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Chapter 3
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
A year passes. John and Mary continue to mourn Mrs. Barton, but the rest of the neighborhood forgets her. John continues to organize for workers’ rights, and though Mr. Wilson isn’t interested in organizing, he and John remain best friends. Jem Wilson gets work at an engineering firm that makes various machines. Mr. and Mrs. Wilson are always praising Jem to Mary—which, she knows, is because he’s silently in love with her and wants to marry her.
Though the narrative has already illustrated the exploitation of the working class by their employers, Mr. Wilson’s lack of interest in John’s workers’ rights organizing shows that not all workers have the same response to their exploitation: some are angry and active, while others are passive, resigned, or uninterested in change.
Themes
One day in winter, Mary runs into Alice, who invites her to tea to meet Alice’s upstairs neighbor, a girl Mary’s age. After Alice has worked to make her humble dwelling comfortable, the neighbor—Margaret, shabby but kind-looking—enters. Mary, who has dressed carefully to impress the stranger, arrives after. Margaret is awed by Mary. Alice, serving the girls oat bread characteristic of the north, reminisces about how she left her northern home when young to work in Manchester—and never saw her mother again, as she couldn’t save the money to visit her first year in service, and then her mother died. She hopes to visit home again before she dies.
Alice’s hard work to make her poor dwelling a nice place for Mary and Margaret emphasizes the consideration poor and working-class characters show one another in the novel, in contrast with the callous or indifferent way rich people treat the poor. Alice’s reminiscences about how her low wages kept her from visiting her mother until her mother died yet again emphasize the hard lot of working-class employees in mid-Victorian England.
Themes
Mary asks why Alice hasn’t gone home since her mother died. Alice replies that she often lacked money, as she financially helped her “scapegrace” brother Tom and—after Tom’s death—raised his son Will. Will has since become a sailor and is now in South America. Changing the subject, Alice convinces Margaret, reputed to have a lovely singing voice, to sing a Lancashire ballad called “The Oldham Weaver,” which is about a poor, starving cotton-weaver. Then Margaret sings “Lord, remember David.” Mary is moved to tears by Margaret’s beautiful voice. After tea is over, Margaret invites Mary to come upstairs and meet her grandfather; Mary agrees.
Alice has voluntarily foregone trips home in order to help her “scapegrace” (irresponsible) brother financially, again showing the generous communal spirit of the working poor in the novel. The songs Margaret sings—a ballad about a poor worker and the Psalm “Lord, remember David”—emphasize the centrality of work and poverty on the one hand and religion on the other to the lives of the novel’s central characters.
Themes
