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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

The Author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act �988.

Published by Humanities-Ebooks.co.uk Tirril Hall, Tirril, Penrith CA�0 2JE

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Elizabeth Gaskell: Mary Barton

Richard Gravil

Literature Insights. Tirril: Humanities-Ebooks, 2007

Contents

Part 1. Life and Times1.1 General Introduction1.2. Life and Works1.3 Gaskell’s Unitarian Milieu1.4 The Condition of England1.5 The Rise of Chartism1.6. ‘Political Economy’1.7 The Woman QuestionPart 2. Narrative Strategies2.1 Narrative Voice2.2 A dual narrative?2.3 Dialogic Features of the Text2.4 ‘Faction’: Mary Barton’s merge with history2.5 Absence2.6 Murder by Proxy2.7 Symbolism2.8 Gaskell’sinfluenceonDickens’sBleak House2.9 Death Scenes and Their UsesPart 3. Reading Mary Barton3.1 An Account of the Novel3.2 Some Critical IssuesPart 4. Reception4.1 Contemporaries4.2 Modern Readings4.3 Bibliography:4.4 Websites

Gustave Doré, London: A Pilgrimage (1872) More elegant streets, but the same poverty

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 per-suade 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 diplo-matic 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 as the ‘I’ in the preface to the novel 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 nar-rator has a tendency to engage in false pleading and specious argument, while the workers demonstrate honesty and commonsense.1

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 broth-erhood to blood-letting, and that she ought somehow to have arrived at a politico-economic 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 pro-fessed 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 deliber-ately 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 per-sonal 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).

1 Coral Lansbury, Elizabeth Gaskell: the Novel of Social Crisis (London: Paul Elek, 1975), 9.

Mary Barton 7

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-war-rior, whose conversation is mostly devoted to pointing out the evils done by employ-ers, 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 min-ister 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 with Christian philanthropists and reformers from around England and New England.

TheGaskells’firstliteraryeffortwasajointlycomposedpoemcalled‘Sketchesamong the Poor’, published in Blackwood’s Magazine,1837.Elizabeth’sfirstthreestories (‘Libbie Marsh’s Three Eras’, ‘The Sexton’s Hero’, ‘Christmas Storms and Sunshine’) were published in 1847 under the rather American pseudonym Cotton Mather Mills2 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-

2 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.

Chalk portrait by George Richmond, 1851National Portrait Gallery, London

Mary Barton 8

mentsincludingChartism.Itwasthedeathofhersonthatledtoherwritingherfirstnovel, Mary Barton,whichshefinished in1847 (herhusbandproposed thatwrit-ing 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 sev-eral 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. Ruthisseducedbyamanwhofirstmeetsherwhensheisondutyasaseamstressataball (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 9

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(oneofthefirstwriterstodealwithanindustrialunderclassinAmerica,inherLife 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 amillioncopiesinitsfirstdecade.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 firstpublishedRebeccaHardingDavis),andwithCharlesEliotNorton,latereditorofthe 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.� Gaskell’s Unitarian Milieu

The key fact about Mrs Gaskell is that she was a Unitarian both by birth and by mar-riage. The Unitarians were, in the main, politically progressive and theologically lib-eral. 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 �0

The roots of Unitarianism go back to the early 17th century, �thoughitflourishedinEngland 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 radicalfiguresasJohnCartwright,whosemanifestoTake Your Choice! (1777) crys-tallized 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 educa-tion, 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 influentialEdinburgh 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 insocietywithmostmalignantinfluence.Nowitisthedutyofeveryonetodo

� Unitarianism is sometimes known as Socinianism, after its founder Socinus (1539–160�)

Mary Barton ��

what he can to remove such causes of irritation and alienation from the commu-nity. This lies within the province of every one of us. This is peculiarly the mis-sionofChristianladies....Toactbyproxyanddelegationisnotsufficient;forthepersonalinfluenceofeveryloverofmankindisimperativelyrequiredinthiscrisisof 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 aliena-tion is not at all the same as supporting the status quo, which they clearly deplored. Whenthenewlymarriedcouplepublishedtheirfirstliterarycollaboration,‘SketchesAmong 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.� 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 intro-duced 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 compari-sons 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 condi-tions 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 neigh-bouring 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

5 Report, 18�3, 53, cited from Monica Fryckstedt, �9.

Mary Barton �2

to have their just rights, or die in the attempt, and say they will neither support del-egates 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 convic-tion, shared by all classes alike, that the country has arrived at a state when some-thing 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 andalleys...thataconstitutionalgovernmentcansecuremorepalpablebenefitstothemanythanatyranny;unlesshumanbeings[ceasetobe]sacrificedtoaproposi-tion 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.� 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 asaresultofthreeeventsinparticular.Thefirstwasthefailureofthe18�2 Reform Act to provide for adequate representation of the people. All that was achieved by

� Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, 9 (July 18�2), �23.

Mary Barton ��

the Act was the inclusion of most of the middle class into the electorate, on a fran-chise 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 fami-lies 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 shoe-maker 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 pov-erty 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 formu-lated 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,nopropertyqualificationsforMPs,annualelections,parliaments,equalrep-resentation, 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 �4

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’, ‘unlaw-ful 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 work-ers 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 acclama-tion, 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.8

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 sec-ondly, because—it seems to me—his views may have inspired Mrs Gaskell’s implied equation between wilful murder and murder by neglect.

1.�. ‘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-

7 The Purgatory of Suicides, 18�5, Book 5.8 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 her-selfpublishedherfirsttalesinHowitt’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 pov-erty’, 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 politi-caleconomywerefixedandimmutable.MartineaulambastedDickens’sHousehold 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 ��

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 flatteringsuppositionthatwealthwentwith‘sagacity,ingenuity,andeconomy’,andwas ‘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.� The Woman Question

‘I am every day more convinced, that we women, if we are to be good women, feminineandamiableanddomestic,arenotfittedtoreign’.

—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 some-one 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 devolv-ing 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

9 Letters of Queen Victoria, 1837-1861, ed. Arthur Christopher Benson, 3 vols (London: Murray, 1907), 2:���.

�0 Cited from Ellen Moers, Literary Women (London: The Women’s Press, 1978) 22.�� Theodore Parker. A Sermon on the Public Function of Woman. Boston, 1853

Mary Barton �7

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 aviewofwomanasthe‘humblemonitress’bythefireside,withthe‘highandholyduty 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 influentialone.ItoffersavisionofallwomenasminiQueenVictorias,supremeinultimate power, though herself acting only through her male agents. The problem, ofcourse,isthatthisviewofwomen’sinfluenceasbeingpowerfulbutindirectmaylead to the deliberate restriction of women’s rights in the public sphere. Since civili-sation 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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