Critical Reviews of Mary Barton

Summary

                Three critical reviews from the Norton edition of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton caught my eye, two by John Lucas and the third by Josephine M. Guy. In “Carson’s Murder and the Inadequacy of Hope in Mary Barton” (501-4), Lucas claims that by inserting Carson’s murder as a plot device, Gaskell avoids challenging her own conclusions (“false hope” as Lucas calls it) on how to help the poor. She reduces John Barton, whom she had given complex, real-world grievances, to the caricature of murderer, now easily handled by her good-hearted hopes. This allowed her to solve the problems she masterfully raised in a tidy way that does not conflict with her preconceived beliefs. But Lucas feels this is a cheat. In his mind, the problem of poverty amongst the Manchester working class defied such simplistic solutions (i.e. Christian solutions).

Interestingly, Lucas argues passionately in favor the novel in “Why We Need Mary Barton” (504-9). His argument here does not contradict, but supports, his prior argument, where he applauded Gaskell’s accurate portrayal of the working poor. It is that very accuracy that leads him to state in the second accuracy the need for Mary Barton. Lucas takes issue when Friedrich Engels, the famous Marxist thinker, claimed after visiting Victorian Manchester to fully understand the conditions and anger of the working class. But Lucas notes that the rich young German missed the complexities found within that world. Gaskell did not. She lays out with an expert eye the subtle, but real, differences between impoverished families like the Bartons, Wilsons, Leghs, and Davenports. Engels attributed a single, unremitting anger to the working class, which Lucas says served revolutionary’s purposes well. In fact, Lucas believes what Engels described was “magnificent”, but insufficient. (It almost as if Engels, second only to Karl Marx as a father of Socialism, was not socialist enough for Lucas.) It is Gaskell who got it fully right.

In “Morality and Economics in Mary Barton” Josephine M. Guy (575-83) observed that the exchange of money and moral acts always went together throughout the novel. She says that for Gaskell, money was necessary for morality. A person who gave money, or lowered the price of goods or services for the needy customer, was moral; those who withheld money or assigned fixed prices were less so. Those that had no money at all were in danger of losing their moral moorings. For example, the poor who had some money, like John Barton did early on, used it to help those needier than themselves. Their family and community lives, while modest, were close knit. But those bonds began to break down in the absence of money. They could not afford to social gatherings or to help the neediest. The most moral characters—Jem, Margaret, Job—were (relatively) financially secure.

Analysis

Lucas says that “Mrs. Gaskell doesn’t think that hatred and vengeance make the sum total of working-class consciousness. Engels does. It is only there that the working class is anti-atomistic…” (508, emphasis original). I find this admission extraordinary. This all but admits that Engels refused to see the working-class in any light that would contradict his desire for socialist revolution. He wanted revolution; he wanted the working class to have hatred and vengeance in their hearts and nothing else; and so that is what he saw. Yet, this is the very type of crime Lucas criticizes Gaskell in “Carson’s Murder and the Inadequacy of Hope in Mary Barton”. Only the belief systems are different: Gaskell held preconceived hopes in a Christian solution; Engels held preconceived hopes in a Socialist one. Lucas notes this, and after some criticism, forgives it. Gaskell received from him no such forbearance. It is clear Lucas favors one hope over the other. That is fine, but one must treat all views, even unfavored ones, with the same intellectual honesty demanded of Gaskell.

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.