[In the following essay, Wheeler investigates the various literary sources that may have provided the inspiration for Gaskell's novel.]

Susanna Winkworth was one of many contemporaries who described Elizabeth Gaskell's devoted commitment to her domestic duties: ‘Her books … were only written when all possible domestic and social claims had been satisfied. Not only was she a devoted wife and mother, but her actual household cares were a positive delight to her. She was more proud of her cows and poultry, pigs and vegetables, than of her literary triumphs, and trained a succession of young women into first-rate cooks. Nor did she ever forget the special duties of a minister's wife.’¹ We always think of her as Mrs. Gaskell. However, as Susanna Winkworth noted, the charm of her modest, selfless nature helped to conceal her intellectual powers: ‘All her great intellectual gifts,—her quick keen observation, her marvellous memory, her wealth of imaginative power, her rare felicity of instinct, her graceful and racy humour,—were so warmed and brightened by sympathy and feeling, that while actually with her, you were less conscious of her power than of her charm.’² All but one of these ‘intellectual gifts’ have often been discussed by her critics. The ‘naked sensibility’ view of Mrs. Gaskell dominates most criticism of her work, both past and present. John Geoffrey Sharps's monumental study of Mrs. Gaskell's Observation and Invention (1970)³ epitomizes this view, and, indeed, concentrates on two of the often recognized ‘intellectual gifts’ mentioned by Miss Winkworth: ‘her quick keen observation’ and ‘her wealth of imaginative power’. The one gift which has been largely ignored is ‘her marvellous memory’ for books.

No reader of the Letters of Mrs. Gaskell (1966), edited by Professors Chapple and Pollard,⁴ can fail to notice that the novelist was a great reader. A glance at the Literary Index shows that her reading was extremely varied. Throughout her life she lent and borrowed books with the enthusiasm of one always thirsty for more. In the letters we find her asking for books from friends, reading reviews, looking forward to new publications, joining in literary debates, and, after 1849, gratefully accepting complimentary copies of works by her many literary colleagues. The Gaskells' house in Plymouth Grove, Manchester, contained a sizeable library.⁵ Elizabeth's reading bore fruit in her work: the novels teem with literary allusions.

In spite of all the evidence, the important question of Mrs. Gaskell's reading has often been ignored or glossed over in critical studies of her works, including Mary Barton. Many scholars and critics have upheld the view that this first novel was the product solely of her experience among the Manchester poor, missing the clues furnished by the mottoes, and by quotations in the text, which point to several important literary sources. Too many readers have been deceived by the disarming modesty of the Preface to the first edition of Mary Barton: ‘Living in Manchester … 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. … 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.’⁶ In fact we know that she read Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations.⁷ The main point of the Preface—that the author wrote about what she saw around her, and tried to give an accurate account of a distressing and potentially dangerous situation—helps to strengthen the view of those who like to think of Mrs. Gaskell as a gifted novelist who wrote from observation, unencumbered with preconceived ideas gleaned from books. Adolphus Ward, editor of the famous Knutsford Edition of her works, and an acquaintance of her daughters, claimed that ‘No literary influence seems to have in any appreciable degree co-operated with this experience—for, though the condition of the working classes, and of the factory operatives and their families in particular, was beginning to attract widespread attention, and to be discussed in many literary forms, the topic was only beginning to find its way into fiction, and it was Mrs. Gaskell whose example suggested to Dickens his much later effort in that direction’ (MB, liii). In 1910, four years after the publication of Ward's edition, The Inquirer published an article on ‘Mrs. Gaskell and Her Social Work Among the Poor’, by ‘a Manchester Correspondent’, identified by Aina Rubenius as Miss Mat Hompes.⁸ The reviewer argues that Mrs. Gaskell's social work in Manchester supplied her with material for Mary Barton: ‘It was not for nothing that the poor in Manchester pronounced her name with blessing on their lips. It was not out of empty second-hand information, culled from books and reports, that Mary Barton sprang.’⁹ In trying to defend Mrs. Gaskell from what she sees as the damning accusation of bookishness, the reviewer spoils her argument by taking up an extreme position, claiming that the only source of the novel was personal observation. Similarly, Yvonne Ffrench mentions Frances Trollope's Michael Armstrong, Disraeli's Coningsby and Sybil, and Harriet Martineau's Illustrations of Political Economy, and claims that

… there is no evidence that Mrs. Gaskell had read any of these early examples, or that she had been influenced by their dawning efforts at reform. What is certain is that Sketches Among the Poor was an independent though still, small voice, and that in Mary Barton Mrs. Gaskell followed a line of her own based on conclusions reached from personal experience and observation. Hers is the first voice to plead the cause of humanity solely for humanitarian ends.¹⁰

Her first statement is correct: on inspection, the works cited seem to have had no influence on Mary Barton. However, other works did influence the novel. A careful comparative reading of Mary Barton (1848), and of Caroline Bowles's Tales of the Factories (1833), Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus (1833-34), Chartism (1839) and Past and Present (1843), Caroline Norton's A Voice from the Factories (1836), ‘The Dream’ (1840) and The Child of the Islands (1845), ‘Charlotte Elizabeth's’ The Wrongs of Woman (1843-44), and Elizabeth Stone's William Langshawe (1842) and The Young Milliner (1843), suggests that these earlier works were all read by Mrs. Gaskell, and all influenced her first novel.

Ward, Miss Hompes and Yvonne Ffrench all defend Mrs. Gaskell's powers of observation by attacking the hypothesis that she read and was influenced by earlier social-problem literature. Both defence and attack are unnecessary. Mrs. Gaskell observed the poor areas of Manchester in her social work, but was also deeply moved by accounts of deprivation and degradation which she read before writing Mary Barton. Indeed, it is this exceptional combination of intelligent reading and close contact with the realities of urban poverty which makes the novel one of the finest studies of working-class life in the mid-nineteenth century.

The aim of this article is to examine Mrs. Gaskell's imaginative response to works by just two of the writers listed above—Caroline Bowles and Caroline Norton—and to make some tentative comments on the way in which her ‘marvellous memory’ stored and sifted material from those works.

In February 1833, Caroline Bowles wrote to Robert Southey, her future husband, enclosing the manuscript of one of the Tales of the Factories: ‘Dear friend, will you be at the trouble of looking over the accompanying verses? I have been reading accounts of the factory atrocities, and proofs of them in minutes of evidence taken before the House of Commons, that worked me up to a fever of indignation, which vented itself in verse—…’.¹¹ The Tales were written only a few months before the Factory Bill of 1833 was presented to parliament.

‘The Father's Tale’ and ‘The Grandmother's Tale’ are short, morbid, pseudo-dramatic sketches in which the horrors of the factory system are discussed by those who have lost children in the factories, either through malnutrition and disease, or through the brutality of the overlookers and the dangers of unboxed machinery. It is the third Tale, ‘Pestilence—What May Be: A Dramatic Scene’, which seems to have influenced Mrs. Gaskell's first novel. Although there is no external evidence to suggest that Mrs. Gaskell read the Dramatic Scene, the similarity between one incident in it and a crucial scene in Mary Barton is too close to be coincidental.

In ‘Pestilence—What May Be’, Mr. Harrington, a ruthless factory owner, has lost his wife and all but one of his children in a terrible plague. The factories of the manufacturing town are all closed; some have been burnt down by angry operatives. Although Martha Vane's ‘last boy’ was crippled in Harrington's factory, and now lies in the Dead-Cart with his father, she refuses to join the hands who threaten to murder Harrington. Instead, she forgives him, and offers to nurse his last dying daughter, Gertrude. Now that the plague has forced him to review his past life, Harrington is haunted by the idea that he has sinned against God in his business affairs. Fetching the Family Bible, which he has never before had time to read, he ‘begins reading in the New Testament’.¹² However, the words mean nothing to him:

God help me! I see letters, words, and lines,
But take not in the sense. My brain seems seared,
And my heart withered, palsied, turned to stone.

(TF, 38)

He then turns to the family register in the Bible:

                                                                                Here's the register,
Kept by that saint in heaven, who was my wife,
Of all our children's births; name after name,
Inscribed so fair by that maternal hand,
Down to the little baby's, who died first
At her dead bosom—down from hers, who lies
Still between life and death—…

(TF, 39)

Hearing Gertrude and Martha Vane discussing his reputation among the exploited operatives in his factory, he enters the bedroom, and finds his daughter praying for him:

                                                                      And oh, Our Father!
If thou art angry with him, as they say,
Forgive him for the sake of Jesus Christ!

As the little girl falters out the last words, her Father, no longer able to control his emotion, bursts into a passion of tears, and falling on his knees, extends his arms towards his daughter, burying his face in the bedclothes as he exclaims,

My blessed child! the stony heart is touched!
That prayer has mounted to the Mercy-seat.

(TF, 43)

Although the catalyst in Mr. Carson's conversion is not similar to the daughter's prayer in ‘Pestilence—What May Be’, other details in Mary Barton are reminiscent of Caroline Bowles's Dramatic Scene. Returning home from John Barton's house, having refused to forgive his son's murderer, Carson, the mill owner, witnesses an act of forgiveness which makes a deep impression on him. A little girl, knocked over by a ‘rough, rude errand-boy’, asks her nurse not to have him punished: ‘“He did not mean to do it. He did not know what he was doing, did you little boy?”’ (MB, 428). The words italicized by Mrs. Gaskell have ‘some association’ with Carson:

… he had heard, or read of that plea somewhere before. Where was it?

‘Could it be—?’

He would look when he got home. So when he entered his house he went straight and silently upstairs to his library, and took down the great, large handsome Bible, all grand and golden, with its leaves adhering together from the book-binder's press, so little had it been used.

On the first page (which fell open to Mr. Carson's view) were written the names of his children, and his own.

‘Henry John, son of the above John and Elizabeth Carson.

Born, Sept. 29th, 1815.’

To make the entry complete, his death should now be added. But the page became hidden by the gathering mist of tears. …

Then he roused himself from his reverie, and turned to the object of his search—the Gospel, where he half expected to find the tender pleading: ‘They know not what they do.’

(MB, 428-30)

At the end of the Gospel, the ‘awful End’, he finds the words for which he is searching. The following morning, he returns to Barton's house, where he prays for his forgiveness:

And when the words were said, John Barton lay a corpse in Mr. Carson's arms. So ended the tragedy of a poor man's life.

(MB, 432)

We do not know when Mrs. Gaskell read ‘Pestilence—What May Be’. Did she remember the Bowles scene in detail, or, less likely, was she unaware that her imagination was working upon something she had read, in the same way that an event in the distant past can re-emerge in one's consciousness years later, half-formed, imperfectly remembered, but nevertheless undeniably present? Whichever is the case, Mrs. Gaskell's imagination worked on the apparently intractable material of Caroline Bowle's stiff, lifeless Dramatic Scene, and created something new. Mr. Harrington's vague dipping into ‘the New Testament’ becomes a specifically directed search for a crucial text by Mr. Carson. Carson's Bible is described in detail: it is ‘large’ and ‘handsome’, ‘all grand and golden’, as a rich man's Bible would be. It is also unread, ‘its leaves adhering together from the book-binder's press’. The relevant section of his family register is actually quoted, adding a poignancy which is altogether absent from the Harrington scene.¹³ Mrs. Gaskell's ‘wealth of imaginative power’ often relied upon her ‘marvellous memory’ for its raw material.

It is difficult to guess when Mrs. Gaskell met the Hon. Mrs. Caroline Norton for the first time. It was not until after the publication of Mary Barton that she went to London to meet some of the leading literary figures of the day, including Carlyle, Dickens, Rogers, and F. D. Maurice. She may have met Mrs. Norton at the home of Samuel Rogers, whom she visited more than once during this trip to London, in 1849.¹⁴ It is certain that they knew each other in the 1850s.¹⁵ The John Rylands Library, Manchester, holds two letters from Caroline Norton to Mrs. Gaskell, dated February and April, 1859.¹⁶ However, it is unlikely that they met before the publication of Mary Barton.

In her writings on the Condition of England Question, Mrs. Norton was mainly concerned with the casualties of a new industrial society. How were the physical conditions of the urban poor to be improved, and the level of their spiritual and moral development raised? The first part of the Question had to be answered in Westminster; the second was the responsibility of poets and novelists, preachers and sages.

Caroline Norton took up the challenge of the second part of the Question in A Voice from the Factories (1836). She makes three basic points in the poem. First, ‘Excessive labour works the soul's decay’.¹⁷ Second, the rich would not be so indifferent to the state of English factories if their own children had to work in them (VF, 32). Third, although ‘Men rarely set Authority at naught’, they will revolt if pushed beyond the limits of their endurance (VF, 38). Her view of the Condition of England Question is similar to Carlyle's in many respects, and Mrs. Gaskell would have sympathized with A Voice in the same way that she sympathized with Carlyle's work.

In the poem, the reader's attention is focused on pathetic individual cases of deprived children, each with his or her own marks of exploitation or rejection. The adult is shocked when his comfortable illusion of childhood innocence and security is shattered by the realities of life faced by the children of the poor:

          And therefore when we hear the shrill faint cries
          Which mark the wanderings of the little sweep;
          Or when, with glittering teeth and sunny eyes,
          The boy-Italian's voice, so soft and deep,
          Asks alms for his poor marmoset asleep;
          They fill our hearts with pitying regret,
          Those little vagrants doomed so soon to weep—
          As though a term of joy for all was set,
And that their share of Life's long suffering was not yet.

(VF, 15)

The ‘boy-Italian’ reappears in Mary Barton.

Having heard about Jem's imprisonment on suspicion of murder, Mary staggers home in a daze, passing vendors ‘crying halfpenny broadsides, giving an account of the bloody murder, the coroner's inquest, and a raw-head-and-bloody-bones picture of the suspected murderer, James Wilson’ (MB, 265). She longs to reach home, where she can hide and ‘vent her agony’:

As she neared that home, within two minutes' walk of it, her impetuous course was arrested by a light touch on her arm, and turning hastily, she saw a little Italian boy, with his humble show-box,—a white mouse, or some such thing. The setting sun cast its red glow on his face, otherwise the olive complexion would have been very pale; and the glittering tear-drops hung on the long curled eyelashes. With his soft voice, and pleading looks, he uttered, in his pretty broken English, the words—

‘Hungry! so hungry.’

And as if to aid by gesture the effect of the solitary word, he pointed to his mouth, with its white quivering lips.

Mary answered him impatiently, ‘O lad, hunger is nothing—nothing!’

And she rapidly passed on. But her heart upbraided her the next minute with her unrelenting speech, and she hastily entered her door and seized the scanty remnant of food which the cupboard contained, and she retraced her steps to the place where the little hopeless stranger had sunk down by his mute companion in loneliness and starvation, and was raining down tears as he spoke in some foreign tongue, with low cries for the far distant ‘Mamma mia!’

(MB, 265-66)

Again, Mrs. Gaskell has borrowed an idea, and made it her own. The unmistakable verbal parallels lead one to suspect that she may have read or reread A Voice from the Factories shortly before writing her novel: the ‘glittering teeth and sunny eyes’ and ‘The boy-Italian's voice, so soft and deep’ of the Norton passage are echoed in ‘the glittering tear-drops’ and the ‘soft voice’ of Mary Barton. But whereas Caroline Norton's little boy briefly touches the corporate conscience of adult society—‘They fill our hearts with pitying regret’ [my emphasis]—Mrs. Gaskell's beggar draws a complex response from the heroine of the novel. The reader sympathizes with the imperfect Mary, and understands her initial reaction to the boy. The latter thus becomes more credible. A passing incident in Mrs. Norton's poem becomes a part of the fabric of Mrs. Gaskell's novel.

The parallels between Mary Barton and ‘The Dream’ (1840) are less specific. In this later poem, Mrs. Norton once again portrays the life of the poor:

‘The poor—the labouring poor! whose weary lives,
          Through many a freezing night and hungry day,
Are a reproach to him who only strives
          In luxury to waste his hours away,—
The patient poor! whose insufficient means
          Make sickness dreadful, yet by whose low bed
Oft in meek prayer some fellow-sufferer leans,
          And trusts in Heaven while destitute of bread; …’(18)

One is reminded of George Wilson and John Barton in the Davenports' cellar (MB, 65-73), and of Jane and Alice Wilson, Margaret Jennings, and Mary Barton faithfully ‘watching’ over their fellow poor in sickness (MB, 83, 249, 251). The theme of the poor's generosity to the poor is developed more fully in The Child of the Islands (‘Autumn’, XLIII; ‘Winter’, LXXXVIII).

In ‘The Dream’, Mrs. Norton emphasizes the heavenly reward awaiting the faithful poor and the oppressed:

‘There, shall the desolate heart regain its own!
There, the oppress'd shall stand before God's throne! …
                    Then shall be Lazarus of the earth have rest—
The rich man judgment—and the grievous breast
Deep peace for ever. Therefore look thou not
So much to what on earth shall be thy lot,
As to thy fate hereafter,—to that day
When like a scroll this world shall pass away,
And what thou here hast done, or here enjoy'd,
Import but to thy soul:—all else destroy'd!’(19)

The parable of Dives and Lazarus has a special significance for John Barton, who gloats over the idea of the rich suffering after death for their selfish indifference to the state of the poor in life (MB, 8, 112).

Of course, there are numerous references to Lazarus in the social-problem literature of the period, and ‘The Dream’ is not the only work of literature before Mary Barton to describe the generosity of the poor. However, in the light of Mrs. Gaskell's response to Caroline Norton's other work, it is likely that she read and was moved by ‘The Dream’, a part of her imaginative ‘experience’.

Mrs. Norton's third poem under discussion, The Child of the Islands (1845), provided Mrs. Gaskell with a motto for chapter IX in Mary Barton (MB, 109). There can thus be no doubt that Mrs. Gaskell read and was impressed by the poem. Not only are its general themes very similar to those of the novel—both writers emphasize the need for understanding, benevolence, and faith in their studies of the rift between rich and poor—but there are also many similarities of detail between the two works.

The Child is a long poem, divided into six sections—‘Opening’, ‘Spring’, ‘Summer’, ‘Autumn’, ‘Winter’, ‘Conclusion’—and written in stanzas of nine lines (ABABBCBCC). In each section of the poem, Mrs. Norton reminds the ‘Child of the Islands’—the Prince of Wales, born in 1841—that he will enjoy all the seasons of the year, and all the years (or ‘seasons’) of his life, while the lives of the poor are often little more than prolonged and unrelieved misery. The seasonal schema is best illustrated by quoting extracts from the ‘Argument’: ‘Spring. The Delights of Spring—Its Value to those who seldom taste its Pleasures—The Sempstress—The Trapper in the Mines—…’; ‘Summer. Its Pleasures and Toils—The Woodlands—Moonlight by Land and Sea—Gipsey Girl in Prison—…’; ‘Autumn. Its Beauty—The Moorlands of Scotland—The Heather Brae—A Sabbath Morning on the Hills—… Harvest-Home—Plenty and Privation—…’; ‘Winter. The Snow on the Graves in the Churchyards of England—The Snow in Affghanistan—The Soldier's Glory—… The Worn-out Veteran—The Blind Man's Winter—… “The Child of the Islands”—His Share of what Winter brings’.²⁰

In her constant appeals to the young Prince of Wales, Mrs. Norton stresses the important role which the monarchy could play in the fight against working-class enslavement. She follows a line similar to that of Disraeli—a close personal friend²¹—in Sybil: or, The Two Nations (1845). In the Preface to her poem, Mrs. Norton writes, ‘I selected the Prince of Wales as my illustration, because the innocence of his age, the hopes that hallow his birth, and the hereditary loyalty which clings to the throne, concur in enabling men of all parties, and of every grade in society, to contemplate such a type, not only without envy or bitterness, but with one common feeling of earnest good-will’ (CI, xi-xii). The Opening of the poem is addressed directly to the Child:

                    Bend to the lowly in their world of care;
                    Think, in thy Palace, of the labourer's cot;
                    And justify the still unequal share
By all thy power to aid, and willingness to spare!

(CI, 16)

In criticizing the ruling classes for their indifference, Mrs. Norton does not condemn them. Three years after the publication of The Child, she wrote a pamphlet entitled Letters to the Mob, in which she defended the aristocracy, while admitting that certain of its members, like certain members of the working-class, were bad apples.²²

In the stanza quoted as a motto in Mary Barton, Mrs. Norton writes what a poor man imagines the rich say about the poor:

          ‘A life of self-indulgence is for Us,
                    A life of self-denial is for them;
          For Us the streets, broad-built and populous,
                    For them, unhealthy corners, garrets dim,
                    And cellars where the water-rat may swim!
          For Us, green paths refreshed by frequent rain,
                    For them, dark alleys where the dust lies grim!
          Not doomed by Us to this appointed pain,—
God made us, Rich and Poor—of what do these complain?’

(CI, 31)

In the next stanza, the question is answered:

                    Of what? Oh! not of Heaven's great law of old,
                    That brightest light must fall by deepest shade;
                    Not that they wander hungry, gaunt, and cold,
                    While others in smooth splendours are arrayed;
                    Not that from gardens where they would have strayed
                    You shut them out, as though a miser's gem
                    Lay in the crystal stream or emerald glade,
                    Which they would filch from Nature's diadem;
But that you keep no thought, no memory of them.

(CI, 32)

These two stanzas are crucially important in their context, as they immediately follow Mrs. Norton's story of the ‘pallid weaver’, which influenced Mrs. Gaskell's novel:

                    So sits the pallid weaver at his loom,
                              Copying the wreaths the artist-pencil drew;
                    In the dull confines of his cheerless room
                              Glisten those tints of rich and living hue. …
… And if he quit his loom, he leaves his gains—
          That gorgeous, glistering silk, designed with so much pains!
                    It shall be purchased as a robe of state
                    By some great lady, when his toil is done;
                    While on her will obsequious shopmen wait,
                    To shift its radiance in the flattering sun:
                    And as she, listless, eyes its beauty, none
                    Her brow shall darken, or her smile shall shade,
                    By a strange story—yet a common one—
                    Of tears that fell (but not on her brocade,)
And misery weakly borne while it was slowly made.

(CI, 25-26)

The weaver pawns the silk in order to buy food for his starving family (CI, 27). Justice pursues ‘her course’, and the robe is made up by a ‘different hand’ (CI, 28). Ignorant of its history, the lady who buys the dress has an audience with the Queen:

… Careless of all conditions but her own,
          She sweeps that stuff along, to curtsey to the throne.
          That dumb woof tells no story! Silent droops
                    The gorgeous train, voluminously wide;
          And while the lady's knee a moment stoops
                    (Mocking her secret heart, which swells with pride,)
                    No ragged shadow follows at her side
          Into that royal presence, where her claim
                    To be admitted, is to be allied
          To wealth, and station, and a titled name,—
No warning voice is heard to supplicate or blame.

(CI, 29-30)

The Norton motto in Mary Barton (‘A life of self-indulgence is for us’) heads chapter IX, in which John Barton returns to Manchester after the disappointing Chartist rally (MB, 109). The inhabitants of the cellars and ‘unhealthy corners’ of the motto, Barton's neighbours, are fascinated by his account of the West End: ‘We had to walk slowly, slowly, for th' carriages an' cabs as thronged th' streets. I thought by-and-by we should maybe get clear on 'em, but as the streets grew wider they grew worse, and at last we were fairly blocked up at Oxford Street’ (MB, 113). Barton describes ‘the streets, broad-built and populous’ of the motto. When the marchers come into contact with a stream of carriages, the contrast between ‘them’ and ‘us’ is obvious: ‘It were th' Queen's drawing-room, they said, and th' carriages went bowling along toward her house, some wi' dressed-up gentlemen like circus folk in 'em, and rucks o' ladies in others’ (MB, 113-14). Barton and his fellow Chartists, held up by a stream of carriages heading for the palace, remind one of Mrs. Norton's lines quoted above: ‘No ragged shadow follows at her side / Into that royal presence.’ The aristocrats in the carriages leave the ‘ragged shadows’ in the street. Once again, Mrs. Gaskell develops an idea which she has borrowed.

There is another possible source for this incident in Mary Barton. A comparative reading of the novel, and of Elizabeth Stone's novel, The Young Milliner (1843), suggests that Mrs. Gaskell was influenced by the latter, which antedated The Child of the Islands (1845).²³ Ellen Cardan, the Young Milliner, collapses under the strain of overwork in Madam Mineau's work-room. Madame Mineau is preparing for ‘the last Drawing Room of the season’.²⁴ Outside the work-room, on the day of the Drawing Room, ‘All the streets and avenues leading to the palace were … thronged, either with carriages bound thither, or with spectators crowding to see the show’ (YM, 349). The noise of the crowds milling around St. James's reaches the ears of the exhausted apprentices in the work-room. While Ellen swoons, the crowd roars in delight at the sight of a favourite aristocrat's carriage (YM, 353-54). Ellen never fully recovers from the strain of preparing for the Drawing Room, and dies of consumption (YM, 387).

Mrs. Gaskell made remarkably good use of two different sources, taking up Mrs. Norton's idea of the ‘ragged shadow’ and Elizabeth Stone's idea of carriages passing through thronging crowds on their way to a Drawing Room, while the suppliers of luxury suffer from starvation and overwork nearby.

One other detail in Mary Barton is reminiscent of the ‘pallid weaver’ story in The Child. Mrs. Norton describes ‘some great lady’ purchasing the dress, and adds that nobody will darken her brow by telling her of ‘tears that fell (but not on her brocade)’. This is one of three possible sources²⁵ for a passage in which Mary Barton learns of the murder of Harry Carson at Miss Simmonds', her place of work:

Then each began to communicate to Miss Simmonds the various reports they had heard.

Suddenly she burst out—

‘Miss Barton! as I live, dropping tears on that new silk gown of Mrs. Hawkes'! … if you must cry’ (seeing her scolding rather increased the flow of Mary's tears, than otherwise), ‘take this print to cry over. That won't be marked like this beautiful silk’, rubbing it, as if she loved it, with a clean pocket-handkerchief, in order to soften the edges of the hard round drops.

Mary took the print, and, naturally enough, having had leave given her to cry over it rather checked the inclination to weep.

(MB, 253)

Mrs. Gaskell picked up a passing reference (or several passing references) to a weaver or milliner taking care not to cry over some fine material, and brought the idea to life: the final touch of the offered print is particularly imaginative.

Finally, Mrs. Gaskell may have been influenced by a more general passage from the Conclusion to The Child, in which Caroline Norton summarized the argument of the poem:

                    God hath built up a bridge 'twixt man and man,
                    Which mortal strength can never overthrow;
                    Over the world it stretches its dark span,—
                    The keystone of that mighty arch is woe!
                    Joy's rainbow glories visit earth, and go,
                    Melting away to Heaven's far-distant land;
                    But Grief's foundations have been fixed below:
                    pleasure divides us:—the Divine command
Hath made of sorrow's links a firm connecting band.

(CI, 188)

In Mary Barton, Barton's crime is intended to be seen as the inevitable result of the ‘gulf’ which yawns between Dives and Lazarus in earthly life: ‘pleasure divides us’. In the closing chapters of the novel, the conversion of Mr. Carson senior is crucial; at last the rich and the poor are united, and the ‘keystone of that mighty arch is woe’:

… as Mr. Carson was on the point of leaving the house with no sign of relenting about him, he was again stopped by John Barton, who had risen once more from his chair, and stood supporting himself on Jem, while he spoke.

‘Sir, one word! My hairs are grey with suffering, and yours with years’—

‘And have I had no suffering?’ asked Mr. Carson, as if appealing for sympathy, even to the murderer of his child.

And the murderer of his child answered to the appeal, and groaned in spirit over the anguish he had caused.

‘Have I had no inward suffering to blanch these hairs? Have not I toiled and struggled even to these years with hopes in my heart that all centred in my boy? … He was my sunshine, and now it is night! Oh, my God! comfort me, comfort me!’ cried the old man aloud.

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?

(MB, 424-25)

It is after this that Mr. Carson returns home, and undergoes a dramatic conversion. The following day, John Barton dies in his arms (MB, 432). As Caroline Norton wrote, ‘pleasure divides us:—the Divine command / Hath made of sorrow's links a firm connecting band’. A Child of the Islands and Mary Barton share this central theme.

In all the examples discussed above, Mrs. Gaskell's imagination, quickened by the work of other writers, made something new of borrowed material. Her ‘marvellous memory’ was not simply a bank of stored ideas. It had the kind of life described by Sammy Mountjoy in William Golding's novel, Free Fall (1959): ‘… time is not to be laid out endlessly like a row of bricks. That straight line from the first hiccup to the last gasp is a dead thing. Time is two modes. The one is an effortless perception native to us as water to the mackerel. The other is a memory, a sense of shuffle fold and coil, of that day nearer than that because more important, of that event mirroring this, or those three set apart, exceptional and out of the straight line altogether.’²⁶ The ‘days’ and ‘events’ of Mrs. Gaskell's reading can be seen in the same way. Her creative use of source material in Mary Barton is a product of the ‘shuffle fold and coil’ of her memory.

Notes

1. Margaret J[osephine] Shaen, ed., Memorials of Two Sisters: Susanna and Catherine Winkworth (London: Longmans, Green, 1908), pp. 24-25.

2. Shaen, Memorials, p. 24.

3. John Geoffrey Sharps, Mrs. Gaskell's Observation and Invention: A Study of Her Non-Biographic Works (Fontwell: Linden, 1970).

4. J[ohn] A[lfred] V[ictor] Chapple and Arthur Pollard, eds., The Letters of Mrs Gaskell (Manchester: Manchester U.P., 1966).

5. Following the death of Miss Margaret Emily Gaskell (1837-1913)—Mrs. Gaskell's second daughter—the contents of 84 Plymouth Grove, Manchester were put up for auction by George H. Larmuth & Sons. The sale catalogue included ‘about 4000 vols. of Books’. The Sixth Day's Sale, devoted to these books, was made up of 662 lots of books, and four lots of bookcases. Although many of the entries are vague, it is obvious that William and Elizabeth Gaskell owned a large number of these books. At least 300 of the 662 titles actually listed were of books almost certainly published before Mrs. Gaskell's death in 1865. Unfortunately, one cannot be sure that the auctioneer made up his lots methodically. The seven ‘others’ in lot 650, for example, (Pope, ‘Homer’, 2 vols., and seven others) may well not have been other works by Pope, but rather those volumes which happened to be next to the Homer on the Gaskells' shelves. An unmarked copy of the sale catalogue is now housed in Box 4 of the Gaskell Collection, Manchester Central Library. Mr. G. F. Driver of Oldham informs me that Larmuth's business ceased in 1939 due to bankruptcy, and that all old records were destroyed in that year. There is thus no chance of finding the auctioneer's marked copy of the Gaskell Sale Catalogue.

6. A[dolphus] W[illiam] Ward, ed., The Works of Mrs. Gaskell (Knutsford Edition), 8 vols. (London: Smith, Elder, 1906), vol. 1. (‘Mary Barton’ and Other Tales), pp. lxxiii-lxxiv. All further references are to this edition, cited as MB in the text.

7. In a letter to her daughter Marianne, dated [7 April 1851] by Chapple and Pollard, Mrs. Gaskell writes, ‘I think we should read together Adam Smith on the Wealth of Nations. Not confining ourselves as we read to the limited meaning which he affixes to the word “wealth”’ (Letters, p. 148). Mrs. Gaskell refers to the book with obvious familiarity.

8. Aina Rubenius, The Woman Question in Mrs. Gaskell's Life and Works (Upsala: Lundequistska Bokhandeln, 1950), p. 385.

9. The Inquirer, 69 (1910), p. 656.

10. Yvonne Ffrench, Mrs. Gaskell (London: Home, Van Thal, 1949), pp. 17-18.

11. Edward Dowden, ed., The Correspondence of Robert Southey with Caroline Bowles; To Which Are Added: Correspondence with Shelley, and Southey's Dreams (Dublin: Dublin U.P., 1881), p. 265.

12. [Caroline Bowles], Tales of the Factories (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1833), p. 38. Hereafter cited in the text as TF.

13. Curiously, Mrs. Gaskell chose the anniversary of her own birthday for the late Harry Carson. She was born on 29th September, 1810.

14. Chapple and Pollard, Letters, pp. 79-80.

15. Although there are reference to ‘the Nortons’, ‘Ann(e) Norton’ and ‘Mrs. Norton’ in several of Mrs. Gaskell's letters written in the 1850s, one cannot be sure that they all refer to Caroline Norton and her family: Chapple and Pollard, Letters, pp. 239, 304, 471, 472, 837.

16. Rylands English MSS 731/79 (Postmark: Fe. 4 59 Edinburgh) and 731/80 (Postmark: Ap. 23 59 London).

17. [Caroline Elizabeth Sarah Norton], A Voice from the Factories: In Serious Verse (London: Murray, 1836), p. 18. Hereafter cited as VF in the text.

18. [Caroline Elizabeth Sarah] Norton, The Dream and Other Poems (London: Colburn, 1840), pp. 63-64.

19. Norton, The Dream, pp. 64-65.

20. [Caroline Elizabeth Sarah] Norton, The Child of the Islands: A Poem (London: Chapman, Hall, 1845), pp. xv-xvi. Hereafter cited as CI in the text.

21. See Alice Acland [i.e. Anne Marreco], Caroline Norton (London: Constable, 1948), pp. 38-39, 74.

22. ‘Libertas’ [i.e. Caroline Norton], Letters to the Mob (London: Bosworth, 1848), pp. 5, 7, 17.

23. Elizabeth Stone's novel, William Langshawe, the Cotton Lord (1842) provided the basis for a remarkable number of characters and plot motifs in Mary Barton: the similarities between the two novels are unmistakable. It is hardly surprising to find that Mrs. Gaskell was also indebted to several passages in The Young Milliner, published one year after William Langshawe.

24. [Elizabeth] Stone, The Young Milliner (London: Cunningham, Mortimer, 1843), p. 348. Hereafter cited as YM in the text.

25. In ‘Charlotte Elizabeth's’ The Wrongs of Woman (London: Dalton, 1843-44; Part 1, p. 30) and in Elizabeth Stone's The Young Milliner (p. 31), young needlewomen are rebuked for dropping tears on their material. Mrs. Norton herself may have read these two works before writing The Child.

26. William Golding, Free Fall (1959; rpt. London: Faber, 1968), p. 6.