'A poor man I know': Samuel Bamford and the making of Mary Barton

Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel Mary Barton has been praised, ever since its publication, for its realistic portrait of working-class life in Manchester during the Chartist years. Yet while Gaskell routinely included real places in her work, she rarely mentioned real people; indeed, she later questioned the “objectionable and indelicate practice” of writing memoirs of living people. “Nobody and nothing was real… in Mary Barton but the character of John Barton; the circumstances are different, but the character and some of the speeches, are exactly a poor man I know.” It is nonetheless possible to identify the originals of several working-class characters in the novel. There is also one explicit reference to a real working man. After the trade unionist John Barton reports the crushing failure of the Chartists’ march on London to petition parliament, the old weaver-naturalist Job Legh relates the story of his own daughter’s lonely death in the capital.