Beyond Philanthropy: Gaskell and the Chartists

How did a minister's wife at a prestigious chapel, which numbered bankers, factory owners, aldermen, and MPs in its congregation, come into contact with Chartist ideas? I would suggest three modes of contact, the most direct of which was Gaskell and her husband's philanthropic work, which embodied the widespread Unitarian commitment to education as a means of individual and social reform.Footnote ² As is well known, Gaskell married at the age of twenty-one, leaving behind her maternal aunt and rural childhood home to join her new husband in Manchester. Her career as an author began gradually as she balanced writing with child rearing and active participation in the Cross Street Chapel where her husband William worked as an associate minister. Gaskell's involvement included performing home visits for the Unitarian Domestic Mission and teaching in the chapel's Sunday school, which provided free instruction for the children of the poor (Thiele 266, Brill 32–33, 62).William served as secretary of the Domestic Mission, held English classes at the Mechanics’ Institute and Working Men's College, and helped manage these and other organizations. Gaskell's letters leave ample evidence of the impression encounters in these contexts made upon her. In 1838, she wrote to Mary Howitt about her husband's lectures on “The Poets and Poetry of Humble Life,” presented in Miles Platting, “the very poorest district of Manchester”: “You cannot think how well they have been attended, or how interested people have seemed. And the day before yesterday two deputations of respectable-looking men waited on him to ask him to repeat those lectures in two different parts of the town. He is going on with four more in the winter, and meanwhile we are picking up all the ‘Poets of Humble Life’ we can think of” (Letters 33; Brill 46–47). Perhaps remembering these earnest visitors, Gaskell makes inverted home visits an important structuring device in Mary Barton. Whereas laborers call on the mill-owner Carson, he remains ignorant of the domestic life of his workers.

No matter the paternalistic assumptions common in educational philanthropy, instructing Manchester operatives in the 1840s and 50s involved dialogue with a politicized population, potentially exposing the teacher to radical notions. At the end of the 1850s, the Chartist W. E. Adams took the Rev. Gaskell's Mechanics’ Institute course. In Adams's telling, the participatory nature of William's class was striking. Students prepared themes to be read and discussed in class, including one by Adams on “the republican idea.” Years later in Memoirs of a Social Atom, Adams recalled the experience appreciatively: “Our literary evenings under Mr. Gaskell were ambrosial evenings indeed” (390–91). Even home visits to the impoverished might involve more equal communication than is usually assumed. Elizabeth's friend Susanna Winkworth's relieved description of encounters with a family of Chartists evokes the give and take of argument, not the imposition of ideas from on high, even if Winkworth might have expected passive acquiescence: “[Having] despaired of getting them to listen to reason. . . quite to my surprise last Tuesday, the man began to praise me and said that if all the middle classes took as great an interest in the working classes as I did, they could soon come to an understanding with each other and get their grievances redressed” (qtd. in Uglow 163).

In North and South, Gaskell's depiction of philanthropic visits captures their fraught and politically-charged nature, of which her friend complained. At the same time, Gaskell presents conversations arising in this context as dynamic and surprisingly egalitarian. Indeed, the protagonist Margaret Hale, an ex-minister's daughter, learns far more from the working-class family she visits than what she imparts, including the crucial insight that they are right to resent her presumption in assuming the role of benevolent counselor. When Margaret suggests Christian resignation to the family's daughter, the father reproaches her: “Now, I’ll not have my wench preached to. She's bad enough as it is, with her dreams and her methodee fancies” (91; ch. 11). In The Life of Charlotte Brontë, Gaskell records similar skepticism towards charitable visitors among the Reverend Brontë's Haworth parishioners. Their dislike of being “preached to,” like Nicholas Higgins’ in North and South, made them appreciate Charlotte's father's desultory attitude toward home visits: “many of the Yorkshiremen would object to the system of parochial visiting; their surly independence would revolt from the idea of any one having a right, from his office, to inquire into their condition, to counsel, or to admonish them” (42). Gaskell's own letters tell us little about the circumstances of her conversations with the Manchester poor, but they say more about the influence they exerted on her than the uplift she provided. Indeed, a Manchester Chartist helped inspire Mary Barton: “Nobody and nothing was real (I am sorry for you, but I must tell the truth) in M. Barton, but the character of John Barton; the circumstances are different, but the character and some of the speeches, are exactly of a poor man I know” (Letters 82). And: “‘John Barton’ was the original title of the book. Round the character of John Barton all the others formed themselves; he was my hero, the person with whom all my sympathies went, with whom I tried to identify myself at the time, because I believed from personal observation that such men were not uncommon” (Letters 74).Footnote ³

A second way that Gaskell would have been exposed to Chartist ideas is through her contact with a circle of radical Unitarians. Understanding Gaskell's relationship with this network contextualizes the novel's sharp questioning of common middle-class assumptions about the market, the nature of poverty, and the rights of the poor. While Unitarianism as a whole was defined by a reforming zeal which led members of the religion to play important roles in the abolition of slavery and Catholic emancipation, a left wing of the church was committed to causes more radical still, including Chartism at home and republicanism in Europe.Footnote ⁴ More skeptical about orthodox political economy than many of their co-religionists, this group centered on W. J. Fox's South Place Chapel in London and included in the forties John Humphreys Parry and the young lawyers William Shaen and James Stansfeld. Reforming authors and publishers who were not themselves Unitarians also moved in Fox's orbit, including Douglas Jerrold, Eliza Cook, and William and Mary Howitt. Not only did the radical Unitarians endorse the Chartists’ program, they actively participated in radical organizations, especially William Lovett's National Association in London.Footnote ⁵ This organization emphasized education, self-improvement, peace, and women's rights, issues all resonant with the commitments of Fox's circle. In lectures at the association's National Hall in Gate Street, Holborn, William Shaen spoke on phrenology and Sabbath legislation, James Stansfeld talked about educational reform and the need for teachers’ colleges, and W. J. Fox spoke regularly from 1846. Another Unitarian, John Humphreys Parry, edited the National Association Gazette, to which Fox contributed.

Nor did influence flow only from middle-class philanthropists to working-class protégés. A treatise on education by William Lovett and John Collins, titled Chartism, so impressed William Shaen that he wrote his sister of plans to use it as the basis for the curriculum of the Unitarian Sunday school he superintended (Gleadle 76). Lovett contributed articles about Chartist activities to Howitt's People's Journal, and acted as the magazine's publisher after debates about religion prompted him to resign his position as secretary of the National Association.Footnote ⁶ Jerrold, Fox, and Howitt were enthusiastic enough about the writings of the “laureate of labour” Thomas Cooper to contribute letters to a soiree honoring him (NS, May 9, 1846). The Chartist Circular, in turn, excerpted Howitt's writings on the colonies while the Northern Star reprinted poetry from Howitt's Journal and included a poem which puffed Howitt in the form of an acrostic: “Wonder no more! ye Tyrant men, / If ’gainst you wields the patriot's pen. . . ” (NS Oct. 24, 1846).Footnote ⁷ Chartists and radical Unitarians also came together in two organizations dedicated to promoting the cause of republican émigrés, Lovett's People's League and the People's International League (Finn 71–72, Prothero 225). In sum, Fox's circle celebrated working-class literature and culture, supported Chartism as a movement seeking intellectual and political liberation, and actively sought to build alliances with working-class radicals.

Although Gaskell was not directly involved in this London-based and mostly masculine network, outspoken and politically-minded women connected to it were some of her most intimate friends. In late 1847, when Gaskell was completing the novel, she hosted Annie Shaen, William's sister, in Manchester, and visited the Shaen family at Crix, near Colchester, where she talked politics for several hours. Gaskell also knew William Shaen through Emily Winkworth, who lived with the Gaskells while being tutored by the Rev. Gaskell. Winkworth, herself a committed reformer, became engaged to the radical lawyer over Christmas 1848. The Howitts, long-time advocates of abolition and peace, were especially important in the context of Mary Barton. Correspondents from the 1830s, the Gaskells met the pair – much to both parties’ surprise – while vacationing in Heidelberg in 1841, where they spent some time together touring the city. The Howitts published Gaskell's first works in their journal, helped place Mary Barton at Chapman and Hall’s, and offered advice on points of the contract. Although Gaskell only met Eliza Fox, W. J. Fox's bohemian daughter, on a trip to London after the publication of Mary Barton, the two artists formed a close and lifelong friendship.Footnote ⁸ Gaskell's affectionate letters to “Tottie” brim with enthusiasm for radical émigrés and describe the author's divided sense of her personality, including “one of my mes. . . a true Christian – (only people call her socialist and communist),” language echoed in North and South when the protagonist is teasingly described as “a democrat, a red republican, a member of the Peace Society, a socialist” (Letters 86, 108; North and South 323; ch. 39).

Finally, Gaskell might have encountered Chartist ideas by reading Chartist periodicals, a possibility curiously neglected in the critical literature, though Mary Barton depicts them as an important part of working-class culture. They were, moreover, easily available in Manchester, which was a long time center of radical publishing and the headquarters of the National Chartist Association until 1844. Scholars are familiar with Gaskell's friendship with Samuel Bamford, the author of Passages in the Life of a Radical, for whom she acquired from Tennyson a signed copy of his works. Although the aging Bamford grew increasingly conservative in the 1840s, the Chartist Northern Star excerpted his memoir (Aug. 8, 1840). Abel Heywood, a printer and proprietor of an important radical bookstore, was also a “freelance Unitarian” and visited the Cross Street Chapel (Seed 16). At Heywood's shop and many others, Gaskell would have found McDouall's Chartist and Republican Journal and the National Association Gazette as well as the Star, which evidence from Mary Barton strongly suggests she read.Footnote ⁹ Not only was she aware of the Star's frequently communal consumption (she shows Barton reading a copy of it borrowed from a radical public house), but she accurately represents the kind of material found in it from the mid-1840s when it became increasingly concerned with the factory question (John Barton reads an editorial supporting “short time” – legislation limiting the work week). More speculatively, the significant publicity around the lottery for the Chartist land plan might have inspired the novel's use of the figure of the lottery to describe the conditions of the poor and to designate John Barton the secret assassin of Henry Carson. In a drawing conducted in Manchester on Easter Monday, 1846, the Chartist Co-operative Land Society chose at random from among its thousands of members the “fustian landlords” who would receive homes on the first of five farms purchased with society funds.Footnote ¹⁰ Finally, Gaskell had a good grasp of the canon of authors promoted by the radical press. In Jem Wilson's climactic confrontation with Henry Carson she has the artisan intone a line of Burns, whose poetry Chartist journals ubiquitously reprinted. The narrator later speculates that the operatives representing the strike know their Carlyle, who was also widely excerpted. These instances of working-class reading will be examined in detail below.

Philanthropy among a politicized population, diverse connections with the radical Unitarians, and exposure to working-class print culture all suggest Gaskell's access to Chartist ideas, especially on themes central to Mary Barton, including education, self-help, and mutual improvement. The following two sections explore a range of Chartist viewpoints by examining Lovett and Collins's Chartism as well as writing in McDouall's Chartist and Republican Journal, a weekly published in the Manchester region in 1841 and 1842. Although there is no evidence Gaskell was familiar with this specific material, together they describe the radical milieus with which she came into contact. The unstamped and one-penny McDouall’s was the type of writing John Barton's original would have read – even more than the Star it was full of the kind of polemics about the factory system which Gaskell's hero quotes to his daughter's suitor. But McDouall’s was also pre-occupied with questions surrounding self-help and literacy. It reported contemporary debates about education and aimed to rebut middle-class stereotypes that justified a monopoly on political privilege with claims of working-class ignorance. Its diverse contents themselves integrated a curriculum about political rights with a more general program of learning. Lovett and Collins's Chartism, which, as already mentioned, was influential among the radical Unitarians, called for a national system of schools while suggesting a theory of pedagogy that would transform classrooms into laboratories of local democracy. Chartism and McDouall’s show a basis in radical thought for Gaskell's celebration of the liberatory potential of learning and the novel's vision of self-help based on collective activity and mutual support.

“A System of Education Which Puts Their Useful Knowledge to Shame”

As much as the now more-commonly discussed issues of poverty, inequality, and social strife, a debate about education defined the “condition of England” question in the 1830s and 1840s. Education was seen as a sign of division between the nations of rich and poor but also held out as a potential remedy for that divide. Whig politicians and middle-class philanthropists hoped Mechanics’ Institutes and a newly decorous penny press would foster a culture of respectability and invest the working classes in the emerging industrial order by promoting the virtues of thrift, sobriety, and diligence. But working-class activists sharply contested these limited notions of improvement. They challenged what should count as education, the context in which instruction should occur, and the ultimate goal of learning. Considering the fierceness of the debate, the term “education” poses terminological problems, a difficulty Dickens complained of in 1848 when he noted that “that ill-used word might, quite as reasonably, be employed to express a teapot” (qtd. in Hartley 89). Risking imprecision, I use “education” in the expansive sense favored by the radical press, in which any formal or informal efforts by individuals or groups to acquire or share knowledge counted as education.Footnote ¹¹ Stressing the informal nature of much working-class learning countered middle-class educational reformers who emphasized the lack of working-class knowledge and proposed schools as a means to mitigate the negative influence working-class families and communities supposedly exerted on children. The radical press defined education as inherently political, true education as movement towards liberation (Harrison xiv; Haywood 24). In this light, the press saw itself as a crucial agent of learning, the proper educator of the people. This notion continued to animate the Chartist press in the 1840s. Indeed, the 1830s struggle for a free press was a vital tributary of the Chartist movement. The London Working Man's Association, which drafted the text of the Charter in 1837, was founded to assist in paying the fines of editors and printers convicted in the “war of the unstamped,” a campaign aimed to repeal the “taxes on knowledge.” As the LWMA expanded its agenda, a free press remained an intrinsic element of the radical program and a part of a vision of the democratic potential of education (Altick 341). Reflecting these ideas, the Poor Man's Guardian's motto proclaimed “Knowledge is Power.” In a gesture at once pre-figurative and self-authorizing, the Guardian defiantly replaced the red government stamp with a black one showing a printing press.

The career of William Lovett embodies the way education played a central role in radical culture. A cabinet-maker, long-time activist, and founder of the LWMA, Lovett had himself undertaken an arduous program of self-education, reading widely on politics, language, and religion before becoming involved in various mutual improvement endeavors including the London Mechanics’ Institute and a radical discussion group called the Liberals.Footnote ¹² His pamphlet, Chartism, a New Organization of the People (1840), written with John Collins, was the most extensive treatment of educational theory the Chartist movement produced. Attentive to the material basis of knowledge, Chartism attempts to find ways to surmount the constraints placed on working-class learning by poverty and the continual necessity of labor, challenges usually glossed over in middle-class publications celebrating working-class achievement, including George Craik's popular The Pursuit of Knowledge under Difficulty, despite the latter's title.

Lovett and Collins composed Chartism during their twelve-month confinement in Warwick Gaol on a conviction for seditious libel resulting from the incendiary Manifesto of Ulterior Measures of the Chartist convention of 1839, which urged that in the event that Parliament rejected the Chartist petition for sweeping suffrage reform the people respond with consumer boycotts, the withdrawal of currency from banks, and a “national holiday” or general strike.Footnote ¹³ Though conditions in the prison were harsh and Lovett suffered poor health for years from bronchial and intestinal issues arising there, the confinement provided the working-class activists enforced leisure and a room of their own, allowing them, paradoxically, the freedom to write:

Lovett and Collins argue that the Chartist rank and file should direct their efforts to building a network of democratic educational institutions. They suggest that if the million plus signatories of the first Chartist petition would subscribe a small sum to a central body, the association could maintain a vast range of services: a national system of schools, 710 circulating libraries; a press which would distribute 20,000 tracts per week, and 80 district halls. The halls would offer evening programs for adult instruction and amusement and free non-denominational schools for children of all ages and both sexes (25–26). Relying on the cultural wealth indigenous to the class, the schools would contain small museums “furnished. . . by the collections and contributions of the members” (54).Footnote ¹⁴ Finally, the organization would award prizes for essays which help advance an enlightened pedagogy, a topic badly in need of development: “Though much has been written on the subject of education, we think that very little of it has been to the purpose” (54).

Chartism itself lays out a set of pedagogical practices designed to bring radical ideals into the classroom. In the words of the Northern Star, the pamphlet creates “a system of education which puts their useful knowledge to shame” (Oct 17, 1840; qtd. in Simon 244). Lovett and Collins continually stress the importance of democratic structures and cooperative learning. Adult education should focus on discussion groups and reading circles, forums which depend on the involvement of all. The education of children should eschew lecture and recitation in order to foster more active and creative kinds of participation. Lovett and Collins's ideas in this regard differ from most educational initiatives in the 1830s, the heyday of the monitorial system, which emphasized discipline and rote learning (Simon 262). Lovett and Collins's faith in cooperative self-help contrasts starkly with the educational establishment, which often saw the school's role in educating the poor as “redeeming the mischief wrought in generations of a vicious parentage” (Kay-Shuttleworth, First Report 295). Even Owenite educational theory considered students raw material rather than equal participants in a shared endeavor (Simon 265).Footnote ¹⁵ Lovett and Collins, on the other hand, denigrate the idea of students passively acquiring a set body of knowledge, emphasizing instead the realization of the student's own capacities: “‘EDUCATION,’ to be useful, such as will tend to make wise and worthy members of the community, must comprise the judicious development and training of ALL the human faculties, and not, as is generally supposed, the mere teaching of ‘reading, writing, and arithmetic’” (67). To this end, the authors suggest a model curriculum which includes literature, music, science, dance, and the appreciation of nature. Recognizing individual enjoyment as both a legitimate goal of education and a spur to greater learning, they keep in view which activities children will find the most stimulating. A measure of Lovett and Collins's heterodoxy is their emphasis on play for the youngest classes, for whom time outside the classroom should be paramount, because in “the air and exercise of the play-ground. . . all their faculties are in full activity” (38).

The approach to discipline in Chartism represents another departure from contemporary norms. A pedagogy of the oppressed, the essay stresses that power inequalities between teacher and student reflect and perpetuate wider injustice. Lovett and Collins therefore condemn corporal punishment for its brutality as well as the way it promotes a “slavish subjection” (41). Along similar lines, they insist that schools welcome girls while opening the National Association's membership to women. Linking political oppression with subjugation in the private sphere, the authors argue that women's particular exploitation demands their political education (61). Lovett's feminism featured prominently in the National Association, separating it from most Chartist organizations. Subtitled “The Rights of Man and the Rights of Woman,” the association's Gazette published or re-printed essays on political and educational inequality by Harriet Martineau, Mary Wollstonecraft, and the Unitarian W. J. Fox (Jan 8, Jan 15, and Feb 12, 1842).

Upon founding the National Association in March 1841, William Lovett promoted it as an alternative to Fergus O’Connor's National Charter Association, an effort which led to a schism within Chartism and resulted in Lovett's marginalization from the mainstream movement. Although the National Hall became an important cultural center in London, Lovett's organization had little reach outside the capital and its membership never exceeded five hundred. Nevertheless, as Kathyrn Gleadle has shown, alliances forged between middle- and working-class radicals under the auspices of the National Association made significant contributions to the early feminist movement (77–81). The association also helped nurture Chartism's cultural front. Although the O’Connorite Star eventually condemned the organization as a source of disunity and lampooned “Knowledge Chartism” as a poor substitute for political organizing, it did not reject Lovett and Collins's educational program in itself (April 17, 1841).Footnote ¹⁶ Indeed, as local organizations followed the Star's lead by passing resolutions censuring the “New Move,” they pursued the very direction Lovett and Collins advocated. The early 1840s witnessed an explosion of working-class cultural and educational activity as radicals organized schools, churches, temperance societies and libraries, conducted camp revivals and went on lecture tours. Poetry readings, political tea parties, and soirees took their place as fixtures of Chartist life beside “monster” rallies, branch meetings and debates. By 1840, Chartist adult classes had spread throughout much of the country (Silver 82; Chase 144–45). The Halifax Chartists established a reading room in their party headquarters; in Leeds a debating society aimed “to cultivate that talent which, for want of opportunities, has lain as long dead” (Northern Star March 27, 1841). O’Connor praised as “a great intellectual hotbed” an enormous Manchester hall outfitted with a Sunday School, library, and massive amphitheatre, which became a center of Mancunian culture (qtd. in Simon 244). The Sunday school served “seventy children of various ages,” whose parents, according to the Star, were delighted at the “arrangements made for carrying out an effective system of education, so much at variance with the generally adopted plan of conducting Sunday schools” (Jun. 24, 1843). The rich working-class tradition of politicized education, then, would have been available to Gaskell in writing Mary Barton.

Useful Knowledge is Power? The Penny Magazine and the Chartist Press

Lovett and Collins's tract and other Chartist writing on education occurred in a publishing market saturated with educational material for the poor, which presented a variety of perspectives on the significance of working-class learning. By the 1840s, the stamp duty had been substantially lowered but the penalties for violating it made more draconian. At the same time, a new kind of periodical literature strenuously competed with the radical press for working-class audiences. Useful knowledge magazines like the Penny Magazine and Chamber's Edinburgh Journal were part of a concerted effort by middle-class philanthropists to shape working-class reading by providing a politically safe alternative to the unstamped press.Footnote ¹⁷ The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (SDUK), which published the Penny Magazine as well as inspirational biographies and tracts on a variety of subjects, most clearly embodied this program. A postscript in the opening number of the Penny Magazine imagines how orthodox reading will replace more illicit material: “We are called upon to pour into [the channel opened by other cheap papers]. . . clear waters from the pure and healthy springs of knowledge” (Mar 1, 1832, 8). Thirty years later, the Magazine's publisher recalled his paper's effort to supersede “contraband newspapers. . . dangerous in principle and coarse in language” (Knight 2: 180).

A weekly miscellany superintended by Charles Knight, the Penny Magazine achieved the extraordinarily high circulation of 200,000 in 1832, a popularity attributable to several factors including its innovative use of woodcut illustrations. Though sales declined to 40,000 by the mid-1840s, even the latter figure matched the Northern Star at its height.Footnote ¹⁸ The Magazine included scores of articles on industrial processes and other technical and scientific topics, making it a literary analog to the Mechanics’ Institutes movement, which the SDUK also supported. But it also went out of its way to “touch rapidly and lightly upon many subjects” (Knight 2: 182). Travel writing, anthropology, historical essays, pieces on the colonies, and portraits of famous writers all appeared regularly. Though imaginative literature was putatively excluded, the Magazine skirted its own prohibition with ample quasi-fictional material, including summaries of the Canterbury Tales and the Cid throughout 1841. Aligning learning with entertainment rather than politics was characteristic for the journal. The paper's first issue outlines a theory of leisure reading which makes this bias clear:

While eschewing “the violence of party discussion,” the Penny Magazine nevertheless sought out controversial topics, but treated them in a non-polemical, putatively objective manner. Essays on industrial technology and on the colonies were presented absent the debates raging about emigration, colonial rule, and the “factory question.” The Magazine avoided advocating laissez-faire, but its illustrations and enthusiastic prose implicitly promoted the benefits of industrialization (Bennett 132). In this way, the Penny Magazine taught its audience to read apolitically what was divisive elsewhere while articulating a vision of politics as a sphere separable from the broad and diverse realms of knowledge it claimed as its subject.

The framework of useful knowledge similarly bleached the controversy out of historical writing. Once again, the Magazine attempted to re-contextualize the kinds of material common in the radical press. Histories of the Norman Conquest and of seizures of monastic properties during the Protestant Reformation, both leitmotifs in radical discourse, featured prominently, but the optimistic tone of travel narratives and accounts of museum exhibitions bled into this more contentious subject matter. In the inaugural issue, for instance, an article recounts improvements in Charing Cross brought about by “clearing away decaying houses” (Mar. 31, 1831, 1). Rather than justifying the clearances, the magazine offers a history of the neighborhood, featuring the sixteenth-century seizure of a Catholic hospital, a precedent for the latter-day urban renewal. The off-handed presentation of interesting but decontextualized facts converts the privatization of Church property and the destruction of charity for the poor into a piece of local color. Accounts of the Norman Conquest likewise promote a touristic sensibility: “Whatever our individual opinions may be as to the object or necessity of any particular battle, or even of battle and warfare more generally, who can look upon the scene of a ‘well-foughten field’ without finding themselves drawn, as it were, into its influences” (Jan. 16, 1841, 17–18).

If radical topics reemerged as a kind of political unconscious in the Penny Magazine, the conventions of useful knowledge exerted influence on Chartist periodicals as well. Struggling over a mutually conditioning field, radical papers responded to the useful knowledge fad by incorporating writing on an ever-widening range of subjects. They gave substantial space to science, biography, history, and literature, a break from previous radical publications which focused more narrowly on politics. This new emphasis characterized the whole range of genres which defined Chartist print culture and evidenced a commitment to a democratic and communitarian variant of the improvement ethic. News weeklies like the Northern Star and the Northern Liberator offered reports on the reading groups, Sunday schools, and lectures which were part of the fabric of daily life in Chartist branches. Literary magazines such as the Labourer included improving stories with democratic twists. Educational journals like the Chartist Circular and the National Association Gazette presented extended series on a range of topics, including educational experiments in other countries and debates concerning national education. And radical miscellanies like the Western Vindicator and McDouall's Chartist and Republican Journal offered a radical alternative to useful knowledge publications such as the Penny Magazine.

A member of the “uneasy classes,” Peter Murray McDouall was a Scottish doctor who became politicized as a young man when he conducted a survey on the health and living conditions of the working classes in Bury, where he had established his first medical practice in the mid-1830s.Footnote ¹⁹ The poverty, sickness, and degradation he discovered amidst the Lancashire operatives made him a vehement critic of the abuses of the factory system and, eventually, a Chartist.Footnote ²⁰ At the Chartist convention of 1839, McDouall represented the left wing by urging the right of the people to bear arms and calling for a general strike in the event of Parliament rejecting the National Petition, the position which provided grounds for Lovett and Collins's imprisonment. Arrested himself in 1839, McDouall served a year term in Chester Castle. After his release, he suffered chronic financial difficulties and supported himself, like a number of Chartist activists, through paid lecturing and journalism. He wore a black suit and long cape when he spoke in public and was described by a fellow Chartist as possessing “the appearance of a hero of melodrama,” a persona which seemed only to increase his popularity (qtd. in Ashton and Pickering 15). His journal, based a few miles east of Manchester in Ashton, combined articles on republicanism and the factory system with topics further afield from radical politics. Over a run of twenty-seven issues, it printed travel stories from the American west; a history of the corruption of the Roman Republic; a series of letters by William Aitken on hydrostatics (which was also the subject of an SDUK tract); jokes and humorous anecdotes; reflections on the French revolution; fables set in Turkey and Arabia; and weekly mathematical problems, to which solutions appeared in subsequent numbers.

But McDouall’s also carefully distinguished itself from useful knowledge magazines, criticizing middle-class educational provision in ways common to radical papers. The Chartists asserted that useful knowledge, despite its apolitical pretensions, promoted a politics in favor of the status quo (Johnson 78–79). The poet John Watkins wrote in the Star: “We ask for the Charter, and they give us a reading-made-easy” [Feb. 11, 1843 qtd. in Harrison 101]. For Lovett and Collins, philanthropic educational initiatives were “[training] up the youthful mind of our country to be submissive admirers of ‘things as they are’” (vi.). In McDouall’s, Bronterre O’Brien directly addressed Lord Brougham, the founder of the SDUK, complaining he encouraged education which would not “enable [the people] to resist their oppressors, but one that would teach them to be ‘content with their station,’ that is to say, to remain passive paupers and slaves. You would teach them the difference between a camel and a dromedary, but you would not teach them the difference between the natural and the artificial rights of property” (Jul. 3, 1841, 110–11). While deriding the irrelevance of useful knowledge material, the Chartist press liked to point out that knowledge of any stripe could be put to purposes beyond the schoolmaster's intent. Following an 1845 outbreak of incendiarism, the Star made hay with Brougham's claim that his educational initiatives had mitigated the luddite spirit of the working classes. The Star suggests instead that arsonists might have acquired their expertise in the middle-class's own papers: “Have the Penny Magazine, Chambers’ Journal. . . and the Saturday Magazine existed for nothing[?] Has all the stuff we have heard about fire-balls, and air-guns, and mixtures for spontaneous combustion, been all humbug” (July 21, 1840)? The insurrectionary-minded McDouall likewise plays on assumptions about the pacifying nature of education by urging adult classes be used as fronts for seditious organizing: “To be safe from the fangs of the law, sub-divide your association into reading clubs of any number. . . of subscribers to papers, pamphlets, &c; and, above all, profess only to aim at the spread of knowledge” (19). This suggestion had a distinguished pedigree in British radicalism, a tradition with which Gaskell would have been acquainted from reading Bamford's Passages in the Life of a Radical. Bamford recounts how during the governmental repression of 1816, “open meeting thus being suspended, secret ones ensued; they were originated at Manchester and assembled under various pretexts. Sometimes they were ‘benefit societies;’ sometimes ‘botanical meetings’. . . but their real purpose divulged only to the initiated, was to carry into effect the night attack on Manchester” (40).Footnote ²¹ In the context of discussions of adult schooling in McDouall’s, criticism of the pap provided in Brougham's “blue-coat slave training nurseries,” the advice for forming Chartist cells disguised as reading circles, though intended literally, becomes pointed satire (July 3, 1841, 111). The image of armed study groups turns on its head the notion of self-improvement through education as politically safe.

As Chartist papers mercilessly criticized useful knowledge publications, they also attempted to meet the demand for interest in the genre. Though the reader of McDouall’s failed to learn the “difference between a camel and a dromedary,” he or she did encounter a biography of Archimedes and a pair of articles on panther attacks in America. Even McDouall's polemical “Lectures on the Factory System,” and his articles on Roman and British history, might be found, slightly modified, in the Penny Magazine. In the Chartist press, however, a radical sensibility defined the most banal content. Thus William Aitken introduces a series on hydrostatics, “a branch of natural philosophy, [which] treats of the nature, gravity, pressure, and motions of fluids” in a utopian key (McDouall’s, Apr. 17, 1841, 23). For Aitken, the popular study of science will dispel “the unhallowed influence [of] a venal and hypocritical priesthood,” and conduct “the world at last to freedom” (14–15). The Western Vindicator, which featured a science column with articles on sound, astronomy, the atmosphere, and anatomy, distinguished its program from the offerings in Mechanics’ Institutes, where the curriculum is like the play “‘Hamlet’ with the part of Hamlet left out. . . . The earth, the air, the heavens are explored. . . but MAN – his nature and relations, the action of the external world upon him, his condition in society, his physical constitution – are neglected, or only honoured with an occasional and trifling notice” (Dec. 7, 1839).

Substantial differences also separated Chartist biographical and historical writing from those genres in useful knowledge papers. Chartist history underlined the contemporary significance of events, situating current crises in entrenched institutions. The National Association Gazette prefaces a history of taxation with the promise that the admittedly tedious subject will place its readers “in a better condition to understand the financial proceedings of the government, and to exercise a greater check upon its extravagance” (Jan. 15, 1842, 19). Accounts of other radical and revolutionary movements were also common, including the French Revolution and the plebian revolts in ancient Rome, the latter in Ernest Jones's Notes to the People. Needless to say, the Penny Magazine ignored these incendiary topics. Along similar lines, Chartist biography promoted a pantheon of revolutionary heroes. William Tell, Toussaint L’Ouverture, and Percy Shelley feature in the Chartist Circular and George Washington and the orators of the French Revolution in the National Association Gazette. These profiles present their subjects as exemplary as leaders of a movement rather than accomplished individuals as the papers emphasize the role of “the great mass of population in history” (Hall 236).

A dramatic example of the merger of educational and editorial functions occurs in a series in the Northern Star on state trials, which ran while John Frost and the other leaders of the Chartist rising in Newport awaited trial for treason during the winter of 1839–40. The four prisoners were ultimately condemned, but a massive petition campaign succeeded in saving their lives. As the country awaited their trial, the Star educated its readers on British justice by recounting Anne Boleyn's execution by Henry VIII, prosecutions for witchcraft in the time of Queen Elizabeth, and the scapegoating of Catholics in the aftermath of Guy Fawkes.Footnote ²² In the place of the SDUK's “Whig history” in which superstition has been gradually superseded by technology, reason, and liberal values, the Star shows irrationality and tyranny continuing into the present. Announcing that one issue's proceeds will go to the defense fund of the Welsh prisoners, and claiming that its series aims to rectify the “willful errors [of] bigoted historians,” the paper casts education and resistance as synonymous acts (Dec. 14, 1839; Dec. 21, 1839).

Beyond mocking the content of useful knowledge or re-imagining the genre in ways which configured learning as a terrain of ideological struggle, the Chartist press challenged a fundamental assumption of philanthropic educational initiatives: the supposed ignorance of the working-classes. A series of articles critical of knowledge tests as a voter qualification in McDouall’s defends the breadth of working-class learning. Arguing that all labor involves intellectual activity, McDouall underlines how social prejudice warps ideas of what counts as knowledge. He suggests, for instance, that demonstrating the use of a plough or loom might replace a contemplated literacy test as an appropriate assessment for the right to vote: “if you make the tools of labour the standard. . . then the least of the labourers would make a fool of the greatest of your aristocrats” (May 8, 1841, 42). A later essay propounds a materialist vision of learning in which reading contains within it several types of craft labor, anticipating Michael Denning's “labor theory of culture” with a labor theory of knowledge (Denning 91–94). In a polemical inversion of middle-class educational schemes, the working classes educate the rest of society, not vice-versa:

Images of weavers reduced to rags or colliers suffering exposure were a standard part of the radical idiom of the 1830s and 40s. Carlyle's Past and Present, Marx's Paris Manuscript, and the radical press used such images to radicalize and embody poetically the labor theory of value, in which the fruits of labor were lost to those who perform it.Footnote ²³ McDouall's innovation is to link this language to learning, to suggest that literacy has been torn from the class that creates it, because the mechanics who enable widespread reading are themselves barred from the enjoyment of knowledge (Aug. 28, 1841, 170). The question of the poor's claim on the world of culture and the implication of their exclusion from that world also animates Gaskell's novel, which like Chartist writing is attentive to the political stakes and material circumstances of education.

Collective Agency and Domestic Melodrama in Mary Barton

Raymond Williams's vexed appreciation of Mary Barton in Culture and Society helped establish the novel's place in the modern canon while delineating a set of terms through which the novel is still commonly discussed. For Williams, Mary Barton begins a powerful reconstruction of working-class life but ends a disappointing fable, in which the intractable problems of the two nations are displaced onto a fantasized space beyond the borders of England (99–103). Following the murder of a Manchester mill-owner, the Chartist John Barton all but disappears from the novel as the narrator turns her attention to private life and Mary's efforts to exonerate the falsely accused Jem Wilson. Williams's framework of a retreat from collective action to domestic regeneration, as well as his idea that this divide is marked formally with Gaskell's initial realism giving over to melodrama, remains influential. Catherine Gallagher describes how the competing generic conventions of tragedy (associated with John Barton's struggle) and melodrama (affiliated with the domestic plot around his daughter) shape the novel (Industrial 72–77). For Deirdre d’Albertis, Gaskell's novels “ricochet almost uncontrollably between orthodoxy and radicalism. . . even as each is ultimately resolved through an uncomfortable or, alternatively, an excessive resort to conservative ideologies of the State, Christianity, science, or the home” (13). Chris Vanden Bossche contends that by turning to Jem's upward mobility story Gaskell excludes all forms of working-class agency except individual improvement (173–74). Ruth Yeazell and Josephine Guy broaden Williams's framework to other works of social problem fiction. Yeazell contends that industrial novels commonly substitute a “conventional heroine” for a male figure associated with political violence, thereby shifting “from the public history of class conflict to the private story of an individual courtship” (243). Guy goes further, arguing that the individual was the horizon of possibility for all “mid-Victorian writers (of whatever political persuasion)” and that every social issue was inevitably “addressed by recommending changes in individual behaviours” (10).

Considering Gaskell's engagement with the Chartist program of education and self-improvement, however, complicates the dichotomy between the political and private upon which much of this criticism rests. Education in the 1840s was politically multivalent, supported as a prescription to resolve various social issues by both radicals and liberals, though in dissimilar ways. Appreciating this multivalence enables us to see Mary Barton as a thorough-going exploration of the relationship between individual and collective improvement. Radical ideas about education circulate freely in the novel. Lovett's emphasis on mutual improvement is instantiated in the circuit of cultural and intellectual sharing Gaskell describes. McDouall's complaints about the denigration of working-class intellectual accomplishments are echoed in the satirical portrait of the younger Carson's contempt for Jem and the striking operatives. And like the Chartists, Gaskell rejects the view of education as a simple antidote to social ills, a way to teach the lower orders respect and docility. Instead, the novel presents learning as oppositional and democratic, a surprising arena of working-class autonomy and authority. Rather than simply abandoning Chartist themes in the novel's second half, then, Gaskell isolates the ideological currents within the movement which in her view hold out the best hope for the resolution of the crises she so vividly portrays. Indeed, the achievement of working-class political power is not the solution Gaskell advances. She continues to suggest that the task of advocacy for the poor should fall to well-meaning members of the middle classes, a position which starkly separates her from the Chartists as well as from the radical Unitarians who supported the demand for working-class civil rights. Nevertheless, the novel delineates the limits of an upward-mobility plot based on individual success, so that Jem and Mary's happy ending remains shadowed by and connected to the collective struggles which the novel details.

Narrative focalization has often been taken as an index of the separation between the novel's two halves with their various thematic emphases. Detailed attention to focalization, however, troubles the supposedly neat division between the Chartist and domestic sections of the novel.Footnote ²⁴ Mary's perspective becomes central after the death of Carson, but the narrator initially aligns herself with multiple viewpoints, including Mary’s. In fact, the reader first learns of John's political life through his daughter's confused perspective: “she was aware that he had joined clubs, and become an active member of the Trades’ Union, but it was hardly likely that a girl of Mary's age. . . should care much for the differences between the employers and the employed” (23; ch. 3). By intermingling political and domestic themes, the chapter goes on to indicate the importance of politics to even “a girl of Mary's age.” In the space of a few pages, the reader learns of John's beliefs; of the death of his son by scarlet fever; and of Mary's desire to seek work as an apprentice dressmaker, a decision informed by her father's attitude which holds “domestic servitude a species of slavery” (26; ch. 3).

Domestic and political themes remain intertwined throughout the early part of the novel. Even John's visit to London as a Chartist delegate is embedded in a chapter about Jem's frustrated attempt to propose to Mary. In a humorous scene, the would-be lover is made to listen to John's perspective on the factory question while his daughter hides in her room. The very appearance of Mary's competing suitors have been marked by history – Jem Wilson's face is scarred by childhood smallpox, a fact notable in a novel which understands the exposure to disease as an essential inequality between the two nations. Jem's mother Jane similarly feared her husband would retract his promise to marry after she was maimed in an industrial accident. As these examples indicate, the personal lives of Gaskell's characters unfold in a world suffused with political and economic conflicts. The novel's original title, A Manchester Love Story, highlights the ironic disjunction between the quotidian nature of Mary's romantic adventures and the world-historic pressures brought to bear upon them.

Although the narrator leavens her account of her heroine's work with details of frivolous gossip, Mary is cast in the iconic role of the sweated seamstress, a figure which recurs in mid-century fiction as a symbol of the abuse of female labor and one to which Gaskell returns in Ruth. The repeated scenes of Mary and her friend Margaret sewing late into the night are the only depiction of work in the novel, a fact rarely noticed in critical interpretations, perhaps because the treatment of their work differs markedly from the exposé-like descriptions of the impoverished home life of the Bartons, Davenports, and Wilsons. Nevertheless, Mary's sexual vulnerability arises out of her subordinate economic position. The narrator underlines how Carson's attempted seduction of Mary derives from his position of class privilege, his threatening behavior paralleling his militancy in the face of the strike.Footnote ²⁵

In Williams's account, Henry Carson's murder is the hinge between the novel's focus on politics and its sensational storyline of romance and upward mobility. Williams's emphasis, however, has tended to obscure the novel's delicate interlacing of the Chartist and domestic plot. Participating in a union lottery to decide who will revenge the mill owner's lock-out, Barton chooses “the lot of the assassin,” an inspired device worthy of Boucicault (190; ch. 16). This fated resolution decrees Barton commit an act of personal and political revenge: the tyrannical cotton lord is simultaneously the secret seducer of the hero's daughter. The elegant logic of the hero's action, however, is not the end of the story, as it would be in stage melodrama, for neither Barton nor any other character recognizes the justice of his deed. Mary, in fact, is dumbfounded at her father's involvement. She knows he is unaware of her romantic entanglement and cannot imagine what other motive he might have. The knowledge the reader shares with Mary as she pursues the contradictory goals of exonerating Jem and protecting her father creates a series of peculiar effects where the narrative generates suspense around Jem's guilt or innocence after the question has been settled. But by foregrounding the counter-factual possibility of Jem's guilt the novel explores the implications of two crimes, the actual assassination and a hypothetical murder resulting from a real love triangle. It explores, in other words, the very divide which has come to dominate critical discussion of the novel: the difference between stories about politics and about romance.Footnote ²⁶

Mary's correct but confused perspective views her father's participation as essentially random. His seemingly capricious act of violence is contrasted to the hypothetical involvement of Jem, who has a logical and natural connection to the immoral victim. The elder Carson's suspicions, the doubts of Jem's friends, and the sympathy the public shows the wronged lover all highlight the obvious legibility of romantic melodrama. Gaskell sharpens this comparison by showing Barton's failure to recognize his personal connection to Carson when he rebuffs his fallen sister-in-law Esther, who tries to warn him about the danger menacing Mary. By ignoring Carson, Barton has neglected his responsibilities toward his daughter, a failing he unwittingly rectifies with his crime.

Caroline Levine has alerted us to the high stakes of suspense in Victorian realism. For Levine, the creation of doubt frequently functions as a kind of “political and epistemological training, a way to foster energetic skepticism and uncertainty rather than closure and complacency” (2). Levine's framework is particularly suggestive for Mary Barton where suspense is “anomalous,” involving a mystery which has been already resolved. What question, then, does the murder investigation consider? We have noted that presenting Mary and others baffled by Barton's involvement in the crime creates a sense of chance ruling Gaskell's characters’ lives. The excruciating scenes of Job and Jem's mother waiting as Mary races to save Jem likewise pit human agency against a fatal mechanism, the machinery of the law. These effects are consonant with the feeling of powerlessness in the face of the economy the first half of the novel emphasizes, a sense rendered more complete by Gaskell's willingness to leave unlocated the origin of the economic crisis which shutters the Manchester mills. Unlike Dickens, who typically traces crises to the wrongdoing of specific characters (i.e., Mr. Merdle's malfeasance in Little Dorrit), Gaskell precedes with broad overviews, seemingly unconcerned to enclose her characters’ universe as they are pummeled by abstractions beyond the range of their vision. Taking seriously the purpose of suspense, the murder plot picks up from a different angle themes central to the novel's first half, rather than simply abandoning them.

The novel's climax in the union's murderous lottery invokes Gaskell's framing metaphor for economic contingency and the helplessness of the poor. The introduction describes Gaskell's imaginative identification with beleaguered strangers buffeted by circumstances they cannot control:

When a real lottery dooms both Carson and Barton, Gaskell renders literal this figure for economic determination. The eschatological language of the preface describes in advance the plight of the Chartist hero, who to borrow a phrase from Jacques Rancière is “exposed to a precariousness that [takes] on the visage of prison” (Rancière 155). In the event, however, it is not the economic system alone which transforms Barton into the plaything of chance. Rather, the Chartists’ attempt to shape a collective destiny by imposing human will on anonymous economic forces ironically completes the hero's degradation. The narrator marks Barton's loss of freedom with repeated reference to the fixity of his expression, his “involuntary motions” and “measured clockwork tread” (Mary Barton 346; ch. 33; Graziano 144–48). Despairing of politics, Mary Barton turns to education as an alternative way to imagine agency in the face of crushing social forces. The following section analyzes the conflicting implications of this turn.

Education, Self-Help, and Mutual Improvement in Mary Barton

In the novel's penultimate chapter, the elder Carson asserts the importance of individual responsibility to answer Job's claim that as Christians the rich owe the poor a debt: “Still, facts have proved, and are daily proving, how much better it is for every man to be independent of help, and self-reliant” (385; ch. 37). This laissez-faire version of self-help anticipates the use to which liberals put the ideology in the 1850s when a ubiquitous gospel of individual transformation and the cult of the self-made man became important arguments against the need for the social amelioration of economic conditions.Footnote ²⁷ Carson ultimately becomes a quiet reformer, but does the novel affirm his perspective on the need for sturdy self-reliance? In other words, how does Gaskell negotiate the divergence between the liberal assumptions of the Unitarian Domestic Mission, in which fostering individual virtues would ameliorate social harms, and Chartist ideals which saw education in terms of mutual support, solidarity, and political engagement?

The novel is structured around a chiasmus. Initially, Mary's romantic daydreams appear selfish and vain, whereas John's political involvement appears noble and self-sacrificing. Ultimately, however, John's political enthusiasm severs his ties to the community, and Mary demonstrates her heroism in the effort to rescue Jem while Jem's loyalty and intelligence contribute to his success. This changing evaluation of Mary and her father, however, is more complex than it at first appears. The narrator's attitude towards Mary becomes sympathetic only after her romantic attachment transfers to Jem, for it is the selfish nature of Mary's dreams, as much as her sexual naiveté, which the narrator condemns. Mary fantasizes about providing a condescending patronage to her spurned working-class lover once she becomes a member of the social elite as Henry Carson's wife. Worried that “kindness from me, when I’m another’s, will only go against the grain” with Jem (80; ch. 7), she imagines rescuing her father from “the old dim work-a-day court” and installing him in her “grand house,” a fantasy made humorous not least because she envisions her father perusing “newspapers and pamphlets. . . everyday – and all day long if he liked,” enjoying, in other words, a political literature which condemns exactly such scenes of idleness and luxury.

The increasing financial stability of the Wilson family allows the narrator to revisit earlier motifs in a dramatically changed context, as when the terrifying scenes at Ben Davenport's deathbed, which include scathing social commentary, are reworked through the representation of Alice Wilson's peaceful death and Mary's illness and recovery. But even as an unremarked aura of prosperity replaces images of destitution, the Wilsons’ increasing affluence depends on a savage irony. Jem is able to keep his job while his factory is “all the while turning off hands” (122; ch. 10), only because he has invented an engine which will enable his employer to replace a less efficient crank, a kind of device useful knowledge journals like the Penny Magazine endlessly celebrated without considering their social implications. On one level, Gaskell treats Jem's invention similarly, focusing narrowly on his ingenuity and the good fortune that results. But the novel has also intimated that such innovations depress the demand for labor and exacerbate the effects of the economic crisis, as when Barton's neighbors suggest the Chartists should demand the regulation of spinning-jennies to mitigate their impact on employment and wages.

If Jem and Mary become self-reliant at the end of the novel, they do so in a manner different from what the elder Carson imagines. Jem's upward trajectory does not entirely separate him from his class, either by elevating him into the ranks of the masters or cordoning off his family's fortunes from those of the community. In Raymond Williams's account, Jem's emigration epitomizes Gaskell's failure to find a solution to the narrative's conflicts, for his success occurs outside the framework of the factory system, and, indeed, outside of England. However, emigration as a closural gesture has a range of meanings in Victorian novels. The Micawbers’ voyage to Australia at the end of David Copperfield acts mostly as an escapist fantasy, though one ironic in its excess. Thomas Martin Wheeler's Sunshine and Shadow and Frances Trollope's Michael Armstrong, on the other hand, feature protagonists who seek asylum abroad as political and economic refugees. In these novels, emigration indicts British society by highlighting the intractability of the antagonisms which define it. Though Gaskell's idealized closing is less critical than Wheeler's or Trollope’s, the narrator in the final pages turns back to an untransformed Manchester and the shared grave of John Barton and his sister-in-law, marking the limits of the proffered solution. Jem and Mary's success is also less individualistic than it might seem. A family carving a home out of the Canadian wilderness resembles the kind of emigration propaganda the Chartists press repeatedly debunked, a topic taken up in the next chapter. Yet even this vision of hardy pioneers includes the ghost of collective liberation: Jem achieves “independence” through his immersion in an institution loosely related to the radical politics depicted in the novel's first half. He obtains a position at an agricultural college in Toronto, his continued involvement in a culture of self-help and education signaling that the passage to Canada is more than a personal escape from the class structure.Footnote ²⁸ Duncombe, the name of the factory master who secures Jem his new position, affiliates this character with a famous ally of working-class radicalism. T. S. Duncombe, an MP for London, sponsored the Chartist petition of 1842 and had his portrait distributed by the Northern Star.

Margaret Jennings, the other character who prospers economically over the course of the novel, likewise remains loyal to the aspirations of the community as her fortunes improve. Just as Mary helps Margaret complete her outwork, Margaret insists on sharing with her impoverished friend the wages from her recitals at the Mechanics’ Institute. This mutual aid is part of the moral economy the novel reconstructs, a network of support notably different from the conflict-ridden system which binds masters and men. Tellingly, Gaskell elides the association of the Mechanics’ Institute with middle-class philanthropy, an irony given her and her husband's deep involvement in educational initiatives for the laboring classes. In North and South, the middle-class protagonist's father does prepare lectures for working-class audiences at a “neighbouring Lyceum,” but he does so badly, selecting his subject of “Ecclesiastical Architecture. . . in accordance with his own taste and knowledge” rather than his hearers’ interests (140; ch. 18). In Mary Barton, Gaskell renders the Mechanics’ Institute a working-class space where a popular audience enjoys politicized folk songs free from elite involvement. Similarly, the narrator constantly foregrounds the extent to which the poor pool their material and intellectual resources: characters share food, money, shelter, and work, as well as newspapers, poetry, medicine, and advice. This web of shared possessions, experiences, and knowledge comes to define Gaskell's characters in a way which defies novelistic convention. In Anne Graziano's account, John Barton too closely embodies the sociological conditions of Manchester to function effectively as a protagonist, because he lacks the sense of openness and possibility Bakhtin has highlighted as essential characteristics of novelistic heroes (144–48). Graziano helps explain why Gaskell dispenses with John in favor of Mary. But looked at another way, Gaskell shows how Barton participates in and depends upon a dense system of relationships for his existential ground, stretching the possibilities of a fictional protagonist's character space. Mary's developmental plot tracks whether and to what degree she will remain connected to this network or become independent of it.

The complexity and ambivalence of the upward mobility plot is an indication of the extent to which competing ideological imperatives shape Mary Barton. The novel likewise presents tangled viewpoints when it considers the nature and extent of working-class knowledge. The preface borrows the Carlylean motif of Chartism as an inarticulate expression of grievances by an ignorant population: “I became [anxious] to give some utterance to the agony which, from time to time, convulses this dumb people” (3; preface).Footnote ²⁹ This judgment intermittently resurfaces, and it is crucially related to the political failure the novel chronicles. Nevertheless, Gaskell gives the reader grounds to distrust it. First, the narrator presents herself as a naïve observer who cannot understand the science of political economy, affiliating her perspective with that of the “dumb people.” Second, just as textual developments frequently negate explicit affirmations of political and economic orthodoxy, the novel's detailed reconstruction of the intellectual pursuits of the working-class flatly contradicts the assertions of their ignorance. The puzzling cleavage between the sympathetic narrator's perspective and her understanding of the events she relates instantiates the inability of the middle class to comprehend working-class experience, a theme the novel considers at length. Footnote ³⁰

Job Legh, an amateur naturalist who is Barton's friend, is the novel's most vivid embodiment of working-class learning. Realizing many readers will not credit the accomplishments of the autodidact, Gaskell defends his verisimilitude by recounting an anecdote from the botanist Sir J. E. Smith's autobiography which encapsulates the incredulity she anticipates:

What Smith assumes is specialized knowledge is shown to be the common property of a broad culture of learning (King 257). The narrator affiliates Job's science with Jem's industrial invention and Alice Wilson's “considerable knowledge of plants and herbs” (16; ch. 2), distinguishing Gaskell's portrait of working-class achievement from the biographical sketches of isolated individuals which populate the Penny Magazine and Craik's volume.Footnote ³¹ For Gaskell, working-class knowledge encompasses both formal subjects (natural history and “mathematical problems” taken up by “many a broad-spoken, common-looking factory hand”) and topics middle-class observers “are accustomed to call valueless,” such as Alice Wilson's herbal remedies which (16; ch. 2; 39; ch. 5). Even Margaret's singing is praised as a species of “really scientific knowledge” (37; ch. 5). Gaskell is also attentive to the informal spaces in which education occurs. The narrator describes “common hand-loom weavers” reading Newton's Pricipia at the “loom” and presents characters reciting poems in working-class residences, where they also discuss newspaper articles and take up questions of marine biology (39; ch. 5). Finally, the text's footnotes valorize the intelligence native to the Manchester poor. Answering an editor's demand to make the use of working-class dialect understandable to a middle-class audience, in a polemical gesture Gaskell provided glosses of the operatives’ language with quotations from high literature.Footnote ³² The reader discovers that working-class colloquialisms can be traced to Shakespeare, Spenser, Ben Jonson, the Canterbury Tales and the Wickliffe Bible. Dialectal language, far from its typical function as comic relief, demonstrates the popular share of a universal cultural inheritance. North and South similarly troubles derogatory associations with working-class speech when the middle-class protagonist justifies her use of slang to her scandalized mother: “If I live in a factory town, I must speak factory language when I want it” (233; ch. 29). In Mary Barton, the reader's presumed unfamiliarity with the vernacular highlights his or her ignorance of the elite literary canon, embarrassing anticipated condescension.Footnote ³³

Yet the narrator also repeatedly remarks the lack of education of her working-class characters, particularly around questions of economics. This contradictory stance becomes, in fact, part of Gaskell's case for reform, for the novel attributes the alienation between the classes to ignorance of political economy. The narrator suggests, for instance, that if the operatives understood the tenuous circumstances of their masters in the international market it would dull the edge of conflict between the groups. In the novel's penultimate chapter, a conversation between the stricken Carson and Jem and Job models the kind of relationship Gaskell envisions superseding the violent strife the novel details. In this regard, Mary Barton echoes the view common in the 1830s and 40s that education might remedy class conflict, popularized by among others Gaskell's Manchester acquaintance James Kay-Shuttleworth. The first secretary of the newly established Privy Council on Education, Kay-Shuttleworth wrote several influential essays on working-class learning, at least one of which his wife loaned to Gaskell.Footnote ³⁴ In The Moral and Physical Condition of the Working Classes in Manchester in 1832, Kay-Shuttleworth claims that unionism and machine-breaking stem from ignorance of political economy and that education would guarantee domestic peace by suppressing radical organization (Kay-Shuttleworth 69–70; Simon 168; Silver 96–97).Footnote ³⁵ By the rise of the Chartist movement in 1839, his prognosis had become desperate. An essay from that year argues that only a national system of schools can stem the rising influence of demagogues who “teach the population to seek a remedy for the evils they endure by violent attempts at social change” (Kay-Shuttleworth, “Recent Measures” 89).

The union meeting at the Weaver's Arms, where Henry Carson's murder is decided, repeats several aspects of Kay-Shuttleworth's stereotyped view of radicalism. Gaskell presents the London orator as an intellectual arriviste manipulating a benighted population: “As the man who has had his taste educated to love reading, falls devouringly upon books after a long abstinence, so these poor fellows, whose tastes had been left to educate themselves into a liking for tobacco, beer, and similar gratifications, gleamed up at the proposal of the London delegate” (185; ch. 16). But the image of the London radical also betrays ambivalence towards the idea of education as a social sedative. He plays not only on the strikers’ ignorance and intemperance but also their aspirations for high culture – classical allusions dapple his incendiary speech. Whereas Kay-Shuttleworth describes a universally ignorant population, Mary Barton recognizes that learning is already an integral part of a militant working-class milieu. Explaining that Barton's politics stem from a lack of knowledge, a few sentences later the narrator details how his intellectual abilities serve the Chartist movement: “He had a sort of practical power, which made him useful to the bodies of men to whom he belonged. . . . He had a pretty clear head at times, for method and arrangement; a necessary talent to large combinations of men” (170; ch. 15). It is therefore appropriate that the narrator turns to that most famous subaltern autodidact, Frankenstein's monster, to describes her hero: “The actions of the uneducated seem to be typified in those of Frankenstein, that monster of many human qualities, ungifted with a soul, a knowledge of the difference between good and evil” (170; ch. 15). The monster crystallizes Gaskell's ambivalence about working-class learning, for Shelley's creation is, after all, not uneducated, but self-educated. And it is precisely the monster reading Milton, Plutarch, and Goethe at the Delaceys’ cottage which transforms him from an innocent brute into a wronged individual intent on revenge.

Literature likewise politicizes Barton. On his deathbed, the penitent murderer describes his first effort learning to read and his subsequent confusion trying to “make folks’ actions square wi’ th’ Bible” (371; ch. 35). Earlier, we encounter Barton reading the Northern Star. His justification to Jem of short-time legislation includes an anecdote which illustrates the potentially radicalizing effect of reading. Barton recounts how he was allowed additional time to recuperate from a fever in his factory's infirmary because he could transcribe medical reports. Literacy earns Barton the privilege of food, rest, and medical attention, but these fail to purchase his loyalty. He describes to Jem how he informed the company surgeon that the documents made clear that “by far th’ greater part o’ the accidents as comed in happened in th’ last two hours o’ work, when folk getten tired and careless” (84; ch. 8). Years later, the example buttresses the Star's case for a shorter workday. Barton's critical use of the Bible to reveal injustice and his education by the radical press closely resemble the Chartists’ view of learning as a tool of social struggle.

Several other characters read a political canon, including some seemingly uninterested in politics. Job's penchant for natural history is far from Bamford's image in Passages of a Life of a Radical of artisans studying insurrection under cover of botanical societies, but he shares with Mary and John a poem written by Bamford himself, which espouses a militant Christianity and expresses the hope that “God will yet arise and help the poor” (112; ch. 10). Both the poem's thematic emphasis and the fact that its author is “a weaver like oursel” validate working-class culture (111; ch. 10).Footnote ³⁶ Similarly, in the key confrontation between Jem and Henry Carson, it is the words of “the Ploughman Poet” Robert Burns that give the operative courage to challenge his romantic rival about the latter's mistreatment of Mary: “He seemed to the poor smith so elegant, so well appointed, that he felt the superiority in externals, strangely and painfully, for an instant. Then something uprose within him, and told him, that ‘a man's a man for a’ that, for a’ that, and twice as much as a’ that’” (176; ch. 15). More is at stake here than the contrast between Carson's pretensions and Jem's democratic philosophy. The conflict between masters and men plays out not least in the cultural realm; working-class literature nourishes a set of values which permit a critical judgment of the “superiority in externals” of the masters in a way which calls to mind the debunking of a knowledge qualification for the franchise in McDouall’s. In fact, a poem by Robert Nicholls in McDouall’s anticipates the use to which Gaskell's operative puts Burns's verse: “Burns! thou hast given us a name / To shield us from the taunts of scorn” (June 12, 1841, 88).Footnote ³⁷

When the narrator turns to Carson, she explores the deficiencies of his own class-bound understanding of culture, how his miseducation has warped his perception:

A short while later another aphoristic misapplication of Shakespeare dooms Carson. He appends a quotation from Falstaff to the caricature he sketches with his “silver pencil” of the “famine-stricken” union delegates, which circulates among the masters (184; ch. 16). Not realizing the dubiousness of affiliating his perspective with Shakespeare's “fat knight,” Carson makes a more serious mistake: when he attempts to discard the torn halves of the drawing he is “careless whether they reached their aim or not [and] did not look to see that they fell just short of the consuming cinders” (184; ch. 16). This carelessness, as much as the drawing itself, evokes Carson's contempt for the operatives, his assumption of their cultural or real illiteracy. But the narrator has already speculated that the delegates are readers of a literature of which the masters know nothing. In describing the dilapidated clothing of the operatives, the narrator wonders if they have read Carlyle's “Sartor Resartus,” because they value eloquence and intelligence over appearance.Footnote ³⁸ And of course – although Carson never knows it – they understand the implications of the caricature all too well.

Gaskell's view of education in Mary Barton is multi-sided and often contradictory, but the aim of this chapter has been to ground her dissident ideas in a rich but largely forgotten canon of radical writing. If the narrator repeats at times the cliché of the inarticulate and unlearned poor, the portraits of Job, Jem, Margaret, Alice Wilson, and John Barton dispel those stereotypes. Beside the affirmation that education will mitigate tension between the classes are examples of readers learning to assert their rights. Self-improvement leads to individual prosperity, but does so within a system of mutual support. A last aspect of Gaskell's treatment of working-class education, the stress on the private enjoyment of study, might also have been gleaned from Lovett and Collin's curriculum which emphasized engaging and inspiring “all the human faculties” or even from the enthusiastic eclecticism of Chartist miscellanies like McDouall’s (67). This emphasis distinguishes Gaskell's perspective from that of many middle-class observers including Kay-Shuttleworth, who advocated broadening the curriculum for children in workhouse schools mainly in terms of the “practical utility” of a diverse subject matter (First Report 335). Richard Altick's study of the common reader underlines how debates about the dangers of mass literacy, the advantages of public libraries, and the necessity of a politically orthodox cheap literature, emphasized again and again questions of public usefulness while ignoring the individual's pleasure in reading. While parsing the political implications of workers who read, Gaskell shares her character Margaret Jenning's wonder at how much satisfaction learning provides: “Well, I’m often downright glad grandfather is so fond of his books, and his creatures, and his plants. It does my heart good to see him so happy, sorting them all at home, and so ready to go in search of more” (42; ch. 5). The cultural movement of Chartism similarly possessed a broad and humanistic sense of the possibilities of working-class intellectual life, insisting on education as a democratic right and celebrating it as a means of individual and collective self-realization.