Family Business and Childhood Experience: David Copperfield and Great Expectations

Abstract

Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848) is designed, as its preface tells the reader, to expose the horrible living conditions of Manchester’s textile workers during the severe economic downturn of the 1840s. While the workers’ children starve to death one after another, the mill owner’s children continue to live a life of luxury. But just as the novel is on the verge of arguing for a more equal distribution of wealth, John Barton, the novel’s union agitator, assassinates the son of the mill owner. Rather than furthering the cause of the suffering textile workers, the crime puts the owner in a sympathetic light when his employees find to their surprise that he grieves very deeply for his lost child. It eliminates union organization as a possible solution to the problems of economic inequality and blurs the line between owner and employee as both are shown to have a deep connection to their families. The Victorian factory owner who does nothing to aid the children dying in horrendous poverty can, according to the narrative, be forgiven anything if it turns out that he loves his children. In the end, the novel offers no solution to the social injustices it explores.1 It is enough to learn that business owners are family men too.