SOURCE: Wildt, Katherine Ann. “Mary Barton: Colors of Alienation and Harmony.” In Elizabeth Gaskell's Use of Color in Her Industrial Novels and Short Stories, pp. 49-74. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1999.

In the following excerpt, Wildt examines the way Gaskell uses color to evoke mood and to portray moral truth in her novel.

Gaskell uses color in establishing a moral tone as she constructs the plot, character, and themes of Mary Barton (1848). Jenny Uglow, in her book Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories, points to some of Gaskell's scenes in Mary Barton which are reminiscent of various paintings. She mentions in particular Wilson's and Barton's journey to Davenport's dwelling, which is “like a Bosch painting, where naked children crawl in darkness and a dying man lies on rotten straw, with only sacking to cover his ‘worn skeleton of a body’” (199), and the depiction of Mary Barton in...