Reading and Community as a Support for the New in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton

This chapter illustrates Elizabeth Gaskell's originality and success, and shows how she used her understanding of literary tradition to articulate and develop her new female point of view on the new urban poverty caused by industrialization. Her consciousness of isolation in her task led her to draw on both earlier and contemporary writers for support and motivated her to provide her successors and contemporaries with models and encouragement. As the chapter shows, Mary Barton emerged from Gaskell's wide reading, her habit of regular writing, with a Unitarian sense of duty and the obligation to tell the truth. It was also motivated by the hope of distracting herself from the personal tragedy of her baby son Willie's death in 1845. At the same time, Gaskell made tradition part of the subject matter of her novel when she showed Mary Barton throwing off the expectations about female behavior which had constrained her and when she dramatized John Carson's religious obligation to forgive John Barton.