1. Compare the picture of women’s position and role in Manchester in Engels and Gaskill. Consider the position of women both in the economic order and in the domestic sphere. How do you account for the differences between the accounts of Engels and Gaskill? In what senses do the pictures complement or reinforce each other? Taken together, what do they suggest about the situation of women in Victorian working-class England and about attitudes towards that situation.

2. Mary Barton, seamstress, is the only working woman we see in Mary Barton (unless we count the rather different labors of her aunt Esther). Consider her choice of work, her place in the economic order, her working conditions, and, especially, the relation of her work to the rest of her life. How important is Mary Barton herself in representing the position of workers, and especially of women workers?

3.For much of the novel Mary is a conflicted character, torn between divided loyalties. What makes her the heroine of her novel? What does her heroic position suggest about the nature and potentialities of women in her society? What does it imply about the values that the novel finally espouses? Is Mary a credible and convincing heroine?

4.What is the role of women in the domestic sphere described in Mary Barton? In class discussion we suggested that families in the novel have a matriarchal structure, that it is really the woman (wife and mother) who holds the family together, and that it is the family rather than work that is the dominant force in the society of the novel. What gives women the authority they possess in the family? What is the significance of the fact (if it is a fact) that this authority lies in the hands of women rather than men?

5. Compare family relations among the poor to those among the rich. In what ways are the lives of the Bartons and Wilsons, on one hand. and the Carsons , on the other, significantly different? What is the social, moral and political significance of those differences?

6. In addition to the solidarity shown within domestic groups, the working people in the novel show particular solidarity in the face of adversity. The death of Davenport and the roles of Wilson and Barton are a strong indication of this solidarity. A similar solidarity is shown among the working women of the novel. What are the sources of this solidarity? What are its political consequences? How is it related to other affective relations in the novel?

7. The death of children was a favorite Victorian topic, and one that Gaskill uses repeatedly in Mary Barton (though I am not sure that the death of Harry Carson quite counts as the death of a child). Discuss the death of children as both thematic and emotional elements of Mary Barton. (Does the death of children make a significant connection between theme and emotion?) To what extent is the condition of children a moral index by which readers can evaluate the condition of society?

The Problems of Workers

8. We see John Barton as a worker, a Chartist, a union member, a striker, and a family man. Discuss Barton as a tragic hero. Assuming that a tragic hero is one whose flaws and unhappy fate have broad social and moral significance, in what sense is he a tragic hero? What are the causes of his downfall, and what is their significance? How is his tragic nature related to his status as a worker and father?

9. To what degree is Mary’s choice between Jem and Harry based on a contrast between workers and management? What elements of that contrast do their characters embody? What is the relevance to this contrast of the facts that Harry was murdered and Jem was charged with murdering him? What is the relationship of sexual rivalry to class and economic rivalry?

10. Mary Barton is a novel filled with paired characters (Jem and Harry, Mary and Esther, and so forth), but by the end of the novel the most important pair seems to be Barton and Carson. Consider the connections between the two not only in terms of the personalities and circumstances but in terms of the class ideologies for which they stand. To what degree do they and their outcomes reflect the moral and political position taken by the novel?

11. Consider the concept of “class” as developed in both Mary Barton and The Condition of the Working Class in England. What makes a class an identifiable unit? How are the classes differentiated. To what degree and in what ways is class an important element of the ways in which characters in Gaskell’s novel identify themselves and identify others? Is there a difference between the distinction of “workers” from “owners” and the distinction of “the proletariat” from “the bourgeoisie”?

12. Discuss the treatment of Chartism in Gaskell and Engels. Given the fact that Barton turns out to be a murderer, is he an effective spokesman for the Chartist position? Does Gaskill seem to support Chartism? Does Engels? Do they express similar reservations about Chartism? The problem of the workers, after all, is basically economic, and Chartism proposes a political solution (universal male enfranchisement). Does the political solution, as Gaskill and Engels see it, adequately address the economic problem?

13. Discuss Mary Barton as an effort to apply a specifically Christian solution to the social and economic problems of Victorian Manchester. Can one define the Christian position as urging the unfortunate to accept their social positions but urging the well-off to provide substantial charitable aid to the helpless? Evaluate this position in terms of Gaskell’s novel and Engels’s description of Manchester.

The Novel as Document; the Novel as Aesthetic Object

14. To what extent is Mary Barton seriously about the conditions of the working class; to what extent does it genuinely seek to articulate significant social criticism? Or is it primary a domestic novel concerned with telling a romantic and dramatic love story? Is the condition of the poor merely a setting for the novel? What is the relative importance of the love story and of the plight of the poor? Does the love story serve as a vehicle for presenting the situation of impoverished workers, or does it distract readers from that situation?

15. The novel seems filled with ironic situations: characters say things they do not mean or misunderstand the statements of others; characters take actions on the basis of misimpressions, or they deliberately mislead other characters. Discuss Mary Barton as an ironic novel, or a novel about misunderstandings. What is the relation of this element of the novel to its treatment of social issues?

16. Mary Barton sets up a series of contrasts. What are the major contrasting elements of the novel? Do these contrasts effectively and convincingly embody the basic ideas of the novel, or do they lead to oversimplification? Do these comparisons accurately depict the situation of English working people in the 1840s? What is the relation of the Gaskell’s contrasts to the inevitable class warfare envisioned by Engels?

17. Setting aside the particular factual differences between Mary Barton and The Condition of the Working Class in England, what does Gaskell’s novel contribute to the picture of working-class life that Engels does not? In effect the question asks you to justify fiction as a form of social and political discourse. In what ways can we think of an imaginative description as truer than social and economic description and analysis?

18. Though accused by its early reviewers of overstating the harshness of managers and the plight of the workers, Mary Barton does not contain significant negative information emphasized by Engels. What does she leave out, and how significant are her omissions? In what ways does her agenda in writing Mary Barton differ from that of Engels in The Condition of the Working Class in England?

The Composition and Reception of Mary Barton

19. In the letters included in the Broadview edition (“Appendix A”), Elizabeth Gaskell explains, after the fact, some elements of her intentions in writing Mary Barton, and she makes similar statements in the “Preface” to the novel. How accurate do these statements seem in relation to your own reading of the novel? What is the authority of the author in discussing his or her own work?

20. “Appendix B” of the Broadview edition includes five early reviews of Mary Barton. They reveal not only different readings and reactions to the novel but also different attitudes toward a major subject of the novel–the condition of workers in Manchester of the early forties. Discuss these reviews as indications of the early reception of the novel. What light do they shed on the significance of the novel itself?

21. Mary Barton was not the only Victorian novel written about the conditions of the working class and the problems of class conflict. Others include Charles Dickens’s Hard Times, Charlotte Bronte’s Shirley, and George Eliot’s Felix Holt. If you are familiar with one of these novels, you might compare it to Mary Barton.

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