Having already lost his son Tom at a young age, Barton is left to raise his daughter, Mary, alone and now falls into depression and begins to involve himself in the Chartist, trade-union movement.

She fondly hopes, by marrying Carson, to secure a comfortable life for herself and her father, but immediately after refusing Jem's offer of marriage she realizes that she truly loves him.

"[1] However, it is clear from her preface that the suffering she saw around her was the motivational factor for the content of the novel: "I had always felt a deep sympathy with the care-worn men, who looked as if doomed to struggle through their lives in strange alternations between work and want[...] The more I reflected on this unhappy state of things between those so bound to each other by common interests, as the employers and the employed must ever be, the more anxious I became to give some utterance to the agony which from time to time convulsed this dumb person.

"[2] Gaskell's desire to accurately represent the poverty of industrial Manchester is evident in a record of a visit she made to the home of a local labourer.

[1] It is widely thought that the murder of Harry Carson in the novel was inspired by the assassination of Thomas Ashton, a Manchester mill-owner, in 1831.

One element of the novel that has been a subject of heavy criticism is the apparent shift in genres between the political focus of the early chapters to the domestic in the later ones.

On the one hand, the consistent use of tone through the original preface and the novel, and authorial insets like the first paragraph of chapter 5 suggest the Gaskell is directly narrating the story.

[7] Prominent in the novel is Gaskell's attempt to reinforce the realism of her representation through the inclusion of "working-class discourses", not only through the use of closely imitated colloquialisms and dialect, but also through "passages from Chartist poems, working class ballads, proverbs, maxims, and nursery rhymes, as John Barton's radical discourse, Ben Davenport's deathbed curses, and Job Legh's language of Christian submission.

A key symbol shown in this chapter is the use of five shillings; this amount being the price John Barton receives for pawning most of his possessions, but also the loose change in Harry Carson's pocket.

Gaskell details the importance of the mother in a family; as is seen from the visible decline in John Barton's physical and moral well-being after his wife's death.

This view is also symbolized by Job Legh's inability to care for Margaret as a baby in the chapter "Barton's London Experience".

Both Wilson and Barton are pictured holding the infants in the place of the nanny that can't be afforded as the novel begins, but eventually, both end up relying on the income of their children, Jem and Mary respectively.

Here it can be seen that redemption is also a key aspect of the novel; not least because of the eventual outcome of the relationship between Messrs Carson and Barton, but also in Gaskell's presentation of Esther, the typical "fallen woman".

[5] Several times Gaskell attempts to mask her strong beliefs in the novel by disclaiming her knowledge of such matters as economics and politics, but the powerful language she gives to her characters, especially John Barton in the opening chapter, is a clear indication of the author's interest in the class divide.

She openly pleads for reducing this divide through increased communication and, as a consequence, understanding between employers and workmen and generally through a more human behaviour based on Christian principles, at the same time presenting her own fears of how the poor will eventually act in retaliation to their oppression.

Gaskell also describes an Italian torture chamber where the victim is afforded many luxuries at first but in the end, the walls of the cell start closing in and finally they crush him.

[10][11] Stephen Derry mentions that Gaskell uses the concept of the shrinking cell to describe John Barton's state of mind but also added the element of luxury to further enhance it.

Early reception of the novel was divided, with some praising its honesty and fidelity to facts and others criticising it for presenting a distorted picture of the employer-employee relationships.

[7] The Athenaeum's otherwise positive review raised the question of whether "it may be kind or wise or right to make fiction the vehicle for a plain, matter of fact exposition of social evils".

[7] Thomas Carlyle wrote a letter to Gaskell in which he called it "a Book seeming to take its place far above the ordinary garbage of Novels".

[17][18] In the years following, there were then a number of stage productions, based more or less loosely on the plot and themes of the novel: Colin Hazlewood, Our Lot in Life, 1862; Dion Boucicault, The Long Strike, 1866 (at the Lyceum, in which the political plot was removed and which also incorporated elements of Lizzie Leigh); J P Weston, The Lancashire Strike, 1867; George Sims, The Last Chance, 1885; and, best-known, Stanley Houghton, Hindle Wakes, 1912, of which there have been four film versions.