly she had not read Frankenstein recently or at all. Her participation in the common error of calling Frankenstein's creature by its creator's name awakens, as Mrs. Gaskell did not intend but Mary Shelley did, a doubt as to who it is that is truly monstrous—the creature with its discourse on its own development and education (rational and enlightened, at least in the author's intention), or the idealistic scientist whose supposed high intelligence and scrupulous attention to detail did not extend to any provision for post-natal care.

Mrs. Gaskell's intention is clearly to argue that however unthinking ‘we’ may have been, ‘we’ do have souls and therefore ought now to take responsibility for the urban poor, the soulless monster created (as she claims) by industrial capitalism. The implications of the image in terms of Barton himself are less clear. The analogy between ‘Frankenstein’ and the uneducated, whom Barton represents, arose out of the claim that his class sympathies showed mistaken judgement, affected by an opium addiction which brought him close to madness. If the analogy holds good then Barton has no soul, no ‘knowledge of the difference between good and evil’. The argument continues, immediately:

John Barton became a Chartist, a Communist, all that is commonly called wild and visionary. Ay! but being visionary is something. It shows a soul, a being not altogether sensual—a creature who looks forward for others, if not for himself.

The turns in reasoning are as upsetting as a switchback. The wild and visionary quality which Mrs. Gaskell attributes both to Barton's consciousness and to his political affiliations belongs to her presentation of and attitude to him: impassioned and inviting imaginative sympathy. The reason which she denies to Barton and implicitly attributes to the middle class seems deficient in herself. In the next paragraph this wild and visionary soulless soul is said to have ‘a sort of practical power, which made him useful to the bodies of men to whom he belonged’, a rough eloquence coming from the heart, and ‘a pretty clear head at times, for method and arrangement’. Underlying all these intelligent, heart-felt, practical and socially responsible qualities is an absolute unselfishness, the prerequisite for ‘great and noble men’. And it is Barton's commitment to Chartism which is the occasion for the practice of his abilities and virtues. All this (the last sentence is deduced from the context) is said by Mrs. Gaskell: the insertion of ‘at times’ looks like a momentary awareness of how far she has gone in subverting her Gothic image of Barton, and an attempt to repair the damage. It could be argued that the contradictions revealed here in the author's presentation of John Barton are in fact realistic: expressing the multiplicity of character, the complexity of psychological states and behaviour. I do not think this argument is adequate. A Gothic way of imagining the character is supervening on the realistic one: they collide here; and the Gothic mode continues to be used to withdraw sympathy from Barton and the strikers.

If Mrs. Gaskell is not fully in control of herself when she argues or imagines or feels, she is in control of her plot. The combination of working men to which Barton commits himself assigns to him the murder of Harry Carson, son of one of the employers. This episode, in chapter sixteen, reveals again the shift in sympathy and mode. During the interview between employers and the strikers' representatives Harry Carson has drawn a caricature of the half-starved ragged men. One of them goes back to get it: ‘There's a bit on a picture up yonder, as one o' the gentlemen threw away; I've a little lad at home as dearly loves a picture; by your leave I'll go up for it’. The strikers' enjoyment of the sketch, followed by anger, is drawn with lively detail and sympathy, mainly in direct speech. But the decision to murder, and the drawing of lots to choose the murderer, is shifted to indirect reporting, which returns the realistic individuals to the set of spooks they had first appeared as in chapter ten:

And so with words, or looks that told more than words, they built up a deadly plan. Deeper and darker grew the import of their speeches, as they stood hoarsely muttering their meaning out, and glaring, with eyes that told the terror their own thoughts were to them, upon their neighbours. Their clenched fists, their set teeth, their livid looks, all told the suffering their minds were voluntarily undergoing in the contemplation of crime, and in familiarising themselves with its details.

Then came one of those fierce terrible oaths which bind members of Trades' Unions to any given purpose.

The shift in mode marks a blackening of the trades' union by association with murder; and Mrs. Gaskell's own murder of her relatively realistic and sympathetic character, John Barton, decreating him to a spectre, a shadow, an automaton. His act as assassin is absent from the text, although just before it may be presumed to take place Barton tenderly guides a lost child home; the kind of display of benevolence which the monster in the Frankenstein films makes. Barton himself is then absent, except as an occasional thought in the minds of others, for fifteen chapters. The questions raised by his absence are given no consideration in the text, as if there were no longer any interest in his character, psychology, motivation: why had he not been aware that he would incriminate Jem Wilson by borrowing his gun and throwing it away near the scene of the crime? Why did he take no action to clear Jem—as a newspaper reader he would surely know of the arrest and trial, even walking to Glasgow on union business, which has taken him off the scene? The kind of explanations which would be essential to realistic characterization are no longer relevant to John Barton.

He returns in chapter thirty-three as a slow and heavy foot-fall, a form gliding in the shadows:

A foot-fall was heard along the pavement; slow and heavy was the sound. Before Jem had ended his little piece of business, a form had glided into sight; a wan, feeble figure, bearing, with evident and painful labour, a jug of water from the neighbouring pump. It went before Jem, turned up the court at the corner of which he was standing, passed into the broad, calm light; and there, with bowed head, sinking and shrunk body, Jem recognised John Barton.

No haunting ghost could have had less of the energy of life in its involuntary motions than he, who, nevertheless, went on with the same measured clock-work tread, until the door of his own house was reached. And then he disappeared, and the latch fell feebly to, and made a faint and wavering sound, breaking the solemn silence of the night. Then all again was still.

Mrs. Gaskell's account of Jem's reactions can be read as a confession of her own perplexed half-reasons, half-feelings, the entanglement of her ‘real motives’, as well as an apology for the perplexity she may be putting her reader in by what she is doing to her character. Mary, delirious after her exertions at the time of the trial, has split Barton into two—her father and ‘the blood-shedder’. Aware of this, Jem decides to behave as if he has not seen Barton, as if he were a shadow or supernatural visitation:

If you think this account of mine confused, of the half-feelings, half-reasons, which passed through Jem's mind, as he stood gazing at the empty space, where that crushed form had so lately been seen,—if you are perplexed to disentangle the real motives, I do assure you it was from such an involved set of thoughts that Jem drew the resolution to act as if he had not seen that phantom likeness of John Barton; himself, yet not himself.

‘I do assure you it was …’ The novelist's earnest assurance of her reader has earlier marked an insistence on ideology as opposed to what her narrative presents; here the anxiety (protesting too much) may be associated with the shift in narrative mode.

The picture of Barton in chapter thirty-four marks the third phase in his presentation: the first exemplified in chapter eight, with fire, pipe and newspaper; the second in chapter ten, chewing opium or smoking by the fire-place without a fire; the third, sitting by the grate: ‘Some dull, grey ashes, negligently left, long days ago, coldly choked up the bars. He had taken the accustomed seat from mere force of habit, which ruled his automaton-body’. His face is ‘like a skull’. He is a lifeless shadow of himself, as dead as the fire, as empty as the room. Of course my account of a presentation of Barton split into two—realistic character and spectre-automaton—has so far ignored the final phase; the pity appealed for, the ultimate Christian reconciliation with Carson. That is because what dominates the imagination is the ‘crushed form’ in ‘empty space’: the space in which Mrs. Gaskell might have sustained a realistic and sympathetic study of a representative of the first working-class political movement.

John Barton is called a Chartist, but Mrs. Gaskell empties the label of full historical content. The progressive silencing of him—which can be traced throughout the text as his speech is replaced by a Gothic imagination of him—can be read as a covert acknowledgement of this. When we read, in chapter fifteen, that Barton ‘became a Chartist’ we may well assume that this is the point at which he became one; but he had already joined the movement after his wife's death, in chapter three. This is of course why he goes to London, as a delegate to present the National Petition (presented to Parliament in 1839 and rejected)—though Mrs. Gaskell is as likely as the reader to have forgotten the fact since she nowhere gives Barton specifically Chartist views, nor does she mention the Charter's six points of political reform: universal male suffrage, equal electoral districts, removal of property qualification for M.P., payment of M.P.s, the secret ballot, and annual general elections. The assumptions behind these proposals about the causes and cures of working-class misery are ignored. In spite of the intellectual power, austerity and authority attributed to him, Barton's notion of the petition is presented both as utopian and as a child's cry for pity from neglectful parents, to procure charity: ‘some grand relief, by means of which they should never suffer want or care any more’. He speaks humbly, with none of the Chartist sense that what was necessary was a working-class voice in government: ‘“… what I think on, is just speaking out about the distress, that they say is nought … and when they hear o' all this plague, pestilence, and famine, they'll surely do something wiser for us than we can guess at now. …”’ (Chapter 8) When Mrs. Gaskell attempts in her own person to account for the causes of misery, she mingles it with her sense of the ‘impossibility’ of describing that misery adequately:

Even philanthropists who had studied the subject, were forced to own themselves perplexed in the endeavour to ascertain the real causes of the misery; the whole matter was of so complicated a nature, that it became next to impossible to understand it thoroughly. … It is so impossible to describe, or even faintly to picture, the state of distress. …

(Chapter 8)

Yet she has described the misery, with the moving effect to which Raymond Williams testifies, and she has given an account in chapters three, five and six, of certain clear major causes: the capitalist market economy and more immediately the continuing severe weather which by making the purchase of summer clothes unnecessary depressed the home clothing market. With such causes, the Christian charity or otherwise of the employers is irrelevant.⁷ The passage quoted, with its perplexity and doubt about ‘the real causes’, foreshadows in its diction Mrs. Gaskell's account of Jem Wilson's reactions to the Gothic John Barton, an account which reflects her own evasion of a realistic presentation of the man. However much she may have felt that Chartism oversimplified, there must surely have been a case, since she has chosen to call her hero a Chartist, for presenting the Chartist view?

Her silencing of the Chartist voice is balanced by an attack on contemporary government more satirical than any speech she gives Barton:

They could not believe that the government knew of their misery; they rather chose to think it possible that men could voluntarily assume the office of legislators for a nation, ignorant of its real state, as who should make domestic rules for the pretty behaviour of children, without caring to know that those children had been kept for days without food.

(Chapter 8)

Her angry and moving, detailed and general, account of this ‘misery’ as the context of the petition, does in fact endorse a modern historian's account of the genesis and persistence of Chartism: ‘A movement like Chartism in Britain would collapse time and again, under its political weakness. Time and again sheer hunger—the intolerable burden which rested on millions of the labouring poor—would revive it.’⁸

Nevertheless, Barton returns from London silenced, as Parliament had silenced the petition: he grimly refuses to tell ‘what happened when yo' got to th' Parliament House’, and the space which that might have taken in the text is filled by Job Legh's pathetic and comic anecdote of his own trip to London and back. It may be significant that in the first outline of the novel Job Legh, a reluctant union member in the completed text, was himself a Chartist who instigated Barton (then Wilson) to join a Chartist Club.⁹ Just as this affiliation is suppressed between outline and text, so Legh is used in the text to replace Barton's potential speech, both in chapter nine and in the penultimate chapter, chapter thirty-seven, where he accounts for Barton's motives to Mr. Carson in total ignorance of ‘the real causes’.

This pattern of displacement—a patient Job Legh substituted for a Chartist Job Legh, a silent spectre-automaton for an articulate John Barton—is most obviously enacted in the plot and form of the novel. Mrs. Gaskell's angry documentation and her labelling of Barton as a Chartist create expectations of a political novel, in which Barton might finally speak out and defend himself as a Chartist. These expectations are disappointed. The sensational murder story withdraws attention from the outcome of the strike and is merged with the love story as Mary Barton's suitor Jem Wilson is charged with the murder of Harry Carson, who has been pursuing her. This merger leads to a detective novel, with first Esther, Mary's prostitute aunt, and then Mary herself as early female detectives; and finally to courtroom drama with a last-minute vindication, when Jem Wilson stands trial in place of John Barton. Edmund Wilson credited Dickens with the creation of a new genre, ‘the detective story which is also a social fable’. In Bleak House (1852-3) ‘the solution of the mystery is to be also the moral of the story and the last word of Dickens's social “message”’.¹⁰Mary Barton may have influenced Dickens but in it Mrs. Gaskell uses the detective story and the court-room drama to evade political analysis, and to divert attention from her own ‘social message’.

I have used the allusion to Frankenstein, and the traces of the tale of terror associated with it, to claim that Mrs. Gaskell was almost consciously avoiding the realistic satisfaction of certain expectations which the novel creates. I now want to suggest that the ‘biblical’ scorpion, which I mentioned at the beginning of this essay, can be seen as a similar case. It appears in Margaret Jennings's account of her grandfather Job Legh's entomological studies in chapter five. Just as the scientific hobby (introduced as part of Mrs. Gaskell's elevation of the working-class man as worthy of her reader's respect) may have been a substitute for political engagement, so this anecdote like many others crowds out for its duration any other sort of story she may be telling. I should note here that to say this is not to disapprove: Mrs. Gaskell's passion for gossip and story-telling is both egalitarian and one of the pleasures of her text. A contribution by David Musselwhite to the 1977 Essex Conference on the Sociology of Literature, ‘The Novel as Narcotic’, interprets the scorpion as an ‘image of a dormant class roused by the heat of anger and despair, an irreconcilable creature which has to be drugged to death in gin, totally narcoticized’. (In fact it is boiled to death in the kettle before being preserved in gin:—‘What on earth is he doing that for?’ wonders Margaret as Job gets the kettle. ‘He'll never drink his tea with a scorpion running free and easy about the room.’) Along with the other fauna in the novel it offers, David Musselwhite claims, a ‘shadow’ of ‘the text's “ideological ambition”’: the argument between Will Wilson and Job Legh about mermaids and flying fish offers the possibility that if flying fish are possible then so are mermaids, so that contradictions may be resolved. Just as Will pacifies Job by offering him a cat without a tail, a Manx cat, so the novel itself becomes a scorpion without a sting: the potentially political novel becomes a less offensive entertainment.

That is one way of attributing significance to the apparently random choice of a scorpion. It can be misleading to insist upon the full parallelism of allusions in Mrs. Gaskell's work, as Professor Easson reminds us.¹¹ (If we did so with Carson's conversion by his recollection of Luke 23.34, ‘Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do’, we would find ourselves equating Harry Carson with Christ.) But a search for a relevant background for this superficial anecdotal scorpion reveals how deeply it was embedded in the imaginative resources on which she drew for this novel. It emerges again in a more serious context in chapter ten. Writing of the scope and long-term effects of extreme poverty, she notes how pious and traditional sayings have lost their power to console and reconcile, and herself appeals at once to the Old Testament:

The people had thought the poverty of the preceding years hard to bear, and had found its yoke heavy; but this year added sorely to its weight. Former times had chastised them with whips, but this chastised them with scorpions.

The allusion is to I Kings 12. 11 and 14. Michael Wheeler insists that our interest in such allusions should be restricted to the moment of publication, to their probable effect on the reader rather than to any evidence they might offer about the moment of creation.¹² A thoroughgoing application of this principle would suppress a curious fact about Mary Barton: that the scorpion which emerges in chapters five and ten lies beneath the structure of chapters fifteen and sixteen. The whole chapter in I Kings underlies the presentation of the employers in those chapters.

The story in Kings is that Rehoboam reigned over all Israel after the death of Solomon. The exiled Jeroboam returns to plead for the people: ‘… now therefore make thou the grievous service of thy father, and his heavy yoke which he put upon us, lighter, and we will serve thee.’ Rehoboam consults with the old men, his father Solomon's counsellors, who recommend that he should ‘serve’ the people, ‘and answer them, and speak good words to them’. But Rehoboam follows instead the advice of the young men, to outdo his father: ‘My father made your yoke heavy, and I will add to your yoke: my father also chastised you with whips, but I will chastise you with scorpions.’ The result is rebellion: all the tribes but one refuse the rule of Rehoboam. So in chapter fifteen some at least of the old men are for conciliation, whereas all of the young men are behind Harry Carson:

Some of the old, whose experience had taught them sympathy, were for concession. Others, white-headed men too, had only learnt hardness and obstinacy from the days of the years of their lives, and sneered at the more gentle and yielding. The young men were all for an unflinching resistance to claims urged with so much violence. Of this party Harry Carson was the leader.

I am arguing that the whole of I Kings 12 was on Mrs. Gaskell's mind, even though the only linguistic reminder of the Old Testament here is in the phrasing of ‘the days of the years of their lives’. In chapter ten the vicious lashing with scorpions is attributed very generally to hard times and not to any specific human agency; in chapters fifteen and sixteen the continuing though submerged presence of the biblical allusion suggests decisive human responsibility—the responsibility of the young men, in the present and presumably in the future. The vicious effect of their hard line as an exacerbation of misery is not directly confessed: lashing with scorpions doesn't emerge in the text at this point. But we can see quite clearly that it was in Mrs. Gaskell's consciousness as she produced the text, once we correlate the assertions in chapter fifteen, and their enactment in chapter sixteen, with the allusion in chapter ten: the policy adopted by the employers is responsible for the misery suffered by the employees and, moreover, is liable to lead to disaster in the future, on the analogy of the fates suffered by Rehoboam (loss of power) and Harry Carson (loss of life).

This note of warning is reinforced by another unstressed allusion in chapter sixteen, where the masters look ‘as like as they could, to the Roman senators who awaited the irruption of Brennus and his Gauls’. Stephen Gill's footnote, in the Penguin English Library edition of Mary Barton, informs us that the Gauls under Brennus plundered Rome, besieged the Capitol for six months and only departed after payment of a ransom.

As in the Gothicizing of John Barton we see here the emergence of that spectre, fear of violence. It is because of this fear that Mrs. Gaskell wants to see the averting of violence as something within the power of the middle class but independent of the economic system which makes them dominant. She wants charity as taught in the New Testament to be capable of resolving the dangerous situation. In this traceable but not fully articulate reasoning she is prepared to blame her own class morally for working-class misery. The scorpion has been the instrument of the middle class; it is to be rendered harmless by charity, sympathy, concession, as Carson's vindictiveness (‘Let my trespasses be unforgiven so that I may have vengeance for my son's murder’, chapter thirty five) melts into penitence, mercy and love. Mrs. Gaskell's readiness to attribute guilt, her creation of oppressors and victims in terms of the Hebrew tribes and their rulers, parallels that division into rich goats and poor sheep, Dives and Lazarus, with which she endows Barton and which clearly moved her strongly. The economic determinants of the situation she has described in Manchester do not permit such simple oppositions and resolutions; she resorts therefore to other genres, other discourses, with terms that can be resolved.

The employment of the tale of terror works against the conciliatory conclusion, however. Refusing a realistic presentation of John Barton as a convinced Chartist (which might easily have been accompanied, in Carlyle's manner, by counter-arguments as to the unworkability of Chartism), the Gothic allusions and their encroachment on the realistic text present Barton as monstrous and Other, a spectre with which no human accommodation could be made. This collision of sympathetic, authentic realism with imaginative terror affords, in Mary Barton, an image of Mrs. Gaskell's own psycho-historical condition. Its value as literature resides in this ultimate authenticity which betrays its contradictions.

Notes

1. R. Williams, Culture and Society (Penguin Books, 1961), Chapter 5, pp. 99-103.

2. J. Lucas, ‘Mrs. Gaskell and the Nature of Social Change’, Literature and History, 1, March 1975, p. 12.

3. M. Wheeler, The Art of Allusion in Victorian Fiction, (Macmillan, 1979), Chapter 4.

4. A. Easson, Elizabeth Gaskell, (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979).

5. H. P. Sucksmith, Nineteenth Century Fiction, 29, 1974-75.

6. A colleague, Dr. John Coombes, suggests that the convenience and luxury which is so inappropriate to Barton's condition signals the reconciliation between Barton and Carson, with its basis in the ideological assumption of an ultimate universality of suffering shared by rich and poor; in later chapters Carson does suffer with equal obsession while ‘supplied with every convenience and luxury’.

7. Carlyle mocked the middle-class resort to ‘impossibility’, as a way of evading such issues while showing concern, in Past and Present; see Gillian Beer, ‘Carlyle and Mary Barton: Problems of Utterance’, Essex Conference on the Sociology of Literature, 1977, pp. 242-255; and also Carlyle's Chartism (1839) for his insistence on the need for ‘speech and articulate inquiry’ about Chartism.

8. E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1962), 11, ii.

9. See J. G. Sharps, Mrs. Gaskell's Observation and Invention (Fontwell, Sussex, 1970), pp. 554-62, and Mary Barton, (Penguin English Library), ed. Stephen Gill, appendix I.

10. E. Wilson, The Wound and the Bow ((1941), Methuen University Paperbacks, 1961 pp. 32-33).

11. A. Easson, op.cit., p. 23.

12. M. Wheeler, op.cit., p. 8.