MARY BARTON A Tale of Manchester Life (1848)

A Novelby

Elizabeth Gaskell

The Plot: Story of a Working Class Family

Located in Manchester Site of the infamous “Satanic Mills” Roots in countryside Survival, class struggle & love

Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell

born: 1810 grew up in Cheshire married Rev. William Gaskell in 1832 bore and reared children worked with poor in Manchester published Mary Barton in 1848 wrote several more novels died 1865

Gaskell’s Introduction

Preface Oulines Problem & Solution Problem:

– working class is poor and suffering– working class hates capitalists– Danger: specter of 1848 Revolutions

Solution: Reform– legislation– merciful deeds

Reading the Book

For the story– read the book through once, just for the story

For the themes– re-read the book for the flesh on Marx’s bones– i.e., to think about the relationship between theory and

(novel-)life

Taking notes

outline the story note passages on themes

– bracket or copy out regroup theme material

– index or regroup

Theme Example: Primitive Accumulation

Gaskell doesn’t think in terms of “primitive accumulation”

She paints life, people’s experiences YOU have to make the link

Primitive Accumulation in Chapter One

Story: Bartons & Wilsons walk on Green Hays Fields

Gaskell sets up dichotomy between countryside & city

Countryside is painted attractively City is painted darkly, unattractively

Motto at beginning of Chapter One

“Manchester Song” City: “Oh, tis hard, tis hard to be working The whole of the live-long day” Countryside: “And lovingly they’ll be wandering Through field and briery lane.”

Chapter 1 Text:

Charming rural area: “pleasant mysteries,” “delicious sounds,” “clear

pond,” “quaint farm house and garden,” and “wild flowers”

VS City: “busy, bustling manufacturing town”

Chapter 1 Text:

Country girls:“wenches with such fresh rosy cheeks, or such black

lashes to gray eyes”VS

City girls:“below average, . . . sallow complexions and

irregular features”

Chap. 1 Text: Nuances

Country girls: “deficit of sense . . . characteristic of rural

inhabitants”VS

City girls: “an acuteness and intelligence of countenance”

Chap. 1 Text: Nuances

John Barton -weaver, mill worker “stunted look about him; and his wan, colourless

face”yet

“resolute,” “latent, stern, . . . one from whom a stranger would have asked a favour with tolerable faith that it would be granted”

Chap. 2 Text

Ugly City & Homes -streets awash with “household slops, washing suds, etc. -dark even with fire “ruddy glow” & candle “coarse yellow glare” Country Medicine & Health -Alice “knowledge of hedge and field simples” for “drinks

and medicine” -Alice, the country woman, is a sick nurse & healer

Chap. 4 Text

Alices memories “the hills there as seem to go up into the skies”, a cottage

situated among giant grey rocks all covered with yellow & brown moss, “the ground between them knee-deep in purple eather, smelling sae sweet and fragrant” etc.

vs her damp, dark cellar

Chapter 6 Text

Davenport’s home: worse than Barton’s or Alice’s– everything sold to eat, pay rent, house bare

Davenport on “mouldy straw”, the children “rolling on the damp, nay wet, brick floor through which the stagnant, filthy moisture of the street oozed up”

Davenport’s weak resistance to typhus “brought on by miserable living, filthy neighborhood, and great depression of mind and body”

Chap. 24 Text

“Alice spoke, and sang during her waking moments, ... so happily with ... the scent of the heather, and the song of the wild bird hovering about her in imagination -- with old scraps of ballads, or old snatches of primitive versions of the Psalms (such as are sung in country churches half draperied over with ivy, and where the running brook, or the murmuring wind among the trees, makes fit accompaniement...”

Link with Theory-1

juxtaposition country - city concerns enclosure - encarceration (in factories, in cellars)

attractiveness of countryside = resistance to being driven off, longing to return

bleakness of city = bloody legislation to enforce

Link with Theory-2

industrialization meant drop in quality of life, health-wise

industrialization meant widening of perspective, understanding

Gaskell very similar to Marx in this

Other themes Capitalists’ attitudes toward workers (like machines) Anger of workers toward capitalists Power of the wage, bypassing of exchange value Effect of business cycle Dangers for working class women Working class self-activity

– --negative: unions, charter– --positive: self-reconstructed

Child labor Industrial Accidents Labor mobility & families Dynamics of strikes

--End--