Elizabeth Gaskell; Mary Barton

Hopefully later today I will find some time to catch up on Mary Barton, Elizabeth Gaskell’s debut novel from 1848.  I’m up to chapter 10.

According to the back cover blurb of my Oxford World’s Classics edition, Gaskell’s first novel introduced the fiction-reading public of the mid-nineteenth century to aspects of the contemporary world it knew little about.  Part tragedy, part romance, passionate with anger yet touched by humour, Mary Barton remains the major novel acclaimed by Charles Dickens on first publication.

I’ve read nine out of thirty-eight chapters and it is very good.  There’s an unsettling increasing and causal body count with each successive chapter one could be forgiven for thinking it was penned in the mid to late 20^th century (yes, I mean you, but not exclusively, Brett Easton Ellis).

However, Gaskell is noticing the effects of acute poverty during the ‘hungry forties’.  If heavyweight essays such as Friedrich Engels The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845) isn’t your thing, Mary Barton may be the novel for you.  The social realism is stark, but the romance at the centre of the novel is traditional and very amusing.

In chapter 9, which I recently completed, Mary’s second love interest and their go-between makes an appearance, and very satirical the episode is, so it’s a fairly safe bet my previous sentence is accurate.

I’ve read all of Gaskell’s shorter works, Cranford, included, and a very sharp and sophisticated satirist she is.  Admittedly, she is the only novelist who has reduced me to tears at times, but usually she very swiftly turns the mood around with some witty turn of phrase and I’m chuckling away calling myself a silly sod for shedding the odd tear in the first place.

As an introduction to Gaskell’s style, I can recommend highly the short stories Christmas Storms and Sunshine, Libbie Marsh’s Three Eras, and The Crooked Branch.  The novella A Dark Night’s Work is also worth a tear or two.

Anyway, it’s midday, and I’m off to the library to update this blog and do my jobsearch.