SOURCE: Lucas, John. “Mrs. Gaskell and Brotherhood.” In Tradition and Tolerance in Nineteenth-Century Fiction: Critical Essays on Some English and American Novels, edited by David Howard, John Lucas, and John Goode, pp. 141-205. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1967.

In the following excerpt, Lucas attributes the flaws in Mary Barton to Gaskell's failure to deal honestly with the social conditions she was attempting to represent.

Was it embracing or aiding was most in my mind.

Clough

1

It is probably easier to explain the purpose of this essay than to justify it, for it may well seem to fall between two stools. Basically my subject is the social-problem novel of the 1840s and 1850s, yet though several of these novels come into the discussion it is not really meant to provide a survey account, because of the hundreds of novels that belong to the genre a mere handful repay reading...