OKAY EVERYBODY now that you have all hopefully finished the book, my post will no longer be a spoiler alert. If it still is then too bad so sad. No but really. Wasn’t the ending kinda, you know, lame? Here we have an epic tale of class vs. class and it just ends. With no really winner except for love. Frankly I’m sick of such endings...anyways...

"Many of the improvements now in practice in the system of employment in Manchester, owe their origins in short earnest sentences spoken by Mr. Carson" (page 374)

Well here, our lovely friend, Gaskell wants us to have a nice, lovely, and tidy ending for not only Mary and her beau but for all her little factory friends. I'm not trying to be cynical but after reading excerpts from Engels, Vaughan and all the others, I doubt Carson did anything for these people...or anyone like Carson for that matter

I mean did her and Eliot have a pow wow about how to rob us from a legit ending? I mean Eliot gives us a slight hint to Silas losing his job because of the revolution...and we see his old town demolished into crap town USA....but he still has that lovely fairy tale ending. 

So dude, what are we supposed to get out of such endings? I get it, Eliot was bringing in Realism and all that jazz and Gaskell was trying to break boundaries...but at least give us the right Reality. Love is great, everyone should have it at one point in their lives, but that cannot be a solution to a story. 

Barton's father killed Mary's only chance of having a comfy rich life. Again, i sound really messed up but that's reality sometimes. Then Jem almost dies for her, which is all nice, but he prevails and ends up in Canada.

OH CMON...

it took John like days to walk to London and here Jem is galavanting around.

Whatever, clearly i'm bitter. 

What doesn't the ending tell us? hm?

that the revolution continued to ruin lives.

That the revolution killed children and tore families apart

that the revolution did n't get better til much later on?

hey that's realism baby!

Engels and Gaskell should have combined their stories and had a legit ending. 

my vote!

Wirth, Engel, and the City Life

In Louis Wirth’s “Urbanism as a Way of Life,” the dominance of the city is attributed in its concentration of commercial, industrial, financial, and administrative industries. This reminds me of Engels’ “The Great Towns” in which he attributes the expansion of agriculture and farming to the academic and scientific progress that takes place in cities. Wirth examines the “potency” of the city’s influences on “molding the character of social life into urban form.” The influence of the city is not only experienced through innovations in agriculture, and farming, but also through social life. This influences younger generations into leaving the countryside for the social, and academic opportunities available in the city. The blending of different cultures and customs in cities also tends to reduce prejudice, which influences the social milieu of younger generations. Engels attributes this mixture of ideas in helping reduce social prejudice in large cities. In today’s culture, this is evident in the emergence of fashion movements aimed at capturing the essence of city life.  Modern day clothing stores like “Urban Outfitters” and other clothing stores that seek to use urban culture to attract customers, are not only popular in large cities, but also rural areas. During a recent trip to a small Colorado mountain town, I noticed that teenagers tend to dress similarly across the country, regardless of their living conditions. Wirth states, “the bonds of kinship, of neighborliness, and the sentiments arising out of living together for generations under a common folk tradition are likely to be absent or, at best, relatively weak in an aggregate of which have such diverse origins and backgrounds.” The city allows one to be free. The city eliminates the scrutiny found in small towns, or rural areas. Wirth describes that city-dwellers tend to rely on more people for the satisfaction of their “life-needs;” whereas, those living in rural conditions depend on less people to satisfy their “life-needs,” but depend more heavily on specific people than city-dwellers. This limits the expansion of ideas, and dialogue. The strong reliance on specific people places a social burden to please specific people, which can intensify prejudice, and reduce public dialogue. The anonymity of city-dwellers can also lead to social decadence. The concentration of large groups of people promotes a diffusion of responsibility amongst those living in densely populated areas, which can also lead to crime, and the obliteration of moral values.  Engels describes something similar in “Great Towns.” He meticulously describes the slums scattered throughout the United Kingdom as testaments to the injustices that take place in the cities. These harsh conditions for the laboring class could be influenced by the financial structure of a city, and not solely connected as a characteristic that is unique to all cities. In the cities, there at the most minimal level, exists an opportunity to establish self-identity. This characteristic could be the factor that has set into motion many social movements aimed at improving the conditions of the working class. The movements seem to always ignite in the cities because city-dwellers often have more freedom of expression than those living in rural areas. 

            In the battle of “all against all” described by Engels in “Competition”, there seems to be little hope for the proletariat to escape the misery or, at best, subsistence afforded to them by the bourgeoisie.  The basic human drive of hunger seem enough to coerce any man to turn against his fellow men.  It was due to this expectation that John Barton impressed me so much in this week's reading.  His willingness to suffer and starve in order to provide for others is extraordinary; certainly, there is no other character in Mary Barton who gives so much.  However, I can't help but wonder at the motivation of John Bartnn.  Is his self-sacrifice the result of his incorruptibility or the result of his unwillingness to be corrupted?  Is he immune to the forces of the industrial revolution or is does he simply resist being controlled out of spite?  It is a subtle distinction and, to be honest, I don't think more or less of his character in either case, but the answer could hold significant implications for Gaskell's view of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie.

            Barton, perhaps more astute than most workers, is not merely powerless against the bourgeoisie; he is also eerily aware of these powers.  This is perhaps why he seems to suffer more than others.  While others are content to take what they need when they need it, Barton is skeptical of receiving charity.  When she sees her father's suffering, Mary asks why he doesn't seek the help that, as an able-bodied man, he is certain to get from his union.  His response is perhaps overly idealistic: “I don't want money, child! D—n their charity and their money!  I want work, and it is my right.  I want work” (112).  Barton refuses money in a society where nothing at all can be had without money.  While he understands the need to work for the factory owners in order to survive, his assertion that he has a right work might as well be an Edenic fantasy—he yearns for a world in which he can gather fresh water from the same source that waters the crops he has nurtured for his food.  However, hew has no power to return to such a world.  He understands that men starve who, like himself, are fully willing to work.  It is only natural, then, that he should be aware of the consequences of taking charity without work.

            His refusal of the support in his unemployment stems from his knowledge that the unions and the town have a limited amount of money to give.  Were Mary younger and unable to work, he might be willing to accept charity for her sake, but he is unable to do so for his own.  Even though the Trades Union would have given him money, he instead says, “Give it to Tom Darbyshire [ . . . ] He's more claim on it than me, for he's more need of it, with his seven children” (113).  knowing that every thing he might take could be given to another, he cannot indulge in this charity without setting himself in opposition to other members of the proletariat.  He yields to opium addiction and even murder to avoid playing a part in the forces of competition explained by Friedrich Engels.  However, his apparent loss of humanity and starvation do not truly release him from the forces of the bourgeoisie.  By coming to the rescue of others, he leaves himself powerless to save himself.

            Therefore, I wonder whether the climactic murderous act of John Barton's story is not an act of spite.  By shooting Harry Carson, John Barton exerts control over the bourgeoisie that have since exerted control over his own life.  Without this crime, Barton is only reluctantly subject to their control but not free of it.  Such is the role of John Barton's decay in Mary Barton.  Barton uses his character to illustrate how the proletariat are driven to crime in order to maintain any semblance of control over their own lives.  In short, Barton is driven to inhumane means in order to preserve his own humanity and avoid becoming an easily replaceable cog in the capitalist machine.

The Opiate of the Masses, also Opium

Mary Barton is just swimming in Christian allusions, quotations, and right-out dogma, an overall message of faith that seems hardly believable in ones who suffer so, who are at every end desperate and forced into such material, physical, and moral strife that is hard to believe any kind of practical end could come from it, if we are to believe men like Engels. The message placates the rage of revolution Engels sought to incite, puts manna in the place of bread, in mouths starving for the latter, and ultimately dethrones Mary’s father from his position of steadfast and upright proletarian martyr-soldier. So, is religion here the “opiate of the masses”? How much of this unyielding martyr’s piety is authentic to a man or woman of this time, place, and station, once forced into such a perpetually hard and desperate lifestyle of labor, the only pay for which is clemming? This question comes as the result of another that this novel inspires: That of justice. In Mary Barton, just as in Silas Marner, we are introduced to the grass roots version of social government. Law enforcement is at best inept, and it is always incomprehensible to the uneducated poor. Critical decisions are made by the drawing of lots, and courts of public opinion, such as the tavern in Eliot’s novel and Jem’s factory in Gaskell’s, make decisions of real social significance that, in Mary Barton’s case especially, supersede the opinions of courts. But, like religion, the institution of justice in Mary Barton is something reconstructed by peasants in ways that make it just as accessible and practical to them as Gaskell’s novel argues, as it is intellectually restrictive and counter-productive to Engels’ conjured image of the people of post-industrial England, contented by their Bibles but “intellectually dead” and somehow complacent and unprepared in the sweeping changes that were altering their world. What Gaskell’s and Engels’ works share, however, is that their visions of solutions were hypothetical, invisible hands like Smith’s marketplace Providence: Gaskell, lost in the whimsical dream of laborers, “bound to their employers by ties of respect and affection,” with, “the Spirit of Christ as the regulating law” (374); Engels, in his own fantasy of some unified class-consciousness, “‘One and Indivisible’ Mankind” (10), leading up to actions as glorious and decisive as the Americans’ or as bloody and perpetual as France’s. And then, of course, there’s the opium, or the tobacco, or the alcohol. Oh yes, and let’s not forget the starvation. These things, like religion, do placate, but, to use Steinbeck’s terms in a context at once both anachronistic and likely upsetting to the later-day socialist, they “are the effect, not the cause.” There is a complicated irony in Marx’s phrase, “opiate of the masses,” as a reference to religion. Yes, religion placates an otherwise revolutionary, i.e.: violent, citizen, but, as we see in Mary Barton, religion is equally as effective at building the kind of moral reserve it requires to face adversity. Christ may be good, but opium was a lot more accessible, and it is but for that “golden thread” that only one character, John Barton, gives in to it, and then only after his faith is broken. While it is clear that Gaskell is motivated by the combination of a desire for class diplomacy and a somewhat naive Christian imagination, a strong, practical case for religion is made in her novel, but less by her dialog or asides than by the place where her characters don’t go: Church. The closest thing we get to a church scene is tea-time, but for these people, cut off from the pastoral institutions that Engels so bitterly scoffs at, this humble convention takes up all of the functions of a formal religious institution, and, like justice, its urban-industrial incarnation is the customized product of a particular need: It isn’t top-down from some ideologue puppet-master. It’s bottom-up, from the people who carry the Word into their homes. We spoke in class of the absence of access to healthy foods in working-class neighborhoods, but, for this brief defense of religion, I will offer another example of something common to such working-class towns: An omnipresence of both liquor stores and evangelical churches.

Carlyle and Mammonism

   My reading of Carlyle left me with a sense that he was a bit of an elitist (hopefully I am right in this assumption because my understanding of his writing is based upon this idea). He seems to say that the reason Laissez-Faire will not work for Europe is not the fact that a "Let it be" government is not effective, but rather because the lower class is incapable of functioning and surviving without the help of the government. Carlyle claims that there is a type of reliance between the Lower Class and the Upper Class, that the "captain" and "soldier" relationship creates a working kinship between the two classes. While I agree that there should be some sort of relationship or bond between the two classes, I do not think that the hierarchy that he describes was what was needed. As seen in Gaskell's novel, there was a lack of sympathy for the suffering of the lower class. This separation, the "captain" "soldier" relationship, is exactly what takes away from the human suffering that the working class was experiencing. Carlyle points out that a benefit to the more "hands on" type of government allowed for the Poor Law to be passed, but as we have seen in Engels, it was not meant to better the situation of the poor, rather to just keep them alive long enough to continue working.
   It is interesting that Carlyle sites Mammonism as a part of the downfall of Industry because that seems like an honest and true account of what was going on. However, he compares this Mammonism to the vulgarity of the "Chactaw", and then links the image of the Chactaw to that of the lower class. Instead of realizing that the greed of the upper class is what was destroying the working class Carlyle says it is the greed of the lower class that is their downfall. He says that these men are capable of moving up in society, and from that hope comes their Mammonism. As proof of otherwise though we see in Gaskell and Engles that this time of upward mobility was highly unlikely, if not impossible. The reality was that the dream of success in the city led to an endless cycle of work and starvation that few were ever able to escape from.
      While I think that Carlyle hits a a few key points, he is unable to see the true situation because he is too far removed from it. He is an elitist that is not forced to work to survive, he has no idea how hard Industrial living really was. Gaskell and Engels have shown some of the hard, disgusting, and heartbreaking realities that the working class was forced to endure. What I can say is that the last thing they would have needed was a "captain" to give them orders and purpose, and instead could have just used the kindness of the upperclass to help feed their empty bellies.

All Battle is Misunderstanding

          Refreshing as it was to hear Carlyle bash the ones chosen to be the teaching and guiding force of humanity, by not only showing their duty to all persons, and not just by being labeled Aristocracy, but regarding all “hearts [which] are created by Heaven,” as having roles and a possible dream that everyman should be given what is his, along with the responsibility which Carlyle made his persuasive essay points to reveal who the real guilty party in the discontent of the Working Class; with all of the obvious comparisons to irresponsible parties of history, I was most interested in his opening statement of Chapter 6 “Events are written lessons…: the terror and horror they inspire is but the note of preparation for the truth they are able to teach; a mere waste of terror if that be not learned,” since I have been raised to believe that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” (G. Santayana) and “history repeats itself” (noted to be attributed to Marx and Hegel). In any case, my Indian adage theory that one must “walk a mile in another man’s moccasin” before judging them is true as the theme for this week, again. 

          In any case, Elizabeth Gaskell’s romantic historical fiction, Mary Barton, the terrible and horrible event, which persuades the Aristocracy, or in this case, Mr. Carson, to change is the death of his most loved, and only son. Mr. Carson’s love for his son, is not what Carlyle views as a legitimate guiding force for leadership though. Gaskell is able to show us that one’s selfishness and greed, self-centeredness and personal gain are the misguiding variables in the upper classes of society. Carlyle states that the true insight and genuine understanding of the upper classes to the needs of the “under” classes, stems from the real battle of misunderstanding. If the parties were to know one another, the battle would cease. Gaskell completes Carlyle’s advice by having Jem and Job Legh converse with Carson about the master’s conduct and Carson’s personal duties. Carson admits that he is not capable of remedying the  evils the Working Class complain of. Legh adds that it is not power that the masters have that would eliminate the evils, but the lack of the master’s own suffering and sympathy towards the Working Class. Carlyle adds to this that “when there is no heart, but a monstrous gangrene pretending to exist there as a heart” is when the soul of Truth cannot create an Idea to solve any disease.    

Smith, Carlyle, and Mumford (and me)

“Leave the world alone; it can manage itself.” No, this is not a cry heard from the floor of St. Stephens during Carlyle’s day; it’s the mantra of the Laissez Faire Club of our day. The idea is the legacy of Adam Smith, or rather, the perceived legacy, because Smith never would have said those words. Smith understood that the irresponsible actions of a few could endanger the welfare of the many. As he wrote in Wealth of Nations,

Such regulations may, no doubt, be considered as in some respect a violation of natural liberty. But those exertions of the natural liberty of a few individuals, which might endanger the security of the whole society, are, and ought to be, restrained by the laws of all governments.

Thus Smith never intended for laissez faire as an absolute doctrine. His purpose was to liberate the market from over three centuries of stifling mercantilist policies. This was a reasonable goal in Smith’s day, but, as Carlyle recognizes in this week’s excerpt from Past and Present, the “principle of Let alone (Carlyle’s emphasis) is no longer possible” in Europe, least of all in England. Yet the upper class sees the doctrine as a license for “misgovernment” and “no-government,” while the lower class goes hungry and starves.

The Sage of Chelsea, however, had few words of encouragement for the Chartists. The movement believed that the path to improved working conditions lay through the electorate; hence, the six-point charter and its call for procedural reforms like universal suffrage (for men) and a secret ballot. Yet Carlyle dismisses democracy as a zero sum game. The only thing it accomplishes is the replacement of one group of incompetent leaders for another. Throughout history, he argues, the meaningful “work was done” not by “loud voting and debating of many, but by wise ordering and insight of a few.” To Carlyle the most important right is the “right of the ignorant man to be guided by the wiser.” The fact that you can’t fool all of the people all of the time may have been reason enough for President Lincoln to have faith in democracy, but his contemporary across the pond wanted a higher batting average.

Writing with the benefit of nearly 100 years of insight, Mumford’s rhetoric lacks the power of Carlyle’s, but it shows a more sophisticated understanding of the dynamics of capitalism. Mumford understands that those who reap the greatest benefits under a laissez faire economy will, if left to their own devices, engage in trade practices that deny opportunity that they had to others. Mumford saw this process at work in America under the Homestead Act. Although the act doled out 160-acre tracts to one and all, “gross social inequalities” awaited the next generation of farmers, in the form of land monopolies and inherited fortunes. Thus to keep the playing field even government must pass laws and monitor the market, otherwise political equality is a hollow concept.

During the decade that Mumford wrote, the U.S. government under FDR enacted many reforms designed to redress the excesses that led to the Great Depression. The result was  three postwar decades of unparalleled prosperity where income gains were widely shared across the population, notwithstanding blacks and women. But during the last three decades nearly all the gains have accrued to the very rich, so much so that today one percent of Americans own 42 percent of the wealth, up from 22 percent in 1980. Although America’s institutions are as democratic as ever, it’s common knowledge—except maybe to the blokes who watch Fox News—that big money has hijacked the American political system.