mary barton as social commenta

During the course of this essay, I will discuss the extent to which the love interest narrative in Mary Barton fundamentally weakens the force of the novel as a social commentary. I will be referring to other social commentary novels such as Hard Times by Charles Dickens, and The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell. By using these two novels as markers with which to measure Mary Barton, I hope to discover, whether it is the love interest, or merely Gaskell’s middle class misunderstanding of working class people, that really undermines the novel as a piece of social commentary.

Although written nearly a hundred years later, George Orwell’s Road to Wigan Pier is a great example of social commentary. From the beginning, Orwell sets out to expose the hardship, exploitation, and injustice being suffered by miners in the north of England. Like Gaskell, Orwell came from a lower-upper middle class background. Initially, both writers had no experience of working class life. Gaskell gained her experience of the working classes while helping h

One could say that Orwell’s novel is non-fiction, and therefore bound to be a more effective tool to highlight social problems. However, there are other novels, Dickens’ Hard Times for example, that manage to draw attention to the terrible conditions suffered by the poor, and criticise the ruling classes without alienating their middle class audience. Gaskell’s biggest problem is that she does not understand the working class people on a personal level. She can see poverty, she can write vivid descriptions of poverty, but when writing about the poor as individuals and not as the huddled masses, she fails to remove completely, her middle class blinkers.

As a liberal middle class woman who has witnessed directly the suffering of working class Britons in industrial Manchester, Gaskell presents a well observed, if not slightly patronizing picture, of the then current problems. However, as the genre of the novel swings from social commentary to thriller, and then to love story, one cannot help feeling that Gaskell copped out a little. What could have been a gritty, hard-hitting critique of industrial Britain becomes something of a disappointment, with its fairytale happy conclusion and no solution offered to the problems she had initially outlined. Instead, she panders to her middle class audience, in an effort not to offend anyone. One also gets the impression that she is thinking of how many books she will sell, rather than concentrating on the problems at hand. An example of this can be seen in a conversation between Mary Barton and Mrs Wilson regarding men who they consider have been driven to the public house, because their wives work in factories. This does appear to be Gaskell highlighting her own values and belief in bourgeois domestic ideology, in an effort to reinforce her own respectability in the eyes of her middle class audience. Even the recurring theme that the majority of the problems are caused by a lack of communication between the classes is laughable. It completely removes any blame from the masters, and removes responsibility from herself to come up with a plausible solution to the problem, and I think it is this, more than any other factor, that lets the novel down as a piece of social commentary.

…no education had given him wisdom; and without wisdom, even love, with all it’s effects, too often works but harm…the actions of the uneducated seem to me typified in those of Frankenstein, that monster of many human qualities, ungifted with a soul, a knowledge of the difference between good and evil.

er husband with his duties as Minister in charge of the Cross street chapel in Manchester , and distributing soup tickets, food and clothing through her work with

Some topics in this essay:
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