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QUESTIONS FROM WORKERS WHO READ: EDUCATION AND SELF-FORMATION IN CHARTIST PRINT CULTURE AND ELIZABETH GASKELL’S MARY BARTON

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 January 2016

Gregory Vargo
Gregory Vargo*
Affiliation:
New York University
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Extract

Although the Chartist organ the Northern Star was a careful observer of literary developments, especially concerning social-problem fiction, it failed to comment on the publication of Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton, today the best-known literary work to treat Chartism. The popular and controversial novel about the consequences of an assassination committed by a disillusioned activist slipped by the radical paper unnoticed in the tumult of the fall of 1848. But the Star was not as unfamiliar with Mary Barton as its initial silence suggests. Two years later, when the paper reviewed The Moorland Cottage, it praised Gaskell's earlier book as “a powerful and truthful exposition of the evils inherent in the factory system,” adding that “the graphic manner in which the writer placed before the public the domestic, moral, and social results of factory life, brought down from the upholders of the factory system many sneers at her political economy and her sentimentalism; but none denied the unquestionable genius and superior discrimination of character and motives which pervaded the work” (Dec. 28, 1850).

Type
Work in Progress
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 44 , Issue 1 , March 2016 , pp. 133 - 161
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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