Mary Barton: Chapter 34 Summary & Analysis

Jem returns to Liverpool and waits impatiently at Mary’s bedside for her recovery. Eventually she is no longer delirious, simply exhausted. One day she wakes up, sees Jem, beams happily—and then blushes deep red. An overjoyed Jem runs to find Mrs. Sturgis. After that, Mary recovers rapidly. Yet while Jem has many reasons to return with her to Manchester—for example, he needs to start clearing his name of lingering guilt at work—he worries about the effects of a reunion with John on Mary. One day, on a slow outdoors walk, Mary tells Jem that she must go home alone—and begs him not to explicitly discuss why. He agrees, though he vacillates over whether his agreement is right.

When the day comes for Mary to travel home, she is terribly sad to leave Ben Sturgis and Mrs. Sturgis, who have been so kind to her. By the time Mary and Jem reach Manchester on the train, she is extremely pale, trying to gather her courage to see John if he’s home. She’s terrified to live with a murderer, yet her love for her father makes her long to tend to his moral and psychological “wounds.” When she and Jem reach their neighborhood, she asks him to go and wait for her at Job’s place; if she doesn’t come find him in half an hour, he should go to Mrs. Wilson. When Jem protests her coldness, she tells him she loves him as much now as when she proclaimed her love, but she must do what’s right or regret it her whole life.  

Mary hurries into her house, where she finds John sitting frozen by the cold fire grate, his face skull-like and miserable. Mary immediately sees John, though a murderer, as her “dear father” and tries to tend to him. She goes out to buy food for him with money she received for serving as a witness. On her way home, she stops in to Margaret and Job’s, where Margaret greets her happily. When Job mentions that Mary is regaining some of her color after her illness but looks more like her father now, Mary blanches. She tells them that her father is home but seems unwell.

Job wants to visit John right away, but Mary tells him that John is too unwell and that he and Margaret should wait to visit until Mary gives the go-ahead. She kisses them goodbye and flees home. For the next three days, Mary tends to a weak, nearly silent John. After three days, Mary goes to Margaret and Job’s again. There she runs into Jem, who lovingly asks her to come visit Mrs. Wilson. She says must return to her father.

On the fourth day, Mary spies through the window Sally coming to visit. Rather than let her in, Mary meets her at the door. Sally, seeing John over Mary’s shoulder, is happy enough not to enter, but she wants to question Mary, a “heroine” in the papers, about the trial. When she asks whether Mary regrets not borrowing her black scarf, Mary snaps that she wasn’t thinking about it at the time. Sally replies that she’d forgotten Mary was “all for” Jem and says that if she testified at a trial, she’d “pick up a better beau than the prisoner.”

Sally tells Mary to come back to Miss Simmonds’s to work. When Mary indirectly alludes to the possibility that she’ll marry Jem, Sally informs her that Jem has been fired: his coworkers didn’t want him there even if he had an alibi. Sally leaves, and Mary is rushing to go see Jem when John abruptly speaks, asking Mary to tell Jem to come at eight that night.