SOURCE: Childers, Joseph W. “Mary Barton and the Community of Suffering.” In Novel Possibilities: Fiction and the Formation of Early Victorian Culture, pp. 158-78. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995.

In the following excerpt, Childers explores similarities between Gaskell's novel and Friedrich Engels's The Condition of the Working Class in England.

Those readers familiar with Friedrich Engels's The Condition of the Working Class in England as well as with Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton may be immediately struck by a peculiar similarity in the opening pages of these two important social texts of the middle nineteenth century. Engels begins with a “Historical Introduction” in which he recalls the intellectual and moral state of workers in the years before the advent “of the steam engine and of machines for spinning and weaving cotton” (9).¹ In those years, writes Engels, workers were “righteous, God-fearing, and honest. … Most of them were strong, well-built people...