The Death of the Working-Class Hero in Mary Barton and Alton Locke Anne Graziano After long complicated narratives, the working-class heroes of Mary Barton : A Taie of Manchester Life and Alton Locke, Tailor and Poet end up dead. Embittered by the failure of the Chartist petition of 1839, John Barton slips into opium addiction. When he and his fellow trade union delegates fail in their attempt to negotiate with the factory owners, John Barton murders the mill owner's son on behalf of the delegates. He then suffers from a bad conscience, addiction and starvation. He begs forgiveness of his victim's father and recognizes the error of his political and moral ways. Finally, his starved body metes out its own justice, and he dies. Alton Locke's death represents a long-term effect of infectious contacts , both literal and figurative. After a period of spiritual and moral alienation associated in part with Chartism, he falls into a suicidal funk. He attempts to save a debauched tailor and in the process catches typhus. After a tumultuous dream life, he wakes up and is saved. Yet the infection had already marked his weak form, and Alton Locke dies on the way to the New World. Thus although the narratives clearly diverge in many ways—and most clearly in the Chartists' commitment to their politics— Mary Barton and Alton Locke both represent long, drawn-out narratives of the death of the working-class hero. Critics have described the fate of these heroes as the effect of the political sympathies of the middle-class writers. In his influential work from JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory 29.2 (Spring 1999): 135-157. Copyright O 1999 by JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory. 136 j N T the late 1950s Culture and Society, Raymond Williams set the critical stage for discussions of these works. Beginning with a sympathetic representation of the plight of the working class, Gaskell, he argues, ends with a middle-class perspective on Chartist radicalism. Williams suggests that the novel suffers at the level of form and content when Gaskell turns from representative working-class concerns within John Barton's plot to the murder and Mary Barton's romances. Although more quickly dismissed by Williams, Alton Locke is also said to suffer from a retreat from politics. He contends that in both novels an early sympathetic perspective of the working class and sources of radical politics turns into direct condemnation . In a remark on Gaskell's novel, but one that might also pertain to his reading of Kingsley's work, William asserts that in the course of the novel "the flow of sympathy with which [the novelist] began was arrested" (89). ' The political views of the two Victorian writers provide grounding for Williams' analysis of the novels. Both writers professed a sympathy with the working class and their efforts of self-representation. Yet both contested the violent means that Chartism potentially and directly entailed.2 In a letter written in late 1848, Gaskell suggested that she was afraid of the influence Mary Barton might have with regard to the antagonism between the classes; her preface to Mary Barton also indicates that she sees political violence enacted by the working class as sinful "revenge" rather than potentially justifiable political acts (37). Although he at one point claimed to be a Chartist in his effort to convince workers of his sympathy, Kingsley was part of a group of Christian socialists who ultimately felt that aristocratic leadership was necessary to initiate reform and direct workingclass interests. As a journalist and a novelist, he expressed support of Chartist endeavors, but felt that "physical force" advocates were deeply misguided.3 Clearly the authors' professed antipathy to extreme measures of working -class radicalism encourages us to read the Chartist heroes' fate as a direct product of middle- or upper-class loyalties. Yet if we attend more closely to the patterns of the heroes' dismissal, we will see that the narratives are more complicated than transparent expressions of the writers' political conservatism. The novels clearly represent narratives of decline in which potentially heroic representatives become criminals and diseased remnants of their former potential selves. Yet I would argue...