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Chapter 24
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
After Mary returns home, Sally visits to gawp at her, curious to see the girl at the center of a murder case. When Sally asks why Mary hasn’t come to Miss Simmonds’s, Mary says she’s quitting. Shocked, Sally says that Mary should certainly return to work after the trial and tell her coworkers about testifying. Sally goes on about how Mary might find a new boyfriend in Liverpool and how she should dress to testify. When Sally tries to lend Mary her black silk scarf, Mary asks how she could think about clothes when Jem might be executed. Sally speculates that Mary jilted Harry for Jem and asks why Jem felt the need to shoot Harry. Mary snaps at Sally for assuming that Jem did it—but then, melancholically, says it’s worse when people who know Jem assume the same.
Sally’s focus on what Mary will wear to testify and her possible romantic feelings for Jem—in the context of Harry’s murder and Jem’s possible future execution—show her superficiality. At the same time, her assumption that Jem committed the murder (coming after similar assumptions by Job, Margaret, and the doctor), emphasizes that the circumstantial evidence of Jem and Harry’s fight over Mary has placed Jem in terrible danger.
Themes
Mary is grateful when Job enters, interrupting the conversation and driving Sally—who can’t stand him—away. After criticizing Sally as an evil influence, Job tells Mary that Mr. Bridgnorth thinks it might look bad if Mrs. Wilson doesn’t testify but that if she’s too sick to travel to Liverpool it can’t be helped. Mary asks Job to visit Mrs. Wilson with her and see what he thinks of her health. They go to the Wilsons’ house. After a short conversation with Mrs. Wilson, Job tells Mary that Mrs. Wilson seems far too ill to travel. Mrs. Wilson overhears them, stands up, and announces that she will go to Liverpool to support Jem and pray for him at the trial—no matter what.
Job’s harsh condemnation of Sally, a silly and superficial girl obsessed with romance, indirectly suggests how socially dangerous an interest in sex and romance can be for girls and women in a misogynistic society like Victorian England. Meanwhile, Mrs. Wilson’s insistence on praying for Jem at his trial exemplifies the centrality of Christian religion to the characters’ lives, especially regarding their reactions to adversity.
Themes
Job suggests, in that case, that he should go find Will while Mary and Mrs. Wilson travel together afterwards. Mary hates this idea because she doesn’t trust Job or anyone to be as desperate and determined as she is to save Jem—and because she doesn’t want to sit and wait for others to resolve the problem. On the walk back home from the Wilsons’, she and Job fight bitterly about who should do what. Then Margaret meets them and persuades Job to let Mary seek out Will. (Margaret is secretly motivated by belief in Jem’s guilt: she’s hoping that if Will can’t provide an alibi, it will help persuade Mary of Jem’s guilt.)
Both Mary and Job intensely desire to help Jem in some immediate, practical way. Yet Mary is the more determined of the two: even as she blames herself for the danger Jem faces, she also believes that her love for him makes her his best advocate. Margaret, meanwhile, wants to help Jem but still believes he committed the murder—a belief that yet again shows how public opinion is against Jem, putting him in great danger of execution.
Themes
