Elizabeth Gaskell and Manchester:
Identity, Culture and the Modern City
Conference, 19/20/21 July 2005

Peter Gardner
The Seductive Politics of Mary Barton

Thomas Carlyle had published Past and Present five years before Elizabeth Gaskell set five of his lines on the title page of Mary Barton (1848), simultaneously ironizing her first effort and obliquely referring to the aesthetics underpinning her “Long-ear of a fictitious Biography.”

My presentation will attempt to reconnect Mary Barton to Carlylean aesthetics by focusing on the question of melodrama in Mary Barton. Through positioning Gaskell’s unnamed union delegate from London and the elder Mr. Carson within the Carlylean melodrama of Past and Present, I hope to demonstrate that Mary Barton is a melodrama fraught with the dangers of seduction for both the male and female characters.

Reading Mary Barton as melodrama allows the highly political valence of the novel and its relationship to Carlyle’s solution to the Condition-of-England question to be recovered. There is, I will contend, a double seduction plot in the novel. Sexual seduction, similar to the Esther subplot of seduction, abandonment and prostitution threatens Mary Barton, while the political seduction of Chartism and trade unionism is the danger for John Barton. In the course of making this argument, I also hope to determine that Gaskell’s use of melodrama in Mary Barton is not the failing of an inexperienced writer but an adroit handling of Carlylean melodrama to enable her political strategies of class.

Saint Mary’s College, Rome, Italy
p.gardner@smcrome.it