Mary Barton

**Manchester Seen from the Factory Floor**

**Elizabeth Gaskell's First Novel**

**Love and Murder Inside a Divided Industrial City**

**The Social Novel That Drew Praise from Thomas Carlyle**

*Before the celebrated masterpieces came Mary Barton: a first book in which Elizabeth Gaskell's defining concerns were already taking shape.*

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Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life was the first novel by English author Elizabeth Gaskell, first published in 1848. The story is set in the English city of Manchester between 1839 and 1842, and deals with the difficulties faced by the Victorian working class.

The novel begins in Manchester, where we are introduced to the Bartons and the Wilsons, two working-class families. John Barton is a questioner of the distribution of wealth and the relations between rich and poor. Soon his wife dies-he blames it on her grief over the disappearance of her sister Esther. Having already lost his son Tom at a young age, Barton is left to raise his daughter, Mary, alone and now falls into depression and begins to involve himself in the Chartist, trade-union movement. Mary takes up work at a dressmaker's (her father had objected to her working in a factory) and becomes subject to the affections of hard-working Jem Wilson and Harry Carson, son of a wealthy mill owner. She fondly hopes, by marrying Carson, to secure a comfortable life for herself and her father, but immediately after refusing Jem's offer of marriage she realizes that she truly loves him. She, therefore, decides to evade Carson, planning to show her feelings to Jem in the course of time. Jem believes her decision to be final, though this does not change his feelings for her.

Kathleen Mary Tillotson wrote that Mary Barton is "built on the assumptions of Chartism and Past and Present", two works of social criticism by Thomas Carlyle.

The novel was first published anonymously, but its authorship was widely known within a year. Early reception of the novel was divided, with some praising its honesty and fidelity to facts and others criticising it for presenting a distorted picture of the employer-employee relationships. The British Quarterly Review said it was a "one-sided picture", and the Edinburgh Review that the division between employers and employed was exaggerated. They were echoed by the Manchester Guardian and the Prospective Review, however the Athenaeum, the Eclectic Review, the Christian Examiner and Fraser's Magazine took a different stance. The Athenaeum's otherwise positive review raised the question of whether "it may be kind or wise or right to make fiction the vehicle for a plain, matter of fact exposition of social evils". Thomas Carlyle wrote a letter to Gaskell in which he called it "a Book seeming to take its place far above the ordinary garbage of Novels".

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*“a Book seeming to take its place far above the ordinary garbage of Novels”*

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**Why Mary Barton Still Matters**

Read today, Mary Barton offers more than the curiosity of a famous writer's beginning. It preserves the risks, experiments, and unresolved tensions of a literary voice before later success made that voice familiar.

*Return to the beginning, and discover how Mary Barton first opened the path ahead.*