As Edgar Wright points out in his Oxford World’s Classics edition, Mrs Gaskell ‘originally meant her novel to be called “John Barton”. She mentions to two or three correspondents that she had envisaged the novel as a tragic poem with John Barton as the hero’. This ur-narrative would have concentrated in detail on the working-class hero’s suffering, his alienation and seduction by the ‘vile’ doctrines of Chartism and Communism, his lapse into homicidal crime, and his redemption. Unfortunately, as many modern critics feel, Gaskell succumbed to the preferences of her readers and publishers by recasting her plot as Mary Barton, the story of a virtuous working-class girl who resists the blandishments of a rich seducer and heroically saves her true love from the gallows. John Barton’s melancholy story is relegated to the status of sub-plot.

One of the consequences of Mrs Gaskell’s decision (which was entirely justified if she wished to reach a mass readership) was that details of John Barton’s capital crime are left forever enigmatic. To summarize: driven to despair by the masters’ lock-out, the trades union of which Barton is a conspiratorial ringleader resolves on an act of terror, specifically the assassination of Harry Carson, the haughty son of their chief tormentor among the employers. (Barton does not know that Harry is also the would-be seducer of his seamstress daughter, Mary.) Lots are drawn by flaring gaslight, and Barton is selected as the assassin.

The dreadful pact of the trades union occurs in Chapter 16 (‘Masters and Workmen’). The next chapter (‘Barton’s Night-Errand’) is set two days later. The nature of the nighterrand is ambiguous. Superficially it refers to John’s being sent as a union envoy by rail to Glasgow (with a sovereign’s expenses, which suggests a relatively short stay) to negotiate support from sympathetic fellow workers in the northern city. The other night-errand is, of course, the murder. In preparation John has borrowed a ‘gun’ from Mary’s working-class suitor, Jem Wilson. A model of Smilesian self-improvement, the virtuous Wilson has nothing to do with horrible trades unions. But his deceased father and John Barton were friends, and liked to go target shooting with each other. He gives Barton the weapon (from later references to its ‘stock’ and the small wound it makes we apprehend that the weapon is some kind of small-bore rifle, although Mrs Gaskell is resolutely ignorant about such essentially masculine matters). Since Barton has been unemployed for some months, is starving, and addicted to opium, a sudden whim to improve his marksmanship might seem strange. But Jem is unsuspicious.

Barton, as we deduce, lays in wait for Carson in a hedge as the young man returns from his day’s work in town to his father’s house. One well-aimed shot to the temple does the awful deed. John Barton then disappears – possibly to Glasgow as he claimed. Although there were no witnesses, and no evident need to hurry himself, Barton leaves two clues behind at the scene of the crime. The gun is thrown down where the police can easily find it; since it has distinctive markings on it, tracing the weapon back to Wilson is the work of a few hours. John Barton also leaves behind some paper ‘wadding’, which he evidently removes and throws down before firing the weapon. This piece of paper has written on it the words ‘—ry Barton’. It was presumably placed in the barrel by Barton after cleaning the gun and hiding it in the hedgerow, prior to the murder, to protect the weapon from rusting in the dew. Although the handwriting of ‘—ry Barton’ is distinctively Jem’s, the document (a copy of Samuel Bamford’s poem, ‘God help the poor’) from which the paper was torn belonged to Barton. The police, whose examination of the crime scene is perfunctory, miss this crucial piece of evidence. The paper is discovered by Mary’s aunt Esther, who gives it to her niece, who destroys it. The tell-tale piece of paper persuades Mary of the dreadful fact that it must be her father who has shot Carson.

Gaskell seems to have been extraordinarily nervous of the subject of murder, and her narrative of this episode is remote and infuriatingly vague. Crucially, she does not inform us as to whether John Barton’s leaving the gun and the wadding with his name on it was the consequence of panic or a deep-laid plan. Assuming the second, Barton’s motives would seem to be as follows: the weapon would quickly be traced back through Jem to him, and the wadding – with the murderer’s name on it – would clinch the matter. The ‘—ry Barton’ inscription suggests a man leaving a deliberate trail for his pursuers. The chance of the premeditating, cold-blooded murderer ‘accidentally’ leaving a scrap of paper with his own surname by his victim exceeds even Mrs Gaskell’s penchant for providential coincidence. Speculating further, we may suppose that in Glasgow – where it will cause least trauma for his daughter – Barton intends to kill himself (one of Mrs Gaskell’s notes for this section mentions that Barton’s ‘temptation was suicide’). Alternatively, if his nerve fails him, he may emigrate to the United States from the Scottish port under a false name, never to be seen again by his friends and family.

Barton does not know that Jem (having been informed by Esther of the other young man’s evil intentions) has quarrelled publicly with Harry over Mary, and has threatened the mill-owner with dreadful consequences if he does not leave her alone. The threats are on record with the police, who – having traced the gun – arrest Jem and look no further for the assassin. On his part, Jem knows that John Barton must be the killer, since he borrowed the murder weapon a couple of days before, but out of love for Mary (whom he supposes not to know about her father’s guilt) says nothing to the police or his defence lawyers, prepared as he is to go to the gallows to spare her shame. As it happens, thanks to Esther’s giving her the wadding, Mary does know that her father is the killer. In her notes for the novel, Mrs Gaskell initially intended that Mary should visit Jem in prison; this scene was never written, presumably so that the two young people should remain at cross-purposes during the trial. Clearly, if Jem knew that Mary knew, his supreme self-sacrifice would be unnecessary. And if she knew that he knew, the sensible thing would be to instruct him to inform on John Barton rather than going, as she does, to frantic lengths to procure him an alibi.

What, meanwhile, is John Barton doing? The novel does not tell us. In a note, Gaskell wrote ‘he had not heard of Jem’s arrest and trial till it was over’. This is very unconvincing. Political assassination was a sensational event (Mrs Gaskell was aware of the murder of a mill-owner; Thomas Ashton, during a strike in 1831, and admitted that it may have ‘unconsciously’ inspired her novel). The Manchester Guardian would have been full of the matter. It is incredible that, having murdered someone, Barton would not, if he were in Glasgow, examine the papers for reports of the event. One assumes that he was not in Glasgow, nor in any city, but somewhere in the countryside trying, unsuccessfully, to screw himself up to suicide.

There is another plausible possibility, namely, that Barton intended to frame Jem. In the novel, as written, this is rendered improbable by his not knowing that Harry was the putative seducer of his daughter, and that Jem had made death-threats to his rival. In Gaskell’s notes for the novel, however, Esther tells not Jem about Harry’s evil plans but her brother-in-law, John. In the author’s mind, then, was a pre-existing narrative in which John Barton was fully aware of how suspicious it would be if a gun belonging to Jem and a piece of paper with the words ‘[Ma]ry Barton’ were found near the corpse. Naturally, the police would assume lover’s jealousy. Suspicion would be averted from the trades union, who would have committed the perfect crime. In this version of the plot, John Barton would be many times more culpable than in the novel as written. And this second scenario would make more sense of John Barton’s not hurrying back to prevent an innocent man going to the gallows in his stead (as would seem logical in the novel as written). That Jem should hang in his place was what John Barton intended from the first.

Mrs Gaskell never enlightens us. John Barton returns after the trial. Where he has been, and what he knew while he was away, we are not told. On his return we are informed that he does appear strangely crushed – ‘beaten down by some inward storm, he seemed to grovel along, all self-respect lost and gone.’ This seems something other than assassin’s remorse. It is plausible that he hates himself for having framed an innocent man; this it is that gnaws at his self-respect, and reduces him to a grovelling thing. But, as far as one can make out, Gaskell leaves the point unclear. John Barton’s actions and motives are clouded in the tremendous religiosity of his final reconciliation with Carson senior and his euthanasia, forgiven by the man he has so horribly wronged. Dives and Lazarus, man and master, are united in Christ. Nevertheless, in our speculations about the unwritten novel, ‘John Barton’, one is left wondering just how guilty a felon Mrs Gaskell originally had in mind.