Mary Barton Page #8

Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life is the first novel by English author Elizabeth Gaskell, published in 1848. The story is set in the English city of Manchester between 1839 and 1842, and deals with the difficulties faced by the Victorian working class.

• Novel

								

food in the house would not furnish one little meal. Barton tried
credit; but it was worn out at the little provision shops, which were
now suffering in their turn. He thought it would be no sin to steal,
and would have stolen; but he could not get the opportunity in the
few days the child lingered. Hungry himself, almost to an animal
pitch of ravenousness, but with the bodily pain swallowed up in
anxiety for his little sinking lad, he stood at one of the shop
windows where all edible luxuries are displayed; haunches of venison,
Stilton cheeses, moulds of jelly--all appetising sights to the common
passer by. And out of this shop came Mrs. Hunter! She crossed to her
carriage, followed by the shopman loaded with purchases for a party.
The door was quickly slammed to, and she drove away; and Barton
returned home with a bitter spirit of wrath in his heart, to see his
only boy a corpse!

You can fancy, now, the hoards of vengeance in his heart against the
employers. For there are never wanting those who, either in speech
or in print, find it their interest to cherish such feelings in the
working classes; who know how and when to rouse the dangerous power
at their command; and who use their knowledge with unrelenting
purpose to either party.

So while Mary took her own way, growing more spirited every day, and
growing in her beauty too, her father was chairman at many a trades'
union meeting; a friend of delegates, and ambitious of being a
delegate himself; a Chartist, and ready to do any thing for his
order.

But now times were good; and all these feelings were theoretical, not
practical. His most practical thought was getting Mary apprenticed to
a dressmaker; for he had never left off disliking a factory life for
a girl, on more accounts than one.

Mary must do something. The factories being, as I said, out of the
question, there were two things open--going out to service, and
the dressmaking business; and against the first of these, Mary set
herself with all the force of her strong will. What that will might
have been able to achieve had her father been against her, I cannot
tell; but he disliked the idea of parting with her, who was the light
of his hearth, the voice of his otherwise silent home. Besides, with
his ideas and feelings towards the higher classes, he considered
domestic servitude as a species of slavery; a pampering of artificial
wants on the one side, a giving-up of every right of leisure by day
and quiet rest by night on the other. How far his strong exaggerated
feelings had any foundation in truth, it is for you to judge. I am
afraid that Mary's determination not to go to service arose from far
less sensible thoughts on the subject than her father's. Three years
of independence of action (since her mother's death such a time
had now elapsed) had little inclined her to submit to rules as to
hours and associates, to regulate her dress by a mistress's ideas
of propriety, to lose the dear feminine privileges of gossiping
with a merry neighbour, and working night and day to help one who
was sorrowful. Besides all this, the sayings of her absent, her
mysterious aunt, Esther, had an unacknowledged influence over Mary.
She knew she was very pretty; the factory people as they poured from
the mills, and in their freedom told the truth (whatever it might be)
to every passer-by, had early let Mary into the secret of her beauty.
If their remarks had fallen on an unheeding ear, there were always
young men enough, in a different rank from her own, who were willing
to compliment the pretty weaver's daughter as they met her in the
streets. Besides, trust a girl of sixteen for knowing well if she is
pretty; concerning her plainness she may be ignorant. So with this
consciousness she had early determined that her beauty should make
her a lady; the rank she coveted the more for her father's abuse; the
rank to which she firmly believed her lost aunt Esther had arrived.
Now, while a servant must often drudge and be dirty, must be known as
a servant by all who visited at her master's house, a dressmaker's
apprentice must (or so Mary thought) be always dressed with a certain
regard to appearance; must never soil her hands, and need never
redden or dirty her face with hard labour. Before my telling you so
truly what folly Mary felt or thought, injures her without redemption
in your opinion, think what are the silly fancies of sixteen years of
age in every class, and under all circumstances. The end of all the
thoughts of father and daughter was, as I said before, Mary was to be
a dressmaker; and her ambition prompted her unwilling father to apply
at all the first establishments, to know on what terms of painstaking
and zeal his daughter might be admitted into ever so humble a
workwoman's situation. But high premiums were asked at all; poor man!
he might have known that without giving up a day's work to ascertain
the fact. He would have been indignant, indeed, had he known that if
Mary had accompanied him, the case might have been rather different,
as her beauty would have made her desirable as a show-woman. Then he
tried second-rate places; at all the payment of a sum of money was
necessary, and money he had none. Disheartened and angry he went home
at night, declaring it was time lost; that dressmaking was at all
events a toilsome business, and not worth learning. Mary saw that the
grapes were sour, and the next day set out herself, as her father
could not afford to lose another day's work; and before night (as
yesterday's experience had considerably lowered her ideas) she had
engaged herself as apprentice (so called, though there were no deeds
or indentures to the bond) to a certain Miss Simmonds, milliner and
dressmaker, in a respectable little street leading off Ardwick Green,
where her business was duly announced in gold letters on a black
ground, enclosed in a bird's-eye maple frame, and stuck in the front
parlour window; where the workwomen were called "her young ladies;"
and where Mary was to work for two years without any remuneration,
on consideration of being taught the business; and where afterwards
she was to dine and have tea, with a small quarterly salary (paid
quarterly, because so much more genteel than by the week), a very
small one, divisible into a minute weekly pittance. In summer she was
to be there by six, bringing her day's meals during the first two
years; in winter she was not to come till after breakfast. Her time
for returning home at night must always depend upon the quantity of
work Miss Simmonds had to do.

And Mary was satisfied; and seeing this, her father was contented
too, although his words were grumbling and morose; but Mary knew his
ways, and coaxed and planned for the future so cheerily, that both
went to bed with easy if not happy hearts.




CHAPTER IV.

OLD ALICE'S HISTORY.


   To envy nought beneath the ample sky;
   To mourn no evil deed, no hour mis-spent;
   And, like a living violet, silently
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