MARY BARTON

ELIZABETH GASKELL

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ELIZABETH GASKELL

MARY BARTON

--A TALE OF MANCHESTER LIFE--

PREFACE

BY ELIZABETH GASKELL

Three years ago I became anxious (from circumstances that need not be more fully

alluded to) to employ myself in writing a work of fiction. Living in Manchester, but

with a deep relish and fond admiration for the country, my first thought was to find a

frame-work for my story in some rural scene; and I had already made a little progress

in a tale, the period of which was more than a century ago, and the place on the

borders of Yorkshire, when I bethought me how deep might be the romance in the

lives of some of those who elbowed me daily in the busy streets of the town in which

I resided. I had always felt a deep sympathy with the care-worn men, who looked as if

doomed to struggle through their lives in strange alternations between work and want;

tossed to and fro by circumstances, apparently in even a greater degree than other

men. A little manifestation of this sympathy and a little attention to the expression of

feelings on the part of some of the work-people with whom I was acquainted, had laid

open to me the hearts of one or two of the more thoughtful among them; I saw that

they were sore and irritable against the rich, the even tenor of whose seemingly happy

lives appeared to increase the anguish caused by the lottery-like nature of their own.

Whether the bitter complaints made by them, of the neglect which they experienced

from the prosperous--especially from the masters whose fortunes they had helped to

build up--were well-founded or no, it is not for me to judge. It is enough to say, that

this belief of the injustice and unkindness which they endure from their fellowcreatures,

taints what might be resignation to God's will, and turns it to revenge in too

many of the poor uneducated factory-workers of Manchester.

The more I reflected on this unhappy state of things between those so bound to each

other by common interests, as the employers and the employed must ever be, the more

anxious I became to give some utterance to the agony which, from time to time,

convulses this dumb people; the agony of suffering without the sympathy of the

happy, or of erroneously believing that such is the case. If it be an error, that the woes,

which come with ever-returning tide-like flood to overwhelm the workmen in our

manufacturing towns, pass unregarded by all but the sufferers, it is at any rate an error

so bitter in its consequences to all parties, that whatever public effort can do in the

way of legislation, or private effort in the way of merciful deeds, or helpless love in

the way of widow's mites, should be done, and that speedily, to disabuse the workpeople

of so miserable a misapprehension. At present they seem to me to be left in a

state, wherein lamentations and tears are thrown aside as useless, but in which the lips

are compressed for curses, and the hands clenched and ready to smite.

I know nothing of Political Economy, or the theories of trade. I have tried to write

truthfully; and if my accounts agree or clash with any system, the agreement or

disagreement is unintentional.

To myself the idea which I have formed of the state of feeling among too many of the

factory-people in Manchester, and which I endeavoured to represent in this tale

(completed above a year ago), has received some confirmation from the events which

have so recently occurred among a similar class on the Continent.

OCTOBER, 1848