Mary Barton Working Class

John Barton: A Mirror for the Physical and Mental Struggle of the European Working Class Elizabeth Gaskell’s 1854 publication of Mary Barton reflects on the once ever-growing industrial Manchester society fueled by engines and rugged factories plummeting as a result of overpopulation and growing economic gaps creating poverty and famine across Europe. Mary Barton depicts the hungry forties, a period in European history in which political, ideological and social consequences arise as a result of an overwhelming industrial upheaval. While better quality food arose and a decrease in widespread diseases resulted from the aforementioned revolution, so too did overpopulation. The Great Famine experienced within Ireland between 1845 and 1852 perfectly

Marx’s “Estranged Labour” further crafts the estrangement of the working class exemplifying their loss of self and surrounding. It is within those works, a proletariat revolution is deemed necessary to arise from the cuffs of the owners of production within society. Yet, Gaskell offers a different approach in Mary Barton. Her illustration of John Barton as a mourning and unemployed former mill worker illustrates the battles of the working class in a withered 1840’s European industry. Gaskell’s critique on politics epitomized through John Barton resembles a Marxist interpretation on the state of society; yet, she envisions the human emancipation of the working poor to only be achieved by means of societal escape or a Christian solution. John Barton remarks on the rich knowing “nothing of the trials of the poor” (I). He continues, adding a religious dimension, “we pile up their fortunes with the sweat of our brows, and yet we are to live as separate as if we were in two worlds; ay as Dives and Lazarus”

Thus, his neurotic behavior evident in the murder of Mary’s lover signifies the estrangement of the worker from the self, a theme largely explore by Karl Marx in “Estranged Labour.” Barton’s work, like all proletariat work, exemplified the core of their existential reality. Barton’s toil with production, fueled by his need to afford his own subsistence for his own survival, resembled a life with little meaning. The impact of industrialization and capitalism left a man alienated from his product, his work, his species object and alienated from fellow humanity. Barton lost the necessary awareness of himself as an