Melodrama and the Production of Affective Knowledge in Mary Barton

In The Condition of the Working Class in England (published in German in 1845 and in English in 1887), Friedrich Engels offers the following argument about "what the English workers' press rightly denounces as social murder":

If one individual inflicts a bodily injury upon another which leads to the death of the person attacked, we call it manslaughter; on the other hand, if the attacker knows beforehand that the blow will be fatal we call it murder. Murder has also been committed if society places hundreds of workers in such a position that they inevitably come to premature and unnatural ends. Their death is as violent as if they had been stabbed or shot. Murder has been committed if thousands of workers have been deprived of the necessities of life or if they have been forced into a situation in which it is impossible for them to survive. Murder has been committed if the workers have been forced by the strong arm of the law to go on living under such conditions until death inevitably releases them. Murder has been committed if society knows perfectly well that thousands of workers cannot avoid being sacrificed so long as these conditions are allowed to continue. Murder of this sort is just as culpable as the murder committed by an individual.

(108-09)

That quotation provides an apt description of two of the primary points of emphasis in Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton: a sensitive, nearly documentary presentation of the impact on working-class families of being "deprived of the necessities of life" and the chain of personal causality through to its consequences in an act of individual murder. Gaskell brings those points of emphasis together at the end of the novel in the often criticized deathbed scene between John Barton, the murderer of Harry Carson, and Mr. Carson, the victim's father. She does so through a melodramatic, ethical tableau that figures the two men as morally equal; the role Carson played in the "social murder" of Barton's young son Tom (among others) and Barton's shooting murder of Carson's son are implied in the scene as morally equivalent. Gaskell's narrative, in this reading, fills the empty space between the abstraction of social murder (a form of murder without a particular perpetrator to blame and thus a crime that is not actionable) and the physical realities of an individual murder through a chain of causality set in motion by social conditions and fulfilled through a series of chosen actions.

Engels tried to fill that same space in his text through the accumulation of detail after detail of inhumane living conditions among the working classes, which culminates in his claim that "There can be no doubt that in England social war is already being waged" (149). Despite that, for Engels, obvious fact, "It is...somewhat surprising that the bourgeoisie should remain so complacent and placid in the face of the thunderclouds which are gathering overhead and grow daily more threatening" (149). How could the middle classes not see what should be so visible a threat to their own well-being, a threat they themselves are responsible for creating? In addition to the well documented literal invisibility of the working classes because of urban architectural design as one possibility, another is that by the 1840s (after the passage of the New Poor Law in 1834), for the middle classes the working class had become little more than an abstract, economic, rather than social category. Gaskell's novel challenges such perceptions with the insight that affective, sympathetic experience through narrative reading can stimulate a cognitive response in thought and reflection, the figurations of narrative enabling a depth of knowledge otherwise inaccessible to consciousness. For her middle-class readers, the working class can become visible, embodied individuals. Deploying scenic figurations from melodrama, Mary Barton communicates through what Elaine Hadley calls "the melodramatic mode," a mode that "seems to have served as a behavioral and expressive model for several generations of English people" (3). In that mode, "the body spoke...for those individuals without a sanctioned public voice. But...