Mary Barton (1848)
464pp, Fiction
Notes
2019-06-29
I picked up Mary Barton to read on the plane to New York and was instantly sucked in. I think Elizabeth Gaskell is pretty underrated esp. compared to her near contemporaries the Bronte’s. I mean she doesn’t have the gothic grandeur of Charlotte or Emily but her characters are richer and her stories resonate more strongly with me. Maybe more on this when I finish the book.
I finished the book
Read a couple of first novels – or rather, as shall be revealed, read one started one – Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton and Patrick Hamilton’s recently back in print Twopence Coloured. Which did I finish? Well in the spirit of Gaskell’s spoilerific chapter titles * it was Mary Barton.
I often find there’s a lot to like in the less polished early work of writers, they’re not as in control so things might turn out more unpredictably, they haven’t yet learned the rules and there’s an unevenness – Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights is a kind of shining example of this kind of thing. I’m not a huge fan but there really is nothing like it. Some writers are able to capture that spark and carry it through their careers.
Anyway, Mary barton has a bit of that unevenness. Gaskell isn’t really able to reconcile her beliefs about how the world works with the story she sets out to tell – I think she does a better job in North and South (though still she tacks on the genre mandated married and lived hapily ever after ending) and in someways Cranford is the best expression of her world view though it lacks the urban setting that makes the former novels so compelling as historical documents. The first half of …Barton has some pretty brutal depictions of poverty in industrial revolution Manchester (the notes of the penguin edition indicate that she was probably sugar coating stuff. Yikes! cf Chapter VI. Poverty and death) before changing gear for the second half into a story about individual redemption and the importance of understanding between the classes. Anyway.
I didn’t get far with the Patrick Hamilton book, though it might just have been that my mood on the train back from seeing Mac DeMarco in Margate wasn’t tuned correctly. I’m a huge fan of Hangover Square and esp. Slaves to Solitude but earlier in his career he didn’t have his tendency towards florid descriptive passages under control, there’s a bit of this in 20,000 Streets under the Sky, Emma bounced off that one. Anyway, I’ll probably try again after Summer. [I did not try again -- Jan 2024]
*eg.
Chapter V. THE MILL ON FIRE – JEM WILSON TO THE RESCUE.
and amazingly
Chapter XXXII. THE TRIAL AND VERDICT – “NOT GUILTY.”