Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1848

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Preface-Chapter 8

Chapters 9-15

Chapters 16-24

Chapters 25-32

Chapters 33-38

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

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Discussion Questions

Background

Sociocultural Context: Class and Industrialization in Victorian Britain

The 19th century was a time of great social and political unrest in Britain. Following the French and American revolutions at the end of the previous century, there was concern in Britain about the sustainability of power structures and the possibility of revolution. This coincided with the Industrial Revolution, a period of increased mechanization that drove huge economic growth and had enormous impacts on society, both negative and positive. Although education, social mobility, and a burgeoning of the middle classes did occur over this time, financial benefits overwhelmingly remained in the hands of the established elite minority, the aristocracy and landed class. A divide opened between the industrial North and the South, which kept more of its traditional, agrarian way of life. In a deeply unequal society, the progression of the Industrial Revolution caused harm to most of the population, most of whom were uneducated, unskilled, and living in financial insecurity or poverty. Population growth and urbanization altered the traditional structures of society and created a large urban class of workers, mostly concentrated around the growing industrial cities of England’s North. These workers lived in squalid conditions and undertook work that was dangerous, difficult, insecure, and poorly paid. Many working-class women worked outside the home, especially as the economic push toward cheap and unskilled labor pulled women—who were by definition paid far less than men—into industry. As working and living conditions worsened, it became necessary for all the members of families, including young children, to work.

These changes and inequalities were the subject of considerable concern, debate, and action at the time, including measures to control and punish the poor, or for reform and relief. In the 1830s and 1840s, the “Chartist” workers’ movement pushed for the People’s Charter of 1838, a bill that aimed to give voting rights to all men regardless of their wealth or status, giving working men a say in the laws that governed them and their labor. Though this movement was popular amongst the working class, many wealthy and elite politicians were skeptical of the movement and refused to hear a group of petitioners who came to make their complaints in 1839. Mary’s father John is a radical Chartist and the characters’ discourse and motivations in Mary Barton are very often politicized. It is in this context that Mary Barton was written, and its themes form part of the wider discourse around social change, progress, and justice.

Authorial Context: Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell

Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-1865) was a highly popular, sometimes controversial, author of fiction during the early Victorian period. Her work is noted for its focus on women’s roles and class dynamics, as well as its rich characterization and an approach towards morality and social mores that sometimes defied accepted thought at the time.

Gaskell was born Elizabeth Stephenson to upper-middle-class parents in London. Her mother died when Elizabeth was an infant and her father sent her to be raised by Unitarian aunts living in Cheshire. She was well-educated and traveled in Britain and Europe as a young woman. In 1832, Elizabeth married William Gaskell, a Manchester clergyman, and took an active role in the relief work of his working-class parish. After the death of their infant son William, her husband encouraged her to take up writing. The city of Manchester and its diversity of people and cultures heavily influenced her writing, in particular her novels. She first started publishing poetry in 1837 in Blackwood’s Magazine, a popular serial at the time, and continued to publish short stories under the pseudonym “Cotton Mather Mills” through the 1840s. Gaskell and her husband were well-received among the literary circles of the Victorian era and were friends with authors including Charles Dickens, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Charlotte Brontë, whose biography Gaskell wrote.

Gaskell published her first novel Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life in 1848; though it was originally published anonymously, her authorship quickly became an open secret. Gaskell wrote Mary Barton in part to distract herself from the grief of losing a young son, and family bereavement is a subject of the novel. Her preface reveals that she sought to document the life and struggles of the marginalized working people of Manchester. Mary Barton places its heroine as a northern urban factory worker, in a realistic community whose economic struggles Gaskell was sure her (mostly southern, wealthy) readers did not understand. Gaskell usually set her fiction in the “Industrial North,” most often in urban centers, a theme that carries on through many of Gaskell’s works, including her most well-known novels like North and South. Her work also often focuses on other utilitarian themes and the role of women in Victorian society.

Gaskell forged her career while also raising four daughters and continuing to serve the poorer community in Manchester. Her view and experience of women’s lives diverged from the representations of women she found in existing literature, and she sought to write more realistic narratives from a woman’s perspective. Gaskell maintained her expected role as a wife, mother, and homemaker, while active in the charitable and social role of clergyman’s wife and entering into public matters in the city of Manchester. Her writing was highly successful in her lifetime and created a good income.