Mary Barton

A month has passed since Esther’s arrest, and she is released from prison. She is still obsessed with the idea of saving Mary, but she doesn’t know whom to petition to help Mary. Then she decides that Jem, Mary’s childhood friend, could help. She lurks outside his job; when he exits, she grabs his arm. Though at first he tries to shake her off, she tells him it’s about Mary Barton—and he stops, shocked, to ask how she knows Mary. When she explains that she’s Mary’s aunt Esther, Jem asks where Esther has been all these years. Esther tells him sharply that he should be able to guess—and that she wants him to save Mary from her own fate, as Mary now loves someone above her station just like Esther did. Jem becomes raptly interested.

Esther explains that she fell in love with an army officer. When his regiment decamped to Chester, she didn’t want to lose their relationship—so she came with him. Though he had promised to marry her, he didn’t. They cohabited for three years, during which Esther had a baby daughter. Then, one day, the officer was sent to Ireland—and he wouldn’t take Esther and their daughter with him, though he left some money.

Esther used the money to set up a little shop, but when her daughter got sick, she couldn’t work and tend her child: she sold everything for medicine and wrote to the officer begging for aid, but he never replied—she thinks he must have changed addresses. Eventually, she was so behind on rent that her landlord was going to evict her in the middle of winter—so she “went out into the street.” Wildly, Esther says that she’ll never see her child again, even in death.

After collecting herself, Esther tells Jem that after her child died, she traveled back to Manchester and, though she never contacted the Bartons’ directly, learned from spying and gossip that Mary was apprenticed as a dressmaker. This apprenticeship seemed like a bad idea to Esther—it required Mary to be out late and so might lead her astray—and Esther decided to look out for Mary from afar. She saw a young man, Harry Carson, accompanying Mary on her walks home, is afraid for Mary, and wants Jem to protect her—Mary’s better off dead than ruined. Jem morbidly replies, “Better we were all dead.”

Jem promises to help Mary and asks Esther to come home with him, so that he can help her find an “honest” job. Esther blesses him for his generosity but tells him that redeeming her is impossible: her life has driven her to drink, and now she is an alcoholic. Yet she insists that he promise to save Mary from such a fate. Jem promises. Afterward, Esther begins to leave when Jem asks how he can contact her again. Esther tells him she has no fixed address—he’ll have to find her in the street—and hurries away. As soon as she’s gone, Jem bitterly reproaches himself for not having urged her to come with him for as long as it took to convince her.

That night in his bedroom, Jem fantasizes about killing Mary rather than letting her marry another. Yet he recognizes that killing her—who simply loved someone else—would be terribly unjust. Then he fantasizes about killing Harry, but a “still small voice” tells him that that would break Mary’s heart. Then he contemplates suicide—but he reminds himself that he promised Esther to protect Mary. He decides that he must live and keep his promise. Esther might have jumped to conclusions about Harry’s malign purposes—Harry might want to marry Mary. After all, his own mother (Mrs. Carson) was a factory girl. With this in mind, Jem plans to ask Harry outright what he means to do.