SOURCE: Childers, Joseph W. “Mary Barton and the Community of Suffering.” In Novel Possibilities: Fiction and the Formation of Early Victorian Culture, pp. 158-78. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995.

[In the following excerpt, Childers explores similarities between Gaskell's novel and Friedrich Engels's The Condition of the Working Class in England.]

Those readers familiar with Friedrich Engels's The Condition of the Working Class in England as well as with Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton may be immediately struck by a peculiar similarity in the opening pages of these two important social texts of the middle nineteenth century. Engels begins with a “Historical Introduction” in which he recalls the intellectual and moral state of workers in the years before the advent “of the steam engine and of machines for spinning and weaving cotton” (9).¹ In those years, writes Engels, workers were “righteous, God-fearing, and honest. … Most of them were strong, well-built people” (10). The children grew up “in the open air.” Workers were uninterested “in politics, never formed secret societies, never concerned themselves about the problems of the day, but rejoiced in healthy outdoor sports and listened devoutly when the Bible was read to them” (10-11). They had “no intellectual life and were interested solely in their petty private affairs” (12). These people, explains Engels, “vegetated happily” in their idyllic life, yet “they remained in some respects little better than the beasts of the field. They were not human beings at all, but little more than human machines in the service of a small aristocratic class” (12). The Industrial Revolution “carried this development to its logical conclusion,” turning the workers “completely into machines” and depriving them “of the last remnants of independent activity” (12). Paradoxically, however, it was also the Industrial Revolution that “forced the workers to think for themselves and to demand a fuller life in human society” (12). According to Engels, political and economic changes that are tied directly to the Industrial Revolution brought the middle and working classes into the “vortex of world affairs” (12).²

The opening of Mary Barton also alludes to a simpler, idyllic past. One April day in the early or mid 1830s, the operatives from Manchester spend “a holiday granted by the masters, or a holiday seized in right of nature and her beautiful springtime” (40) in Green Heys Fields. Scattered about these fields, which are within a half-hour's walk from the busy manufacturing town, one can see “here and there an old black and white farm-house,” which speaks of “other times and other occupations than those which now absorb the population of the neighborhood” (39). And like Engels, Gaskell comments on the physical appearance of some of the operatives, a group of factory girls, whose “faces were not remarkable for beauty; indeed they were below the average, with one or two exceptions” (41). Yet just as Engels remarks on the increased intellectual activity of urban workers, activity that distinguishes them from their rural counterparts, Gaskell also comments on these plain working girls' “acuteness and intelligence of countenance, which has often been noticed in a manufacturing population” (41). A few sentences later, the narrator describes Mary Barton's mother, also named Mary, as a woman who has “the fresh beauty of the agricultural districts; and somewhat of the deficiency of sense in her countenance, which is likewise characteristic of the rural inhabitants in comparison with the natives of the manufacturing towns” (41-42).

Gaskell and Engels observe the same changes in the English lower classes that have come about as a result of the Industrial Revolution. Whereas Engels's workers are thrown into the vortex of world affairs by industrialization, Gaskell's factory operatives are “absorbed” by occupations other than farming. In each text, the lower classes are passive; they are acted upon by the conditions in which they live, conditions they had historically done little to change. But as they have collected together in large masses in towns like Manchester, they have made the most of their compelled socialization. This new type of workers, the urban workers, have become keen and intelligent; they have begun to think for themselves; they have begun to participate in the making of their world.

It is important, I think, to recognize how significant the similarities in these two texts are. In each case the observer is an outsider to the world of the working class, and in each case it is up to the observer to make sense of that alien world. Likewise, in both Mary Barton and The Condition of the Working Class in England there is an insistence on a continuity with a past that has become mythologized as a simpler, less physically and intellectually demanding time. Further, this past is only recoverable as history or memory, whether it be in Engels's comparisons of pastoral to urban life or in Alice Wilson's anecdotes (or delirium). For both Engels and Gaskell the change that was transforming nineteenth-century life was inexorable and ultimately “progressive” inasmuch as it held within it the potential for amelioration of the laboring classes' conditions of life as well as the promise of a vital intellectual and spiritual life for the working orders. But in each text, the workers are represented as partly responsible for their lot, no matter the oppression they experience at the hands of more economically and politically powerful classes. Further, just as industrialism has thrown both laborers and the middle class into the vortex of world affairs in Engels's description of the effects of the Industrial Revolution, in Mary Barton we find that the working classes and middle classes are inextricably bound to one another. In Gaskell's novel, the interests of either are the interests of both, and it is only through understanding this interdependence that their mutual concerns can be served.

The difficulty of making this linkage clear to members of both classes becomes apparent in the John Barton portion of Gaskell's 1848 “Tale of Manchester Life,” which is bifurcated into his story and the story of Mary Barton and Jem Wilson's romance. The one-time titular hero of the novel, John Barton has found that he can expect very little comfort from his economic and educational betters. As he says to his friend of many years, George Wilson,

I tell you, it's the poor, and the poor only, as does such things [as give aid in time of sickness or death] for the poor. Don't think to come over me with the old tale, that the rich know nothing of the trials of the poor. I say, if they don't know, they ought to know. We are their slaves as long as we can work; we pile up their fortunes with the sweat of our brows; and yet we are to live as separate as if we were in two worlds; ay, as separate as Dives and Lazarus, with a great gulf betwixt us; but I know who was best off then.

(45)

John Barton ends this, the first and perhaps most famous of his many speeches on the enslavement of the lower classes by the manufacturers, “with a low chuckle that had no mirth in it” (45). One critic has argued that “this closing reference to heavenly justice is a gloomy prophecy of revenge, not a joyful anticipation of saintly rewards” (Gallagher, Industrial Reformation 71). While Barton's character certainly lends some credence to this interpretation and while such a closing does emphasize the “polarized social vision, and the determinism that informs [John Barton's] thinking” (70), it is important to consider this statement within the context of the scene in Green Heys Fields and within the rhetoric of suffering that even in the first few pages of this novel is being established as the work's interpretive filter.³ With such considerations in mind, the similarities of Mary Barton's opening pages to the “Historical Introduction” of Engels's book take on added significance, and John Barton's punctuating the parable of Dives and Lazarus with his mirthless laugh becomes more than an indication of his character or a foreshadowing of later violence; it also indicates the humorless irony of the situation in which the poor find themselves.

The industrial poor are the natural consequence of the very “system” that made some, such as Barton's employer Mr. Carson, rich. Yet whatever such men may have learned in their success, they have refused knowledge of an existence even more deplorable than that out of which they rose and which they now exploit. As the narrator says, “in the days of his childhood and his youth, Mr. Carson had been accustomed to poverty: but it was honest decent poverty; not the grinding squalid misery he had remarked in every part of John Barton's house, and which contrasted strangely with the pompous sumptuousness of the room in which he now sat” (439). The refusal to know this aspect of the factory system is compounded in the younger Carson when at one point he states his intentions toward Mary Barton: “my father would have forgiven any temporary connexion, far sooner than my marrying one so far beneath me.” When confronted with the fact that his mother was a factory girl he replies, “Yes, yes!—but then my father was in much such a station; at any rate there was not the disparity there is between Mary and me” (184). This offhand repudiation of his own working-class antecedents highlights not only the lack of knowledge that the middle classes have about the lower but a lack of desire to know. It is not for nothing, then, that Barton's “explanation” for killing Harry Carson rings like a refrain in the elder Carson's ears: “I did not know what I was doing” (436).

Barton's use of the parable also illustrates the kinds of explanations and thus the understanding available to the workers as they attempt to interpret and, to an extent, to order their world. This world, as both Engels and Gaskell point out, is one the working classes had very little say in making. It is a world into which they are thrown or absorbed, yet one which they must make some sense of if they are to survive; in this world that seems so hostile to their existence, they must create a space for themselves that they can at least partially control. Barton's reference to the parable of Dives and Lazarus indicates the perspective of opposition and oppression that informs the workers' view of this world and thus provides them with some measure of containing this world within an interpretive paradigm of their own. Oddly enough, however, despite Barton's gloomy understanding of the world and his place in it, the reference to Dives and Lazarus rather incongruously offers the workers some hope for amelioration. It goes far in indicating how profoundly Christian eschatology constitutes the lower classes' comprehension of the industrialized world; or at the very least, Barton's reference demonstrates Gaskell's perception of the working poor's attitudes toward their lots in life.

In the introduction to his Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, Hegel speaks of the “cunning” of reason in history, those events, figures, circumstances that seem to quell the progress of mind and humanity, but which, upon closer examination, reveal themselves as necessary for that progress. In the opening pages of Engels's Condition, we see exactly how such cunning functions, for in the very deprivation suffered by the laboring classes, historical progression is at work. It is precisely because they suffer that the working classes begin to create and to demand for themselves “a fuller life in human society.”

The “principal and most potent Hegelian category and instrument of analysis—the negative” (Marcus, Engels, Manchester 137) primarily informs Engels's logic of representation of the history of the working classes. The working classes are for Engels “the universally negated,” who had “been deprived of everything except their humanity, and even that existed for them in an estranged and unachieved form” (Marcus, Engels, Manchester 138). As universally negated, however, they also represent the “power of universal negation” and prefigure an “immense and dreadful convulsion” (138) that will produce, finally, a positive result. For Hegel, and later for Engels and his famous associate, this result is freedom. In Hegel it is a freedom of the mind; for Marx and Engels it becomes a freedom from the manipulations of capitalism—a social and material freedom.

Importantly, Engels sees the negativity of the working class as that class's impetus for the reinterpretation of itself and its place in the world, and he provides the structure for this new narrative of the working class: the result of the working classes being placed “at the vortex of world affairs” is revolutionary. The workers are no longer at the periphery of the social “machine”; they now are the means by which industrialization thrives. No longer need they be content to be acted upon by history; the urban, industrial workers can make history; they can—if they will—destroy the institutions that continually enslave the lower orders and that persist in debasing their humanity. Thus deprivation and the deplorable conditions of life for the lower orders comprise a vital component both in the way the working classes can interpret and thus redefine and reorder their world, and also in how they can materially change their fate.

Mary Barton's use of the negative, though by no means Hegelian in its derivation, also influences interpretation and understanding, at least for the main characters. Through their suffering they create a world of meaning and thereby a community that is inaccessible and unintelligible to their employers. Suffering is the linchpin of the society of the poor in Mary Barton; all experience it and, as with death, the fact that one will experience it can be foretold with certainty. Suffering is also the impetus to positive change, even when it appears to stifle all possibility of amelioration. Yet unlike The Condition of the Working Class, and much more akin to other social-problem novels of the period, Mary Barton promotes reform rather than revolution, and the ways in which such reform can take place are connected, finally, to those with whom power resides and will continue to reside—the middle classes. In contrast to works such as Helen Fleetwood or Alton Locke, which focus on the importance of individual spiritual purity or regeneration, Mary Barton concerns itself with the problem of communication between the two nations of England, characterizing the gulf between the two classes as a sea of silence, an absence of discourse. According to Mary Barton if communication is established, the middle classes will be able to understand their obligation to the lower orders and to proceed apace with material reform, which Gaskell represents as more immediately necessary than spiritual or moral reform.

At one point early in Alton Locke, Alton is struggling with his conscience about whether his duty to himself and to the attainment of knowledge should outweigh his duty to his inherited religion and his mother. As he says to the reader, “I was not likely to get any very positive ground of comfort from Crossthwaite; and from within myself there was daily less and less hope of any” (53). Out of his discomfort, his suffering, he is able to come to a decision about which course of action he will take. Reform, let alone revolution, is not undertaken by a sated or complacent subject. For Alton, the interpretative paradigm bequeathed to him by his mother no longer satisfactorily orders his world or answers his inquiries. Thus he begins to search for new ways to come to terms with his world and eventually underwrite changes in that world. This too is happening in Mary Barton; from the opening pages of the novel, characters are moved to action through their suffering. And as in Alton Locke, one of the first aspects of the characters' lives to be examined are the discourses that constitute them and their understanding of and relations to their surroundings.

These examinations are particularly interesting, because in Mary Barton the constitutive discourses of the lower classes are predominantly informed by middle-class presuppositions. For example, when John Barton speaks of the “great gulf” between rich and poor, he asks, “does the rich man share his plenty with me, as he ought to do, if his religion was not a humbug?” (45). Barton is questioning the value of a moral system that has no more force than middle-class religion seems to have, but his query is followed by the famous Dives and Lazarus reference, an indication that middle-class Christianity, the religion that Barton is interrogating, has found its way, however mediated, to the lower classes and lies ready to hand for those who will follow it or will employ it. Barton turns this discourse on itself in defining his and his family's place vis à vis the middle classes. Only a few sentences before commenting on middle-class religion as “humbug,” Barton tells of warning his sister-in-law, Esther, about filling Mary's head with notions of becoming a lady:

I'd rather see her earning her bread by the sweat of her brow, as the Bible tells her she should do, ay, though she never got ay butter to her bread, than be like a do-nothing lady, worrying shopmen all morning, and screeching at her pianny all afternoon, and going to bed without having done a good turn to any one of God's creatures but herself.

(44)

Note the ideological and moral alignment in the foregoing examples of Barton's words. Both in his assertion that it is only the poor who look after the poor and in his determination that Mary shall earn her living through honest work, as the Bible instructs, Barton strongly insinuates that the lower orders conform more closely than the middle classes to the middle classes's own code of moral conduct—a code that for Gaskell follows almost exclusively from the precepts of Christianity. Second, the moral rectitude of the poor is represented as all the more remarkable for the debilitating material conditions of life they are forced to endure. When the poor do for the poor, as John Barton says they must, the important biblical analogy is no longer that of Dives and Lazarus but of the scene in Matthew's depiction of the Last Judgment in which the “Son of Man” bids the righteous to come forward to “inherit the kingdom” prepared for them: “For I was hungered, and ye gave me meat; I was thirsty and ye gave me drink. I was a stranger and ye took me in: Naked, and ye clothed me; I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison and ye came unto me” (Matt. 25:34-36). And when the righteous ask how it is that they have done these things for Christ, he answers: “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me” (Matt. 25:40).

Certainly this or a comparable text (such as the parable of the Good Samaritan) determines, in part, Barton and Wilson's errand of mercy to the Davenport household; and as the novel points out of the poor in general: in times of distress, though there were “desperate fathers …, bitter-tongued mothers …,” and “reckless children,” there was “Faith such as the rich can never imagine on earth; there was ‘Love strong as death’; and self-denial, among rude, coarse men” (96). Writes Gaskell, “The vices of the poor sometimes astound us here; but when the secrets of all hearts shall be made known, their virtues will astound us in far greater degree” (96).

This sort of moral consciousness is a part of all the working-class main characters of Mary Barton and even contributes to some of the actions of the pandering Sally Leadbitter (132-33). From Gaskell's middle-class perspective, the perspective shared by most of her readers, this must have been in some degree comforting. Despite well-known attacks by those such W. R. Greg in the Edinburgh Review (1849) in which the novel is criticized for its overly sympathetic portrayal of factory operatives and for Gaskell's failure in understanding the principles of political economy, Mary Barton's representations of a moral segment of the working class escaped serious challenge by its contemporary critics. And though there is little time for church attendance (or at least there is very little discussion of it) in the novel, the fact that the lower classes' moral code is so often exemplary in many ways diminishes the fears of violence and infidelity that so many observers of the working classes, and of Manchester in particular, had expressed.

Thus, unlike Alton Locke, which attempts a reform of public religion and politics by offering a personal spiritual awakening, Mary Barton does not perceive the need to fortify or remake working-class morality as a means of achieving political goals. Indeed, the novel's aim, according to Gaskell, is far from political—even on a tertiary level. As she says in the preface to Mary Barton, “I bethought me how deep might be the romance in the lives of some of those who elbowed me daily in the busy streets of the town in which I resided” (37). The novel's stated goal is dramatic and representational. As Gaskell writes at the end of the preface, “I know nothing of Political Economy, or the theories of trade. I have tried to write truthfully; and if my accounts agree or clash with any system, the agreement or disagreement is unintentional” (38).

Unintentional perhaps, but unavoidable nonetheless. Like Kingsley, Chadwick, or any other observer of the lower classes, Gaskell could not completely repudiate a perception of reality formed by experiences and their interpretations that could only be very different from the experiences and interpretations of most members of the working classes. Thus while John Lucas validly asserts that Mary Barton is an important corrective to The Condition of the Working Class in England because Gaskell was able to represent important variations in attitude and conditions of life among different groups within the lower classes, he errs in his argument that Gaskell's representation is more “truthful” because it is formed out of a more complete “experience” (see Lucas, Literature of Change 39, 56). As subtle as Lucas's definition of “truth” is and despite his denial of any sort of empirical basis to his thesis, ultimately his argument must revert to one of observation and representation. That is, Gaskell, according to Lucas, saw things as they really were. But things “as they really were” to Gaskell differs considerably from the reality experienced by those who had first-hand experience of living in cellars below the water line, or of the gnawing hunger of going days without eating, or of relief at the death of a child because there is one less mouth to feed and because burial society funds might even make such a death profitable.

Moreover, Gaskell never purports to be representing the reality of the situation she observes; she knows this is a claim she cannot make. She writes of Mary Barton in an undated letter of 1848, “I can only say I wanted to represent the subject in the light in which some of the workmen certainly consider to be true, not that I dare to say it is the abstract absolute truth” (Letters 67). She is always aware of the limits on what she can see, and thus the limits on what she can (or should) say.⁴ It comes as no surprise therefore, that she should write to Mary Ewart late in 1848 that “no one can feel more deeply than I how wicked it is to do anything to excite class against class” (Letters 67; original emphasis). For her, to incite revolt would indeed be wicked, for it would be to encourage the destruction of an order that, given her Unitarian theology, must be ordained by God. Yet in the same letter to Ewart she writes:

I do think that we must all acknowledge that there are duties connected with the manufacturing system not fully understood as yet, and evils existing in relation to it which may be remedied in some degree, although we as yet do not see how; but surely there is no harm in directing the attention to the existence of such evils.

(67)

Mary Barton exists between what Gaskell construed as the “wickedness” of inciting class against class and the duty of acknowledging and remedying the evils inherent to the factory system. The problem for this novel, much like the problem for Alton Locke or other novels written by members of the middle classes who were sympathetic to the plight of the poor, is how to devise interpretations and representations that can successfully depict the conditions (and for Gaskell, the emotions) of the workers without upsetting the order of society. Also, like Chadwick, Engels, Mayhew, or Kingsley, Elizabeth Gaskell is an observer of the poor and their lives, and she is sharing her discovery with a world of readers that otherwise would have only limited access to it. Winifred Gérin remarks that “the setting of the tale is, unrelievedly, Manchester” and that “except to the commercial travellers of England, Manchester was virtually unknown in the south” (87).⁵ Speaking of North and South (1855), Gérin writes, “Her descriptions of the back-to-back insanitary dwellings of her dramatis personae, of the stationary pall of smoke polluting the air, well removed though the mills were from the residential areas where the prosperous cotton-spinners and calico-printers lived, had in themselves the power to shock” (87). As with other observers of the lower orders, Gaskell must conceive a strategy of representation that can provide the fullest possible depiction of this alien, unfathomable world yet still be accessible to her readers in terms they can understand.

As an interpretive trope, suffering provides those terms, for it reaches across class boundaries, affecting even those who, John Barton believes, easily weather the storms of bad economic times.⁶ This is the discourse of John Barton's resentment and bewilderment at seeing “that all goes on just as usual with the mill owners. Large houses are still occupied, while spinners' and weavers' cottages stand empty, because the families that once occupied them are obliged to live in rooms or cellars” (59). As far as Barton is concerned the worker alone suffers through bad times at the mill. The narrator of Mary Barton tells the reader, “I know that this is not really the case; and I know what is the truth is such matters: but what I wish to impress is what the workman feels and thinks” (60). The workers, then, are creating their own reality, understanding their world through interpretations that describe the material circumstances that bind them together—and that apparently situate them as adversaries of the manufacturers.

As the reader sees with the murder of Harry Carson, it is not only the operatives who can be affected by loss, nor does suffering lie exclusively in the domain of the laborer. Urged to action by the murder of his son, the senior Carson arranges for a speedy trial and construes the available evidence, circumstantial though it is, as conclusive proof of Jem Wilson's guilt. Carson's loss provides him with the interpretive imperative to create a reality in which the only explanation for his son's death is linked to the rivalry between Harry and Jem for Mary's affections. And after Jem's acquittal and Barton's deathbed confession to Carson, it is mutual suffering, ironically, that heals the breach between laborer and manufacturer, that makes a community of the two nations much as it creates community among the poor:

The eyes of John Barton grew dim with tears. Rich and poor, masters and men, were then brothers in the deep suffering of the heart; for was not this the very anguish he had felt for little Tom, in years so long gone by that they seemed like another life!

(435)

The poor's suffering and the utterances that arise from it seem to be tied directly only to their material conditions of life. Yet in its interpretive functions, that suffering and its articulation is inextricably linked to their religious perceptions and utterances as well. Alice Wilson's “optimistic determinism” is a case in point. For Alice, all bad things ultimately are for the good. Rather than grieving immoderately over the loss of a friend or relative, Alice prefers to believe every misfortune is “sent” and falls “to trying to find out what good it were to do. Every sorrow in her mind is sent for good” (84). This can only be described as a way of articulating suffering that gives vent to the experience of loss or deprivation, yet which also provides comfort. This means of interpreting the world, argues the narrator of Mary Barton, depends upon the strength of one's faith. Thus when Mary strives “to deny the correctness” of her friend Margaret Jennings' fear that she is going blind and thus will be unable to support herself and her grandfather, she offers false comfort, primarily because she refuses to interpret the event of Margaret's blindness as an event of loss, yet one also of gain. As the narrator says, Mary should have helped Margaret to “meet and overcome the evil” (85).

Not all characters find suffering informed by religious faith an adequate discourse for interpreting the world in which they live. Once again, one need only think of John Barton's many attacks on religion. Because the rhetoric of suffering is tied to religious discourse, even in Barton's own speech, this does not mean that religion cannot be or is not called to account. For Barton, religion as a means of understanding the lot of the worker fails miserably. When he and Wilson are in the appalling cellar ministering to the dying Ben Davenport, Wilson tells how while sitting alone with the dying man and his family and bitterly musing on his having to “sponge off” his son Jem, he reads a letter the dying man had written to his wife, which was “as good as Bible-words; ne'er a word o' repining; a' about God being our father, and that we mun bear patiently whate'er he sends” (104).

For George Wilson these are words of comfort, but Barton immediately scoffs: “Don ye think he's the masters' father too? I'd be loath to have 'em for brothers” (104). Such a statement notably denies the community between master and man that Gaskell presents as the only solution to the problems of the poor. In every case such community depends upon communication between the classes, and to an extent an identification of one class with another. As Gaskell demonstrates, however, such identification is impossible when the factory operatives see their employer “removing from house to house, each one grander than the last” until finally the manufacturer withdraws his money “from the concern, or sells his mill to buy an estate in the country” (59). Gaskell goes on to point out that it is not only the actions of the employers but their unwillingness to communicate with the operatives that contributes so greatly to the alienation of classes:

And when he [the worker] knows trade is bad, and could understand (at least partially) that there are not buyers enough in the market to purchase the goods already made, and consequently that there is no demand for more; when he would bear and endure much without complaining, could he also see that his employers were bearing their share.

(59)

Of course, remarks like Barton's indicate that the refusal to identify with another class is not solely a characteristic of the monied orders; indeed, his stated aversion to claiming his employers as “brothers” only contributes to the gap separating master and man so that finally there can be no communication at all, as Gaskell's description of the confrontation between the factory owners and the striking workers bears out:

So class distrusted class, and their want of mutual confidence wrought sorrow to both. The masters would not be bullied, and compelled to reveal why they felt it wisest and best to offer only such low wages; they would not be made to tell that they were even sacrificing capital to obtain a decisive victory over the continental manufacturers. And the workmen sat silent and stern with folded hands refusing to work for such pay. There was a strike in Manchester.

(221-22; emphasis added)

The novel itself steps into the space created by the refusal of the representatives of each class to speak. As with the riots in Alton Locke, the strike is indicative of the breakdown of discourse, the inability (or refusal) of either side to understand its adversary's position. The strike, however, also demonstrates the unwillingness of each group to make known the reasons for its position. The novel interrupts this silence and provides intercourse between these opposing positions, not only as a way of offering a possible solution to the impasse the confrontation between employer and operative has reached but also in order to provide knowledge about the convictions held by those involved. In this way, the novel—both Mary Barton specifically and the novel as a genre in nineteenth-century Britain—presents as well as evaluates social practices that may have been completely alien to a large number of its readers. This function is not only cognitive but constitutive; Manchester, Chartists, fallen women, and working-class naturalists exist for many of Mary Barton's readers according to their textual representation. Knowledge provided, we should remember, is also knowledge made. Possibilities of meaning and understanding are both broadened and circumscribed by the limits of representation.

Whatever readers may not have known about the lives and attitudes of the laboring population, they were quite familiar with the significance of a strike in a manufacturing town. As one historian has asserted, for a Victorian reader the sentence, “There was a strike in Manchester” was “ominous, a signal of violence to come” (Himmelfarb, Idea 506). Violence does indeed follow the declaration of the strike in the form of the operatives' attacks on the “knob-sticks” (scabs) and of course Barton's murder of Harry Carson. But the strike is also preparatory to another act of violence in the parallel plot of the romance of Jem Wilson and Mary Barton. Having learned from Mary's “fallen” aunt Esther that young Carson has been somewhat successfully wooing Mary, Jem seeks out and confronts the manufacturer's son to ascertain Harry's intentions. Harry divulges nothing, and when Jem refuses to let him pass until he gets Harry's word that his intentions are honorable, the verbal confrontation quickly becomes a physical altercation:

The young man raised his slight cane, and smote the artizan across the face with a stinging stroke. An instant afterwards he lay stretched in the muddy road, Jem standing over him, panting with rage.

(230)

This happens after the strike has seized Manchester and has seen Carson and Son emerge as the “most energetic of the masters” in fortifying the resolve of the manufacturers not to give in to the demands of the operatives (222). The encounter between Jem and Harry takes place at a time when communication between master and man is at its least fluent and when violence is most likely. The narrator even attributes young Carson's exuberant involvement in the masters' strategies to “the excitement of the affair. He liked the attitude of resistance. He was brave, and he liked the idea of personal danger, with which some of the more cautious tried to intimidate the violent among the masters” (222).

In light of the more general social context of John Barton's story and the Manchester strike, the confrontation between Jem and Harry may seem trivial and coincidental; but its novelistic function, aside from helping to tie together two disparate plot lines, emphasizes the connections that reach across class boundaries to bind together master and worker in a community that must operate with open communication and mutual respect. Harry's attitude toward Jem is one of suspicion; he is not intent upon “attending very particularly to the purpose [Jem] had in addressing him” but upon “trying to gather … what was the real state of the case” (228). For Harry, any interest Jem may have in Mary's affairs must be selfish and must be ulterior to Jem's reasons for stopping him, though Jem avers that he will tell his reasons in “plain words.” Likewise, Jem distrusts Harry's motives in courting Mary and feels justified in accosting, striking, and even threatening the young manufacturer. Of course, this scene is part of the romance plot of the novel and as in most romances there is a hero and a villain. To be sure, Jem is cast in the former role, and Harry (except perhaps in refusing to press charges when Jem flattens him) is portrayed as contemptible. Nevertheless, the short scene between these characters corresponds in its precepts to the social drama that Gaskell is representing in Mary Barton. Unwilling to acknowledge the claims of its counterpart, each class contributes to the violence that threatens to destroy completely communicative relations between the classes.

Although it is individuals that Mary Barton is most concerned with, as the novel makes clear when the narrator states, “So much for generalities. Let us now return to individuals” (223), it is the generalities that contribute so significantly to relations among individuals and in some measure constitute the conditions of individual existence. And it is through the individuals that generalities are articulated and made apparent. More than forty years after the publication of Mary Barton, Charles Booth in his Life and Labour of the People of London comments on the difficulty of recognizing the individual relations that bind together an urban populace:

It is not in country but in town that “terra incognita” needs to be written on our social map. In the country the machinery of human life is plainly to be seen and easily recognized: personal relations bind the whole together. The equipoise on which existing order rests, whether satisfactory or not, is palpable and evident. It is far otherwise with cities, where as to these questions we live in darkness, with doubting hearts and ignorant unnecessary fears.

(18)

Admittedly, Booth is writing about “deepest darkest London” in 1889, but there is much in his observation that is at the very center of Gaskell's novel. For in Manchester, a town that had grown from 75,000 residents in 1800 to 300,000 in 1840 (and more than 400,000 by 1848), the whole had become an aggregate, a collection of individuals and interests whose relations to each other were no longer “palpable and evident” except that they were informed by certain economic considerations. The human and the humane often were obscured by the layer of sooty misery that blanketed lower-class existence, creating a cover of darkness that materially and imaginatively separated the two nations. Mary Barton is specifically concerned with piercing that darkness, with promoting understanding and eradicating at least some of those “ignorant unnecessary fears.” Certainly this informs the work's narrative, for it is a novel of secrets and misunderstanding, of attempting to discern the unsaid and construe the silences that exist within and between communities. Simultaneously, Mary Barton is a novel about communication and disrupting those silences in order to make things known.

The failure to communicate, to share across class boundaries in the common discourse of suffering, specifically contributes to the very form the narrative takes, for it ultimately is one of the causes of Harry Carson's death. His inability to conceive of the suffering of the workers and his mockery of their condition singles him out as the manufacturer who must die and is foreshadowed early in the novel when George Wilson goes to the Carsons' to beg an infirmary order for Davenport. The contrast between the two homes is striking and fraught with irony. Mrs. Carson's mood is “very black this morning. She's got a bad headache.” To assuage her suffering she orders her breakfast carried upstairs to her chambers, where she will have “the cold partridge as was left yesterday, … plenty of cream in her coffee … and … a roll … well buttered” (107). Amy, the youngest Carson daughter, pooh-poohs the cost of a small rose (half a guinea), saying that her father will not begrudge her the money, knowing full well that she cannot “live without flowers and scents” (108). The amount and types of “suffering” in the Carson household are farcical in comparison to the dire conditions of the Davenport cellar. When Wilson enters with his request, it is almost as though the Carsons cannot conceive of the distress Davenport and his family must be experiencing. Mr. Carson can do no more than give the man an out-patient's order for the infirmary, and young Harry, who is extravagant in all things pertaining to his own person, presses five shillings into Wilson's hand for “the poor fellow”—the same sum Barton, who had no money about him whatsoever, was able to contribute to the Davenports after pawning his better coat and his silk handkerchief—“his jewels, his plate his valuables, these were” (99).

While the failure of the Carsons to acknowledge or participate in suffering until Harry's murder demonstrates the discursive responsibilities of living in a society organized according to Christian values, Barton's withdrawal from the community that has always supported him emotionally and spiritually, if not economically, indicates that the internal dissolution of the community of the poor is not only possible, but a substantive threat to society as a whole. After the death of his wife and of George Wilson, the two influences in his life who mitigate his hatred toward the middle and upper classes and who are the conduits, along with Mary, of his relations with his own class, Barton effectively refuses to participate in the community of which he has so long been a part. The sympathetic ties he has always had to those of his own class who are less fortunate than he are transformed into political bonds. Barton's ambivalence toward the religious basis of the rhetoric of suffering, which for the poor is the discursive basis of community, turns to outright denial of religion as a solution to the problems of the working classes. Instead, he opts for Chartism.

At first, Barton has great hopes for Chartism, though, as Gaskell points out, not all who were involved with the 1839 petition were Chartists and the idea that men “could voluntarily assume the office of legislators for a nation, ignorant of its real state,” while originating with the Chartists, “came at last to be cherished as a darling child by many and many a one” (127). In the beginning, Mary Barton depicts Chartism as positive in many ways and sharing many qualities with religion: it too recognizes the discursive power of suffering; it too attempts to form a community committed to common goals. Ultimately, however, John Barton's turning from religion as the basis of community is as personally and socially devastating as his sister-in-law Esther's turning from the religious teachings of her youth.

Unlike Alton Locke in which Chartists are the most moral and the most highly educated of the working classes, Mary Barton represents individual Chartists as haggard, forlorn, desperate men, and Chartism, despite its good intentions, becomes the most dangerous of activities. Consequently, it is when Barton can no longer interpret his or other workers' distress in the religious discourse of patience, of suffering silently, that Mary Barton is at its most “revolutionary” and most at odds with commonly accepted middle-class values and perceptions of the poor.⁷ This is not to say that the novel ever completely abandons its social and moral presuppositions, but in John Barton's attempt to formulate his social existence discursively through politics instead of religion, Mary Barton examines those presuppositions and presents the alternative to Christian society—violence.

The move from religion to radical politics, as in Alton Locke, is far less difficult for the laborer than one might at first imagine. And, as in Alton Locke, Chartism is described in religious terms: “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” (220). Such a description portrays the activity of becoming a Chartist as an attempt at creating oneself in social and non-material terms. It represents the consequences of the increased intellectual activity of the urban factory operative as Engels describes him. Barton is partially propelled toward becoming a Chartist through his “overpowering thought”: “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?” (219). Reason, however, fails Barton's uneducated mind. He must resort to feeling, and the only emotion “that remained clear and undisturbed in the tumult of his heart, was hatred to the one class and keen sympathy with the other” (219).

Emotion without wisdom, however, “with all its effects, too often works but harm” (219). Gaskell's Unitarianism is most apparent in this statement, which stops short of a complete rethinking of the failure of religion for Barton. Unitarianism, as the title of Dennis Wigmore-Beddoes' book asserts, is a “religion that thinks” (A Religion that Thinks: A Psychological Study). Reason, as well as spirit and sentiment, is the responsibility of the individual who seeks to live a Christian life, and indeed underlies the very basis of Christian society. Within Unitarianism one is as likely—perhaps more likely given the Unitarian denial of the essential depravity of human nature—to be wrong-headed as wrong-hearted.⁸ This is Barton's flaw, for he does not have the capacity to act out of wisdom (which Gaskell attributes to education); rather he acts “to the best of his judgement, but it was a widely erring judgement” (219).

Thus if we return to the passage in which Barton “became a Chartist, a Communist,” we see that despite the religious troping and the sympathetic tone of the comparison of Chartists to visionaries and men of souls, also at work is the condemnation of such activity—a condemnation the passage itself attempts to soften by expounding on the positive rather than the pejorative effects of being “wild and visionary.” Nevertheless, the passage comes at the end of an extended comparison between the working classes—whom Gaskell calls “the uneducated”—and Frankenstein's monster, who despite “many human qualities” was “ungifted with a soul, a knowledge of the difference of good and evil.” Rising up to life, writes Gaskell, the people “gaze on us [the middle classes] with mute reproach: Why have we made them what they are: a powerful monster, yet without the inner means for peace and happiness?” (219-20). Though Chartist activity may indicate that the working classes, despite their “creation” by the middle classes, are not without souls (the soul being for Gaskell the seat both of sympathy and of the knowledge of good and evil), they are still “creatures,” and attempting a political rather than a religious solution. Whatever the intent of the Chartists, because their activities are politically and not religiously informed they are effectively without reason, or at least without right reason, and thus their efforts must inevitably lead to confrontation rather than communication.

One immediately sees both the disturbing and reassuring effects such a representation must have had on the manufacturing classes in 1848. On the one hand is the justification of a class structure which places some above others; for whatever reason, be it innate ability, or industriousness, or the intercession of Providence, good things can happen to members of the working classes. Mr. Carson, formerly a factory operative, becomes one of the most successful mill owners in Manchester, and Jem Wilson looks bound to recreate the narrative of Carson's success in the “uncompromised New World” (Williams, Culture and Society 91). This creates a flexibility within the class structure, and further justifies the positions in society of those who have risen. They are there, the argument goes, because they are more able, because they are meant to be in positions of authority.

On the other hand is Mary Barton's questioning of the factory system as it is run by those who have risen to authority. In many ways this is much more disquieting to middle-class sensibilities than an outright attack on the system such as one reads in a work like Helen Fleetwood or Michael Armstrong. Gaskell's narrator, though critical of the abuses of the system, is after all mediating her observations from a middle-class perspective. She speaks of the manufacturing classes of Manchester as “us.” The working classes “gaze on us,” she writes; they “ask us” why everyone does not suffer during hard times. She knows that this is an uninformed perspective from which the working classes judge their employers. She knows the “truth in such matters.” But knowing the truth does not mitigate the conditions of the poor, nor does it correct their perceptions of the middle classes. Rather, it makes the factory system seem all the more constraining to both manufacturer and operative, and it makes the threat of violence all the more imminent.

Gaskell's solutions to the problems she raises in Mary Barton have often been criticized, and it has become a commonplace to speak of the “failure of Gaskell's art.”⁹ Certainly it is difficult to ignore the contrivance of the narrative resolution: Barton dies, guilty but redeemed. Carson, through his suffering and from talking with Job Legh and Jem Wilson after Barton's confession, becomes a manufacturer who works toward the fulfillment of what has come to be his greatest wish: “that a perfect understanding and complete confidence and love, might exist between masters and men” (460). Jem Wilson and Mary move to Toronto to begin a new life together in a clean, spacious world where the past has no force. Even Jem's attempts to protect Mary from his mother's irritability and possibly misspoken word by not telling the old woman of John Barton's part in Harry Carson's murder is an unnecessary precaution. Years later, after a chance reference to the event, Jem questions his mother and finds she has known of the details of the crimes for years and has never once used it against Mary. This example of the lack of the past's influence on the Wilsons' present circumstances, together with the removal of the Wilsons to Toronto, completes a theme of nostalgia that runs throughout the novel, from the scene in Green Heys Fields, to old Alice's reminiscences and delirium, to a final pastoral ideal that can also accommodate industrialization.

Despite what might be considered literary sleight of hand at its close, Mary Barton contributes to the entire discussion of the problems raised by industrialism in a way that most novels dismiss. This novel represents industrialization as a fact of life that cannot, in itself, be significantly changed. It shapes the lives of workers and manufacturers, and it can be interpreted and understood only in its effects on those lives. Thus, for the workers the factory system is both livelihood and enslavement; for the manufacturers it is the source of their wealth but also the breeder of a force that could destroy the status, privilege, and power that wealth has purchased. For both classes, industrialization is neither completely benevolent nor malevolent; it contains its own negative.

In confronting the negative, in seeing what good can come from it, Mary Barton offers the possibility of communication, community, and solution to the difficulties each class faces. Like most middle-class observers of the problems of the Victorian poor, Gaskell relies heavily on the belief that what is in the best interest of the middle classes is in the best interest of society as a whole. But unlike Alton Locke, which seeks to raise the working classes to the spiritual and intellectual level of their employers, or Michael Armstrong, which represents the manufacturing classes as deserving of retribution, Mary Barton reforms representations of industrialization by presenting the factory system as problematic for all classes, and by demonstrating that one class is as committed to its interpretation of the successes and deficiencies of the system as the other. At the end of the novel, when Jem, Job, and Mr. Carson meet to go over the facts of the murder and fall into a conversation as to the cause of Barton's actions, Carson is depicted as a reasonable, just man, who, like most men, has his own best interests at heart. Yet he is not a Bounderby any more than Barton was ever an Owenite. This novel is not concerned with presenting what would have been considered the extremists in each class, but those who are well informed of their personal and their class's interests and who are themselves typical members of their class. It is among these people that dialogue must take place, so that if the “system” of industrialization cannot change, then as Job Legh says, at least there will be “the inclination to try and help the evils which come like blights at times over the manufacturing places” (458).

When Gaskell writes that the duties “connected to the manufacturing system” are not yet completely understood, and that she is unable to perceive how the “evils” associated with it might be remedied, though “there is no harm in directing the attention to the existence of such evils,” she highlights Mary Barton's interpretive enterprise, which is to bring to a common understanding the attitudes of worker and mill owner toward the necessity of industrialization. And while she is continually concerned to mediate between the interpretations of the two classes, and thus accommodates her narrative to that mediation, the fact remains that in attempting such a negotiation, she calls the very project of the social-problem novel to account. Yet despite the criticism of some, such as Coral Lansbury, who has argued that the weakly resolved plot lines of Mary Barton demonstrate the failure of Gaskell's inquiry into the factory system to provide the answers for improving the conditions of the poor (22), such failures do little to dampen the spirit of inquiry that such a novel fosters. After Mary Barton there are no easy solutions; there is no reverting to an idyllic past. For many the past becomes instead the standard against which to measure the present, as Gaskell indicates in North and South when she writes of manufacturers who “defy the old limits of possibility, in a kind of fine intoxication, caused by recollections of what had been achieved and what yet should be” (45). It is as though there is no longer any way to think about the world—past, present, or future—without considering the effects of the industrial system.

It is in novels such as Mary Barton and Alton Locke that we get ways of reading those effects that provide new ways of organizing and interrogating the world of Victorian England. In each of these novels, the discourse of industrialization does not replace other important discourses, but rather becomes the object of interpretation and inquiry by them. Thus, while we may speak of industrialization shaping the everyday lives of the people of Victorian Great Britain, we must also remember that industrialization—at least as some sort of monolithic public discourse—is evaluated, rethought, and at some level even accepted in these social-problem novels of the second quarter of the nineteenth century. The other interpretive enterprises it mingles with certainly are shaped by it; the paradoxical yet undeniable connections between Chartism and religion are a perfect example; but as we see in Alton Locke and Mary Barton, there is no such thing as the “discourse of industrialism” per se. Rather, through the efforts of these two works we see there are many variants, ways of understanding the concept of industrialism that reformulate it along the paradigmatic lines of a number of discourses. It is in this way that we can speak of the “novelistic reformation of British industrialism,” for in becoming part of the discourse of the novel in nineteenth-century England, industrialism in some ways becomes more accessible, more understandable, even if the material effects it generates cannot be solved in the pages of a novel. And it is in this combination of discursive possibilities that Victorian culture and society is generated as much as it is “reflected.”

Notes

1. As Engels himself points out in his chapter “The Great Towns,” a good deal of his introduction is taken from Peter Gaskell's The Manufacturing Population of England (London, 1833). See translator's note 1 in The Condition of the Working Classes in England, trans. Henderson and Chaloner, p. 9. See also p. 78 of the same edition.

2. Steven Marcus discusses these opening pages of The Condition of the Working Class in England in some detail in Engels, Manchester, and the Working Class (133-39). As Marcus points out, Engels's construction of a pre-industrial way of life for the English is a myth and fraught with empirical inaccuracies. Historical precision, however, while always a concern, is not of primary importance here. More significant is Engels's need to present an historical background in order to examine how change takes place. As Marcus writes of the passage in which Engels describes the workers as intellectually and spiritually dead and the Industrial Revolution as the event that compels them to think for themselves, “It may not be excessive to suggest that in this passage, at this moment, a new mode of conceptual reflection and analysis has been turned upon English events and history. … For what Engels has done here, in the opening pages of the work, is to bring the Hegelian method of thinking to bear upon this momentous development in English history” (136-37).

3. In her essay “Private Grief and Public Acts in Mary Barton,” Rosemarie Bodenheimer argues for the primacy of grief and loss as an organizing trope. She writes that “Mary Barton is a novel about responding to the grief of loss or disappointment. Its pages are filled with domestic disaster; the sheer accumulation of one misfortune after another is the organizing principle of the first half of the narrative” (195). Bodenheimer's main concern is with the movement of the “split” narrative and the “structures” of conflict that shape it (196). Also, for Bodenheimer, Mary Barton starts and ends “always with personal grief,” so that “the novel is only secondarily about politics as such” (213). Although there are obvious affinities between Bodenheimer's reading and my own, my concern is not primarily with the domestic spaces and discourses of the novel, but rather with precisely the ways that suffering, as an interpretive discourse, informs the public, political arena that Bodenheimer sees as secondary.

4. Hilary Schor's Scheherezade in the Marketplace provides an especially good discussion of the implications of such “truth telling” and its limits in terms of the issues of authorship and authority that Gaskell faced as one “almost frightened at [her] own action of writing [Mary Barton]” (see Schor 26-28).

5. Gérin's remark is problematic since as Asa Briggs has demonstrated in Victorian Cities, Manchester was the “shock city” of the period—especially the '30s and '40s—and by 1851 the shock had begun to wear off. Perhaps Gérin is referring to first-hand experiential knowledge of Manchester, and if this is her meaning then there is some validity to her statement; certainly there would have been many Londoners (as well as other southern, more provincial readers) who would never have actually traveled to Manchester despite having read a good deal about it.

6. Hilary Schor comments lucidly on how this trope works to bind the novel's readers to the community of the poor. In Scheherezade in the Marketplace she writes that “the speeches the workers deliver make sense to them—and to us—because they mirror the experience we have been witnessing. When starving workers explain their poverty in terms of dying children, readers who have watched children die for two hundred pages will be moved; the empty talk of foreign markets lacks validity for us, as for them” (17).

7. Although Chartist rhetoric is the obvious exception, there was in early Victorian Britain a tradition, or at least it was perceived as a tradition by the wealthier classes, of the poor's suffering in silence. See E. Chadwick, Sanitary Condition Report, 92.

8. For a full treatment of Unitarian doctrine see Dennis Wigmore-Beddoes, Yesterday's Radicals: A Study of the Affinity between Unitarianism and Broad Church Anglicanism in the Nineteenth Century, 64-69. Compare also Susanna Winkworth's letter to the Rev. J. J. Tayler, dated July 1, 1859:

   As it is I feel myself to some extent in union with all; and especially with the Unitarians, in as much as they, more than most others, seem to me to recognize the true ground of Christian union to be spirit and sentiment, not doctrine, and to uphold the duty as well as right of free search after truth and intellectual veracity.

   (Margaret J. Shaen, Memorials of Two Sisters: Susanna and Catherine Winkworth, 199)

   In the third chapter of The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction, Catherine Gallagher discusses the problems of free will and necessitarianism in Mary Barton in some length. See pp. 64-87.

9. See, for example, P. J. Keating, The Working Classes in Victorian Fiction; John Lucas, “Mrs. Gaskell and Brotherhood,” in Tradition and Tolerance in Nineteenth-Century Fiction; Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, and Catherine Gallagher, The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction. Although these critics do not all agree as to the extent of Gaskell's failed attempts at representing the working classes, all find the novel to be either formally or ideologically defective. The notable exception to this list is Rosemarie Bodenheimer, who writes, “A merger of the Bartons and the Wilsons, repairing the decimation of the original families is the proper resolution in a novel that locates its virtues so firmly in family solidarity and tradition” (“Private Grief” 213).

Bibliography

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Engels, Friedrich. The Condition of the Working Class in England, 1844. 1845. Trans. W. O. Henderson and W. H. Chaloner. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1968.

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———. Mary Barton. 1848. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970.

Gaskell, P[eter]. The Manufacturing Population of England, Its Moral, Social, and Physical Conditions, and the Changes Which have arisen from the Use of Steam Machinery; with an Examination of Infant Labour. London: Baldwin and Cradock, 1833.

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Schor, Hilary M. Scheherezade in the Marketplace: Elizabeth Gaskell and the Victorian Novel. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.

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Wigmore-Beddoes, Dennis. Yesterday's Radicals: A Study of the Affinity Between Unitarianism and Broad Church Anglicanism in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: James Clarke, 1971.

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