to the problem of supply and demand, while at the same time improving the lot of the workers. Then, this having failed, the employers need only show that they tried and that they wish that something could be done in order for the laboring classes to lose its resentment against them.Mrs. Gaskell anticipates that this will happen in her final comment on the changed character of Mr. Carson, who has been brought to understanding by the murder of his son and by the words of Jem Wilson and Job Legh:… The wish that lay nearest his heart… was that a perfect understanding, and a complete confidence and love, might exist between masters and men; that the truth might be recognized that the interests on one were the interests of all, and, as such, required the consideration and deliberation of all; that hence it was most desirable to have educated workers, capable of judging, not mere machines of ignorant me; and to have them bound to their employers by the ties of respect and affection, not by mere money bargains alone… This is, perhaps, too idealistic and has been one of the criticisms of Mary Barton. Nonetheless, it was not so unrealistic as to attempt to impose a form of socialism on Nineteenth Century England.Mrs. Gaskell’s novel is historically important because it gives us a clear social background to the new industrialism in England and the conditions that led up to the Chartist Movement. Despite the author’s concentration on the social aspects of the situation, she has nonetheless succeeded in providing us with the main points of the new economy and its laws.Mary Barton tells the story from the laborer’s point of view, but we are not without knowledge of the mill owner’s side of it either, especially through the philosophical wisdom of Job Legh. In her attempts to present the plight of the laborer in Manchester, Elizabeth Gaskell has not neglected to make us understand the importance and signi...
