[In the following excerpt, Lucas attributes the flaws in Mary Barton to Gaskell's failure to deal honestly with the social conditions she was attempting to represent.]

Was it embracing or aiding was most in my mind.

Clough

1

It is probably easier to explain the purpose of this essay than to justify it, for it may well seem to fall between two stools. Basically my subject is the social-problem novel of the 1840s and 1850s, yet though several of these novels come into the discussion it is not really meant to provide a survey account, because of the hundreds of novels that belong to the genre a mere handful repay reading. On the other hand, I am not trying to provide an assessment of one writer in any depth. True, much the largest part of what I have to say is about Mrs. Gaskell, but I say it in what may appear a niggardly manner. It is not only that I have to leave her best work out of account, but that the novels I am concerned with—Mary Barton and North and South—interest me at least as much for their failings as their successes. So I cannot hope to push very far my belief that she is a far better novelist than commonly allowed. But at least the claim for her merits can be launched, for, restricted as the scope of my interest is, what follows will, I hope, make clear why Mrs. Gaskell is much superior to the company she keeps as a social-problem novelist. Even her failings are proof of merits that her nearest rivals, Kingsley and Disraeli, quite lack.

Failings, indeed, count for most in this essay. Very briefly, its purpose is to suggest that the flaws inherent in the genre of the social-problem novel are a direct result of the novelists' failure to deal really honestly with the social experiences their novels are intended to portray. Instead they rely on stock political attitudes to bridge all imaginative lacunae. I am not, by the way, wanting to beg any question in saying that the flaws are inherent in the genre, merely making use of a tautologous definition that will need to be explained a little later. But before I do that I want to add rather more about the cause of the flaws.

I said that these result from the failure to deal honestly with social experience, but I ought really to speak of a failure of imaginative honesty. This is the more accurate phrase, and I mean by it the writer's unwillingness to follow the implications of his given situation through to the end. But plainly this covers a multitude of sins. It applies, for example, to the novelist who never even gets started, but who out of sheer ignorance puts all his working-class characters in slums and has them behave like animals. And it applies equally to the writer who goes to the other extreme of showing that all the poor are relatively rich and all the rich are relatively poor, so that they about meet in the middle. What unites such novels is that they are still-born: the dead tissue of stock political attitudes. Different attitudes certainly, but the cases are the same in that the novelists are not really concerned with imaginative exploration so much as diagrams to prove an argument, with the result that their characters have all the human vitality of numbers and straight lines. If anyone doubts the existence of this sort of novel, he might try reading, to go no lower, Jessie Phillips by Frances Trollope; but I am not going to discuss any examples here. For what interest me are not the products of this kind of misguided earnestness, but novels where a halt is suddenly called to the attempt at imaginative honesty, and a political attitude quickly wheeled forward in its place. These are the novels that provide the genre's major works, since, as I shall try to show, it is the very intensity of imaginative honesty that compels a withdrawal to attitude or, as I should like to call it, a retreat from the abyss. And above all others, this is the case with Mrs. Gaskell.

Before I get down to the heart of the matter, however, it is necessary to clear up what I mean by ‘social-problem novel’. In fact, I have borrowed the term from Arnold Kettle¹ because it seems to me a very good one, and also has the merit of being far better than all the possible alternatives. To look at the term Raymond Williams uses is to see just why. He and Kettle study very much the same group of novels, but Williams refers to them as ‘industrial novels’² and so perhaps tries to get round the problem of genre altogether. One can sympathise with this: talk of genre can be a substitute for criticism, and the concept is villainously difficult to handle. Yet just because the term ‘industrial novel’ is so unsatisfactory it becomes clear that the possible fact of genre does have to be faced, and cannot easily be discarded. And Williams' term won't do, because I can see no way of justifying Sybil as an industrial novel as opposed, say, to Bleak House. On the other hand, it is quite clear why Sybil is a social-problem novel as Bleak House is not. For Disraeli's work is the product of certain explicit and recognisable pressures: to recommend a solution to the problems to which it draws attention. It goes without saying that the focus of these novels is nearly always the large industrial centres; but that is because it is there that what are regarded as social problems most obviously exist. To put it briefly: in the industrial centres the facts of unemployment, poverty, disease, and consequent hardening class-consciousness most blatantly show themselves as potential threats to national well-being.

The social-problem novel, then, includes among its definitive concerns a conscious attempt to solve what are seen as problems, and indeed I think you only call something a social problem when you think it allows of solution. Until then the tangle cannot be neatly pulled into shape: to speak of human beings and their lives as problems is to reduce them to a schema. Moreover, to be forced to use these sort of terms at all implies that there is some artistic flaw inherent in the genre, for, as Kettle has rightly suggested, the word ‘problem’ implies a limitation of artistic involvement: ‘To see a living complex of forces and people as a “problem” necessarily implies a standpoint not merely detached in the artist's sense, but in a different way judicial, therapeutic perhaps, and all too easily self-righteous.’ This is a very shrewd remark, but I think it needs to be added that the reduction of the living complex to a problem comes to the fore only when whatever political attitude is implied in the recommendation takes over as a shaping force in the novel. For recommendation is bound to get in the way of the novelist's exploration of his characters' lives and interrelationships; demands will be made on plot and theme which must damage the novel's essential freedom, its integrity. Actually, this is an obvious truth, since recommendation is a substitute for imaginative exploration, a short cut to an end conceived of as ‘solution’; and novels, notoriously, have nothing to do with ends, or solutions—not so far as they are works of art, anyway.

But what chiefly interests me, and it is something Kettle does not so much attend to, is why recommendation takes over. For to use the phrase ‘takes over’ means that, unlike Kettle, I think that not all the novels we agree to recognise as such are initially intended as social-problem novels, but that they tend to turn into this in the process of composition. Of course the reason for this may be very simple. An author can turn away from imaginative exploration simply out of a desire to preach, or to put some sort of a message over. Such novels are very like the diagram type, and like them also will not be mentioned here. The crucial cases are not those, but ones where a recognisable vitality and integrity are betrayed by recommendation, not only in the sense of a substitution's being imposed on the novel, but the more radical one that the substitution contradicts the novel's total import; the short cut heads off in the wrong direction. It is in these cases that we can most fruitfully examine the need for recommendation, and enquire why there is a retreat from the abyss.

It seems tendentious to a degree, this talk of a retreat from the abyss. And yet after all I am referring to a body of work which actually exists, and which needs accounting for. If the case were only hypothetical, then it would perhaps be best to argue that attitude need not cut across free imaginative exploration, but might at most supplement it. Such an argument at least has the appealing realism of denying there is such a thing as the ‘pure’ novelist; it implies, and rightly, that novelists as novelists are inevitably involved in their work politically and socially. But, of course, the case is not hypothetical, and the fact is that more brutally than any other genre the social-problem novel engages the novelist as novelist and as social being. This does not reinstate the ‘pure’ novelist, but it does mean that the social-problem novelist may be very reluctant to admit how deeply his art commits him politically. For the conscious social being in him will want to reject what his art shows to be true, frightened by the degree of involvement the novelist discovers in himself. Consequently the greater the talent the more shocking the rejection will seem, for awareness of the abyss will be profounder, more troubling. But why must this be the case? To answer that question I need to return to a salient fact about the genre: that it draws attention to problems.

I am on fairly safe ground in maintaining that one of the distinguishing features of the 1840s as a decade was a widely shared impulse to draw attention to social problems. And this has, as it were, two phases: first, the desire to dispel ignorance; second, to promote sympathy. Now the normal argument for awakening the public conscience to social problems runs something as follows. Growing class insularity breeds a narrowing circle of interests, and therefore an ignorance of, and indifference to, how others live; once make the facts known, however, and conscience and self-interest will do the rest. The barely cynical appeal to self-interest is, of course, important because it assumes that true self-interest is not the selfishness of class concerns, but the selflessness that surmounts them. In this context the classic statement is undoubtedly Carlyle's, still at this time the dominating voice in social thinking. His recommendation, very simply, is that men should come to recognise that, in spite of artificial class barriers, they are all brothers; and he adds to this the jeremiac note which gives urgency to so much of the social conscience of the decade: that the recognition had better come about before it is too late and England is plunged into violent social anarchy. This is the burden of Chartism (1839), as it is of Past and Present (1843), from which the following quotation comes:

One of Dr. Alison's Scotch facts struck us very much. A poor Irish widow, her husband having died in one of the Lanes of Edinburgh, went forth with her children, bare of all resource, to solicit help from the Charitable Establishments of that City. At this Charitable Establishment and then at that she was refused; referred from one to the other, helped by none;—till she had exhausted them all; till her strength and heart failed her; she sank down in a typhus-fever; died, and infected her Lane with fever, so that ‘seventeen other persons’ died of fever there in consequence. The Humane Physician asks there-upon, as with a heart too full for speaking. Would it not have been economy to help this poor Widow? She took typhus-fever and killed seventeen of you!—Very curious. The forlorn Irish Widow applies to her fellow creatures, as if saying, ‘Behold I am sinking, bare of help: ye must help me! I am your sister, bone of your bone; one God made us: ye must help me!’ They answer, ‘No, impossible; thou art no sister of ours.’ But she proves her sisterhood; her typhus-fever kills them: they actually were her brothers, though denying it! Had human creature ever to go lower for proof.³

That passage, of course, provided a source for Dickens' great imaginative exploration in Bleak House of the vast threats that underlie exclusive class interests, and you have only to think of the consequences of Jo's illness, or the implications of Tom all-Alone's—‘There is not a drop of Tom's corrupted blood but propagates infection and contagion somewhere’—to see what Dickens took from Carlyle, and how he transformed it.

But though Bleak House is the most distinguished work to owe something to Carlyle's vatic pronouncements, it is by no means the first. Indeed, since the 1840s was a decade extremely responsive to recommendation for the transcending of private interest in the cause of national survival, it would be difficult to overestimate the wide appeal of the passage I have quoted. Yet this is too loose; I ought really to say that it was the middle class which at this time was likeliest to take Carlyle's words seriously, and (this is the key-point) the social-problem novelists are almost entirely drawn from their ranks. So for the Manchester Guardian to protest in 1849 against ‘this morbid sensibility to the condition of factory operatives, which has become so fashionable of late among the gentry and the landed aristocracy’, is to make two mistakes. For the fashion was far more significantly present among the middle class; and it was by no means morbid. On the contrary: the cynicism of the Guardian's contributor is remarkably shallow for the reason that it does not occur to him that a sensibility to the condition of the factory operative may well be prompted by self-interest.

Now so far I have suggested that this appeal to self-interest is strongly pessimistic; people had better do something about social distress if they want to save their own skins. This is true, but it is not the whole truth. There is a more optimistic cause for the appeal, and it is an obvious one. For the middle class was chiefly sustained by a belief in progress, which not only amounts to an ideology but is the class's chief raison d'être. At the time I am writing of, not even Carlyle had finally turned his back on the belief, and for those who were less reactionary all that was required was a way of removing the threats to progress, or, to put it rather differently, a way of reconciling a belief in progress with the actual social situation. It is again obviously true to say that the belief in progress had, for the middle class, to be evolutionary, unilinear. In other words, progress needed its safeguards against conflict, and inevitably these were centred on the promotion of class sympathy, and, by extension, on the process of class interabsorption. The aristocracy and middle class had indeed already gone a long way in this process (the marriage of Edith Skewton and Dombey suggests something of the difficulties it had to meet), which left the more problematic task of getting the working class to take its place in the alliance; then the one nation could progress smoothly.

All this is fairly commonplace, but I need to outline the facts because they lead to the main point about the essential failure of the social-problem novel. In the last resort this turns out to be a split between intention and achievement; and achievement so contradicts intention that in the more impressive novels it causes that retreat from the abyss I have already noticed.

There seems little point in setting the matter out at length here. My meaning will, I hope, become clear when I turn to the novels themselves. But it may just be worth saying that the intention of recommending the brotherhood of united interests as a solution to social problems and prime aid to a nation of single-minded purpose frequently looks to be undermined by a guilty recognition that it is solely to the advantage of the class that proposes it. And it does also seem that accompanying the guilt is a fear that those who are made the principal object of this recommendation may reject it in favour of their own. It is as though the middle-class liberal, in saying ‘this is for your good’, anticipates the retort, ‘You mean it is for yours.’ And what is unbearable to him is the implication that the object of his sympathy himself knows what is for his good, because this entirely destroys the calming vision of a single nation which gives his belief in progress its moral justification. Trying to preserve this vision against external probabilities and his own unease is therefore very often the social-problem novelist's most acute difficulty. Kingsley's Alton Locke helps us to see why.

I choose this novel to open with because its failure is so instructive that it makes up for a badness which would be only partly redeemed by comparing it with the ruck of novels similarly predisposed. And Alton Locke certainly has a predisposition, one which is soon named: it favours an awakening of sympathy for the plight of the working class. Not that this in itself is very instructive; what is, is Kingsley's method of drawing attention to the facts of working-class existence, since this is an essential part of his recommendation for brotherhood. The novel's hero is the eponymous chartist tailor who tells his own story. Kingsley, that is, wants to confront his audience directly with a working-class man, in order to show them how like themselves Alton Locke is. For this reason the hero is made a poet, which is not only representatively possible, but has the apparent advantage of showing that chartist tailors are not insensitive lumps. Still, the advantage is only apparent, since Kingsley quite tactlessly includes some of Alton's verse, and this is such weak doggerel that it is difficult to resist the idea that Alton is a lump after all. But that is a trivial matter compared with the implausibility of his life and thought, which suggest an almost staggering naïvety on Kingsley's part. Because, faithful to his intention of making Alton a mirror-image of his audience, Kingsley fashions him, a few peculiarities apart, into a middle-class person; environment counts for nothing. And this interpretation of the concept of brotherhood produces the absurdities which are fairly indicated in Alton's following meditation. It occurs when he has just completed a penniless trudge from London to Cambridge, and is watching an undergraduate boat-race on the Cam:

It was a noble sport—a sight such as could only be seen in England—some hundred of young men, who might, if they had chosen, have been lounging effeminately about the streets, subjecting themselves voluntarily to that intense exertion, for the mere pleasure of toil. The true English stuff came out there; I felt that, in spite of all my prejudices—the stuff which has held Gibralter and conquered at Waterloo—which has created a Birmingham and a Manchester, and colonised every quarter of the globe—that grim, earnest stubborn energy, which, since the days of the old Romans, the English possess alone of all the nations of the earth. I was as proud of the gallant young fellows as if they had been my brothers—of their courage and endurance (for one could see that it was no child's play, from the pale faces and panting lips), their strength and activity, so fierce and yet so cultivated, smooth, harmonious, as oar kept time with oar, and every back rose and fell in concert—and felt my soul stirred up to a sort of sweet madness, not merely by the shouts and cheers of the mob around me, but by the loud, fierce pulse of the row-locks, the swift whispering rush of the long snake-like eight oars, the swirl and gurgle of the water in their wake, the grim, breathless silence of the straining rowers. My blood boiled over, and fierce tears swelled into my eyes; for I, too, was a man, and an Englishman; and when I caught sight of my cousin, pulling stroke to the second boat in the long line, with set teeth and flashing eyes, the great muscles on his bare arms springing up into knots at every rapid stroke, I ran and shouted among the maddest and the foremost.⁴

To be sure, some of the dafter excesses of that have a great deal to do with Kingsley's belief in the therapeutic value of muscular Christianity, but for its colossal irrelevance to Alton's position not to occur to him is fair proof of the extent to which his hero is a compound of attitude and recommendation. These stretch as far as possible, of course: it is not only that Alton calls himself ‘a man, and an Englishman’—and which reader can deny that element of brotherhood—but also that he refers to Waterloo and to Manchester, two words which, as well as any, symbolise between them a sort of interest that can be taken to unite various class concerns. But this cannot alter the fact that Alton is mostly unbelievable, and is really mobilised so that the novel can issue as a recommendation to Kingsley's own class to consider its class assumptions as comprehensively valid. Alton is always on the side of the middle class.

It would be a pointless exercise to detail all the evidence of this, but one moment has rather more significance than most and perhaps qualifies the absolute severity of what I have said. It occurs when Alton is addressing a group of agricultural labourers (it is another cause for dissatisfaction with Williams' term ‘industrial novels’ that many of them, including Alton Locke, Sybil and North and South, are at least tangentially concerned with problems facing the agricultural worker). Alton has come to ask the labourers to support the charter, but he finds them so unresponsive to anything bar their immediate needs that, carried away by his own powers of oratory, he tells them to take the bread they need, since it is theirs by right. The advice results in the looting of the near-by Hall farm, the appearance of the yeomanry and arrest of Alton himself. This episode is undeniably more impressive than most in Alton Locke, and one reason, it seems to me, is that Kingsley is writing out a scene where strong, if simple, feelings are involved: of pity and protest. Yet, of course, much more than that is intended, for he also wants to suggest that class indifference breeds violence: it is in the landed gentry's own interest to feed their labourers.

But Kingsley's real difficulty in this scene, and for me its chief interest, is to be found in the tussle between his sympathies with the labourers and his fears of the violence he thinks they command. The labourers are not interested in the charter. ‘“Go then,” I cried, losing my self-possession between disappointment and the maddening desire of influence—and, indeed, who could hear their story, or even look upon their faces, and not feel some indignation stir in him, unless self-interest had drugged his heart and conscience—“go,” I cried, “and get bread!”’ The tussle is enacted there in the double parentheses: the loss of self-possession which explains Alton's command is itself explained: ordering violence is inexcusable, since it involves loss of self-possession, but is excused; self-possession is probably a mark of moral torpor. What is so revealing about this is a feeling of the justification of what prompts the violence doing battle with fear of it, which partly rationalises it as unjustifiable. Clearly Kingsley senses a dilemma here, something so at odds with his explicit intention as to threaten to confound it entirely, and his escape from this reveals a great deal: he makes the violence irrational. Alton loses self-possession and as a result so does his audience.

This seems to me almost archetypally a middle-class resolution of the dilemma. Very plainly the implication is that the labourers are incapable of action until goaded into it by an outsider, so that their irrational violence is simply mob action; and indeed from the moment the looting begins Kingsley refers to the labourers as a ‘mob’. The word has a very interesting history, but we do not need to trace it out to see that from the moment Kingsley lights on it he can fend off what most disturbs him in the labourers' action. For mob action is essentially irrational and arbitrary, or, as defined by E. P. Thompson, in the magnificent The Making of the English Working Class, it is ‘the deliberate use of the crowd as an instrument of pressure, by persons “above” or apart from the crowd’.⁵ Clearly enough this is the mob of Alton Locke, which blindly follows Alton's instructions and indulges in a mindless orgy of destruction.

Yet something troubles this picture. As we have seen, though on the one hand Kingsley denies the justice of the labourers' behaviour, on the other he offers a part justification for it, for he shows them responding to a situation in a manner which he leaves us in no doubt has his sympathy: ‘who could hear their story … and not feel some indignation stir in him’. Are they, then, a mob? Their violence may, after all, not be so irrational as it seems. It is here that Thompson can help us see into the heart of Kingsley's dilemma. He makes a very careful distinction between mob action and riots of a more or less spontaneous, popular and direct action. And of these latter riots Thompson says:

The most common example is the bread or food riot, repeated cases of which can be found in almost every town and county until the 1840's. This was rarely a mere uproar which culminated in the breaking open of barns or the looting of shops. It was legitimised by the assumptions of an older moral economy, which taught the immorality of any unfair method of forcing up the price of provisions by profiteering upon the necessities of the people.

But this, too, seems very near a description of the labourers' riot in Alton Locke. It begins to look as though Kingsley is hopelessly torn between presenting their action as justifiable and at the same time being required to judge it adversely. And this, of course, is the case. What prompts his judgement is a fear of violence which bursts out again in Alton's nightmare much later on in the book. Alton dreams that the poor have risen against the rich ‘crying, “As you have done to us, so will we do to you”; and they hunted them down and slew many of them, and threw their carcases on the dunghill, and took possession of their land and houses, and cried, “We will all be free and equal as our forefathers were, and live here, and eat and drink, and take our pleasure.”’

The fear that the working class might rise against its masters could well be called the middle-class nightmare of the 1840s, and for two good reasons. The first is simply fear of violence in itself, and during the decade this was certain to be sharpened not only by an awareness of what was happening on the Continent but also by the recognition of how unknown a force the working class was. Ignorance always increases fear, and without doubt much of the effort to write about working-class people, including that of Alton Locke, was vitiated by an ignorance which caused a swerving into near panic. Yet such fear is, I think, the shallower reason for the nightmare, and I have no wish to attach undue importance to it. To do so is merely to become ensnared in a straight Marxist interpretation of class antagonism, which labours under the considerable inconvenience of being historically untrue.

All the same, increasing awareness of sharply defined class interests is what underlies the deeper reason for the nightmare. It is this which explains Kingsley's hesitancy about his attitude to the ‘mob’. And I think that what most worries him is not the possibility of actual violence on a large scale, but the guilty fear that the working class may see that there is nothing to be gained from becoming part of the single nation, since, for all the pretences to the contrary, that is really a myth to benefit the middle class. Kingsley does not want to accept the possibility of the working class's treading its own path, yet though he struggles to make his hero a working-class man indistinguishable from a person of the middle class, the fact that it is Alton himself who both sympathises with the labourers and condemns them gives the game away. Kingsley has inadvertently to acknowledge that their action is justifiable, only not from his class standpoint. And that effectively wrecks his concept of brotherhood. So Alton's helpless equivocations suggest why it is that recommendation goes clean counter to whatever elements of imaginative exploration the novel contains. The prospect of working-class autonomy is, at base, Kingsley's deepest fear, though he partly obscures the nature of this from himself by putting it in the crude guise of fear of violence; doing that makes it easier to condemn it, yet cannot put his conscience at rest.

I do not myself believe that Kingsley ever saw very clearly what it was he feared, and Alton Locke's most interesting moments are ones of muddle rather than achievement. For this reason I should not want to be understood as claiming too much for the novel, and the most sympathetic account will not make it into a good one. Yet Kingsley must be given some credit for touching on difficulties that so upset his predisposition, even if it is credit he would hardly be pleased to accept.

It is tempting to argue that the exemplary betrayal of Kingsley's intention is mostly due to the fact that Alton Locke is a post-1848 novel. For it would be easy to imagine that that year gave an ultimate setback to the bright hopes of a smoothly evolutionary progress. Yet the temptation had better be resisted, for though the events of 1848 made the obstacles to an inter-class alliance bulk more hugely than before, it is quite clear that a sense of their hugeness permeated the decade as a whole. The evidence of the social-problem novel itself confirms this, for the possibilities of brotherhood are scarcely more difficult to sustain in Alton Locke than in Sybil, which was published five years earlier, and in which Disraeli certainly did his best to keep alive the hopes of evolutionary progress.

At first sight it may seem odd to make Sybil part of this middle-class ideology, especially since Disraeli is more concerned to cut out that class altogether, and impose a sort of hegemony of aristocracy and working class. Yet the fact is that he, too, is concerned to obliterate every element of conflict from the idea of progress, by uniting the two nations—the rich and the poor—into one. I think it hardly matters here that in detail his dream of the future is not shared by Kingsley or for that matter Mrs. Gaskell. It is enough that they all believe some sort of progress to be a fact, and ostensibly want it safeguarded by a uniting of interests. Nor do I think it greatly matters that Disraeli hoped to eliminate the middle class as a viable force, since his hope for uniting the two nations, coming when it did, is, for all its aristocratic pretensions, essentially middle class, for the very good reason that the middle class stood to gain most by its realisation.

Sybil is not nearly so good a novel as has been the custom to pretend. I am not thinking here of the near illiteracies, although any reader ought to be struck by the frequency with which these occur: ‘she smiled through a gushing vision’, for example, or ‘the deep lustre of her dark orb rested on his peering vision; his eye fled from the unequal contest’; or, more splendid still, ‘“Who told you the truth?” said Morley, springing to her side, in a hoarse voice’.⁶ Nor am I thinking of the hilariously mismanaged plotting, which frequently requires from Disraeli a tortuous complexity which rivals even Savonarola Brown's. I am not even thinking of the almost total failure to render convincing working-class dialogue, though Disraeli is far worse at this than even Kingsley, and relies on novelettish prose of which the following, spoken by two of the leading working-class characters, is typical:

‘Hah, hah!’ said Morley, with a sort of stifled laugh, ‘Hah, hah! … Did I not warn you, Sybil, of the traitor? Did I not tell you to beware of taking this false aristocrat to your hearth; to worm out all the secrets of that home that he once polluted by his espionage, and now would desolate by his treason?’

‘Of whom and what do you speak?’ said Sybil, throwing herself into a chair.

‘I speak of that base spy, Egremont.’

‘You slander an honourable man,’ said Sybil, with dignity. ‘Mr. Egremont has never entered this house since you met him here for the first time; save once.’

‘He needed no entrance to worm out its secrets,’ said Morley, maliciously. ‘That could be more adroitly done by one who had secret assignations at command with the most charming of its inmates.’

‘Unmannerly churl!’ exclaimed Sybil, starting in her chair, her eye flashing lightning, her distended nostril quivering with scorn.

These are bad errors, but they are partly redeemed by some very sprightly writing, especially in the first half of the novel. Disraeli manages, quite wittily, to reflect the glitter and boredom of society life, and every so often his prose takes on an almost epigrammatic neatness. But you cannot claim very much for Sybil on the basis of this praise, and clearly the larger claims will have to lie elsewhere. I think the point is that you can only allow the novel to have substantial merit if an intelligence, not perhaps naturally a novelist's yet lending itself to novel form, is demonstrably present. And indeed the claim that this sort of intelligence is present is what occasions Dr. Leavis' praise. Disraeli, he says, is not one of the great novelists, but still ‘he is so alive and intelligent as to deserve permanent currency, at any rate in the trilogy Coningsby, Sybil and Tancred: his own interests as expressed in these books—the interests of a supremely intelligent politician who has a sociologist's understanding of civilization and its movements in his time—are so mature’.⁷ But I think that if Sybil is studied with any degree of careful attention it is much more likely to appear a mostly unintelligent, because badly muddled, piece of work.

First, a very simple point. Disraeli, as is sufficiently attested, relied a great deal on Blue-book evidence. Such reliance is, I think, very inhibiting, though it was probably an inhibition he courted, for it lets him remain so distant from his characters as to help him take up attitudes to them: they are accretions of external facts, and so more easily turned into problems about which recommendations can be made. Even scenes which seem at first to have a measure of vitality, turn out to have this reductive tendency about them. Here, for example, is a conversation in the street market of a northern industrial town.

‘Well, you need not be so fierce, Mother Carey,’ said the youth, with an affected air of deprecation.

‘Don't mother me,’ said the jolly widow, with a kindling eye; ‘go to your own mother, who is dying in a back cellar without a winder, while you've got lodgings in a two-pair.’

‘Dying! She's only drunk,’ said the youth.

‘And if she is only drunk,’ rejoined Mrs. Carey, in a passion, ‘what makes her drink, but toil? Working from five o'clock in the morning to seven o'clock at night, and for the like of such as you.’

‘That's a good one,’ said the youth. ‘I should like to know what my mother ever did for me, but give me treacle or laudanum when I was a baby to stop my tongue and fill my stomach; by the token of which, as my gall says, she stunted the growth of the prettiest figure in all Mowbray.’

My feeling about a passage such as this is that it is only weakened by being cast in a fictional mould. Its intention is purely informative; Disraeli wants to let his readers know how the poor live so as to put them in the right frame of mind to receive the suggested solution to this problem. But fictionally there seems no good reason for Mrs. Carey and Dandy Mick to tell each other what they already know; and in the light of that reflection the documentation of fact begins to lose whatever power it had. This sort of strategic confusion is typical of the novel, though there are far worse examples, and these make it very difficult to understand the claims that have been made for it.

A good deal of the trouble with Sybil springs from the explicit nature of its assertions, which are never really woven into the novel's fabric. It is not difficult to see what Disraeli ‘means’, in a discursive way; and such meaning is frequently made clearer by our knowledge of his attachment to the Young England movement. But Sybil too easily becomes a repository of fragmented manifestos, and Disraeli has hardly any sense of the difficulty George Eliot was to find so acute, ‘of trying to make certain ideas incarnate, as if they had revealed themselves to me first in the flesh’. To take just one instance: there is, in the novel, the repeated assertion of the need for church city missions, in order to carry Christianity into a context of industrialism. Now as a statement of one aspect of the Tractarian movement—to which the Young Englanders owed a good deal—there is nothing much to say for or against the assertion, except that Disraeli clearly wants it to carry part of the novel's burden; national institutions must serve more than class interests if they are to help in uniting the nation. But there is never a chance for this assertion actively to help shape the novel; in no sense can you regard it as modifying it. And very often the assertions in Sybil are extrusive slabs of prose round which the thin life of the novel trickles.

Still, this is not entirely the case, for Disraeli undoubtedly sees other assertions as the source of the novel's life, the proof of which is that he makes its structure spring from them. And to avoid getting trapped into the wrong sort of discussion here, I had perhaps better say that all I mean by ‘structure’ is the sequentially determined complex of narrative, episode, dialogue, and other, similar, resources. It is these that are taxed by some words of Egremont:

‘The new generation of the aristocracy of England are not tyrants, not oppressors, Sybil, as you persist in believing. Their intelligence, better than that, their hearts, are open to the responsibility of their position. But the work that is before them is no holiday-work. It is not the fever of superficial impulse that can remove the deep-fixed barriers of centuries of ignorance and crime. Enough that their sympathies are awakened; time and thought will bring the rest. They are the natural leaders of the People, Sybil; believe me they are the only ones.’

This speech fairly suggests the Disraelian ideal, and indeed Egremont is seen as a paradigm of the new aristocracy, in sharp contrast to his brother, a member of that ‘unworking aristocracy’ Carlyle had attacked in Past and Present. Lord Marney is a hunting, shooting and fishing man, and a harshly repressive landlord who cares very little for his estate; and at the end of the novel he meets a just death at the hands of a rioting mob. Now Disraeli's starting-point in Sybil is the famous one of the two nations, the rich and the poor; and his purpose is to show that they can again become one (it is an unquestioned assumption that there had once been a united, organic community), despite the severe distrust that the deep social splits have created. This is his theme, or, to put it rather differently, it is assertion given a certain structural relevance through the love-affair and eventual marriage of Sybil and Egremont, nobleman and working-class girl. So the adequacy of Egremont's words is to be tested out by the events of the novel, and we must therefore look at those to see how well the theme is realised.

In fact, Disraeli hardly realises it at all. For at the very least we need to have some sense of Sybil as a working-class girl; otherwise we are in no position to measure the weight of difficulties that have to be overcome before her relationship with Egremont can prosper. And these difficulties are not a personal but a class matter; since Egremont and Sybil are inevitably representative figures, we must be made aware of the massing of social pressures—mutual distrust, prejudice and so on—that will do their damnedest to prevent the marriage. Yet since Disraeli cannot at all suggest the power of these pressures, the love-affair is a wild improbability; it remains not even a novelist's, but a politician's, idle dream. And though the gap between the two novelists is so wide as to make extended comparison useless, you have only to think of Dickens' handling of Lizzie Hexam and Eugene Wrayburn to see just how frail and unlikely Disraeli's talent is. It is more than the simple matter of Sybil's speaking as a middle-class girl. The radical fault is that there is never any deep awareness of what she ought to represent, no sense of what working-class life is—except, of course, in those set scenes taken from Blue books which deal statistically with the husk of such life: laudanum and treacle, and so on.

This failure alone seems to me enough to qualify seriously the claims made for Disraeli. But there are others, and the most spectacular again has to do with Sybil. For it turns out that she is not a member of the working class at all. By a piece of creaking plot mechanism, her father is discovered to be the rightful heir to a large estate and to have some sort of ancient, and pure, pedigree. But once this discovery takes effect the whole idea of the rich and poor being reunited goes out of the window. Egremont falls in love with, and marries, a member of his own class. Moreover, the discovery raises a host of problems without, so far as I can see, solving any. It certainly does not solve Disraeli's failure to make convincing his working-class characters who, whatever Sybil's true state, are supposed to be genuine. And I cannot see that it helps much with Sybil herself. After all, how credible is it that her nobility should constantly shine through her misfortunes, and so distinguish her from her associates? ‘Nothing she does or seems, But smacks of something greater than herself.’ Perhaps, but Disraeli's terms of reference are rather different, and you can only swallow the likelihood of Sybil's showing herself too noble for this place if you are prepared to accept that the aristocracy has congenital physical distinctions, or, as Ruskin put it, that ‘the so-called higher classes (are) generally of purer race than the lower’.⁸ Ruskin's statement is unusually cautious for him, but we can get a hint of what prompted it if we look at a passage in Sybil which voices a fear of the passing of the true aristocracy. It is a description of a person who plays no part in the novel except to have this point made about him. His name is Aubrey St. Lys:

He was distinguished by that beauty of the noble English blood, of which in these days few types remain; the Norman tempered by the Saxon; the fire of conquest softened by integrity; and a serene, though inflexible, habit of mind. The chains of convention, an external life grown out of all proportion with that of the heart and mind, have destroyed this dignified beauty. There is no longer in fact an aristocracy in England, for the superiority of the animal man is an essential quality of the aristocracy. But that it once existed, any collection of portraits from the sixteenth century will show.

That lament recognisably forms part of a line that runs from Carlyle at least as far as Arnold: a lament for the aristocracy, or the barbarians, who have become incapable of fulfilling their destiny to govern: ‘They are the natural leaders of the People.’ And now we know why: it is because they are of purer race. In the preface to Lothair (1870), Disraeli, recalling his famous trilogy, noted that ‘In asserting the doctrine of race, they were entirely opposed to the equality of man, and similar abstract dogmas’. The last hope for recovering this destiny is for the aristocracy to become once more pure. And so at some time—perhaps in the actual process of composition—it must have occurred to Disraeli how misleading it would be to have marriage as the expression of his concept of how the two nations should be united. Hence the need for Sybil to be an aristocrat, for in her marriage to Egremont she will restore a much-needed energy to the nobility. Yet at no point is her aristocratic purity made convincing, and how far the doctrine is mere assertion—the word Disraeli himself uses—one episode will serve to suggest.

The one I am thinking of is where Sybil and her father are arrested after her futile attempts to help him escape a police trap, his plot to commit some sort of violent act against the Government having been discovered (very probably the scene is meant to reassure a worried public about the ability of Government spies to deal with all threats to civil peace: a queer way of helping a novel intended to show the explosive force of class separateness). Sybil's feelings about her father's act and her arrest are predominantly shame and distress; she is ashamed at being thought a criminal and distressed that her father so nearly is one. Such feelings are undoubtedly meant to do her credit, so helping to convince the audience that she is not really a working-class girl; and this is reinforced by the special treatment she gets in prison: Sybil is fully on the side of the law. But the silliness of this is that it shows us nothing of Sybil's integrity, the serene, though inflexible, habit of mind Disraeli saw as essential to the aristocracy. On the contrary, for her to accept the workings of class justice and the immorality of her father's plans argues a lack of integrity the more absurd since on other occasions she is required to exhibit considerable class prejudice and distrust of the aristocracy.

This is not a mere quibble and I would not bring the matter up at all if I thought it was. The fact is that it constitutes a very telling failure of imaginative intelligence on Disraeli's part. For Sybil and her father have previously been shown as convinced of the justness of their cause, and of the injustice of a country ruled by class considerations, and now we see the law operating from a standpoint of class justice. Yet in spite of all this we are meant to approve of Sybil for taking its side. Of course, the aristocracy may support a system which supports it, but for all Sybil knows the system opposes whatever she holds by; shame and distress are feelings that any person of working-class allegiances—and she possesses these whatever her true status—would reject as totally bogus.

And, to compare Disraeli and Dickens again, if we balance Sybil's response to her arrest with the Artful Dodger's, we are bound to sense just how bogus Disraeli is being. ‘This ain't the shop for justice’: for all the element of farce, Dodger's contempt is not devoid of a certain integrity and calm, though inflexible, habit of mind, and it is without doubt expressive of the sense of class separateness as Disraeli's novel never is.

But if Sybil is not expressive of class separateness, it is frequently betrayed into it. Sybil's behaviour after her arrest is a good example of such betrayal, and so is the purpose it serves. For Disraeli wants her as an aristocrat to be naturally on the side of the law, in order to show that the aristocracy will lead the people in a conciliatory, not challenging, fashion. Fear of violence undoubtedly causes this tactic, as it does another, very significant one: the opposing of the true leaders by the false. Here Disraeli has to show that the people's own leaders—mere working-class agitators—are no good, or anyway that where it comes to a choice the people will opt for the aristocrat. They are no good because, in pretending that working-class interests are opposed to, and by, the aristocracy, they plan violent action, and the aristocrat will be preferred since his leadership of the people promises peace, a true reconciliation of interests. But Disraeli's method of showing this is so inept, so ludicrously the result of his need to authenticate his attitudes, that it seems to me conclusively to undermine the claim made on behalf of those ‘so intelligent, so mature’ interests.

The one working-class leader allowed to be admirable is of course Gerard, who turns out to be an aristocrat. In fact, he is linked with Egremont in opposition to Stephen Morley, a working-class radical journalist who is in love with Sybil but rejected for Egremont. He is also opposed to ‘Bishop’ Hatton, the working-class lout who at the end of the novel leads a rioting mob in a destructive orgy. This opposition is schematically shown, since Hatton leads his men to smash up Trafford's factory—Trafford being a benevolent capitalist employer—and Gerard appears on the factory gates to order the men back. Naturally he succeeds: the aristocrat is the natural leader. But the point is that Hatton is so absurd a caricature of a working-class man, so clearly the product of upper-class fears about what the working class is like when left to itself, that he provides the novel's most eloquent betrayal of its assertion that England is split into two nations separated from each other by ignorance.

Not surprisingly the Bishop allows Disraeli to indulge in some nonsense about physical types. So far is he from being distinguished by that beauty of the noble English blood that he is short, fat and very ugly, and extraordinarily brutish. A sort of every child's ogre, he is also the quintessential working-class man as Disraeli conceived him (not consciously perhaps, but Hatton is yet another example of how far Sybil betrays its creator). It is not really surprising that so absurd a figure should lose his followers to Gerard; what is surprising, and not at all explained, is why they followed him in the first place. The people's leader is too easily discredited. And in Morley's case the discrediting is even more inadequate, since it turns largely on the fact that Sybil's dog growls whenever he approaches (it wags its tail at Egremont). In short, Disraeli's version of the working-class agitator is very like C. S. Lewis' version of Milton's Satan because it proves too much; if he is that contemptible how can he represent any threat at all?

Whatever hopes Disraeli had of proclaiming brotherhood triumphant must, at the least, stop short of ‘Bishop’ Hatton. In so far as he is expressive of anything, it is of Disraeli's deep blankness at the real thing strange, and so there is the need to pretend he does not much matter. Brotherhood will triumph in the marriage of Sybil and Egremont. But then this, too, goes wrong because the implications of Disraeli's conception of the hegemonic structure require Sybil herself to be an aristocrat; the aristocracy must be leaders of the people, not, to use a nicely ambiguous word, mates. At whatever point you press, Sybil dissolves into an incoherence which is instructive simply because it involves the contradiction of all Disraeli intended. As he strives to link his two nations, so increasingly are we made aware of how far apart they are. It is the same truth that Alton Locke unwittingly revealed.

If we turn directly from Kingsley and Disraeli's novels to Mary Barton, we encounter so striking a difference that we shall be tempted to overpraise Mrs. Gaskell's first novel. For the strengths of Mary Barton lift it quite clear of the other works, and Mrs. Gaskell rarely falls into the sort of pits Disraeli and Kingsley dig for themselves. She does not repeat Disraeli's mistake of trying to fuse noble labourers with labouring nobility, nor, at her best, is she guilty of the unintelligent sentimentality which allows Kingsley to recommend the working class to a middle-class reading public on the grounds that, contrary to appearances, their interests are the same. The truth is that Mrs. Gaskell is not interested in the idea of brotherhood that Kingsley half dared to believe existed, and which Disraeli probably knew did not. If she can be said to believe in the idea at all, it is not as a conscious thesis to which her characters are bent, but as something which can be sensed in the imaginative exploration that presupposes their autonomous existence. But that, it should be obvious, is a very different sort of brotherhood, one indeed that wrecks the hopes on which the other concept is built.

Since what I am here saying may seem to inflate the novel's reputation dangerously, it is as well to add a note of caution. George Eliot's claim that Mrs. Gaskell is not a classic needs to be challenged, but not on the strength of Mary Barton. In the final reckoning the achievement of this first novel is a fairly modest one; the real wonder is that it should exist at all. For though Mrs. Gaskell is a middle-class liberal who from the evidence of most of her published comments did not consciously chafe at her political creed, her novel really does have to do with working-class individuals and their environment, and not with the middle class or nobility in disguise. At least not at its best. But perhaps inevitably there are moments when she tries to evade the starker implications of her exploration by falling back on comforting attitudes. And yet the very ease with which these moments can be detected is itself proof of her customary integrity; at their truest, her characters are shaped largely by, and exist within, a precisely realised world in which the keynote is provided by grinding toil, poverty, death, and a persistent, scarcely subdued, reek of hopelessness.

The really disturbing centre of the novel, as most commentators have noticed, is not Mary herself but her father. Mary Barton, indeed, seems to owe a great deal of her prominence to the wishes of Mrs. Gaskell's publishers, Chapman and Hall, that the novel should have a love-story running through it. Much of this is detachable and is certainly peripheral to the novel's real concerns, which are well enough indicated by the fact that its first title was John Barton. ‘Round the character of John Barton,’ Mrs. Gaskell told a friend, ‘all the others formed themselves; he was my hero, the person with whom all my sympathies went.’⁹ The novel's real strengths are clustered around him, and Mrs. Gaskell's triumph with him is the more remarkable in that he challenges all the ideas to which, as a middle-class liberal undertaking a social-problem novel, she holds.

To say that may well appear to beg the question. Did Mrs. Gaskell undertake anything of the kind? On the evidence of her preface to Mary Barton the answer would have to be no, for there she goes out of her way to insist that ‘I know nothing of Political Economy, or the theories of trade’.¹⁰ It is enough to convince Mrs. Tillotson. For her ‘the same social conditions, and something of the same anxiety about them, inspired Sybil and Yeast and Alton Locke; but Mrs. Gaskell differs from Disraeli and Kingsley in having no knife to grind’.¹¹ But as we all know now, the important thing is to trust not the teller but the tale, and the undeniable fact is that there are occasions when Mrs. Gaskell retreats from her sensitive exploration of Barton's life to attitudes about him; and such occasions are further marred by a moralising that is strangely superficial, and frequently inapplicable. It may well be that she felt Barton would so soon offend her audience and alienate their sympathies that she forced herself to explain or interpret his behaviour in a manner that damages the fine integrity of his presentation. But there also comes a point where Barton is put beyond even her sympathies, making the possibility of moralising still more explicit. Something else will have to be said about this, but for the moment it is more important to insist on just how splendidly she does manage with Barton.

Essentially he is representative of the working men who during the 1830s and 1840s, as they became increasingly self-conscious of the total condition in which they lived, began to probe for its causes and enquire into its justness. Barton questions the inevitability of his sufferings, and the system that imposes them; and for this he is made to suffer still more. Because of his chartist allegiances he is thrown out of work and blacklegged by all employers: the wages of resistance is poverty and death. Mrs. Gaskell's is by no means a diagrammatic or external statement of what happens to her hero; one of the very best things about Mary Barton is the feel of poverty as its consequences eat into a man, and the sense of the surrounding, ubiquitous city, which imposes hideous conditions on a life from which there is no easy escape. There is then a real temptation for Barton to give in, to accept the system in the hope of living less miserably. So his refusal to do this has a stubborn integrity that is only occasionally upset by Mrs. Gaskell's prim interpolations, asking forgiveness of his sins. Barton's bewilderment at the injustice of the social system in which he finds himself, the gradually hardening knot of his bitterness, and the impulse towards a violent reaction, all spring organically from his situation. And so do his finer qualities. Mrs. Gaskell is very good at showing how difficult it is for any human assertions to struggle against the overwhelming power of poverty, and her art is at its best in the moments which show that the smallest gesture of human decency is, for Barton and his friends, likely to be a considerable triumph over conditions which require selfishness as the best hope for survival.

To put the matter like that is to see just why Barton is the novel's disturbing centre. Certainly it explains why he so disturbed the critics. Indeed, it would be nice to provide a sottisier of reviews of Mary Barton, merely to show the comedy of their attempts to find new and legitimate grounds for the liberal conscience, either by trying to reason with Barton (several reviewers adopt a ‘look here, old chap, this isn't going to get you anywhere’ tone) or by distorting the novel until it fits a picture on which that conscience can bear to gaze. But to do this is beyond the scope of the present essay, and I must restrict myself to two reviews, which suggest well enough the difficulties reviewers found themselves up against. The first comes from The New Monthly Magazine and Humourist:

The authoress professes to have nothing to do with political economy or the theories of trade, she says that she merely wishes to impress what the workman feels and thinks, but she allows the discontented to murmur in prolonged strains without an attempt to chasten the heart or correct the understanding. Barton rails at all capitalists as being so only through the toil of the poor. This would be staunch communism. There surely must be capitalists or the condition of the poor would be worse than ever. We are told in scripture that the poor shall never cease out of the land, but we are also told that their expectation shall not perish, and that those who trust, shall be fed and delivered out of affliction. Further than this we are told that the person of the poor should be no more respected than that of the rich should be honoured, and while it is sinful to oppress and a duty to assist, so also the poor that will not bear rebuke, their poverty is their destruction.¹²

The riches of this piece are wellnigh inexhaustible, but two points deserve special attention. One is that the review is an extreme example of the unease which the novel caused, and which was principally owing to the imaginative power that went into the presentation of Barton. You can feel the reviewer struggling against being swept away by the power, clutching feebly at the straws of communism and the need for capitalists, and then sensing deliverance as he grasps at scripture. The tone steadies, the sentences lengthen, there is a fine bravura about the last words, and a generous magnanimity in the earlier reassurance: ‘those who trust, shall be fed and delivered out of affliction’. Only, unfortunately, and this is the other point, it is quite irrelevant to the novel, in which the family which dies most horribly in a slum cellar—of typhoid brought on by prolonged starvation—are the Davenports, who are good Methodists. The points are obvious ones, but that is because of the obviousness of the review's evasions.

The other review is an altogether more serious affair. It was published in the Westminster Review, and is the longest and most considered of all contemporary criticisms of the book. It begins by nothing that Mary Barton ‘embodies the dominant feeling of our times—a feeling that the ignorance, destitution and vice which pervade and corrupt our society must be got rid of. The ability to point out how they are to be got rid of, is not the characteristic of this age. That will be the characteristic of the age which is coming.’¹³ As Mrs, Tillotson rightly says of this:

the reviewer is not being ironical. The necessary step was the tearing of the iron curtain between the two Nations; and this step was within the power, perhaps even was peculiarly the role, of the novelist—as the construction of blueprints for reform was not. The first step was for those who knew the other nation to build up pictures in the comfortable reader's mind, to haunt his imagination and harry the social conscience.

Yet the odd fact is that Mary Barton does construct blue-prints for reform or, since that puts the matter a little too flagrantly, it recommends. And what interests me about the reviewer's comment is that in his total impression of the novel that is quite forgotten. His responsiveness to Mary Barton's embodying ‘the dominant feeling of our time’ is such that he cannot take at all seriously the novel's recommendations; and in this he is right, since without doubt they are mere paper boats, sunk under Mrs. Gaskell's weighty realisation of the industrial world. It is therefore natural that he should concentrate on this, and much the largest part of his article is taken up with a discussion about John Barton. But here again odd things happen to the reviewer's memory.

To begin with, he says of Barton that

In the commencement of the tale he is in full work, with high wages, and possesses a comfortable home. But in possessing that comfortable home, like too many around him (including other portions of society as well as the mere day-labourers), the enjoyment of the present is alone attended to; while the provision for a continuation of even moderate enjoyment for the future, seems to be scarcely heeded.

Now those sentences quite blunt Mrs. Gaskell's sharp insights, and they do it by a mixture of facts which are true to the novel, together with some illegitimate deductions from the facts which are made to seem equally factual by the quasi-paratactical syntax. So though it is quite right to say Barton is in full employment, to add that he gets high wages is a deduction from that true fact, not another fact taken from the novel, even though that is how it reads. And to then state that Barton possesses ‘a comfortable home’ is to make the comfort dependent on his high wages; you tend to read in ‘therefore’. But this is quite improper, as a glance at the novel will confirm. True, the Barton home has a certain comfort, but this is emotional rather than material. The warmth of family feeling manages to minimise the lack of soldier comforts, a far different matter from pretending that a comfortable home is owing to the Bartons being comfortably off.

I don't want to accuse the reviewer of seeking to muddle his audience, rather I think he confuses himself; but the way he does so is highly revealing. For the whole point of the muddle is that it helps him to turn away from the force of Mrs. Gaskell's work, and this becomes startlingly clear when he goes on to reprimand Barton for attending to the present alone rather than providing for ‘even moderate enjoyment for the future’ (if he's comfortably off, of course he can manage that). Here, then, is part of the episode with which the novel opens. The Bartons, out for a Sunday walk, have met the Wilsons, and invite their friends home for tea:

Then came a long whispering, and chinking of money, to which Mr. and Mrs. Wilson were too polite to attend; knowing as they did full well, that it all related to the preparations for hospitality; hospitality that, in their turn, they should have much pleasure in offering. So they tried to be busily occupied with the children, and not to hear Mrs. Barton's directions to Mary.

‘Run, Mary dear, just round the corner, and get some fresh eggs at Tipping's (you may get one a-piece, and that will be five-pence), and see if he has any nice ham cut, that he would let us have a pound of.’

‘Say two pounds, missis, and don't be stingy,’ chimed in the husband.

‘Well, a pound and a half, Mary. And get it Cumberland ham, for Wilson comes from there-away, and it will have a sort of relish of home with it he'll like,—and Mary … you must get a pennyworth of milk and a loaf of bread—mind you get it fresh and new—and, and—that's all, Mary.’

‘No, it's not all,’ said her husband. ‘Thou must get six-pennyworth of rum, to warm the tea; thou'll get it at the “Grapes”. And thou just go to Alice Wilson … and tell her to come and take her tea with us; she'll like to see her brother, I'll be bound, let alone Jane and the twins.’

The reviewer's rebuke to Barton shows very plainly that he is relying on the liberal remedy of thrift to see a person through even the worst situations, and since Mary Barton is pretty firm in showing the hopelessness of this he has to convert the facts before the remedy can apply. But even if it could in Barton's case—and there is no solid evidence of a supply of money that would last any length of time—the fact is that self-help would merely destroy the comfortable home, because it would squeeze out all the decency and generosity of spirit that manage to survive in the Barton household. So the reviewer's advice to all future Bartons is yet another way of trying to hedge round the truths of the novel.

I must, therefore, provide against the ignorance and imprudence of my employer. He may over-engage himself at one time, and subsequently be obliged to dismiss a portion of his labourers, or become insolvent, and be obliged to shut up his works. Folly, similar to his, may prevail among others. My duty to myself commands me to acquire, by saving a capital for myself—a duty which every well conducted labourer can perform.

Mrs. Tillotson says that Mary Barton was reviewed ‘less as a novel than as a document; its truth and justice, its social moral were emphasized’. But what she does not say, though it strikes me as more important, is that the chief reason for the novel's being reviewed as a document is that its truth and justice and social moral could be not only emphasised but questioned. It is easier to argue with a document than a novel, for the truths of the latter are not open to the techniques by which the worth of documents can be examined. That is why the reviewer's advice to Barton must strike us as ludicrously beside the point when we are faced with the scene which presents his attending to the ‘enjoyment of the present’. On the other hand, what the scene does show—and finely—is the struggle there has to be for gestures of human decency to survive. Mrs. Barton's anxiety about money ought to win the reviewer's plaudits, but though we may well feel sympathy for what causes it we are unlikely to think of her caution as virtue overruled by culpable extravagance. And at one point the reviewer himself is forced to acknowledge the imaginative power of Mrs. Gaskell's treatment of Barton:

That John Barton should have had the discontent, engendered by want, increased to hatred towards the class of rich employers, is not strange nor forced. The patience and long-suffering of the industrious poor, left in the ignorance which we see, are more strange than the conclusions to which John Barton arrives, and which lead him, an unwilling agent, step by step, to the crime. …

That moment of insight is not sustained, and before the end of the review there is more haranguing and advice; yet the fact it is there at all suggests how the strength of Mary Barton can break through the most determined resistance. More particularly, it is because Barton is so satisfactory a fictional creation that he is disturbing as neither Alton Locke nor ‘Bishop’ Hatton could be; and only by backing away from what actually is in the novel could reviewers accommodate him to the world of cliché in which Disraeli and Kingsley's workmen move.

There is not the space to examine in detail the justness of the Westminster Review critic's admission that Barton's progress towards hatred ‘is not strange nor forced’. One instance must do, and I choose it because it also suggests where Mrs. Gaskell fails. Barton and Wilson go to the help of the Davenport family, who are living in terrible squalor since the dying husband has been for so many weeks out of work that there is no money for food or medicine. The approach to the Davenport's living quarters is described in this way:

It (the road) was unpaved: and down the middle a gutter forced its way, every now and then forming pools in the road with which the street abounded. … Our friends were not dainty, but even they picked their way, till they got to some steps leading down to a small area, where a person standing would have his head about one foot below the level of the street, and might at the same time, without the least motion of his body, touch the window of a cellar in which a family of human beings lived. It was very dark inside. The window-panes many of them were broken and stuffed with rags, which was reason enough for the dusky light that pervaded the place even at mid-day. After the account I have given of the state of the street, no one can be surprised that on going into the cellar inhabited by Davenport, the smell was so foetid as almost to knock the two men down. Quickly recovering themselves, as those inured to such things do, they began to penetrate the thick darkness of the place, and to see three or four children rolling on the damp, nay, wet brick floor, through which the stagnant, filthy moisture of the street oozed up; the fireplace was empty and black; the wife sat on her husband's lair, and cried in the black loneliness.

As soon as he sees the family's condition Barton goes home and takes his remaining few valuables to pawn; and with the money he buys some necessaries for them.

So far the episode is pretty well a conventional matter. And in addition there are elements of an amateurishness in the initial description suggesting at the very least that Mrs. Gaskell is a little unsure of her audience's response: ‘after the account I have given of the state of the street, no one can be surprised’, reads very much like a defence against charges of improbability. It also makes the description seem little more than factual reportage on the lines of Sybil. True, there are occasional felicities, as that quiet, un-ironic phrase ‘a family of human beings’. Un-ironic, because the note is one of wondering acceptance: it could have been a family of rats, but it is a family of human beings. The addition of ‘human beings’ tells you much more than the word ‘family’ could; don't we expect the family to be human? But answer the question too contemptuously in the negative, and you find yourself implying an ironical attitude which so easily becomes the mark of feeling good about your protest against conditions in an industrial society. Irony in this sort of context is nearly always a defence, a retreat from honest exploration; it is a sealing-off of imagination. It seems to me a test of Mrs. Gaskell's quality that she avoids this, as Disraeli, for example, does not; his descriptions of Wodgate in Sybil frequently make use of an irony to which only a much better work would earn the right.

But when this is said, it still remains true that there is little in what we have so far been given of this episode to distinguish it from conventional treatment. It is only when we consider how it might continue that we begin to see where the difference lies. What we could expect is that Barton's money would see Davenport through his illness and save his family; and the implication would be that working-class people were capable of sufficiently helping each other through an inexhaustible fund of good-natured generosity.

It hardly needs saying that in Mary Barton matters are very different: Davenport does die, and his family continues to suffer, so that Barton's money is wasted (whether the Westminster Review critic ought to regard his action as culpable because he is ‘scarcely heeding’ future needs, is a nice point). In addition, Mrs. Gaskell lets us into how Barton thinks of his action and what caused it: ‘Barton's was an errand of mercy: but the thoughts of his heart were touched by sin, by bitter hatred of the happy, whom he, for the time, confounded with the selfish.’ Later, as he and Wilson watch over the dying man, Barton curses God for being ‘th' masters' father’, and Wilson rebukes him,

‘Eh, John! donna talk so; sure there's many and many a master as good or better nor us.’

‘If you think so, tell me this. How comes it they're rich, and we're poor? I'd like to know that. Han they done as they'd be done by for us?’

But Wilson was no arguer; no speechifier, as he would have called it.

No trace of a thesis there, but a grittily attentive rendering of two men plunged in discussion, one trying to reconcile himself by clichés to an intolerable situation, one in a rage of indignation against it. Their being ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ is not at stake, what matters is the insight we are offered into how the system they encounter distorts their lives and thoughts; indeed, it is the helpless inadequacy of their words that makes the episode so moving. Neither cliché nor argument will make sense of their experience. It is so even more remarkably in Barton's next speech, where the cliché of argument takes on an especial poignancy; it is revivified by the bitterness of personal utterance. At such moments you realise how fine Mrs. Gaskell's understanding is, not so much of the intricacies of radical thought as of the way in which a man like Barton will cling desperately to its more plangent phrases, hoping that they will somehow light a way through the muddle he finds so bafflingly impenetrable.

‘You'll say (at least many a one does) they'n getten capital an' we'n getten none. I say, our labour's our capital, and we ought to draw interest on that. They get interest on their capital somehow a' this time, while ourn is lying idle, else how else could they all live as they do? Besides, there's many on 'em has had nought to begin wi'; there's Carsons, and Duncombes, and Mengies, and many another, as comed into Manchester with clothes on their back, and that were all, and now they're worth their tens of thousands, a'getten out of our labour; why the very land as fetched but sixty pounds twenty year agone is now worth six hundred, and that, too, is owing to our labour: but look at you, and see me, and poor Davenport yonder; whatten better are we? They'n screwed us down to th' lowest peg, in order to make their great big fortunes, and build their great big houses, and we, why we're just clemming, many and many of us. Can you say there's nought wrong in this?’

‘Well, Barton, I'll not gainsay ye. But Mr. Carson spoke to me after th' fire, and says he, “I shall ha' to retrench, and be very careful in my expenditure during these bad times, I assure ye”; so yo see th' masters suffer too.’

‘Han they ever seen a child o' their'n die for want o' food?’ asked Barton, in a low, deep voice.

It seems to me possible to allow for some flaws here—the last five words, for instance, could be wished away—and still find this an astonishingly fine achievement. Mrs. Gaskell is not putting words into Barton's mouth when she has him say that ‘our labour's our capital’, because the phrase is so properly available to what he wants to communicate—which in the end is not so much an argument as a protest. The word ‘Besides’ introduces not another phase in the argument but another aspect of the grievance he knows is just but not how to justify. He casts around for the right clue, picking up fragments of his experience and one after the other throwing them away because they cannot help him. That is why his appeal to Wilson, ‘Can you say there's nought wrong in this?’ is so touching; all sense of argument has got lost in the deeper, more personal, sense of unaccountable injustice. So with Wilson's answer, and Barton's counter-question. What each says is true, but the two truths do not supplement each other, nor even cancel each other out; they merely make the muddle more overwhelming. It is the anger and bitterness, the sense of muddle which reason cannot cope with and which makes truth seem useless, that force themselves out in Barton's speech, making it credible and moving as no speech in Sybil or Alton Locke could be.

Yet even so there is in this fine scene something that hints at a failure on Mrs. Gaskell's part. It comes out in her mentioning that Barton's thought ‘were touched by sin’; the inadequacy of that comment rivals the inadequacy of some of her hero's. The judgement feels so irrelevant, so trifling; and I think it can be accounted for only if we grasp that Mrs. Gaskell finds the muddle every bit as overwhelming as do Barton and Wilson. Like them she wants to make sense of it, but unlike them she finds the way to understanding made out of liberalism generously tinged with Christianity. In itself this is not remarkable; it was the way many took. But Mary Barton is a remarkable novel because it so powerfully suggests the guilt at which all liberalism must eventually connive, and which therefore requires Mrs. Gaskell to put it behind her with a resoluteness for which few liberals would feel the need: that the happy may be the selfish; that her religion may be for the masters only; that caring for individual freedom may mean caring for the freedom of a relatively few individuals: it is from the shocked recognition of such possibilities that Mrs. Gaskell finally turns away. So it is that trying as honestly as she can to present the denseness and bewildering complexity of the industrial experience, and for that very reason finding it bearable only as it can be accounted for, she produces moments in the novel where interpretation usurps and contradicts imaginative exploration, and the ‘truths’ of liberalism become the novel's lies. Most troublingly this is the case with the murder of the manufacturer Carson's son, and what stems from it.

There can be little doubt that Mrs. Gaskell always intended the murder to happen, even though it would be bound to put great strain upon her claim that Barton was ‘the person with whom all my sympathies went’. And undoubtedly she does her best to make it seem fitting. In particular, she makes the victim the son of a bullying manufacturer and the would-be seducer of Mary; and the Westminster Review critic spotted the implications of this: ‘[Carson's morals] are only of, and for, a class … a beauty in humble life might—without any blot on his class-character, detriment to his station, or remorse to his conscience—be made to serve the purpose of his mere animal indulgence … Class-morality naturally made him thoughtless of the feelings of those not of his rank …’ So in having Barton kill him Mrs. Gaskell closes the circle of moral retribution with a neatness that recalls Carlyle's grim pleasure in pointing out that the widow of the Glasgow slums ‘proves her sisterhood; her typhus-fever kills them: they actually were her brothers, though denying it’. Indeed, so positively does Mrs. Gaskell appear to accept the proof of brotherhood that she has the elder Carson forgive his son's murderer and plan to become a more considerate employer.

So far so good. But, as Raymond Williams has quite rightly noticed, the trouble with the murder is that it is so unrepresentative an act for a novel whose focus is predominantly representative; it is altogether too exceptional. And in addition it seems an excessively crude way of dramatising class conflict. Where I disagree with Williams is in his explanation of why Mrs. Gaskell falls back on the murder: ‘The real explanation, surely, is that John Barton, a political murderer appointed by a trade union, is a dramatisation 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’ (Williams' italics). I think not. True, as we have seen in Sybil and Alton Locke, fear of such violence was widespread, and it may even be the case that Mrs. Gaskell was partly conditioned by it when she came to deal with the murder; but that is not the central reason for the violence. It seems to me that she finds the murder necessary, because by means of it she can simplify a complexity which has become too terrific for her to accept consciously. Her mind shuts out the awareness of a muddle so colossal that it defeats the explanations of her social creeds, and so she attempts to impose order by turning to murder, where a neat pattern can realise itself: class antagonism producing a violence from which springs reconciliation. It is far too simple, principally because the antagonism is reduced to a matter of individual violence, so that though the pattern itself is intendedly representative it is fashioned out of quite arbitrary material.

Mrs. Gaskell may, however, have been additionally persuaded to adopt it, since it has the apparent advantage of disposing of Barton. I put the matter callously, and that is as it should be, for there is something callous in her attempt to write him off. The word seems an odd one to use about her, but her treatment of her hero justifies it. For Williams, ‘she recoils from the violence of murder, to the extent of being unable even to enter it as the experience of the man conceived as her hero’. Again, this seems to me not the whole truth. It is not so much that Mrs. Gaskell is unable to enter the experience as that she sees she does not need to; Barton's act means that she need no longer take him seriously. More and more he has been leading her to an understanding of the limitations of her consciously held beliefs, but now she can stand back and judge him, as she had earlier when she noted that ‘his thoughts were touched by sin’. As soon as Barton commits murder he becomes at best an object of pity; and that phrase fairly suggests the position of superiority to which Mrs. Gaskell retreats. She can now take up an attitude to Barton.

Mrs. Gaskell, then, profits from the murder in two ways, though at the cost of damaging all that is best in her novel. Because of Barton's act she can simplify the issues Mary Barton has been exploring, and she can also dismiss from serious attention its disturbing centre. I do not say that this latter gain had always been intended, in fact I am certain that the murder must have come as a tremendous relief to her, since it offered the way out of her problem with Barton, his so awkwardly leading her to the exposure of false hopes she dare not abandon. It is these which are meant to be realised by the consequences of the murder. Carson's forgiveness and vow of reform seem to represent a triumph for the best hopes of liberalism. Mrs. Tillotson, seizing on the detail of Barton's dying in Carson's arms, says: ‘And this points to the book's true theme: not this or that feature of industrial society is being criticised, but its whole principle, excluding any human contact between masters and men; and the hope of betterment lies not in this or that reform, but in the persistence, against all odds, of humanheartedness’. But this is a grotesquely inadequate hope in terms of the novel itself. For one thing, even if Carson's reform is genuine it is a purely individual matter, whereas one side of Mrs. Gaskell certainly hopes it will emerge as a general recommendation. For another, it is only one side of her, and the shallower, interpretive side, at that. The side which is truer to the novel knows that such a resolution is impossible, and indeed at the very end of Mary Barton all the main characters are sent off to Canada to make a fresh start, and so are given a purely fortuitous, and individual, release from a context which had been shown to be so inescapable. As Williams remarks, there is at this point ‘a kind of writing-off, when the misery of the actual situation can no longer be endured’. Human heartedness indeed! If only the matter were that simple, Mrs. Gaskell's liberalism need not have been in conflict with all that is finest in her novel.

Notes

1. It comes from his essay in the Pelican Guide to English Literature, Vol. 6; easily the best essay on the subject.

2. Culture and Society, London, 1957. But Williams's few pages are of considerable interest.

3. Past and Present, Works, Vol. 10, London, 1896-9.

4. Alton Locke, London, 1850.

5. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, London, 1963, p. 63. Thompson has a splendid discussion of the concept of ‘mob’, pp. 62-78.

6. All quotations come from the Hughendon edn., London, 1881.

7. F. R. Leavis, The Great Tradition, London, 1947, p. 1. This praise is echoed by Kettle.

8. Ruskin, Modern Painters, Works, Vol. 7, ed. Cook and Weddeburn, London, 1900-13, p. 343.

9. See A. B. Hopkins, Elizabeth Gaskell, London, 1952, p. 77.

10. All quotations come from the 1st edn., London, 1848.

11. Kathleen Tillotson, Novels of the 1840's, London, 1961, p. 202.

12. Vol. 84 (part 3 for 1848).

13. Vol. LI, July 1849.