Analysis of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on May 9, 2025

Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel of social injustice, Mary Barton, was banned in 1907 by the London County Council, which deemed the novel unfit for children aged 14 and under. That action supports the power of Gaskell’s prose to influence readers in judging their own society as corrupt and tainted by inequality and abuses toward members of the working class. Of one character, Gaskell writes, “In his days of childhood and youth, Mr. Carson had been accustomed to poverty; but it was honest, decent poverty; not the grinding squalid misery he had remarked in every part of John Barton’s house, and which had contrasted strangely with the pompous sumptuousness of the room in which he now sat.”

Through the Barton family, readers become acquainted with a privation stunning in its ability to reduce even a highly moral individual to despicable acts for the sake of his family. Gaskell titled the novel after her female protagonist at her editors’ insistence. They may have thought sales would be stronger with a woman’s name in the title, ironic in light of the fact that the book was published anonymously due to fears that Gaskell’s identity as a woman might discourage sales.

Most critics agree that what separates Mary Barton from other so-called thesis novels is its male protagonist, John Barton. While the novel’s quality may not meet that of Gaskell’s contemporaries, such as Charles Dickens and Charles Kingsley, her first book shows the promise of her later signature treatment of subjects. She remains a humane writer, not so steeped in theory that she sacrifices her characters to the symbolic needs of moralistic fiction. John Barton, despite his poverty and suffering, despite his membership in the Chartist movement, despite his eventual crime, is no stereotype. Rather, Gaskell shapes him with such compassion that his humanity remains obvious.

Gaskell wants to shine the light of public awareness on the disgraceful treatment of England’s working classes in the mid-19th century, but she also wants to illuminate details that result from a minute examination of her subject. While she may not have been steeped in the knowledge of politics and economics of Benjamin Disraeli, she did have something that Disraeli, Dickens, and Kingsley all lacked—an intimate knowledge of her characters and setting. As the wife of a Unitarian minister, she had firsthand experience with the suffering of the working class and wrote of that suffering without the condescension or distance of those who knew only the group, and not the individual. She had also lost a child of her own to illness, allowing further identification with destitute parents whose children died in droves, often due to the effects of crippling poverty.

Gaskell had lived within the Manchester setting for 12 years, and she reproduced scenes designed to haunt her readers, inhabited by figures like John Barton. He so represents the novel’s emotional center that many agree it should have borne his name as a title, rather than that of his daughter, Mary.

When readers first meet John, he is a loving father and husband attending a picnic. The narrator describes him as a man whose face told others that as a child, “he had suffered from the scanty living consequent upon bad times,” wearing an expression of “extreme earnestness” with a “sort of latent, stern, enthusiasm,” in which “the good predominated over the bad.” Barton is dynamic and opinionated, dedicated to his family’s support. Almost immediately, he loses his wife, Mary, in childbirth with their daughter, Mary, and readers learn that his wife had influenced John as “one of the ties which bound him down to the gentle humanities of earth.”

The loss affects his spiritual equilibrium, allowing difficult circumstances to eventually drive him to murder. He engages in violence but only after having been its victim. Barton and others like him are at the mercy of the ignorance of employers who neglect workers’ needs, the ambivalence of a public intent on owning goods produced at the cost of human lives, and the waste of precious resources by the wealthy class. In one scene, John feels defeated by the isolation caused by a class structure separating human from human. He understands that separation is an unnatural situation inflicted by man upon man, not by God upon man. One character says of John, “He were sadly put about to make great riches and great poverty square with Christ’s Gospel.”

Wracked by remorse following his murder of his employer’s son, John remains at all times human; his faults recommend, rather than condemn, him. By the novel’s conclusion, Barton is “a wan, feeble figure” who carries a water cask “with evident and painful labour,” his head bowed into a “sinking and shrunk body.”

Gaskell produces a somewhat contradictory character in Mary Barton, who, while a member of the decidedly oppressed working class, speaks without a hint of the dialect of her peers and, at one point in a love triangle, seems at first to have more in common with traditional romance heroines rather than the female characters populating 1840s novels. Mary enjoys the devotion of both Jem Wilson, a worker of her own class, and Harry Carson, from a propertied family whose father owns the mill where many in Mary’s community are employed, including her father. Gaskell uses Mary to personalize class conflict, borrowing from a modified Romeo-and-Juliet plot. Mary is “ambitious,” one who “did not favour Mr. Carson the less because he was rich and a gentleman.”

However, her ambitions will be thwarted when her own father murders Harry Carson, and Jem Wilson stands accused of the murder. For characters like Mary Barton, the world of romance remains an illusion, blurred by subsistence conditions.

However, as something more than a traditional romance character, Mary may be more active, and she assumes a crucial role in helping to acquit Jem of murder charges. She also acts as a focus for several scenes in which Gaskell reveals important details regarding abuses against the working class and gender issues within the tightly knit community. As Mary sews mourning garments with a seamstress friend, their discussion hints at the abuses of the funeral business and its inflicted guilt on the poor, causing them to spend precious funds on burial rites. In the same scene, Mary’s friend reveals her terror of losing her vision, crucial to her craft and the only means of income for her poverty-laden family.

The women view the burning of Carson’s mill with two men trapped inside and witness a dramatic rescue of the men, not by any emergency personnel, but by Jem, the son of one of the men. The fire will result in a loss of their only income for many workers, while the Carsons delay its rebuilding, enjoying their insurance income, all of which serves to interest Marxist critics.

Feminist critics will be interested in the conversation that follows Jem’s show of heroism between Mary and her father, in which her father declares that Jem “should have her tomorrow, if he had not a penny to keep her.” While John Barton departs from the convention of trading his daughter for titles or money, he believes himself in full control of her fate. When he prepares to travel to London to represent his group in the presentation of the Chartist petition to Parliament, Mary cleans his shirts, a role Gaskell compares to that of Beau Tibbs’s wife, referring to Oliver Goldsmith’s Satire of English Life, Citizen of the World (1762), in which Tibbs adopts “the role of the man of society without having the means.”

In the novel’s conclusion, following Mary’s display of intelligence and courage in Jem’s defense, she assumes the prone position through illness, so common to romance females, and reverts to a childlike state as others prepare her father for his funeral.

Mary’s character remains interesting, if not fully developed. She symbolizes the restricted choices available to women of her class who had slim chances to marry into a higher class; could marry into their own class, lose children to poverty and disease, and likely die as young women; could become streetwalkers, as did her Aunt Esther; or could escape England altogether. She selects the final option to escape her surroundings, although only with Jem’s help, as they decide to marry and relocate to Toronto.

Gaskell’s overwhelming message appears clearly in the scene in which John not only receives forgiveness from his victim’s father but dies in his arms. Legislation will not accomplish reconciliation, nor will theoretical church sermons. Only recognition of each individual’s humanity and the willingness to practice compassion on an individual basis will solve England’s social ills. John Barton, more than any fictional character from the troubled period of the 1840s, best personalizes that message.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Tillotson, Kathleen. Novels of the Eighteen-forties. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954.