SOURCE: Jordan, Elaine. “Spectres and Scorpions: Allusion and Confusion in Mary Barton.” Literature and History 7, no. 1 (spring 1981): 48-61.

In the following essay, Jordan discusses literary quotations and allusions in Gaskell's novel, concentrating on elements of Gothic discourse that appear after the murder of Harry Carson.

Raymond Williams has said of Mary Barton (1848) that it is ‘the most moving response in literature to the industrial sufferings of the 1840s’. But he sees also that there was ‘a point, in its writing, at which the flow of sympathy, the combination of sympathetic observation and of a largely successful attempt at imaginative identification’, was arrested. Mrs. Gaskell has her hero, ‘the person with whom all my sympathies went’, commit murder:

… John Barton, a political murderer appointed by a trade union, is a dramatization of the fear of violence which was widespread among the upper and middle classes at the time, and...