Search

In this haunting scene from her 1848 social problem novel, Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life, Elizabeth Gaskell alludes to a method of criminal punishment once popular in early modern Italy. She appropriates the ever-enclosing walls as a metaphor for the effects of John Barton’s “diseased thoughts,” ones rooted in difficulties with the Chartist movement and opium addiction, in order to bring his hardships to life for her readers (MB 225). But the moving walls also speak to the more literal characteristics of the physical spaces Barton inhabits: the kinetic and dynamic spatial forces of industrial Manchester that leave him “sinking under the pressures of want,” threatening to “crush the life out of him” (225).