Mary Barton Study Guide

Elizabeth Gaskell was born Elizabeth Cleghorn Stevenson to William Stevenson, a Unitarian minister, and Elizabeth Holland Stevenson in London in 1810. When Elizabeth Holland Stevenson died about a year after giving birth to her daughter, William Stevenson sent the baby to her maternal aunt, Hannah Lumb, in the rural town of Knutsford, Cheshire, England. Hannah Lumb essentially raised Elizabeth. In Knutsford, Elizabeth attended a young ladies’ school from age 11 to age 16, where she studied not only social graces but also classical literature. At age 21, Elizabeth married a Unitarian minister named William Gaskell (1805–1884), and the newlyweds moved to the northern manufacturing city of Manchester, where William Gaskell became the minister at Cross Street Unitarian Chapel. The Gaskells had six children: one stillborn daughter, four surviving daughters, and one son who died as a baby. In 1837, the couple published in Blackwood’s Magazine a set of poems called Sketches among the Poor that they had written together. Subsequently, Elizabeth Gaskell began writing short stories. In 1848, she published her first novel, Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life, anonymously—but after the novel’s commercial success, people discovered that Gaskell was the author. She went on to write seven more novels, the last of which, Wives and Daughters (1864–1866), was finished by English journalist and editor Frederick Greenwood (1830–1909) after Elizabeth Gaskell died of a sudden heart attack during its serialized publication in Cornhill Magazine.

In Mary Barton, the eponymous heroine’s working-class father John Barton becomes a Chartist. Chartism (c. 1830s –1850s) was an English working-class political movement named after the so-called People’s Charter of 1838, a massively popular petition demanding reforms from Parliament that included a general right to vote for adult men whether or not they owned property; a right to run for Parliament whether or not the candidate owned property; and a salary for members of Parliament so that working-class men could afford to hold office. In 1848, after food-shortage protests in Manchester (where Mary Barton takes place) and other cities, the Chartists planned a march on Parliament to force England’s government to listen to their demands. In response, Parliament revived a centuries-old law that radically limited (to 10) the number of people who could present a single petition to Parliament in person. Parliament also passed other laws to make mass demonstration more difficult. The Chartists had to cancel their march, though a smaller number of them still brought a petition to Parliament. Though the Chartists lost many members after 1848, some of their demands later became law: for example, in 1867, Parliament extended the vote to working-class men in cities, though it didn’t pass full adult male enfranchisement until the early 20th century.

Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848) represents class conflict between mill and factory owners and their working-class employees in the northern English manufacturing city of Manchester at the tail end of the Industrial Revolution (c. 1760–1840). Gaskell’s later serial novel North and South (1854–1855) also represents class conflict in a northern English industrial town. Gaskell was personally acquainted with the more famous Victorian novelists Charles Dickens (1812–1870) and Charlotte Brontë (1816–1855); in fact, Gaskell wrote the first biography of Charlotte Brontë, The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857). As such, it seems possible that Mary Barton may have influenced Dickens’s representation of the working poor in Hard Times (1854), while Brontë’s stubborn and self-determining eponymous heroine in Jane Eyre (1847) may have influenced Gaskell’s portrayal of spirited young women in her subsequently published novels. In addition to these possible influences, Gaskell explicitly alludes in Mary Barton to William Shakespeare’s history play Henry IV, Part I (c. 1597), Mary Shelley’s proto-science fiction novel Frankenstein (1818), and the poetry of radical Samuel Bamford (1788–1872), indicating that Gaskell had read and may have been influenced by all these writers.