Mary Barton

478 Pages·2006·1.21 MB·english

by  Elizabeth Gaskell

oxford world’s classics
MARY BARTON
Elizabeth Gaskell was born in 1810, the daughter of Elizabeth
Holland and William Stevenson, who trained as a Unitarian minis-
ter and was subsequently a farmer, journalist, and civil servant.
After her mother’s death, she was brought up by her aunt in
Knutsford, Cheshire. In 1832 she married William Gaskell, Junior
Minister at Cross Street Unitarian Chapel in Manchester; the
couple had seven children, of whom four survived to adulthood.
Gaskell’s first novel, Mary Barton, published in 1848, was very
successful and brought her to the notice of Charles Dickens who
subsequently asked her to write for his new periodical, Household
Words. Her second novel, Cranford (1853), began as a series of
papers in this journal. Her other novels are Ruth (1853),North and
South (1855), Sylvia’s Lovers (1863), Cousin Phillis (1864), and
Wives and Daughters, published posthumously in 1866. She also
wrote many stories and non-fictional pieces, and the first biography
of Charlotte Brontë (1857). She died in Hampshire in 1865.
Shirley Foster has recently retired from the University of
Sheffield where she was Reader in English and American Litera-
ture. She has also taught at the University of Hull. Her research
interests are nineteenth-century English and American fiction and
travel writing, and she has published widely in these areas. Her most
recent book is Elizabeth Gaskell: A Literary Life (Palgrave, 2002).
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OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS
ELIZABETH GASKELL
Mary Barton
Edited with an Introduction and Notes by
SHIRLEY FOSTER
1
3
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Gaskell, Elizabeth Cleghorn, 1810–1865.
Mary Barton / Elizabeth Gaskell ; edited with an introduction and notes by Shirley Foster.
p. cm. –– (Oxford world’s classics)
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Triangles (Interpersonal relations)––Fiction. 2. Fathers and daughters––Fiction.
3. Manchester (England)––Fiction. 4. Working class women––Fiction. 5. Textile industry––Fiction.
6. Trials (Murder)––Fiction. 7. Poor families––Fiction. 8. Labor unions––Fiction. I. Foster, Shirley.
II. Title. III. Oxford world’s classics (Oxford University Press)
PR4710.M3 2006 823′.8––dc22 2005021616
Typeset in Ehrhardt
by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk
Printed in Great Britain by
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ISBN 0–19–280562–2 978–0–19–280562–1
1
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements vi
Introduction vii
Note on the Text xxvii
Select Bibliography xxix
A Chronology of Elizabeth Gaskell xxxii
MARY BARTON 1
Appendix A: A Rough Draft of Mary Barton 380
Appendix B: Gaskell’s Outline of the
Novel’s Conclusion 382
Appendix C: William Gaskell’s Two Lectures on
the Lancashire Dialect 384
Explanatory Notes 415
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
For this edition I am deeply indebted to other Gaskell editors and
scholars who have already done so much work on this novel: John
Geoffrey Sharps, Alan Shelston, John Chapple, Edgar Wright, and
Walter Smith. I am particularly indebted to Angus Easson, whose
assistance has been invaluable and on whose scrupulously detailed
edition of Mary Barton, a model of its kind, I have unashamedly
drawn.
I should also like to express my thanks to the many other
individuals who have helped me with my task. These include the
librarians of the Manchester Public Library, the John Rylands
University Library, the Bodleian Library, the Portico Library, and
Knutsford Public Library; and Anne Secord, Peter Skrine, David
Martin, Barbara Dennis, and Nancy Weyant. Undoubtedly there are
others whom I have omitted to list here, and I should like to thank
them too.
S.F.
INTRODUCTION
The Genesis of Mary Barton
Mary Barton owes its inception to very personal events, hinted at in
the first sentence of the Preface (‘circumstances that need not be
more fully alluded to’). In early 1849, the author expands on this in a
letter to Mrs Greg: ‘The tale was formed, and the greater part of the
first volume was written ... when I took refuge in the invention to
exclude the memory of painful scenes which would force themselves
upon my remembrance.’1 The ‘painful scenes’ alluded to are those
connected with the death of her much-loved and only surviving son,
Willie, who in autumn 1845 succumbed to scarlet fever at the age
of nine and a half months. Gaskell’s early biographer, Mrs Ellis
Chadwick, notes that ‘it was his death that caused the novelist to
turn her thoughts to the writing of a long story in order to soothe her
sorrow’ and adds that the idea was suggested by William Gaskell, the
novelist’s husband.2
Gaskell’s entry into the arena of creative production was not,
however, solely precipitated by this personal tragedy. She had
already written two earlier pieces: ‘Sketches Among the Poor’, a joint
poetic production with William, published in Blackwood’s Edinburgh
Magazine in 1837; and ‘Clopton House’, an account of an outing in
her schoolgirl days, published in William Howitt’sVisits to Remark-
able Places (1840). She had also written ‘Libbie Marsh’s Three Eras’,
an earlier tale about Manchester, printed in Howitt’s Journal in 1847.
In the Preface to Mary Barton, she mentions having begun a previ-
ous tale set in Yorkshire (perhaps an outline for Sylvia’s Lovers,
1863) and it is also possible that at this time she had started to
compose another short story ‘Lizzie Leigh’, published in 1850. She
was, then, hardly a complete literary novice. Furthermore, as is
1 The Letters of Mrs Gaskell, ed. J. A. V. Chapple and Arthur Pollard (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1966),74.
2 See Mrs Ellis Chadwick, Mrs Gaskell: Haunts, Homes and Stories, 2nd edn.
(London: Pitman, 1913),151–3. This claim is supported by various references in the
novel to the deaths of young children. The interpolated (authorial) comment about
the pain of mourning and the need to alleviate distress by action, in Chapter XXII,
is also significant in this respect.
viii Introduction
reflected in the novel’s concern with the links between the private
and the public spheres, it was also inspired by wider preoccupations.
Before its appearance, in several letters to her publisher, Edward
Chapman, Gaskell herself points out the relevance of the work to
‘the present state of public events ... the present relations between
Masters and work people’,3 and she makes clear that her depiction of
class strife and suffering in Manchester was not merely invention or
theorizing but was inspired by and based on personal observation
and interpretation. The Preface––written at Chapman’s request––
explains this: ‘I bethought me how deep might be the romance in
the lives of some of those who elbowed me daily in the busy streets of
the town in which I resided. I had always felt a deep sympathy with the
care-worn men, who looked as if doomed to struggle through their
lives in strange alternations between work and want; tossed to and
fro by circumstances, apparently in even a greater degree than other
men’ (p. 3). In a letter of January 1849 to Miss Lamont, she notes
that ‘I had ... long felt that the bewildered life of an ignorant
thoughtful man of strong power of sympathy, dwelling in a town so
full of striking contrasts as this, was a tragic poem.’4 And in the letter
to Mrs Greg already referred to, she reiterates her overwhelming
sense of ‘the seeming injustice of the inequalities of fortune’, based
on ‘personal observation’ of men like John Barton.5
The motif of journeying through ‘the busy streets’––one which
also underpins the narrative of Gaskell’s second Manchester novel,
North and South (1855)––connects the observed experience with the
more abstract or generalizing focalization to which it is subject.
When she went to live in Manchester in 1832, after her marriage to
William, the junior minister at Cross Street Unitarian Chapel, the
young Elizabeth Gaskell was not wholly unfamiliar with the city. She
had visited it with her Cheshire relatives in early adulthood, before
staying there in 1831 with her cousin, Mary, who was married to
Cross Street’s senior minister, John Gooch Robberds (where she met
William). But the experience of actually living there was eye-opening
for the young woman from the provincial environment of Knutsford
and its surrounding countryside. The Gaskells first settled in Dover
3 Letters,55.
4 Ibid.70.
5 Ibid.74.
Introduction ix
Street, just off Oxford Road, and although this was an essentially
middle-class area it was not far from some of the worst slums and
most intensely developed factory districts in the city. As a minister’s
wife, Gaskell became acquainted with poverty and suffering on a scale
hitherto unknown to her, and her charitable work took her to areas
of severe deprivation. The period in which Mary Barton is set
(c.1834–40) was one of social and political unrest, both nationally
and locally. Manchester, with its enormous growth in population and
industrial expansion, its class antagonism, and its trades union and
Chartist activity, was exemplary of the deplorable ‘condition of
England’ about which Carlyle, among others, expressed so much
concern.6 Nationally, too, working-class unrest and challenges to
authority had especial resonance because widespread revolution
across Europe in the late 1840s bred fear that the same could happen
in Britain. Like many contemporary observers, Gaskell recognized
that political discontent, boiling over into violence and agitation
which threatened the stability of English society, was inextricably
linked to the conditions in which large numbers of the population of
Manchester lived and worked. The political demands made by the
Chartists and presented to Parliament in June 1839––including uni-
versal male suffrage, annual parliaments, and the removal of the
property qualifications7––were fuelled by the economic hardships of
the period, caused partly by rapid urban growth and partly by the
imposition of the Corn Laws, the latter particularly impacting upon
the poor because they kept bread prices high.8 Gaskell, both observer
and inhabitant of ‘dear old smoky grim grey Manchester’,9 was
bold enough to present these hardships and apparent injustices to a
readership many of whom were unprepared to receive the truth of
her depiction.
6 See especially his Past and Present (1843) for his criticism of the machine-driven,
money-obsessed age in which so much poverty and suffering existed. As the novel
demonstrates, Gaskell was considerably influenced by Carlyle in her depiction of
Manchester. It is worth pointing out, however, that by the 1830s it was not just a
Lancashire mill town, but a flourishing commercial centre.
7 For more details about Chartist activity, see Explanatory Note to p. 25.
8 The Corn Law Act, passed in 1815, aimed to protect landholder interests by pro-
hibiting the import of corn into Britain until grain prices had fallen below a specified
minimum. In March 1839, the Anti-Corn Law League was founded in Manchester; in
1846, the first of the Acts to repeal the Corn Law was passed.
9 Letters,489.