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Chapter 8
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
The next evening, it rains. John returns from London drenched and utterly demoralized: Parliament has refused to heed the working men’s petition. When Mary tells him that Mr. Wilson has died, he simply declares that that’s “better” than the alternative. Mary, alarmed, quickly runs to Margaret and Job’s and asks Job to come comfort her father. Margaret and Job come with Mary to the Bartons’ and do succeed in cheering John somewhat. Though still doomily prophesying that the rich will suffer in the afterlife, John tells his curious audience about various things he saw in London. Yet when Job asks what exactly happened in Parliament, John can’t bear to relate it.
In June 1839, Parliament really did vote not to hear the Chartists’ petition on behalf of working-class men’s rights. This refusal suggests that the ignorance that blocks empathy is sometimes culpable: fortunate people sometimes choose not to know or learn about the sufferings of the less fortunate. John’s prediction that the rich will suffer in the afterlife shows his focus on vengeance rather than more traditionally central Christian virtues like mercy and forgiveness.
Themes
Job, to break the gloomy silence, tells the others about the time he visited London. His only daughter, Margaret’s mother, married a young joiner, Frank Jennings, who moved to London for a better-paying job. After moving, Job’s daughter wrote him letters hinting that she was pregnant. Then Frank’s father visited Job looking miserable and told him their children had caught a fever. The two fathers hurried to London, but by the time they arrived, their children were dead—though their grandchild, Margaret, had just been born and had survived.
Frank Jennings’s move for a job—and his and his wife’s subsequent sudden deaths—again emphasizes how the lives of the poor and working class were ruled by economic necessity and highly precarious in Victorian England.
Themes
Going back to Manchester with baby Margaret, neither Job nor the other grandfather could get her to eat. The last day of their trip, they stopped at a cottage and offered to pay the woman who lived there if she could feed the baby. The woman—looking sad—unlocked a drawer of baby things, took some out, and cleaned and redressed baby Margaret before feeding her. When the woman’s husband came home and acted annoyed at her tending to the baby, Job offered to pay. She refused. When her husband scowled angrily, she said, “For poor little Johnnie’s sake.” Nevertheless, Job slipped some money onto the table before leaving; he believes he will see that woman “in heaven.”
When the woman says “For poor little Johnnie’s sake,” it implies that she and her husband had a child that died in infancy and that she wanted to help baby Margaret in memory of him. This anecdote illustrates both the centrality of empathy to moral action in the novel—the woman, who understands what it’s like to lose a child, wants to prevent the death of another baby—and the pragmatic mutual aid that characterizes working-class relations in the novel. Job’s assumption that he’ll see the woman “in heaven,” meanwhile, reminds readers that Christianity underlies most characters’ moral worldview.
Themes
Job’s story ends. He, John, and Margaret notice that Mary has fallen asleep. Almost immediately, she wakes—and claims she was awake the whole time. The others laugh. Job dares Mary to stay awake while he reads John a poem by Samuel Bamford about the sufferings of the poor. After Job recites the poem, John—greatly impressed—asks Mary to copy down the poem for him. The next day, Mary uses the blank half of an anonymous valentine (which she believes Jem sent her) to copy down the poem.
Samuel Bamford (1788–1872) was a radical poet from northern England who supported the rights of the poor and working classes. John’s enthusiasm for his poem bolsters John’s characterization as a working-class radical. Mary’s use of Jem’s Valentine as scrap paper reminds readers of her economically inflected lack of interest in working-class Jem and ongoing flirtation with rich Harry.
Themes
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