Ever since reading North and South in an English Lit survey course, I have been in love with the writings of Mrs. Gaskell. Many of her novels, set in the industrial north of England, showcase the horrors of the working classes, and speak to the need for employers (those “Captains of Industry” as Carlyle called them) to do everything in their power to improve the living and working conditions of their employees. Her first published novel, Mary Barton, is no different.
John Barton is a working class father who dotes on his family. As the novel opens, he is living in a time of relative prosperity. His wife is pregnant with their third child (a son, Tom, died some years earlier) and his daughter Mary is not yet thirteen. He has steady work in the factories of Manchester, and more than enough food and money to share with those less fortunate then himself.
But as life doesn’t stay static, it is not long before John Barton’s fortune changes. His wife and child die in childbirth, he loses his job, and sinks into a morass of opium induced disparity. Lamenting over the ever widening divide between rich and poor, John Barton makes choices that put himself, his family and his closest friends at terrible risk.
Set in the early 1840’s, Gaskell is one of the first Victorian writers to shine a spotlight on the deplorable conditions of the working classes in Manchester. At this period in England, trade tariffs where destroying the country. Manufacturers could not afford to compete with offshore factories and so many factories turned out its workers, and though the middle classes had to tighten their belts some, the working classes all but starved to death, waiting for tax laws to be repealed and factory jobs to open up again. A working class movement to improve living conditions and get the vote for working class men was afoot. Called Charterists, these delegates of the Trades Unions travelled around the country trying to spark interest in their cause and effect change. They failed, but Gaskell puts her main character, John Barton, firmly in the forefront of this political uprising and uses it as a backdrop of her novel that debates the working class problem.
Finding the middle classes and Parliament unsympathetic to their cause, the Charterists in Gaskell’s novel take a drastic approach to punishing those who, in their opinion, have caused their strife. A murder plot is hatched and lots are drawn, and poor John Barton, who would rather give his last mouthful to a hungry child and starve himself, than see another suffer, is charged with the murder of a factory owners son.
The murder plot is a rather drastic way to finally wake up the middle classes to see the working class side of things, which Gaskell finally allows to happen near the end of the novel. But before we can get there, she diverts her readers with a romantic plot. Young Mary Barton has grown into a beautiful woman who has caught the eye of two very different suitors – Henry Carson, the ill-fated son of a factory owner, and Jem Wilson, the son of her father’s best friend. When Henry is murdered, Jem is charged with the crime, and Mary, knowing her father to be the guilty one, must find a way to save both men from the gallows.
Both plots seem a bit incongruous, but Gaskell does a fine job of weaving the threads of the plot back together in the final chapters. But though her solution to the problem of the working classes was not a popular one (she, like Carlyle, promoted emigration), her abilities to show the living conditions of the working classes were very much appreciated.
I first read Mary Barton one summer shortly after my survey course, but did not overly enjoy it, most likely because I didn’t have the historical background knowledge that infuses this book, and which makes it such a rich read. Having a greater understanding of the plight of the working classes and the Chartist movement, my second reading of this book was so much better that I enthusiastically recommend it.
Till next time, happy reading!
L J
| TBR = 26 | WPL = 30 |
No comments:
Post a Comment