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Chapter 34
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
Mary runs into Jem on the Wilsons’ street and immediately asks whether it’s true. After a pause, he says that if she’s talking about his firing, then yes: some men at the foundry no longer wanted to work with Jem and talked to the owner about it. When Mary protests that people who know Jem ought to believe in his innocence, Jem says that the overlooker does and is working with the owner, Mr. Dunscombe, to get him a job outside Manchester. He asks whether Mary would be willing to move away from Manchester; the overlooker has a family connection in Canada. Mary says she would go anywhere with Jem, but she can’t yet. She tells Jem that John wants him to come visit that night.
Jem’s tentative suggestion that he and Mary move to Canada reveals just how much economic danger the trial has put Jem in: he may have to move all the way across the Atlantic to get a stable job again! Mary’s response—that she can’t move yet—suggests that she, like Jem, is trying to balance the demands of individual romance with family- and community-oriented morality: she can’t leave England while her father is guilty and ailing.
Themes
Jem persuades Mary to visit Mrs. Wilson before going home. When they arrive, Mrs. Wilson is annoyed that Jem didn’t come home sooner. He has hidden his firing from her; she likes to make him food to serve as soon as he gets home from “work,” and it annoys her when he doesn’t arrive promptly to appreciate the food. Yet when Jem and Mary arrive looking radiantly pleased with each other, Mrs. Wilson is only annoyed for a moment before she hugs Mary, blesses her, and asks her to make Jem happy.
Mrs. Wilson’s impulse to bless Mary—a religious action—shows how Christian belief is intertwined with various characters’ positive emotions and relationships, while her ability to put aside her annoyance in the face of Mary and Jem’s happiness shows her fundamental altruism and generosity despite her occasional fractiousness.
Themes
After the visit to Mrs. Wilson, Jem and Mary walk to Mary’s house. When they arrive, Mr. Carson and Job are there with John. Mr. Carson is demanding to know whether he heard John correctly: is John really confessing to Harry’s murder? If so, Mr. Carson swears to have him executed even though he confessed. John snaps back that execution would be a blessing: he has felt such guilt for the two weeks since the murder that he nearly committed suicide, and death would be easy punishment in comparison. He “would go through hellfire” to expiate his sin and sometimes thinks that, if he were really in a world with a God, God would help him know morality.
John’s confession, his claim that death would be an easy punishment in comparison with his guilt, and his desire to burn in “hellfire” to pay for his sin all dramatically illustrate how, in the novel’s worldview, vengefully straying from the path of religious righteousness leads to terrible suffering. Thus, John’s suffering serves to suggest indirectly that if Mr. Carson succeeds in getting legal vengeance on John, it won’t improve Mr. Carson’s life or alleviate his grief.
Themes
John, exhausted, sits. Mary hurries to him. He asks for Jem. When Jem steps forward, John apologizes for letting Jem be arrested; he refuses to bless Jem because a blessing from him would help nothing, but he says, “Thou’lt love Mary, though she is my child.”
Though Christianity teaches that God is radically forgiving to anyone who repents, John—like Esther—is harsher with himself than orthodox Christianity would be: he won’t bless Jem because he thinks, as a sinner, he has no right to give religious blessings. Nevertheless, he instructs Jem to love Mary “though” she’s John’s daughter—suggesting that Mary’s family would be a reason to hate her were it not for Jem’s romantic love of her.
Themes
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Mr. Carson walks to the door, pauses, and announces that he’s going to the police to have John and his “accomplice” arrested—and soon enough to have John hanged. Mary grabs Mr. Carson’s sleeve, points out that John seems to be dying, and begs Mr. Carson to let John die at home with her. John, standing with effort, says that he’ll die where Mr. Carson wants—it doesn’t matter where he dies—but that Jem is innocent. When John tells Mr. Carson that his hair is gray “with suffering,” Mr. Carson interrupts to remind John of his own suffering: his beloved only son Harry, his “sunshine,” has been killed, leaving him in perpetual “night.” John weeps; Mr. Carson is feeling the same pain John felt for his baby Tom.
When Mr. Carson refers to John’s “accomplice,” he clearly means Jem. By implication, Mr. Carson’s irrational vengefulness has made him unwilling to consider that Jem is entirely innocent even though someone else has just confessed to the murder! This irrationality bolsters the novel’s implicitly Christian suggestion that vengeance is an entirely negative phenomenon, making vengeful people act wrongly and suffer. Meanwhile, Mr. Carson’s evocative description of his grief—that his son Harry was his “sunshine” whose death has left him in eternal “night”—allows John to draw a parallel between his loss of his son Tom and Mr. Carson’s loss of Harry. Thus, John is finally able to understand and empathize with Mr. Carson despite their class differences.
Themes
John no longer sees Mr. Carson as an owner, an employer, and an enemy but as a fellow human being. He wants to comfort Mr. Carson, but he feels he can’t because he’s the cause of Mr. Carson’s suffering. Moreover, he no longer sees his killing of Harry as part of a war against an exploiting class but as the murder of a human being with a family: “a man, and a brother.” Every time Mr. Carson sobs, it hurts John. John whispers that he didn’t realize what he was doing, throws himself at Mr. Carson’s feet, and begs for forgiveness for his sin. Job quotes the Lord’s Prayer: “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive them that trespass against us.” Mr. Carson declares that he would rather remain unforgiven himself and have vengeance. Then he leaves.
The transformation of John’s attitude toward Mr. Carson makes clear that only John’s lack of empathy for the employer class—his blindness to their humanity and individuality—allowed him to murder Harry. As soon as John begins to see Harry and Mr. Carson as individuals rather than as representatives of their economic class, he is horrified by his own violence. This horror clearly has a religious dimension: John’s recognition that Harry was not only a fellow human being but “a brother” to him accords with Christian doctrine according to which all human beings are spiritually siblings because all are children of God. Job’s quotation of the Lord’s Prayer, meanwhile, makes clear that the Christian thing for Mr. Carson to do would be to forgive his son’s murder; thus, the novel casts Mr. Carson’s vengefulness as inherently unchristian.
Themes
Mary, Jem, and Job raise John from the floor and take him to bed. Meanwhile, Mr. Carson hurries unsteadily down the street. He pauses, braces himself against a railing, and looks at the sky; then he seems to hear a sad voice repeating back to him his own words about preferring vengeance to forgiveness. Feeling sick, he decides to go home for the night rather than directly to the police. On the way, he sees a coarse errand boy, about 10 years old, knock into a prettily dressed little girl, causing her to fall and bleed from the face. The girl’s nurse grabs the boy and threatens him with the police, but the little girl intervenes, holding back tears and insisting that the boy didn’t mean it—he didn’t know what he was doing.
Though the sad voice that Mr. Carson hears may not literally represent the voice of God, it seems clear that his (implicitly Christian) conscience is troubled and revolted by his own desire for violent revenge. The scene between the two young children, in which the girl insists that the boy only hurt her out of ignorance, suggests a parallel to John’s murder of Harry: John was only able to kill Harry because he saw Harry as a representative of Harry’s class, did not recognize Harry’s individual humanity, and thus failed to empathize with him.
Themes
The phrase “I did not know what I was doing” reminds Mr. Carson of John’s whispered pleas—and of a quotation from the Bible. He hurries home and opens his family Bible, only to see the names and birthdays of his children—including Harry—written on the first page. He lays his head on the Bible and cries. Oddly, he feels he cannot hate guilty, dying John as much as he hated the murderer when he thought the murderer was young, strong, and defiant. He had noted the extreme poverty of John’s house, different from the “decent” poverty of his own early life. He turns to the Gospels looking for a particular quotation: “They know not what they do.” He ends up reading the entire Gospels and debating what he should do.
In the Christian Gospel (Luke 23:34), Jesus Christ asks God to forgive the people who have crucified him while he is dying on the Cross: “Forgive them, father, for they know not what they do.” The allusion to Jesus forgiving his executioners makes clear that forgiving one’s enemies is literally Christlike behavior. Mr. Carson’s engagement with his family Bible makes clear that a desire for vengeance is pulling him in one direction, while his Christian beliefs are pulling him in another. Additionally, when he contrasts John’s miserable poverty with the “decent” poverty he experienced as a working-class man, it implies that he is realizing and coming to empathize with the economic desperation that fueled John’s crime.
Themes
Meanwhile, Mary, Jem, and Job are watching over John as he raves in bed that he never learned right from wrong, because even though he had access to the moral teachings of the Bible, the people around him never followed them, which made him think the Bible was a “sham” to con the poor and uneducated. The happiest part of his life was when he was trying to live a Christian life, but then his son Tom died, and he couldn’t manage to witness the sufferings of the poor and love the employer class at the same time, and finally he despaired, becoming worse and worse. He cries aloud that he hadn’t thought Mr. Carson would be such an old man, and he wishes Mr. Carson had offered him forgiveness.
This passage makes explicit that John’s life deteriorated because he fell away from Christian teaching, thus emphasizing that—in the novel’s worldview—Christian faith forms the bedrock of a good and Christian life. Yet John fell away from Christianity precisely because of the unchristian, exploitative behavior of the employer class, a fact that implicitly blames working-class sin and violence on rich people’s immoral refusal to help the poor. Finally, John’s lament that he hadn’t recognized Mr. Carson would be so old shows John coming to empathize with Mr. Carson’s frailty and grief despite their class differences.
Themes
Eventually, Job goes home, and Jem steps out to buy some medicine, leaving Mary alone with John. John’s breathing falters. Mary tries to lift him up, but she isn’t strong enough. Mr. Carson walks in, sees the situation, and lifts John in his own arms. Mary kneels and begs Mr. Carson to pray for them. Mr. Carson prays: “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive them that trespass against us!” John dies, and Mary faints. When she comes to consciousness, Job has returned; he and Mr. Carson are talking. Mr. Carson says goodbye, and Job comments that God has comforted Mr. Carson.
Mr. Carson prays the Lord’s Prayer—the same Christian prayer that Job quoted when trying to get Mr. Carson to forgive John—as John is dying. The prayer suggests that God will forgive sinners exactly in proportion to sinners’ willingness to forgive others; thus, Mr. Carson’s use of the prayer implies that he has forgiven or is trying to forgive John and thus that, having abandoned revenge, he is returning to the fold of Christianity. Job’s final comment that God has comforted Mr. Carson suggests that Mr. Carson’s religious forgiveness is not only morally right but also emotionally healing.
Themes
