SOURCE: "Private Grief and Public Acts in Mary Barton," in Dickens Studies Annual: Essays on Victorian Fiction, Volume 9, edited by Michael Timko, Fred Kaplan, and Edward Guiliano, AMS Press, Inc., 1981, pp. 195-216.

In the following essay, Bodenheimer contends that Mary Barton can be read as a novel of mourning—one which deals with two primary issues: what to do in response to injustice, and how such responses might traverse the divide between the private and public spheres.

Mary Barton is a novel about responding to the grief of loss or disappointment. Its pages are filled with domestic disaster; the sheer accumulation of one misfortune after another is the organizing principle of the first half of the narrative. The story begins with Mrs. Barton's grief about the disappearance of her sister, and the Barton-Wilson tea party that is organized to help comfort her ends with the social awkwardness of...