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Running Head Literature Insights
General Editor: Charles Moseley
Elizabeth Gaskell:
Mary Barton
Richard Gravil
‘our labour’s
our capital,
and we ought
to draw interest
on that’
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© Richard Gravil, 2007
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Tirril Hall, Tirril, Penrith CA10 2JE
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Elizabeth Gaskell:
Mary Barton
Richard Gravil
Literature Insights. Tirril: Humanities-Ebooks, 2007
Contents
Part 1. Life and Times
1.1 General Introduction
1.2. Life and Works
1.3 Gaskell’s Unitarian Milieu
1.4 The Condition of England
1.5 The Rise of Chartism
1.6. ‘Political Economy’
1.7 The Woman Question
Part 2. Narrative Strategies
2.1 2.2
2.3
2.4
2.5
2.6
2.7
2.8
2.9
Narrative Voice
A dual narrative?
Dialogic Features of the Text
‘Faction’: Mary Barton’s merge with history
Absence
Murder by Proxy
Symbolism
Gaskell’s influence on Dickens’s Bleak House
Death Scenes and Their Uses
Part 3. Reading Mary Barton
3.1 An Account of the Novel
3.2 Some Critical Issues
Part 4. Reception
4.1
4.2
4.3
4.4 Contemporaries
Modern Readings
Bibliography:
Websites
Part 1. Life and Times
1.1 General Introduction
It is said in The Gentleman’s Magazine in 1895 that when Mrs Gaskell tried to persuade a working man that he should not feel hatred towards the rich, he replied, ‘Ay,
ma’am, but have ye ever seen a child clemmed [starved] to death?’ She puts the same
question—repeatedly—to her readers in this novel.
The gulf between rich and poor was never wider than when Elizabeth Gaskell
set out to depict the abyss of working class misery in her novel Mary Barton, and
since she was writing for the rich, with a desire to engage their active sympathy for
the poor, she constantly faces a diplomatic problem. How can she tell the
truth—that extreme poverty is a result
of an unjust and exploitative social
system—without causing offence?
In chapter 3 Gaskell gives a vivid
and persuasive sketch of the process of
capital accumulation, showing how
the poor weaver sees ‘his employer
removing from house to house, each
one grander than the last’ while the
weaver and his fellows struggle to feed
their children. She immediately enters
a caveat: ‘I know that this is not really
the case ... I know what is the truth in
such matters’. But she does not tell us
what that truth may be. One may well
ask whether the ‘I’ that knows ‘what
is the truth’ in this chapter, is the same
Gustave Doré, London: A Pilgrimage (1872)
as the ‘I’ in the preface to the novel
More elegant streets, but the same poverty
who says she has ‘tried to speak truth-
Mary Barton fully’, or who presents the truth of extreme working-class suffering in chapter 6 and
elsewhere.
In many ways, Mary Barton is a deeply unstable text, and its author’s politics
remain unknowable. That is undoubtedly part of the perennial fascination of this pio
neering industrial novel. Coral Lansbury makes the point very clearly:
Nothing could be more unwise than to regard the authorial ‘I’ of the novels as the
voice of Elizabeth Gaskell, particularly in the Manchester novels. There the narrator has a tendency to engage in false pleading and specious argument, while the
workers demonstrate honesty and commonsense.
Despite this assertion, well supported in the argument of Lansbury’s chapter, Elizabeth
Gaskell has often been adjudged guilty by modern critics of failing to overcome her
‘middle-class’ limitations. It is sometimes implied that she was wrong to prefer brotherhood to blood-letting, and that she ought somehow to have arrived at a politicoeconomic theory capable of explaining the crisis of capitalism, or used her novel to
articulate a legislative programme that would have anticipated a century and a half of
Liberal and Labour administrations.
If, indeed, novelists are ‘conditioned’ by their societies, it is surprising how little
space has been devoted to discovering what Elizabeth Gaskell’s milieu might have
conditioned her to believe, or what she did, in fact, believe. We do know that she professed considerable sympathy with the hero of her book. Writing to Mrs W. R. Greg
(the wife of an industrialist who wrote a hostile review in the Edinburgh Review) she
explained that ‘John Barton was the original title of the book’, and that she deliberately stressed one side of the question, simply because ‘I don’t feel as strongly (and
as it is impossible I ever should) on the other side’ (42). In a much quoted passage
she says:
Round the character of John Barton all the others formed themselves; he was my
hero, the person with whom all my sympathies went,
but the full context is slightly less positive. To continue the quotation:
… with whom I tried to identify myself at the time, because I believed from personal observation that such men were not uncommon, and would well repay such
sympathy and love as should throw light down upon their groping search after
the causes of suffering, and the reason why suffering is sent, and what they can
do to lighten it’ (Letters of Mrs Gaskell, ed. J. A. V. Chapple and Arthur Pollard,
Manchester University Press, 1966, 42).
Coral Lansbury, Elizabeth Gaskell: the Novel of Social Crisis (London: Paul Elek, 1975), 9.
Mary Barton Notice the reservations. She tried to identify, at the time. Such men are engaged in a
groping search. And there is the implication that if suffering is sent [i.e. by God], it
may play some part in an inscrutable divine purpose. Moreover, Barton is a class-warrior, whose conversation is mostly devoted to pointing out the evils done by employers, and as Gaskell says elsewhere: ‘no one can feel more deeply than I how wicked
it is to do anything to excite class against class’ (letters 72).
1.2. Life and Works
Elizabeth Gaskell was born in London, in 1810, to
William Stevenson and Elizabeth Holland. After
her mother’s death, a year later, she went to live
with an Aunt in Knutsford. When her father died
in 1829 she was taken in by the Reverend William
Turner in Newcastle, until in 1832 she married The
Rev. William Gaskell, who was then assistant minister at Cross Street Unitarian Chapel, Manchester,
where he remained throughout his ministry.
Manchester’s status in the industrial revolution
had led to rapid growth, extremes of wealth and
poverty, and unprecedented social problems. Cross
Street Chapel was in the front line of developing
class tensions, and the Gaskells were in frequent
contact both with chapel-going industrialists and
Chalk portrait by George Richmond, 1851
with Christian philanthropists and reformers from
National Portrait Gallery, London
around England and New England.
The Gaskells’ first literary effort was a jointly composed poem called ‘Sketches
among the Poor’, published in Blackwood’s Magazine, 1837. Elizabeth’s first three
stories (‘Libbie Marsh’s Three Eras’, ‘The Sexton’s Hero’, ‘Christmas Storms and
Sunshine’) were published in 1847 under the rather American pseudonym Cotton
Mather Mills in Howitt’s Journal. The Howitts, William and Mary, were very much
on the radical wing of Unitarian social thought, and backed all kinds of reform move American, because Cotton Mather was one of the dominant figures in the early years of the New
England colony. He is notorious for his part in the Salem witchcraft trials, the subject of Gaskell’s
short story ‘Lois the Witch’. His family emigrated from Liverpool where his grandfather was pastor
of Renshaw Street chapel.
Mary Barton ments including Chartism. It was the death of her son that led to her writing her first
novel, Mary Barton, which she finished in 1847 (her husband proposed that writing a novel might help her to deal with her own grief). In 1850 the family moved to
Plymouth Grove, Manchester, where they lived for the rest of her life, except that she
travelled extensively, to Germany with her husband and to France and Italy on several occasions, usually with her daughters.
Mary Barton made her notorious among local factory owners, and famous
nationally. It brought her to the approving attention of such writers as Charles
Dickens, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Charles Kingsley, Thomas Carlyle, and Charlotte
Bronte—who became a close friend and whose biography she published in 1857. In
1850, two years after the appearance of Mary Barton, Elizabeth started contributing
to Dickens’s new weekly magazine, Household Words, which took a campaigning
stance on numerous issues, including employment laws, industrial relations, the
rights of women, and popular education, and she went on contributing to Dickens’s
publishing ventures for another thirteen years.
In 1853 she published the previously serialized Cranford and the notorious Ruth,
in which the eponymous heroine (like Mary Barton) is apprenticed to a dressmaker.
Ruth is seduced by a man who first meets her when she is on duty as a seamstress at a
ball (to repair the gowns of ladies) just as Mary is spotted by Carson when her sisters
are visiting Miss Simmonds’s establishment. This brave novel (it is brave because
Mary is not just an unmarried mother but is the heroine of the novel) was again
deeply controversial among her husbands congregation, but was admired by Dickens,
Kingsley, Elizabeth Barratt Browning and Florence Nightingale.
Her second industrial novel, North and South (in which the heroine Margaret Hale
mixes with employers and workers alike) was published in 1855,after serialization in
Household Words. Her biography of Charlotte Bronte was published in 1857, and led
to threats of legal action (she had written rather incautiously about who might have
been responsible for the moral decline of Charlotte’s brother Branwell Bronte, and
for the death of Maria Bronte at Cowan Bridge School). In 1858 she published My
Lady Ludlow, and in 1863 her press-gang novel, Sylvia’s Lovers, again notable for the
realism of her characters and for its sense of history. Cousin Phillis was serialized in
the Cornhill Magazine, 1863–64 and Wives and Daughters published posthumously
in 1866, again after serialization in the Cornhill.
There is a mistaken assumption that Gaskell was somehow rather provincial
in her experience and attitudes. In fact, in the course of her writing life she met
and corresponded (one might say networked) with a great many writers, especially
Mary Barton women writers, and sustained a surprisingly close relationship with America. This
is partly because philanthropic Americans took a great interest in social conditions
in Manchester, and played a part in inspiring the Domestic Missions. And partly
because her own writing was much admired in America: it inspired Rebecca Harding
Davis (one of the first writers to deal with an industrial underclass in America, in her
Life in the Iron Mills, 1861); and it impressed the most famous woman writer of the
age, Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) which sold half
a million copies in its first decade. Uncle Tom’s Cabin did for American slaves what
Mary Barton did for English wage-slaves. Stowe wrote to Gaskell in May 1856 to
introduce an African American (Mrs Webb, the daughter of a fugitive slave) who was
visiting Manchester, and she added: ‘I do hope I may be permitted to see you this
summer, I hope it is to be in England and somewhere perhaps we may meet—You
have made me cry very unfairly over Mary Barton when I bought the book to amuse
myself with on a journey—but I bear no malice for that. / With true affection, / Ever
yours gratefully, / H. B. Stowe.’
Longer term friendships were with the American publisher James T Fields (who
first published Rebecca Harding Davis), and with Charles Eliot Norton, later editor of
the North American Review and Professor of Art History at Harvard, who graduated
from Harvard shortly before Mary Barton was published. An admirer of her work,
and a friend of the family, Norton was Gaskell’s guide to the art treasures of Rome
when she visited Italy in 1857 as guest of the American sculptor William Wetmore
Story.
Elizabeth Gaskell died suddenly in November 1865, shortly after buying a family
home in Hampshire for her husband’s retirement.
1.3 Gaskell’s Unitarian Milieu
The key fact about Mrs Gaskell is that she was a Unitarian both by birth and by marriage. The Unitarians were, in the main, politically progressive and theologically liberal. They denied several important Christian doctrines, including the doctrine of the
Trinity (the idea that God is three persons: Father, Son and Holy Ghost), that of the
divinity of Christ (they celebrated his humanity instead), Atonement (the idea that
Christ died to atone for humanity’s sins), and the notorious doctrine of Predestination.
Their correspondence is available in Letters of Mrs Gaskell and Charles Eliot Norton, ed. Jane
Whitehill (London 1932).
Mary Barton 10
The roots of Unitarianism go back to the early 17th century, though it flourished in
England mainly in the late 18th and early 19th century, and was strongest in the new
industrial cities of Manchester, Birmingham and Leeds. Its luminaries included such
radical figures as John Cartwright, whose manifesto Take Your Choice! (1777) crystallized many of the ideas that were important to the Chartists (see 1.5 below); Joseph
Priestley, the Chemist and political writer, whose revolutionary sympathies led to the
burning of his laboratory by ‘Church & King’ mobs, and his emigration to America;
the potter Josiah Wedgwood, James and Harriet Martineau, Florence Nightingale and
John Stuart Mill. Unitarians were at the forefront of campaigns for universal education, public health, prison reform, women’s rights and the abolition of slavery.
Gaskell herself is rumoured to have attended school with two grand-daughters of
Joseph Priestley, who returned from America in infancy. John Chapple (in Elizabeth
Gaskell: the Early Years [1997]), points out that her relations were in the forefront of
political debate. One of her uncles drew up Bolton’s petition against the American War.
Her father, William Stevenson, in a work of 1796, quoted approvingly from Tom Paine’s
then very recent The Age of Reason. Stevenson became one of the earliest contributors
to the influential Edinburgh Review, wrote essays on ‘The Political Economist’ for
Blackwood’s in the 1820s, and was later a co-contributor to the Westminster Review
with the famous philosopher John Stuart Mill (Chapple 38, 40, 69, 277). Moreover,
James Kay-Shuttleworth, whose Moral and Physical Condition of the Working Classes
Employed in the Cotton Manufacture in Manchester (1832) appeared in the year of her
marriage, was a colleague of Samuel Gaskell, her brother-in-law.
In 1830, Cross Street Chapel hosted the meeting of the British and Foreign
Unitarian Association, which demanded the establishment of Domestic Missions, and
William Gaskell (Elizabeth’s husband) was on the committee to which the domestic
‘missionaries’, John Ashworth, George Buckland and John Layhe, submitted their
reports. They began their work just about the time Elizabeth Stevenson became
Mrs Gaskell, and their reports on the living conditions of Manchester’s workers
fed directly into the most harrowing passages of Mary Barton. They may also have
inspired Gaskell’s own sense of mission. This is what the report for 1843 had to say
about the social responsibility of ‘Christian ladies’:
Nothing indeed seems more desirable, than that the spirit of class-antipathies
should be entirely superseded by a feeling of benevolent and brotherly regard. For
want of this assimilation, jealousy, distrust, and ill-will are festering and rankling
in society with most malignant influence. Now it is the duty of everyone to do
Unitarianism is sometimes known as Socinianism, after its founder Socinus (1539–1604)
Mary Barton 11
what he can to remove such causes of irritation and alienation from the community. This lies within the province of every one of us. This is peculiarly the mission of Christian ladies. ... To act by proxy and delegation is not sufficient; for the
personal influence of every lover of mankind is imperatively required in this crisis
of our country’s fate.
From a revolutionist’s standpoint, clearly, such activity is undesirable, since it is
designed to reduce rather than exacerbate class antagonisms. But overcoming alienation is not at all the same as supporting the status quo, which they clearly deplored.
When the newly married couple published their first literary collaboration, ‘Sketches
Among the Poor’, 1837, they did so in Blackwood’s Magazine, where her father had
developed his critique of political economy in the previous decade.
1.4 The Condition of England
Mary Barton is most often referred to as a prime example of a ‘Condition of England’
novel, in fact in many ways the most successful of that genre. Other novels of this
genre included: Benjamin Disraeli’s Sybil or the Two Nations (1845), which introduced the phrase the two nations’ to public consciousness and instituted ‘one nation
Toryism’ (conservatism with a social conscience) as a response; Charlotte Bronte’s
Shirley (1849); Charles Kingsley’s Alton Locke (1850); Dickens’s Bleak House (1853)
which, in its symbolism, seems to relish the prospect of some kind of apocalyptic
breakdown so that society might be purged and reborn, and Hard Times (1854), which
uses the techniques of fable to critique industrial relations; Gaskell’s own North and
South (1855); and George Eliot’s Felix Holt the Radical (1866). Numerous comparisons between these works are possible, but the most salient point, for me, is that the
only one consistently and almost exclusively concerned with working-class conditions and working-class culture is Mary Barton.
In July 1842 Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine carried the following sample of the
regional press, under the headline ‘Alarming State of the Manufacturing Districts’:
—This part of the country is in a deplorable state, for hundreds and thousands have
neither work nor meat. They are daily begging in the streets of Haslingden, twenty
or thirty together, crying for bread. Meetings are held every Sunday, on the neighbouring hills, attended by thousands of poor, haggard, hungry people, wishing for
any change, even though it should be death. …The people say they are determined
Report, 1843, 53, cited from Monica Fryckstedt, 49.
Mary Barton 12
to have their just rights, or die in the attempt, and say they will neither support delegates nor conventions,—for present relief they want, and present relief they will
have before another winter makes its appearance. They say they might as well die
by the sword as by hunger. —Correspondent of the Liverpool Mercury.
In February 1851 the North British Review (Volume 14) published a joint review
of Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor (1851), which had been
inspired by an outbreak of cholera in 1849 that killed 13,000 people, and Charles
Kingsley’s Alton Locke. Both Mayhew and Locke, the reviewer found, seemed to
favour ‘an exodus … out of the Egypt of our present system of competition and
Laissez-faire, into a comparative Canaan of some kind of Co-operative Socialism’.
(The metaphor ‘Exodus’ implies the liberation of the Israelites from servitude). e, It
found Alton Locke ‘as powerful a literary expression as exists of the general conviction, shared by all classes alike, that the country has arrived at a state when something extraordinary, whatever it is, must be decided upon and done, if society is to be
saved in Britain’. Three months later Charles Kingsley himself, reviewing reports on
sanitary conditions, in the same periodical, demands a publicly owned water supply,
because:
Unless some practical proof is given to the suffering masses who inhabit our courts
and alleys ... that a constitutional government can secure more palpable benefits to
the many than a tyranny; unless human beings [cease to be] sacrificed to a proposition in a yet infant and tentative science,—we must expect to see, in the course of
events, a revulsion on favour of despotism...” 252
By an ‘infant and tentative science’ he means the kind of Political Economy that was
criticized by Gaskell’s father, William Stevenson, in 1824.
1.5 The Rise of Chartism
Chartism was perhaps the greatest popular movement in British history, and certainly
the one that came closest at times to creating a revolutionary situation. It was based
on ideas left over from the era of the American and French Revolutions, when many
radicals wanted a thorough reform of the British Constitution, and it came into being
as a result of three events in particular. The first was the failure of the 1832 Reform
Act to provide for adequate representation of the people. All that was achieved by
Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, 9 (July 1842), 423.
Mary Barton 13
the Act was the inclusion of most of the middle class into the electorate, on a franchise based on property and income, and the exclusion of all wage-labourers. It drew
the lines of class division even more sharply than before. The second event was the
conviction, and transportation, in March 1834, of six Dorchester labourers—the
Tolpuddle Martyrs—for forming a branch of a trade union. The third was the Poor
Law Amendment Act, carried out by the supposedly reformed Parliament in August
1834. This prohibited any form of poor relief outside workhouses, segregated families who were sent to them, and made living conditions within workhouses as harsh
as possible—i.e. distinctly less comfortable than could be enjoyed by the lowest paid
labourer.
Apart from inspiring half a century of protest literature (not least by Charles
Dickens) and folklore, the Act galvanized protest. Dorothy Thompson’s The Chartists:
Popular Politics in the Industrial Revolution (Aldershot: Wildwood House, 1984)
cites two passionate attacks on the system. Samuel Kydd, who was a young shoemaker in the 1930s, said in retrospect, that:
The passing of the New Poor Law Amendment Act did more to sour the hearts of
the labouring population than did the privations consequent on all the actual poverty of the land … the labourers of England believed that the new poor law was a
law to punish poverty; and the effects of that belief were to sap the loyalty of the
working man, to make them dislike the country of their birth, to brood over their
wrongs, to cherish feelings of revenge, and the hate the rich of the land’ (History
of the Factory Movement, Vol 2, 76).
And Joseph Rayner Stephens, a former Methodist minister, said that it threatened
the dissolution of the marriage tie, the annihilation of every domestic affection,
and the violent and most brutal oppression ever yet practised on the poor of any
country in the world. (A Sermon Preached at Primrose Hill, London, on Sunday
May 12th 1839).
The result was that in January 1837 the London Working men’s Association formulated an address to Parliament embodying the six points of what was to be known as
‘The People’s Charter’. The Charter, published in 1838, demanded universal male
suffrage, no property qualifications for MPs, annual elections, parliaments, equal representation, payment of MPs, and vote by secret ballot. Some of these ideas went back
to the debates of the 1790s, and indeed involved some the same people. There was a
widespread assumption that if these demands were not met there would be recourse
to armed insurrection, and in fact in some parts of the country, particularly in mining
Mary Barton 14
areas, Chartist activists did for a while take over responsibility for law and order, with
armed militias displacing the police.
The People’s Charter of May 1838 was presented to parliament in 1839, in
which year there were numerous trials of Chartists or ‘seditious conspiracy’, ‘unlawful association’ etc. In 1840, John Frost, William Jones and Zephaniah Williams were
sentenced to death for their part in leading the thousands of colliers and iron workers who marched in the Newport Rising of November 1839. When their sentences
were commuted to transportation the Chartist poet Thomas Cooper wrote that ‘fear
/ Of Labour’s vengeance, stayed the hangman’s hand’. In August 1841, Feargus
O’Connor, editor of The Northern Star [which John Barton reads in chapter 6 of
Mary Barton] was released from imprisonment in York Castle to general acclamation, and Cooper wrote ‘the lion of freedom comes from his den / We’ll rally around
him again and again’. In March 1842, a Chartist Convention assembled in London,
prior to presentation of the second Petition on 10 April. Rejection of that petition,
dramatized in Mary Barton, and the decision of various employers to reduce wages,
led to the great strikes of the Summer of 1842, and inter alia, to the arrest of Thomas
Cooper, for ‘seditious conspiracy’ in the Potteries. In his case seditious conspiracy
meant rousing people to fury by arguing that each and every aspect of industrial
poverty was a violation of the precept ‘thou shalt do no murder’, which argument
Friedrich Engels adopted in 1844 for his Condition of the English Working Class, a
classic text in the development of Marxism.
I mentioned Thomas Cooper so much for two reasons. First, because he was a
friend of William and Mary Howitt, who published Gaskell’s early stories, and of W.
J. Fox, whose oratory helped launch the Manchester Domestic Missions. And secondly, because—it seems to me—his views may have inspired Mrs Gaskell’s implied
equation between wilful murder and murder by neglect.
1.6. ‘Political Economy’
It seems self-evident, today, that such social conditions as gave rise to Chartism are
deplorable and ought to be remedied. But in the 1830s there was a widespread view,
among the middle class, that the laws of political economy, like the laws of physics,
were ordained by God, and that any interference with market mechanisms—espe The Purgatory of Suicides, 1845, Book 5.
See The Life of Thomas Cooper: Written by Himself (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1872),
187–99.
Mary Barton 15
cially with the right of employers to buy their labour as cheaply as possible—was
either impossible or likely to puncture the economy. Such views even permeated
the well-to-do portions of the Reverend Gaskell’s congregation, which was made of
partly of successful factory owners. The Unitarianism to which Mrs Gaskell belonged
was a broad enough church to encompass diametrically opposed readings of ‘political
economy’ or ‘theories of trade’ or even notions of charity. On the one hand, there were
wealthy factory owners, and fully paid up propagandists for their view of ‘political
economy’, such as Harriet Martineau (who taught, and believed, that charity tends to
impoverish the recipient); on the other, W. J. Fox of The Monthly Repository, and the
Howitts of Howitt’s Journal and The Peoples’s Journal, who favoured some form of
co-operative socialism. Martineau and Fox might meet as Unitarians and feminists,
but their ideas on capitalism did not. Somewhere along this spectrum sat the Gaskells.
They had family and/or social connections to Martineau, yet Elizabeth Gaskell herself published her first tales in Howitt’s Journal.8 The signals are mixed.
Fox was a charismatic speaker, certainly known to William Gaskell, who in 1831
preached a sermon on ‘The Claims of the Poor on the Followers of Christ’. Depicting
the wretchedness ‘imposed’ on the poor ‘by society’, he asks ‘must these things be ...
Are we only to hope, and to wait? Are we to do nothing?’ He concludes, ‘I urge upon
you the claims, the moral claims, of your injured, wretched and degraded brethren;
and, as the followers of Christ, demand of you in the name of Christ, JUSTICE FOR
THE POOR’ (6). There is, he points out, ‘an antagonist power to the miseries of poverty’, implanted in the ‘sympathies of humanity’, and it is a Christian duty (as the
Domestic Mission reports in Manchester also argued) to cherish those sympathies,
which are ‘guardians within us of our brethren’s rights’.21
All in all, it is rather hard to believe Gaskell’s famous proclamation in the novel’s
Preface, ‘I know little of political economy’. She had certainly read Adam Smith’s
famous work on The Wealth of Nations (to which she introduced her daughters). And
it is highly improbable that she had not read neither her father’s articles criticizing
political economy, nor the very popular works of Harriet Martineau and Jane Marcet.
As expounded in their works, orthodox political economy held (like Mr Carson)
that nothing whatever could be done to help the workers because the laws of political economy were fixed and immutable. Martineau lambasted Dickens’s Household
Words for publishing Henry Morley’s powerful attacks on the masters for mincing
people up in their machines—as happens to Mrs Wilson in Mary Barton. She devoted
the nine volumes of her Illustrations of Political Economy (1832-34) to proving that
‘The interests of the two classes of producers, labourers and capitalists, are therefore
Mary Barton 16
the same; the prosperity of both depending upon the accumulation of CAPITAL’.
Whether in the spread of woollen or cotton manufactures, or any other instance of
the introduction of machinery, she claimed, ‘the interests of masters and men are
identical’.17
Gaskell’s father, William Stevenson’s critique of this position, in 1824–25, though
extremely theoretical, takes much the same position as did John Stuart Mill in the radical
Unitarian Monthly Repository in 1833 and 1834. Mill was simply scathing about the
flattering supposition that wealth went with ‘sagacity, ingenuity, and economy’, and
was ‘meted out proportionally to the worthiest’, and he appealed for ‘more rational’
modes of distribution than individual competition (Monthly Repository, 7 [1833]
576). Nor could Mrs Gaskell have avoided some contact with the ideas of Robert
Owen, dealt with elsewhere in this Insight.
1.7 The Woman Question
‘I am every day more convinced, that we women, if we are to be good women,
feminine and amiable and domestic, are not fitted to reign’.
—Queen Victoria.
As a professional writer, and biographer of Charlotte Bronte, Mrs Gaskell was well
aware of the inequality between men and women. As she once wrote, when a man
takes up writing, he simply takes time from his other professional pursuits, or someone else takes over his tasks: ‘But no other can take up the quiet regular duties of the
daughter, the wife, or the mother…; nor can she drop the domestic charges devolving upon her as an individual, for the exercise of the most splendid talents that were
ever bestowed’.10 Notice, however, how matter-of-fact this remark is. Mrs Gaskell is
simply stating what is the case, rather than protesting about it. Yet in 1853 an American
pamphleteer remarked that ‘To make one half of the human race consume all their
energies in the functions of housekeeper, wife and mother is a monstrous waste of the
most precious material that God ever made’11 and his remark is typical of numerous
feminists of the day, both male and female. Compared with many other novelists,
however, Mrs Gaskell shows very little interest in the women’s movement as it was
developing in her time. In fact, the notorious anti-feminist writer, Mrs Sarah Stickney
Letters of Queen Victoria, 1837-1861, ed. Arthur Christopher Benson, 3 vols (London: Murray,
1907), 2:444.
10 Cited from Ellen Moers, Literary Women (London: The Women’s Press, 1978) 22.
11 Theodore Parker. A Sermon on the Public Function of Woman. Boston, 1853
Mary Barton 17
Ellis probably expresses Gaskell’s views of the role of women fairly accurately.
In 1813 Sarah Stickney Ellis published her best seller, The Women of England:
their Social Duties and Domestic habits. Mrs Ellis was wife of a missionary, and
founded a girls’ school in the 1840s. Her book went through 16 editions. It offered
a view of woman as the ‘humble monitress’ by the fireside, with the ‘high and holy
duty of cherishing and protecting the minor morals of life’. She aids her husband by
providing a refuge from the confusion of the workplace and the market-place and
the din of politics, and by acting as ‘a kind of second conscience.’ Her ‘clear eye’
corrects him, and she dissuades him, with her superior moral intuition, from actions
he might otherwise commit. Mrs Ellis’s vision of the public role of women being
exercised through their men might almost be a comment on why John Barton goes
to the bad when he loses his wife (or on why George Eliot’s Fred Vincy, in the novel
Middlemarch, would amount to nothing without Mary Garth).
There is some power in Ellis’s vision, which was, after all, a very popular and
influential one. It offers a vision of all women as mini Queen Victorias, supreme in
ultimate power, though herself acting only through her male agents. The problem,
of course, is that this view of women’s influence as being powerful but indirect may
lead to the deliberate restriction of women’s rights in the public sphere. Since civilisation needs the Madonna in her shrine, it was argued, civilisation itself would suffer
if conditions were created in which women might become as contaminated by public
strife as were men. It would be wrong to assume that either the women or the men
who believed strongly in this ideology were hypocritical, but it was being strongly
challenged at the time Gaskell was writing.
The idea that woman has a particular sphere—the domestic—is not necessarily
the same idea as the idea that women have particular characteristics. There are three
logically distinct ideas that tend to get mixed up in discussing the question of gender.
First, that there are contrastive pairs of traits: rationality, emotionalism; assertiveness,
submissiveness; strength, tenderness; physicality, spirituality; coarseness, delicacy;
authority, compassion, etc. Second, that these traits belong either necessarily or
properly to males and females respectively. Third that it is improper for a woman to
vacate the domestic sphere, to which the second set of virtues belong.
Mary Barton clearly demonstrates, in the nurturing role of such men as John
Barton, Mr Wilson, Job Legh and Jem Wilson, and in the active enterprise of Mary
Barton, and in the coarseness and lack of empathy of Sally Leadbitter, that the second
of these assumptions is untrue. The plot of the novel also shows that on some occasions,
at least, it is vital that a woman exerts herself in the male sphere of action. To that
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