Elizabeth Gaskell and Material Culture

The valentine that Mary dismisses haunts Mary Barton (1848) as a ragged remnant: recycled for copying out Samuel Bamford's radical poem, torn up for gun wadding in the execution of a political assassination, and burned as trash before it can become trial evidence. The recycling of these bits of paper instantiates what many critics have seen as the novel's double loyalties: a radical political plotline masquerading as a romantic one, Mary's marriage plot thus sabotaging John's political awakening. Others have argued that this masquerade is really the intricate entanglement of complex values. The enmeshment of these values emerges powerfully in the figure of the valentine because, like all European and American paper during this period, valentines were made from rags. This material history allows us to see the valentine's narrative position in the novel's plot through its historical position in the industrialisation of papermaking and the emergence of a modern print culture that would make the novel of social purpose possible and craft professional careers like Elizabeth Gaskell's. The complexity of this material history affords a glimpse of Mary Barton' s hidden radical politics.