Mary Barton is, generically-speaking, a mixed novel. Celebrated, from its publication to the present day, as a work which vividly depicted the acute sufferings of the industrial working-class in nineteenth-century England, through a social realism unparalleled in contemporary fictional writings in a similar tradition, it is often criticised, nonetheless, for evasively resorting to romance and melodrama in its dénouement. The orthodox critical position – established by Raymond Williams, Arthur Kettle (who first dubbed the work a “social-problem novel”) and others – is that, in the second half of the novel, Gaskell retreated from the implications of the moving record of distress presented in the first half, falling back on literary convention to eschew the social and political issues raised by the very originality and authenticity of her account. Such a reading, whatever its merits, tends...
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Citation: Billington, Josie. "Mary Barton". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 27 July 2001; last revised 16 October 2025. [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=3725, accessed 09 June 2026.]
