itself. The author tells us that Mrs. Carson’s “sick headaches” would be cured by a little bit of housework. In other words, we are never out of sight of the fact that the Carsons rose from the same class as the Bartons and the Wilsons and are now making the lower class workers pay for their leisured indolence. Yet they are not well bred enough to do anything constructive with their time; thus, they have no real right to leisure at the expense of the laborers.Against this setting, we see individuals, families, the social group that it concerns, fighting or succumbing to the external influence according to the strength of their moral natures and the integrity of the human heart. John Barton is not so much a victim of his surroundings as he is of both his environment and his own depravity. In this sense, then, Mary Barton never loses hold of its realism, despite the social message it is trying to convey.The social range is limited, seldom moving beyond the world of the mills and the ill workers. The mill owners appear in the plot because of the theme of reconciliation and understanding between masters and men, but they are only shown as the modern day Dives who oppresses the working Lazarus. Mrs. Gaskell, in limiting the space and the environment, succeeds in showing us the extent to which life was cramped and conditioned by the physical, social, and mental environment of the new technologies.Within this narrow range, Mrs. Gaskell looks closely at the problem as she sees it. Her starting point is that each human being is an individual soul deserving close contact with nature as opposed to technology. Technology, such as it was in England in he early years of the Industrial Revolution, kept men free from the blessings of nature and turned men against each other.At the end of the novel, the main characters have found happiness by moving away form Manchester into the country and back to the glories of nature, whi...
