Contemporary Reviews of Mary Barton

Summary

Any popular novel wins its share of approval and disapproval from critics. Even so, Mary Barton seemed to incite the greatest of passions amongst its contemporary reviewers.  Appreciative reviewers praised the novel’s masterful blending of fiction and social commentary into a work of art. To them, Mary Barton wrenches at the heart (mostly) without sentimentality as it tells of the plight of the poor and desperate. They laud its vivid picture of this desperation, even to the point of imploring readers to embrace the novel’s message. So powerful are the descriptions of working class speech and ordinary life that they declare the author’s powers of observation keen, and suspect she has firsthand experience in that world. Reviews also praised Mary Barton’s even-handedness in describing the weakness of the poor as well as the rich. For example, the novel describes not only the masters’ unconcern toward the worker, but also the worker’s tendency toward improvidence—wasteful spending and the failure to save money against hard times. But here, even positive reviewers admit that the novel understates worker’s weaknesses, and so the point is easily passed over.

Mary Barton’s detractors chiefly object to what they saw as one-sidedness, and an unfair portrayal of the factory employers. They further object to inaccuracies of the portrayal of the then-current state of English manufacturing in general, working conditions, economics of the time, and worker morale. From my research into reactions and reform to the Industrial Revolution (for my class presentation), anger amongst the working class had indeed calmed somewhat, which lends some strength to this argument. The reviewers write that most masters or factory owners are decent men, and go on to cite statistics that factory conditions are not as dangerous as rumor imagined, and that many workers were undeniably improvident with their wages.

Analysis

“Mary Barton…is a work of no ordinary talent in reference to the humbler characteristics of a novel, whilst its truthful pictures of the humbler classes of society…is an evidence of much higher capacity of the author" (Gaskell et al., 366, emphasis added).

"A [grave] charge has been brought against the book…that it is one-sided and unfair, and places the relation of the whole class of masters to their work people in a false and invidious [i.e. hateful] light” (Gaskell et al., 379, emphasis added).

The two quotes taken from contemporary reviews of Mary Barton illustrate the positive and negative points made in the summary above. But I find they share, perhaps unwittingly, a common value or expectation—that this work of literature ought to represent the truth. “Truthful” is the word the first review calls Gaskell’s portrayal of the working class; where the second, while excerpted from a positive review, notes that many believed the author paints a “false” image. The reviews always examined the novel’s accuracy, as if it were of the utmost importance. It appears Victorian readers expected a work of fiction to hold true to the society and conditions of its setting. No reviewer said, in essence, that the story was wonderful independent of real world accuracy. Rather, they applauded it as truth, or complained that it was not.

Works Cited

• Gaskell, Elizabeth Cleghorn, and Thomas Recchio. "Contemporary Reviews." Mary Barton: Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism. New York: W.W. Norton &, 2008. 365-90. Print.