Mary Barton Summary

When Mary Barton is 13, her aunt Esther disappears. Shortly after, her mother, Mrs. Barton, dies in childbirth along with the baby. Mary’s widowed father John Barton throws himself into labor organizing among Manchester’s workers. When Mary is 16, John decides she must work. As pretty Mary has secret pretensions to marry up, she doesn’t want to be a factory girl or a servant. Her father agrees that she can apprentice to a seamstress, and she begins working for a woman named Miss Simmonds.

A year later, Mary’s elderly family friend Alice Wilson introduces her to a girl her age, Margaret, who is plain but sings beautifully. Margaret lives with her grandfather Job Legh. Margaret and Mary become fast friends—though Mary doesn’t tell Margaret about her new flirtation with Harry Carson, a factory owner’s son. Meanwhile, Alice’s nephew Jem Wilson is in love with Mary, but she isn’t interested. One night while Mary and Margaret are sewing together, the girls hear a commotion outside. They run and see that a nearby mill owned by Harry’s father Mr. Carson is on fire. Jem helps rescue his father Mr. Wilson and another worker from the burning mill. Mary, seeing Jem in danger, faints. Mr. Carson decides to keep his mill closed rather than employ workers while he makes repairs. Throughout the spring, other mills shorten workers’ hours or close as well. Unemployed workers’ families begin to starve.

The workers decide to petition for help from Parliament. John Barton is selected as one of their representatives. Mary, suffering from a guilty conscience about her flirtation, decides not to see Harry while her father is away. One evening, her coworker Sally Leadbitter, who acts as a go-between for Mary and Harry, visits Mary and finds her crying. Mary explains that she’s crying because Mr. Wilson has died unexpectedly. The next evening, John returns from London defeated: Parliament refused to listen to the workers. Margaret and Job visit the Bartons, and Job reads them a poem by Samuel Bamford about the suffering of the poor. John, moved, asks Mary to copy down the poem for him. The following day, Mary writes the poem down on the blank half of an anonymous valentine that she suspects Jem sent her.

A year passes. John Barton, having lost his job when he traveled to London, can’t find more work. The Bartons’ home life becomes deeply unpleasant, and Mary spends more and more time outside with Harry. One night, when John is returning home from a union meeting, Esther—dressed like a sex worker—approaches and begs John to listen to her “for Mary’s sake.” John assumes Esther means the dead Mrs. Barton, who was also named Mary. As he blames Esther for Mrs. Barton’s death, he furiously casts Esther away. Esther, sick and weak, falls. A policeman who assumes she’s drunk arrests her.

Meanwhile, Jem musters the courage to propose to Mary. When Mary refuses him, he says that her rejection might turn him into an alcoholic and a murderer. When she still refuses, he flees. Then Mary bursts into tears, having suddenly realized—too late—that she loves Jem, not Harry. She decides to end her flirtation with Harry. When she tells Harry she doesn’t love him, he assumes she is angling for a proposal—and he says he loves her so much he’ll even marry her, though he never considered marrying her before. Shocked that Harry intended to “ruin” her, not marry her, Mary runs away.

Alice’s godson Will, a sailor, visits Manchester on leave. At a gathering at Job’s, Will falls in love with Margaret upon hearing her beautiful singing. Meanwhile, Esther is released from prison. Having watched her family from afar, she knows about Mary’s flirtation with Harry and wants to save Mary from being “ruined” as Esther was. She ambushes Jem Wilson outside work and tells him how her flirtation with an army officer led to extramarital cohabitation, a daughter, the officer’s eventual abandonment, her desperate entry into sex work to support her daughter, and her daughter’s death. Now Jem has to save Mary from the same fate at the hands of Harry Carson. When Jem tries to convince Esther to return home and be rehabilitated, Esther tells him she can’t be rehabilitated because sex work has driven her to alcoholism. She flees.

The factory owners receive a large manufacturing order, but they fear the client has sent the same order to factories in Europe and will only buy from the factories that fill the order at the lowest price. Therefore, they offer workers employment—but at extremely low wages, without explaining their fears that European factories will undercut them. The workers, outraged, go on strike. During the strike, Jem approaches Harry Carson on the street and asks him about his intentions toward Mary. When Harry refuses to answer, Jem prevents him from leaving. Harry whacks Jem with his cane, so Jem punches Harry. A policeman intervenes. Harry declines to press charges but threatens Mary as he leaves; Jem, in turn, threatens Harry if he hurts Mary.

Later, at a meeting between the factory owners and workers’ representatives, the two sides fail to come to an agreement about wages. During the meeting, Harry Carson doodles a mocking caricature of the ragged, starving workers and throws it at the fire—but misses. One of the workers retrieves it later. The workers, John Barton included, are so outraged that the factory owners would mock their starvation that they decide to terrify the owners with an act of violence. They tear Harry’s caricature into strips and mark one; whoever draws the marked strip will be the “assassin.”

Two days later, Will says goodbye to Mary—he plans to walk to Liverpool and then sail to the Isle of Man to visit other relatives. When Mary suggests he travel partway with John, who is going to Glasgow via Liverpool on union business, Will admits that he’s walking, not taking the train, because he’s out of money. That evening, after John and Will both leave, Margaret comes crying to Mary’s house and announces that Alice Wilson has just suffered a stroke. Later the same evening, Harry Carson’s corpse is carried home by policeman—someone shot him in the head.

The following morning, Mary hears of Harry’s murder and nearly faints. The police, who know about Jem’s altercation with Harry, send an undercover officer to the Wilsons’ house and ask Mrs. Wilson to identify a gun without telling her it was found at the crime scene. The unsuspecting Mrs. Wilson confirms that the gun belongs to Jem. The police arrest Jem at work.

Late Friday night, Esther knocks on a distraught Mary’s door. Hiding her status as a sex worker, Esther tells Mary that she investigated the crime scene and found some wadded shot nearby with Mary’s name written on it in Jem’s handwriting. She has brought the wadded shot to Mary to protect her. Then, giving Mary a fake address, she quickly exits. Mary is too horrified to notice that Esther’s behavior is strange: she recognizes that the wadded shot is made from the valentine that Jem sent her and that she repurposed to copy down a poem for her father. In that moment, she realizes that John killed Harry. Mary resolves to find an alibi to prove Jem’s innocence without implicating her father. She learns from Margaret and Mrs. Wilson that Jem walked partway to Liverpool with Will the night of the murder. She decides to find Will after he comes back to Liverpool but before he ships out again; Will can testify that he was with Jem at the time of the murder.

Yet when Mary reaches Will’s Liverpool address on Monday, Will’s landlady tells her that his plans changed—he shipped out that morning. Mary rushes to the Liverpool docks, hires a small boat, and sails out after Will’s ship, which can’t leave the mouth of the river for open sea until high tide. When (with much shouting) the watermen in Mary’s boat convey to the sailors aboard Will’s ship what they want, Will appears and promises to return to Liverpool via the pilot-boat to testify—but it isn’t clear whether he’ll make it back in time.

The next morning in court, Mary is called to the stand. When the rude prosecuting attorney asks whether she liked Harry or Jem better, Mary announces that she loves Jem. After Mary descends from the stand, she begins to feel markedly unwell. When Will arrives, she screams that Jem is saved, then she has a seizure. Will testifies that he was with Jem when the murder took place, and Jem is acquitted.

While a delirious Mary convalesces in Liverpool, Jem figures out from her ravings that she knows her father killed Harry. (Jem had already figured it out because John Barton borrowed the murder weapon from him, but he told no one because he didn’t want to implicate Mary’s father.) As Alice is dying from complications of her stroke, Jem travels back to Manchester to say goodbye and attend her funeral. After the funeral, Jem sees a wrecked-looking John Barton returning home from his “trip to Glasgow.” Jem returns to Liverpool to see Mary, who is eventually cured of her delirium. After Mary and Jem take the train back to Liverpool, Mary lovingly tends to John Barton despite knowing he’s a murderer, as he’s very sick. Meanwhile, Jem is fired from his job because his coworkers don’t want to work with a man who’s been accused of murder.

One day, Mary returns home to find John confessing to Mr. Carson that he killed Harry. Mr. Carson announces that he plans to seek John’s execution. John, recognizing Mr. Carson’s suffering, throws himself at Mr. Carson’s feet and begs forgiveness. Mr. Carson storms out. Yet rather than go to the police, he goes home and reads the Gospels. Later that night, Mary is tending to the sickly, dying John when Mr. Carson bursts in and holds John up to help him breathe. John dies. Later, Job and Jem receive a letter from Mr. Carson asking them to visit him. During the visit, Mr. Carson asks them why John killed Harry. Job explains that the employers’ lack of humane, Christian care for their suffering workers drove John insane. Mr. Carson devotes the rest of his life to improving working conditions in Manchester.

Shortly after John’s funeral, Mary gets a visit from her extremely sick aunt Esther, who later dies at home. Afterward, Jem and Mary get married and immigrate to Canada with Mrs. Wilson. In Canada, no one knows that Jem was once accused of murder; he and Mary live happily and have a son named Johnnie. One day, they receive a letter announcing Margaret and Will’s engagement. Will plans to bring Job and Margaret with him to visit Mary and Jem on his next voyage to North America.