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Chapter 15
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Mary Barton, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Employers vs. Workers
Sexuality and Danger
Christianity
Poverty and Morality
Empathy vs. Ignorance
Summary
Analysis
On the appointed day, the mill owners gather at the hotel where they are supposed to discuss the strike with representatives of the workers. Some, very angry over a poor weaver beaten for attempting to take work during the strike, are determined to give the workers nothing. None consider explaining the circumstances that led them to reduce wages in the first place. Then five workers’ representatives arrive. One representative reads the workers’ rather extreme demands to the owners, and then the representatives leave the room so the owners can deliberate.
Once again, the novel takes care to remind readers that the employers haven’t told the workers their reasons for offering such low wages. By arrogantly preventing the workers from understanding their reasoning, the employers are shooting themselves in the foot—precluding mutual understanding, empathy, and a possible resolution.
Themes
By a single vote, the owners refuse to advance any income to workers but agree to make a concession: one more shilling per week than they had originally offered. The representatives come back, hear the concession, and refuse the offer—they want all their demands met. Harry Carson, infuriated, puts forward a different resolution: the owners should stop talking to the Trades’ Union, refuse to hire any worker in a Trades’ Union in the future, and protect any workers who accept the owners’ original salary offer. Harry’s proposal passes. The owners announce it to the representatives, who leave in grim silence.
The employers’ concession is stingy and not enough to alleviate the widespread poverty and food insecurity the workers are experiencing. Because the employers have not revealed the reasons behind their desire to keep operating costs as low as possible—they think that otherwise they won’t get paid for the manufacturing order, essentially—the workers find their stinginess offensive and reject the “concession.” This rejection leads to an unempathetic hardening of the employers’ position. In other words, because the two parties start from a position of misunderstanding, their attempts at bargaining only lead to increased bad feeling.
Themes
Meanwhile, Harry drew a caricature of the ragged workers’ representatives when they first came in and wrote a quotation “from the fat knight’s well-known speech in Henry IV” on it. The owners passed it around, smiling; when it returned to Harry, he threw it nonchalantly at the fire, not realizing he’d missed. A worker who noticed Harry drawing comes back to the hotel after the meeting and retrieves the caricature.
This passage alludes to William Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part I (c. 1597), specifically a scene in which “the fat knight,” Falstaff, gives a speech about how, after receiving the task of conscripting soldiers, he took bribes from men wanting to avoid army service and recruited extremely poor men and criminals instead. Harry’s caricature is comparing the workers’ representatives to Falstaff’s immiserated, pathetic, criminal, and despicable recruits. His mockery of the starving workers—and the other factory owners’ amusement at it—shows the employer class’s lack of empathy for the working class.
Themes
The workers meet at a pub that evening to discuss the meeting with the masters. Then a sleazy union man from London gives a speech advising how the Manchester workers should handle the strike, after which he gives them a little money. After the meeting breaks up, some workers stay behind, and the man who retrieved Harry’s caricature passes it around. One of the workers caricatured announces that he can take a joke when he’s not starving, but it infuriates him that someone would mock the workers when his starving family is begging for food at home.
The caricatured worker’s fury at Harry’s mockery suggests that the workers do not resist the employers’ offer of lowered wages solely due to economic or class interest but also out of a sense of dignity—they feel that the employers do not recognize their humanity or care about their suffering, a feeling that stiffens their resistance to concessions or bargaining.
Themes
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John, who is at the meeting, says the caricature makes him furious: it’s hideous that someone would mock workers who only want enough food, warm clothes, and roofs for themselves and their dependents. In a low voice, he says he knows of a “tender-hearted man” who killed his own child rather than let the child starve to death. Then he says that the workers are only asking for their rightful portion of the manufacturing earnings, which they would spend on necessities, not luxuries the way the owners would—and he wants revenge on the owner who drew the caricature.
The caricature, which represents the employers’ lack of empathy for the working classes, spurs John to demand revenge on the employers. John’s thirst for revenge—a fundamentally unchristian desire—shows how, in the novel’s view, the cruelty and callousness of the rich tends to damage the goodness, empathy, and religious faith of the suffering poor.
Themes
John explains that he missed the meeting with the owners to visit Jonas Higginbotham in prison, a man who threw acid on a rural weaver who came to Manchester for work during the strike. Jonas, repenting what he’d done, asked John to sell his silver watch and give it to the weaver’s family. John sold the watch, but when he visited the weaver in the Infirmary to find out his family’s address, the man was screaming his wife’s name and lamenting that he was blinded for trying to support his baby—too deliriously for John to get the address. John asked the nurse to find out the address, but now he wants to tell the other workers that they should never again attack workers who try to break the strike.
Though John may have rejected Christian teachings against vengeance, he is not bloodthirsty or indiscriminate in his desire for revenge. He cautions the other workers not to attack members of their own class who are desperate enough to break the strike, a caution that shows his class solidarity, empathy, and residual moral qualms about violence.
Themes
When a few workers grumble disapproval, John announces that he’s not a coward—but he wants to fight the owners, not fellow workers. The idea of terrifying the owners catches on, and the furious group discusses what they might do. Finally, the assembled men tear the caricature into strips, mark one of those strips, and then pull them from a hat. Then they leave in silence—but the man who, unknown to the others, pulled the marked strip has “drawn the lot of the assassin.”
Harry’s caricature, torn up, becomes the method by which the workers choose who among them will kill a member of the employer class. Symbolically, the use of Harry’s caricature to choose “the assassin” indicates that Harry and the other employers’ lack of empathy has infected the workers, making them callous, desperate, and violent.
Themes
