Whether through exchanges with the greater, smoke-filled atmosphere of Manchester or the atmospheres within individual, steam-powered mills, the working-class characters of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848) turn into ghosts with every breath they take. The novel depicts scenes of suffering and death, often illustrating bodily vulnerabilities to illnesses and lack of nutrition. Gaskell takes a step further to connect disease and starvation, as with her early depiction of Mary’s younger brother, Tom, who dies “for want of better food.”¹ Tom is one example of many who lack nutrition in this novel; as Gaskell explains, “whole families went through gradual starvation.”² Throughout the narrative, Gaskell is attuned to bodily intake — not only of pathogens and of food, but also of air. While this novel on industrial Manchester clearly focuses on scenes of starvation, Gaskell shows that the working-class’s hunger is also for “the open air” — a phrase repeated in the novel five times. Gaskell draws attention to breath over sixty times, where inhales are often gasps and exhales are often coughs, and while illness features heavily in the novel, Gaskell includes the “smoky” skies as an exacerbating factor.³

The air is thick with largely unseen, particulate threats, which both surround Manchester's workers and infiltrate their lungs. The labored inhales and exhales are constant reminders of bodily porosity, or "trans-corporeality," which Stacy Alaimo explains as a recognition that “the human is always inter-meshed with the more-than-human world.”⁴ Alaimo's "trans-corporeality" framework disrupts the idea of the human as a bounded entity, but this recognition also suggests bodily risk. Manchester contained five hundred factory chimneys by the early 1840s; it is therefore no surprise that its residents “imbibed the sulphurous, smoke filled air with every breath they took.” While the mechanisms of dangerous particles remained invisible, residents “tasted” the smoke daily.⁵ Breathing itself revealed the disturbing materiality of this heavily polluted atmosphere. Pale, gaunt, and somewhere between life and death, the working-class characters of Gaskell’s novel resemble specters, and as specters, they resemble the hazardous air surrounding them, passing through them, and transforming them. This essay will draw attention to Gaskell's reliance on spectral elements that make vivid a changing industrial city that created smoke-filled inhabitants.

In the years directly following the publication of Mary Barton, chemical climatologists would connect Manchester’s polluted skies to the damaged lungs of its residents. In their “battle against the bad air,” groups contemporary with Gaskell’s novel sought solutions: “Smoke-abatement reform groups and city ordinances date to the early 1840s, when the central city had 250,000 inhabitants crammed in the shadows of its mills and warehouses.”⁶ While harmful particles in the forms of bases (like alkalis) and acid (such as sulfuric acid) were invisible, their effects certainly were not. In Angus Smith’s study titled “On the Air and Rain of Manchester” (1852), he carefully shows the connection between Manchester’s factories and their harmful effects on plant and animal life. Harold Platt explains that Smith alarmingly discovered “three times more pollution in the inner city than the outskirts.”⁷ In Smith’s own words, his rainwater analysis showed “sulphuric acid in proportion as it approached the town.”⁸ He concluded that the acid, as well as other organic matter, devastated the immediate area.

In addition to Smith’s chemical analyses, spectral language fills his 1852 report. Near the end of his findings, he added a spirit-air description: “We cannot say much for the increases of clearness of thought when we compare this with a description of air written ... in 1552: ‘Aer est spiritus, spiritus est ventus.’ The air is spirit, spirit is wind.”⁹ Smith equated air and wind to spirit, animating the air in this section of his report and ultimately describing it as material, especially in Manchester, due to its chemical "impurities." For Smith, the air had become a living, destructive force. Making his metaphysical analysis of air clear, while also connecting to health, Smith continued: “Modern chemistry has gone far towards proving the correctness of ancient impressions, that the air goes with the blood through the whole body, and some have almost gone as far as a Greek philosopher, who said that the soul is in the lungs.”¹⁰ Smith was not the only scientist to find these results, nor to describe them in supernatural terms. In a study titled Coal, Smoke, and Sewage (1857), Peter Spence extended Smith’s research of Manchester’s atmosphere and the effects on surrounding life. Personifying Manchester’s smoke, he argued that “atmospheric poisons” made their way up chimneys and were “pouring themselves down the throat of the first pedestrian they meet in the street.”¹¹ In despair, Spence found that “the invisible evil is completely ignored.”¹² Using anthropomorphic imagery, Spence's report attempts to enliven the particulate dangers his audience cannot see and therefore could overlook.

Spence’s descriptions of particulate hazards as an “invisible evil” anticipate Ulrich Beck’s foundational work on contemporary environmental risks born out of industrialism, including radiation and other forms of industrial toxicity. Using the language of supernatural hauntings, Beck describes a “new ‘shadow kingdom’ ... which is hidden behind the visible world and threatens human life on this Earth.”¹³ By using the haunting image of a “shadow kingdom,” Beck makes the case for a Gothic materiality,¹⁴ where the invisible becomes visible through depictions of the supernatural: “The world of the visible must be investigated, relativized and evaluated with respect to a second reality,” Beck claims, “only existent in thought and yet concealed in the world.”¹⁵ This "second reality," in other words, is the "shadow kingdom" consisting of toxic, deadly material threats.

In Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Rob Nixon asks how to represent “calamities that are slow and long lasting” and that disproportionately affect the poor, especially when the calamity is not (or no longer) a “spectacle,” and may no longer hold an audience’s attention.¹⁶ Nixon, referencing Beck's "shadow kingdom," shows that deploying supernatural depictions is one option. Similarly, in The Sky of Our Manufacture, Jesse Oak Taylor describes Gothic literature's capacities in rendering environmental pollution and the "polluted body." Taylor explains that the fin-de-siècle Gothic, such as Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, "stages the precariousness of bodies ... produced by exposure to environmental disturbance or pollution."¹⁷ Published in 1848, Gaskell's Mary Barton offers an earlier example of the Gothic's ability to not only portray dangerous air, but also to depict the body's inhalation of this air and its subsequent transformation.

If Spence anticipated Beck’s “shadow kingdom” argument, Gaskell anticipated them both. Lucy Sheehan has argued that the combination of realist and supernatural modes in Mary Barton enables Gaskell to more fully depict the factory workers: “the novel imbricates fantastic and realist modes in order to broaden, rather than constrict, our view of social reality in mid-century England, granting access to the ghastly conditions that underlie industrialized society and that cannot be adequately captured by non-fantastic narration alone.”¹⁸ Sheehan notes that scholars have seen Gaskell's use of the Gothic as concealing the harsh realities faced by Manchester's working class. Instead, Sheehan shows that Gaskell's use of the Gothic enables a direct engagement with this reality: “But what if we were to take appearances of the Gothic seriously?” Sheehan asks, explaining that the Gothic plays a vital role in Gaskell’s “critique of representation.”¹⁹ My essay likewise takes the Gothic seriously, analyzing Gaskell’s representations of the working class with an examination of her spectral atmosphere and spectral characters.

Years prior to Smith’s and Spence’s experiments in Manchester, Gaskell was attentive to an “invisible evil” stemming from industrialization, and she likewise turned to supernatural language to depict industrial pollution. Published in 1848 but set in the late 1830s, Mary Barton is haunted by the earlier decade’s energy transition from water power to steam power within the English textile industry.²⁰ In an interlude nearly halfway through the novel, Gaskell writes of the “mighty agency of steam,” which is “capable of almost unlimited good or evil.”²¹ With its characters frequently turning into phantoms, Mary Barton decidedly shows the “evil” sides of steam power. In Gaskell’s preface to the novel, she famously explains that she “endeavoured to represent” the “factory-people in Manchester.”²² Gaskell’s use of the supernatural contributes to her project in depicting the working class, making the “evil” atmosphere’s damage to the lungs hauntingly visible.

Gaskell frames the novel with an epigraph on humans becoming spirits, showing the centrality of specters in Mary Barton. The spectral, in other words, is not only occasionally evoked, but is a lens for reading the entire novel. While the novel’s epigraph by Carlyle on novelists and readers is often quoted and examined, another epigraph, in German, appears before Carlyle’s. Only the last stanza of Johan Ludwig Uhland’s “On the Crossing” appears on the page, which A.W. Ward has translated — in the Knutsford edition of Gaskell’s novels — as “Take, good ferryman, I pray / Take a triple fare today; / The twain who with me touched the strand / Were visitants from another land.”²³ Evoking the afterlife with the crossing by “visitants,” the image evokes the mythical River Styx, with the dead making their journey to the underworld. Further supporting the idea that these “visitants” are ghostly figures, the previous stanza reads: “And yet, what binds all friendship, / Is when spirit finds fellow spirit, / Spiritly were those hours, / With spirits am I still bound.”²⁴ The opening epigraph shows beings on a journey to the underworld, which frames my readings of the ghosts in Mary Barton: the epigraph reveals that one appropriate lens for reading the novel is through ghostly transformations.

The epigraph also clarifies some oddities in the opening chapters of the novel. In the opening dinner scene with the Wilsons at the Bartons’ home, the narrator peculiarly uses “human” as a modifier: “At length the business actually began. Knives and forks, cups and saucers made a noise, but human voices were still, for human beings were hungry and had no time to speak.”²⁵ The use of “human” may first appear strange; yet, with the lens of the opening epigraph, the narrator must clarify with these adjectives that the story is now occupied with the living. The use of “human” as a modifier appears again in the chapter describing Ben Davenport’s death. The narrator directs us to the Davenports’ cellar-home below street level: “You went down one step even from the foul area into the cellar in which a family of human beings lived. It was very dark inside.”²⁶ Even though the narrator insists that "human beings" live in this cellar, the narrator then turns to descriptions of the abhuman, the “not-quite-human subject.”²⁷ When Ben dies, it is from a “ghoul-like fever” within a chapter with its own epigraph describing a “dark demon foe.”²⁸ Ben’s death haunts the rest of Mary Barton, and ghosts or ghost-like characters exist throughout the novel, continually informing the plot. Some of the passages in Mary Barton contain the explicit terms “phantom,” “ghost,” “spectral,” or “spirit.” For other passages, the novel’s opening epigraph invites an interpretation of specters, even when not explicitly stated in the text.

The epigraph foregrounds the transformation of the novel’s first ghost, Mary’s mother, as well as subsequent others. Soon after Mrs. Barton dies, Mary sees her form at night: “and Mary would start from her hard-earned sleep, and think, in her half-dreamy, half-awakened state, she saw her mother stand by her bed-side, as she used to do ‘in the days of long ago;’ with a shaded candle and an expression of ineffable tenderness.”²⁹ Mrs. Barton's death has numerous contributing factors and is not overtly connected to mill labor, and yet John Barton immediately thinks about her work in the factories after she dies, drawing attention to Mrs. Barton’s vulnerable body, shaped by Manchester. This first ghostly apparition (excluding the epigraph) sets the tone for the other apparitions in the text: these ghosts are the working-class figures of Manchester, and they serve as a warning that the working class is made disposable, filled by smoke, the waste-product of steam-powered industry, their Gothic materiality illustrating Gaskell's social critique.

The entire working-class population in Mary Barton has been shaped by their proximity to industrialized mills. This population is distinguishable even from other industrial towns, as the narrator describes the “specimen of a Manchester man; born of factory workers, and himself bred up in youth, and living in manhood, among the mills.” The “manufacturing population,” the narrator notes, has become pale, with “sallow complexions and irregular features.”³⁰ The workmen’s spectral appearance becomes clearer with the depictions of the union men who come looking for John Barton. Mary becomes terrified of these “desperate” men, who had been “made ready by want” for “any thing.” The narrator explains that Mary’s dreams are “haunted” by the “strange faces of pale men with dark glaring eyes [who] peered into the inner darkness” of the home where she lives with her father.³¹ The focus in this spectral description is on starvation; however, the surrounding context clarifies that the workers are also vulnerable to Manchester’s dangerous industrial atmospheres. Juxtaposing nutrients and breathing in the same description, the narrator explains that the workmen were “starving, gasping on from day to day,”³² again showing Gaskell’s emphasis on bodily intake.

While Gaskell occasionally uses “gasping” to depict a character’s shock, “gasping” occurs frequently to describe the labored breathing of Mary’s father, John Barton, especially near his death. The main focus of Barton’s end-of-life struggle is on his breathing. His transformation into a phantom during his life makes clear that he had transformed into the dangerous air surrounding and flowing through him. Undergoing a “period of bodily privation,” John Barton inhales the smoke of Manchester’s skies and the smoke of opium rather than ingesting food. Opium usage dramatizes the depiction of Barton’s body being transformed by atmospheric toxins, as he increasingly becomes a specter. Before learning of John Barton’s gasping, the narrator alerts us that “no haunting ghost could have had less of the energy of life in its involuntary motions than he, who, nevertheless, went on with the same measured clock-work tread until the door of his own house was reached.”³³ His “measured clock-work tread” illustrates what E.P. Thompson foundationally called “the new time-discipline” of industrial time, which means that this passage juxtaposes John Barton’s spectral transformation with his factory labor. The narrator emphasizes Barton’s transformation in a passage on the following page, which also ends the chapter: “Jem drew the resolution to act as if he had not seen that phantom likeness of John Barton; himself, yet not himself.”³⁴ In the span of the next two chapters, the spectral John Barton has lost his ability to fully inhale. Three passages draw attention to his attempts: “I’m getting scant o’ breath,” he says, which is followed by Jem’s suggestion to purchase medication for this “gasping breath,” but the chapter ends when John Barton’s “breathing seemed almost to stop.”³⁵

Gaskell describes John Barton's fellow mill weavers as having a similar fate awaiting them. When the textile mill weavers meet with the mill masters in the middle of their strike, Gaskell depicts the men’s vulnerable bodies in the presence of industrial hazards: “Unshaded gas flared upon the lean and unwashed artisans as they entered.” The men must cover their eyes due to the brightness of the flames, showing both the intensity of the light and the complete lack of boundaries between themselves and the gas. Even their clothing cannot shield their bodies, since they could not afford any new material: “air-gaps were to be seen in their garments.”³⁶ It is only during the “Sabbath stillness” that the spectral workers find respite from their labors, as the skies show a brief lessening of pollution. There are “no factory bells” on Sundays, and “no early workmen going to their labours.” Instead, they experience the “fresh sharp air.”³⁷

Gaskell explicitly describes the smoke-filled skies of Manchester on only a couple of occasions in the novel; at other times, the smoke depictions appear nearly hidden within other descriptions. Even without numerous depictions, the steam power in this novel remains omnipresent. Nathan Hensley and Philip Steer, in their introduction to Ecological Form, discuss coal as “obliquely omnipresent” in the Victorian novel, which leads to their argument for a “hermeneutics of coal” that can make the steam-power energy visible in Victorian novels, including Gaskell’s Cranford (1853) and North and South (1855).³⁸ Gaskell’s Mary Barton further illustrates Hensley’s and Steer’s argument, for the novel only discusses the coal-filled atmosphere when characters perceive Manchester from a distance — either while in other industrial locales, such as Liverpool, or as they depart Manchester. The characters do not describe the smoke while they are in it, for they have become accustomed to these skies, and there are no clear skies present for comparison. The smoke becomes visible, in other words, when characters can detach from the area, no longer inhaling and exhaling its pollution.

It is only when Mary is on her way to Liverpool that the novel explicitly notes the smoky skies of Manchester, and in these descriptions, Mary explains that these skies are a sign of home for her. As Mary and Charley (the character who aids Mary in her voyage) first spot Liverpool, they disagree on which location has the smokiest skies. The conversation occurs as they wait to dock their boat, and this moment is yet another instance when Gaskell describes respiration: the pause “gave Mary time for breathing.” Referring to Manchester, Charley asks, “A nasty, smoky hole, bean’t it? Are you bound to live there?” When Mary replies that it’s her home, Charley reveals his “intolerance of the smoke of Manchester”: “Well, I don’t think I could abide a home in the middle of smoke,” he replies.³⁹ Mary, on the other hand, believes Liverpool to be the more polluted city. As illustrated by this conversation, Mary and Charley have unsettling attachments to their chosen polluted landscapes. Home has become equated with smoke. Earlier, Mary had further revealed this attachment while seeing the smoke of Manchester from a distance as her train departed: “She had a back seat, and looked towards the factory-chimneys, and the cloud of smoke which hovers over Manchester, with a feeling akin to the ‘Heimweh.’”⁴⁰ The passage’s use of “Heimweh,” meaning homesickness, takes on a double meaning in the context of Gaskell’s novel. While Mary will miss Manchester during her trip, her home of Manchester is also the location of much illness, especially respiratory illnesses.

The novel's additional depictions of Manchester’s pollution reveal the smoke's omnipresence in all seasons. Near the novel’s opening, Gaskell draws attention to the pervading dirt that the wind has blown about and the low temperatures have frozen, and thus captured, within ice. In the middle of discussing Mary and Jem’s initial courtship, the narrator describes a nightmarish atmosphere, where everything is covered with frozen coal dust:

It was towards the end of February, in that year, and a bitter black frost had lasted for many weeks. The keen east wind had long since swept the streets clean, though on a gusty day the dust would rise like pounded ice, and make people’s faces quite smart with the cold force with which it blew against them. Houses, sky, people, and everything looked as if a gigantic brush had washed them all over with a dark shade of Indian ink. There was some reason for this grimy appearance on human beings, whatever there might be for the dun looks of the landscape.⁴¹

The last sentence explains that the workers resemble their industrial landscape, showing that they are transforming into their polluted environment. The reason for the grime, the narrator later explains, is a lack of water for washing. The narrator calls the water needed “soft water,” in contrast to the frozen water, or “thick gray ice,” that needed to melt. Even the solution to cleaning this dust, the water, remains full of dust itself. Importantly, this “dust” is not simply dirt. As Platt explains in his scholarship on Manchester’s pollution, “dust” was often used to describe the remnants of coal smoke.⁴² The use of “bitter” when describing the “bitter black frost” is telling: there is an acrid taste to the frost, a chemical component. Certainly, the use of “bitter” when describing frost may only refer to the severity of the cold. However, the combination of “bitter” and “black” when describing the frost evokes coal in this passage. As a part of Smith’s study, he describes tasting the rain samples he collected in and near Manchester. It had a “peculiarly oily and bitter taste when freshly caught,” he explained.⁴³ Margaret Kennedy makes a similar claim about the bitterness of Manchester’s frost: “Countering expectations of a white winter, the ‘black’ frost startles us into an awareness of Manchester’s smoke.”⁴⁴ No white winter is possible in Manchester, where water becomes inseparable from soot.

To further depict and explain this pollution, Gaskell describes the dusty wind as haunted — a feature of the “shadow kingdom.” The wind takes on a malevolent personality as Gaskell describes it supernaturally: “People prophesied a long continuance to this already lengthened frost. … Indeed, there was no end to the evil prophesied during the continuance of that bleak east wind.” With the wind’s connection with evil, it is no surprise that characters in Mary Barton attempt to keep the wind from entering their bodies and homes. In the novel, it is Mary who first does so: “Mary hurried home one evening, just as daylight was fading, from Miss Simmonds’, with her shawl held up to her mouth, and her head bent as if in deprecation of the meeting wind.”⁴⁵ While holding the shawl to her mouth could also signify the need for warmth, this passage appears directly after the description of the grime and “bitter black frost.” Rather than hold her shawl up to her nose, which could make “dust” appear more as excrement or another foul-smelling source, the dust in this context appears more as soot. Keeping her shawl over her mouth, Mary attempts to avoid ingesting polluted, “evil” air.

As Mary blocks the malevolent, frigid wind from entering her body, others attempt to keep the grime from entering another porous location: their homes. As the weather warms, and the rain warms, the narrator discusses the possibility of spring flowers: “But in Manchester, where, alas! there are no flowers, the rain had only a disheartening and gloomy effect; the streets were wet and dirty, the drippings from the houses were wet and dirty, and the people were wet and dirty. Indeed, most kept within-doors.”⁴⁶ This list compounds the ever-pervasive dirt, while also showing what Smith had found in his study only four years after the novel’s initial publication: the acidic rain was killing plants in Manchester. The attempt to block out grime by keeping “within-doors” becomes impossible for many in the novel, including the Davenports, as “the gray dawn penetrated even into the dark cellar.”⁴⁷ While a host of atmospheric dangers threaten the Davenports’ home, the details of the scene, particularly the gray color of the dawn, show that smoke also enters the home. In the early spring, John Barton becomes morose, and the scene highlights his inability to keep Manchester’s polluted winds out of his home: “when the bitter wind piped down every entry, and through every cranny, Barton sat brooding over his stinted fire.” Certainly, with the use of “stinted fire,” a main concern is the wind’s frigidness, as this is a “cold, bleak spring.”⁴⁸ However, the descriptions of the wind as carrying grime frame this passage, and so keeping out the wind also means keeping out the dirty air. Each attempt in the novel to keep dangerous air out of the home and body is futile.

Trans-corporeal exchanges with Manchester’s atmosphere become most apparent in Mary Barton through chronic coughs — especially coughing with unexplained sources, as if coughing is to be expected. Coughing shows trans-corporeality in action even more violently than inhaling and exhaling, as the characters forcibly expel air — dangerous air which is already transforming their lungs, as shown by the cough itself. Gaskell describes these coughing characters as those transforming into specters, now resembling the hazardous air around them. Clarifying the connection between environmental impacts and respiratory illnesses of the 1840s in Manchester, Mosley explains that “increasing death rates from respiratory diseases were also associated with other environmental sources of illness, such as damp, overcrowded housing.” Evidence suggests, Mosley explains, that Manchester’s residents formed committees to confront the coal-powered industries. Mosley points to Reverend John Molesworth of the Select Committee on Smoke Prevention as an example, who articulated in 1843 that the smoky air “‘must tend to disease.’” That the smoke “tends” to disease reveals the known connection between coal-powered industries and prolonged illness, especially respiratory illnesses. These illnesses included an “increased incidence of chronic respiratory diseases, especially bronchitis, in poor urban areas.”⁴⁹ Indeed, bronchitis increasingly became normalized, as Platt explains, including a quotation from a physician of Manchester in 1868: “‘The normal condition of the working man of middle age in Manchester is bronchitic,’” the physician wrote, adding that “‘an impure atmosphere increases enormously the tendency to consumption.’”⁵⁰ Newspaper advertisements in the Times and the Manchester Mercury contemporary with Mary Barton further illustrate Mosley’s and Platt’s findings: promises of cures for bronchitis, asthma, and consumption frequently appear in the late 1840s onwards, and such medications included “Hoppers Black Currant Cough Elixir, for coughs, asthma, [and] incipient consumption,” which appears directly below multiple advertisements for coal.⁵¹ These historical contexts of sickness and smoke go far in explaining the ubiquitous coughing in Mary Barton; however, unlike Mary Barton with its ghostly characters, these historical sources do not address how best to depict the body’s transformation within the “invisible evil” of Manchester.

Coughing appears quotidian in the novel, as if expected, but coughing also functions as a marker of identity. One character in Mary Barton, perhaps most studied for the toll factory life can take on the body, is Jane Wilson, who has been of particular interest to scholars for her mill accident before marrying George. However, Jane also suffers from an unexplained cough. Whether through accidents or atmospheric exchanges, Manchester continually transforms Jane Wilson into a specter. Alice, speaking to Mary, mentions Jane’s cough nearly as an aside: “I felt it sore one fine day when I thought I’d go gather some meadow-sweet to make tea for Jane’s cough; and the fields seemed so dree and still, and at first I could na make out what was wanting; and then it struck me it were th’ song o’ the birds, and that I never should hear their sweet music no more, and I could na help crying a bit.”⁵² This passage appears after Jane loses her twins and her husband George; her cough possibly stems from her own battles with typhus. Since the source of her lingering cough is never explicitly explained or addressed, the cough appears ordinary in this Manchester setting. Mary and John Barton’s conversation about Jane further shows that her health had been deteriorating in Manchester for decades. Mary, in response to her father’s explanation of Jane’s mill accident, responds by claiming that “she has never been a strong woman.” A similar articulation about strength previously describes her twin boys. According to John Barton, Jane had — for some time — been turning into a specter: “all pale and limping she went up the aisle... Her face was white like a sheet when she came in church.” John Barton links this earlier moment of Jane’s life to her current health: “I didn’t like her looks to-night,” he adds, and is then haunted by her death-in-life appearance as he tries to sleep.⁵³

A variety of other characters have nonchalant coughs like Jane’s, showing a pervasive issue in the working-class population. Job, Esther, and Jem also have unexplained coughs. Rather than merely speaking, Job’s words are twice described as coming out in coughs. Esther has a cough that the narrator only begins to explain: “Esther went on, without noticing Mary’s look. The very action of speaking was so painful to her, and so much interrupted by the hard, raking little cough, which had been her constant annoyance for months, that she was too much engrossed by the physical difficulty of utterance, to be a very close observer.”⁵⁴ Esther has a “cough to tear her in two,” according to Jem. Esther also, in her first conversation with Jem, reveals that she is being haunted by ghosts, such as the ghost of Mary’s mother and Mary herself, even though Mary is alive. She explains to Jem the “dim form” that these ghosts take on at night. “There they go round and round by bed the whole night through,” Esther explains.⁵⁵ She appears to be already in a spectral atmosphere, as if she experiences a death-in-life: “they see me,” she adds. As her health deteriorates and she sees her own “approaching death,” Esther’s final desire is for “open air.”⁵⁶ Through Esther, especially, Gaskell makes clear that a transformation into the realm of ghosts is a painful transformation.

Jem Wilson is actually known by his cough in a way similar to that through which Mary becomes known by the sounds she makes while breathing. Margaret, who has become blind, explains to Mary that she recognized Jem after hearing his cough: “I heard a cough before me, walking along. Thinks I, that’s Jem Wilson’s cough, or I’m much mistaken. Next time came a sneeze and a cough, and then I were certain.”⁵⁷ Like his mother Jane’s, Jem’s cough could be the result of battling the same typhus that killed some of his family members. His “hellish” work atmosphere could also explain his lingering cough: “Dark, black were the walls, the ground, the faces around them” at Jem’s furnace-house, showing the porosity of the workers who become a reflection of their workplace. Jem’s work places him in direct threat of daily smoke inhalation, and on more than one occasion he appears covered in soot even when he is no longer working. Moreover, Jem and his workplace appear supernatural: “a deep and lurid red glared over all”; the workers, “like demons,” smelt iron into a “fiery liquid.”⁵⁸ Laura Kranzler argues that this workplace is particularly Gothic: “Gaskell describes with Gothic intensity the hellish conditions of the foundry where Jem Wilson works.”⁵⁹ There are many reasons to have a persistent cough in this haunting Manchester setting, and since the novel never directly explains or addresses Jem’s cough, a combination of illness and smoke appears likely.

Jem's interactions with Mary further highlight coughing as a marker of identity in the novel, and their courtship remains haunted by Manchester's specters. As Sheehan argues, even the marriage plot concerning Mary and Jem only “attempts to escape” the “continual spectral presence” in the novel.⁶⁰ When Mary falls ill, the narrator nearly counts her among the undead, much like Esther does in her visions of Mary as a ghost: “Mary still hovered between life and death when Jem arrived.” At this moment, Jem witnesses Mary’s “laboured breathing.”⁶¹ Gaskell only uses “laboured breathing” to describe Mary’s respiration during this illness, but by the end of the novel, this description appositely describes the gasping and coughing of the workers throughout the narrative, whose breaths are strained due to the conditions and settings of their labor. Margaret, who had recognized Jem by his cough, also recognizes Mary by her breathing, which she announces to her grandfather: “It’s Mary Barton! I know her by her breathing!”⁶² What does it mean for Mary’s breath to be audible, and for how long had Mary’s breathing made a recognizable sound? The novel does not answer either of these questions directly, but for Margaret to “know her by her breathing” at this point in the novel means that Mary’s breathing was likely audible, perhaps through wheezing, long before her illness. Identified through her breathing, Mary has become her struggling breath, and while Margaret may hear the sound of Mary's distinct cough-identity, Gaskell shows that as a member of the working class in Manchester, Mary was expected to have a struggling respiratory system. Asking if she would consider moving to Canada with him, Jem poses this question: “Would it grieve thee sore to quit the old smoke-jack?”⁶³ Manchester had become synonymous with smoke, and while Jem and Mary arguably leave due to John Barton murdering Mr. Harry Carson, Jem’s question also shows that a fresh start requires finding fresh air.

Midway through the novel, John Barton wonders about the “rich and the poor” and why they are “so separate, so distinct.”⁶⁴ Gaskell clarifies that these distinctions include respiration: who can inhale, and who can only gasp; who can exhale, and who must cough; who remains corporeal, and who transforms into a ghost. The rich, in other words, are never known by the sounds of their breathing in Mary Barton. Directly after witnessing the gasping and dying John Barton, the wealthy mill owner named Mr. Carson stands “at one of the breathing-moments of life” near the end of the novel.⁶⁵ The rich in Mary Barton are never breathless, as Mary is while listening to Will Wilson tell a story from one of his voyages.⁶⁶ In this fantastical interlude, Will describes a mermaid coming to the surface of the water, "like a creature come up to take breath." How can Will help Mary understand what this sounds like? What would serve as a clear analogy for the working class of Manchester? "Well; you've heard folks in th' asthma, and it were all the world like that," he explains. This startling image, like the many startling images of spectral figures, disrupts the narrative. Gaskell's turns to the supernatural, especially the hauntingly spectral, make clear that industrial pollution, the "invisible evil" which disproportionately affects the poor, cannot go ignored then or now. For the respiratory calamities of Mary Barton, Gaskell uses specters to draw attention to the “slow violence” created by Manchester’s pollution and those who reap the financial benefits. Gaskell’s specters create haunting spectacles throughout the novel, and their spectral lungs — shaped by respiratory illnesses and smoky skies — not only depict the mechanisms of pollution, but also mirror, or haunt, our current calamities and invisible evils.