SOURCE: "Causality versus Conscience: The Problem of Form in Mary Barton" in The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction: Social Discourse and Narrative Form 1832-1867, The University of Chicago Press, 1985, pp. 62-87.

In the essay that follows, Gallagher studies the influence of Gaskell's Unitarian understanding of moral freedom and responsibility on the writing of Mary Barton.

As in the Religion of Causation, Man seemed to be crushed into a mere creature, so was it on his behalf that remonstrance broke forth, and, at the bidding of Channing, the Religion of Conscience sprang to its feet. However fascinating the precision and simplicity of the Necessarian theory in its advance through the fields of physical and biological law, it meets with vehement resistence in its attempt to annex human nature, and put it under the same code with the tides and trees and reptiles. Our personality . . . is sure to recover from...