[In the following essay, Handley examines some of the epigraphs used in Gaskell's novel and their relevance to the meaning of the work as a whole.]

In her first novel, Mrs. Gaskell followed the practice of some of her predecessors and contemporaries in prefixing epigraphs to each of the chapters. This is a commonplace in fiction—certainly it was used by Dorothy Sayers as late as the 1930's—and it also occurs in nineteenth century narrative poetry. Of the eighteenth century writers Mrs. Radcliffe, close on the Romantic period, indulges lavishly in the form, raiding the larder of minor poetry in order to supply herself with appropriate quotations of a morbid or merely scenic value. Since none of the major eighteenth century novelists uses the convention, she would appear to be the precursor of Susan Ferrier and Scott; in the mid-Victorian period, apart from Mrs. Gaskell, we find George Eliot, towards the end of her career, and Hardy, at the beginning of his, employing the epigraph with a varying degree of frequency.

This paper in no sense seeks to give undue weight to the importance of the epigraph. When the history of its usage comes to be written no doubt proper stress will be given to its place in the total scheme of a novel—as in Daniel Deronda, for example. Here the epigraphs often reach intimately into the plots and sub-plots of that remarkable novel, and it can be demonstrated that a simple and brief preface like ‘Vengeance is Mine—And I will Repay’ is sounded with varying effect and resonance throughout the action of Anna Karenina. What I hope to show in this modest examination of three epigraphs in Mary Barton, is that the very usage tends, with Mrs. Gaskell as with George Eliot, to set up a reverberating relevance in the text which adds immensely to our enjoyment of the novel and to our critical appraisal of it.

As far as I am aware, there is no equivalent in the Gaskell papers to the Gutch Memorandum Book, in which one might follow the paths to Monkshaven and Hollingford, though I suggest that Virgil's Georgics merit close attention if one is to discover the source of the animating wisdom which informs Cousin Phillis. In Keats' Craftsmanship M. R. Ridley showed what Keats owed in The Eve of St. Agnes to Mrs. Radcliffe, Shakespeare, The Arabian Nights, and to a French translation of Boccaccio's Il Filocolo¹; the poetic imagination drew phrases and situations into the whirl of inspiration which transmutes and expands until the original is forgotten. Thus it is with Keats, and, in small compass, one may show what Mrs. Gaskell derived from Keats, Coleridge and the Corn Law Rhymer, Ebenezer Elliott, in Mary Barton. It was R. W. Livingstone who wrote, ‘Some influences are tyrannous; they impose themselves, they dominate, they enslave. But there is a better and rarer type of influence, which stimulates and inspires yet leaves the poet free to develop his own genius with enlarged horizons and quickened sensibilities’.² These remarks, definitive in their wisdom, apply as well to the novelist as the poet, and in Mary Barton the influences, far from being tyrannous, are expansive, adding greatly to the imaginative experience of the reader.

Before dealing directly with the three writers named above, I would like to look at two of Mrs. Gaskell's usages in order to demonstrate the effect of some of these influences. Let us consider, for example, the epigraph to Chapter XXI, a quotation from Margaret's song in Faust:

My rest is gone,
          My heart is sore.
Peace find I never,
          And never more.(3)

The words echo the situation of Esther, whose position is not unlike that of Margaret: they also look forward with terrible emphasis to the sufferings of Mary when Jem is tried for murder, and, perhaps more particularly, to the anguish of John Barton, the murderer who is to find peace only in death. Another example of Mrs. Gaskell's use of her reading occurs when Sophy, one of Mr. Carson's daughters, is about to wake him with the news of Harry's death. Mrs. Gaskell inserts into the text the following quotation from Mrs. Hemans:

Ye know not what ye do,
          That call the slumberer back
From the realms unseen by you,
          To life's dim weary track.(4)

The moving simplicity of these lines immediately ensures the reader's sympathy for Mr. Carson, and this is a sudden manipulation of his responses, since at this stage—and later—Mr. Carson is anything but a sympathetic character. In fact it is not until the final—and some would say artificial—reconciliation with John Barton that Mr. Carson completes the forgiveness theme which is such an important aspect of Mary Barton. But the quotation has an additional, oblique force; there is the ‘dim, weary track’ of the poor throughout the novel, and for Carson himself the phrase carries some poignancy after his son's death. It sounds the sombre note which was so fully orchestrated in the early part of the novel—the deaths of Davenport, the Wilson twins, Mrs. Barton in child-birth and, in retrospect, Job Legh's daughter and Barton's boy. In a sense it has a unifying function, for the rich manufacturer is brought to experience what his distant employees know as the commonplace of living—the round of death, the anguished individual suffering which brings man closer to his fellows in spirit, and draws forth from him that practical assistance which John Barton gave to the Davenport family in their hour of need, or the spiritual sustenance, the moral altruism, which Carson shows Barton as he is dying. Mrs. Gaskell's echoes are not always sombre; just before Barton leaves for London to present the operatives' case Mrs. Gaskell speaks of ‘An argosy of the precious hopes of many otherwise despairing creatures’, and on the same page she adds ‘Barton might be said to hold a levée, so many neighbours came dropping in’.⁵ Shortly afterwards Mary says to her father ‘what a dandy you'll be in London’.⁶ The choice of words and phrases, strongly ironic, is deliberate, for Mrs. Gaskell is using the kind of language which permeates the silver-fork novels of the period to indicate the simple excitement of the poor in terms normally reserved for the exaggerated effusions of the rich. The effect is of heightened pathos, for the high-flown verbiage is meant to expose by contrast the moral vacuum of the leisured, with the corollary that words cannot fill the stomachs of the poor.

Mrs. Gaskell's use of the epigraph has a varied purpose and effect, and one may begin with an instance of her employment of it for a comparatively simple purpose. Chapter XXII of Mary Barton opens with an epigraph from Keats' Hyperion:

There was a listening fear in her regard,
As if calamity had but begun;
As if the vanward clouds of evil days
Had spent their malice, and the sullen rear
Was, with its stored thunder, labouring up.(7)

In this chapter Mary realizes that her father is the murderer, strives to prove that Jem Wilson has an alibi, seeks to convince Job Legh of Jem's innocence, and tries to gain the confidence of Mrs. Wilson. Just as Hyperion is about the fall of the old immortals, so this chapter in its immediate application stresses the fall of the older generation who have influenced Mary—her father, now fallen from grace because a murderer, Mrs. Wilson, fallen because of Jem's arrest and her own inability to control her reactions, Alice, fallen into the state of innocent babbling which anticipates death, and Job Legh, for all his wisdom and compassion, fallen temporarily into a lack of understanding of Mary. There is nothing particularly subtle about this, though the poignant force of the quotation is somewhat enhanced if we recall the lines which immediately precede those of the epigraph, and which have a peculiar application to Mary in her suffering:

How beautiful, if sorrow had not made,
Sorrow more beautiful than Beauty's self.(8)

What is clear, however, is Mrs. Gaskell's imaginative tendency to use what she read to point a situation in her own writing; and the associative absorption would appear to be so strong in her, that some of Keats' mood seems to have been captured by her and to underlie both the poignancy and the contrast of the generations in this chapter. Undoubtedly Mrs. Gaskell considered the lines particularly apt, probably for the reasons given above; and it seems likely that a much-praised and quoted sequence which occurs shortly afterwards in Hyperion may have precipitated a sudden poetic intrusion of the author in Mary Barton. Perhaps Mrs. Gaskell never forgot the following:

As when, upon a tranced summer night,
Those green-rob'd senators of mighty woods,
Tall oaks, branch-charmed by the earnest stars,
Dream, and so dream all night without a stir,
Save from one gradual solitary gust
Which comes upon the silence, and dies off,
As if the ebbing air had but one wave;(9)

This beautiful interruption of the narrative (also in Chapter XXII) might be placed beside the above:

There was little sympathy in the outward scene, with the internal trouble. All was so still, so motionless, so hard! Very different to this lovely night in the country in which I am now writing, where the distant horizon is soft and undulating in the moonlight, and the nearer trees sway gently to and fro in the night wind, with something of almost human motion; and the rustling air makes music among their branches, as if speaking soothingly to the weary ones, who lie awake in heaviness of heart. The sights and sounds of such a night lull pain and grief to rest.¹⁰

Now apart from the obvious common content of trees at night shared by both extracts, an analysis of Mrs. Gaskell's shows how close she is in mood to the Keats of Hyperion. The first two lines, for instance, accurately mirror the state of Saturn in

                              the shady sadness of a vale
Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn.(11)

while the whole of the last part closely follows the description of Thea's approach to Saturn, who does indeed lie awake in ‘heaviness of heart’, as do all the fallen immortals of the poem. Natural beauty such as Mrs. Gaskell describes is constantly found in Hyperion, and often is used as a contrast with the feelings or situation of the immortals, just as this passage, with its freedom and freshness, is an intended contrast with the mood and situation of Mary. This epigraph does not reach widely into the novel, but it does probe deeply into this chapter of it; thus Mrs. Gaskell's creative process, by absorbing the description in beautiful poetry, assures a richer content for her prose.

This is, of course, not remarkable, and if it were an isolated instance of Mrs. Gaskell's transmutation of her reading, it would be unimportant. There are, however, several other interesting sequences which show when an author or authors were running in Mrs. Gaskell's mind, and perhaps the most fascinating of these is the one which looks back verbally and imaginatively to The Ancient Mariner, so that John Barton becomes subtly linked with the Mariner in the mind of a reader who knows Coleridge's poem. Perhaps it is as well to remember that, although Mrs. Gaskell's echoes here may be a subconscious reflex, her own conception of John Barton was central to the novel:

Round the character of John Barton all the others formed themselves; he was my hero, the person with whom all my sympathies went, with whom I tried to identify myself at the time …¹²

Now just as there is an overwhelming swing of sympathy towards the Mariner as his terrible isolation is felt by the reader, so there is unmitigated compassion for John Barton at the end of Mrs. Gaskell's novel. The Mariner and John Barton are murderers, and although John Barton dies his message is the same as the Mariner's:

He prayeth best, who loveth best,
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us
He made and loveth all.(13)

The Mariner is compelled to live on, whereas John Barton dies regretting that he has forsaken the Christian love which he once had:

All along it came natural to love folk, though now I am what I am. I think one time I could e'en have loved the masters if they'd ha' letten me; that was in my Gospel days, afore my child died o' hunger. I was tore in two oftentimes, between my sorrow for poor suffering folk, and my trying to love them as caused their sufferings (to my mind).¹⁴

At the end of the poem and the novel there is this degree of similarity; Mr. Carson, like the Wedding Guest, cannot choose but hear John Barton's tale, and he is a poignantly sadder and wiser man as he holds the body of his son's murderer in his arms.

The epigraph to Chapter XIX is from ‘The Pains of Sleep’, though Mrs. Gaskell does not give the reference.

Deeds to be hid which were not hid,
Which, all confused, I could not know,
Whether I suffered or I did
For all seemed guilt, remorse, or woe.(15)

It is in this chapter that Mary learns of Harry Carson's murder and Jem is arrested on suspicion. The tone of the poem is certainly present here in the novel: ‘Mary felt as though the haunting horror were a nightmare, a fearful dream, from which awakening would relieve her’¹⁶; Mrs. Wilson ‘falls into another doze, feverish, dream-haunted, and unrefreshing’, while later her ‘sleep was next interrupted … like a recurring nightmare’.¹⁷ There is, of course, a strong connection between this poem and The Ancient Mariner, but perhaps even more significant are certain lines in it which approximate to John Barton's state of mind before the murder (and even Mr. Carson's after it):

Thirst of revenge, the powerless will
Still baffled, and yet burning still!
Desire with loathing strangely mixed
On wild or hateful objects fixed.(18)

Mrs. Gaskell is able to absorb Coleridge's mood, and obviously its strange, mystical, fearful tension, the keen awareness of the evil within, is an area of the consciousness she wished to explore in Mary Barton.

At first the echoes of The Ancient Mariner are the commonplaces of imagery, perhaps even the platitudes of all time. Mary, we are told, ‘reddened like a rose’; ‘The old Hebrew prophetic words fell like dew on Mary's heart’; ‘Deep sank those words into Mary's heart’.¹⁹ Esther's return (in a chapter containing an epigraph in verse called ‘Street Walks’) contains a re-iterative irony in an overt reference to the Mariner. When Esther speaks to Jem of Mary we are told:

The spell of her name was as potent as that of the Mariner's glittering eye. He listened like a three-year-child.²⁰

This comes after the chapter called ‘A Traveller's Tales’ (perhaps the introduction of Will Wilson into the story set Mrs. Gaskell's mind working on The Ancient Mariner), and Esther most certainly has a tale to tell—which she subsequently does—a tale as harrowing and bitter as the Mariner's in its conscious acknowledgement of sin. Later Mary feels ‘as if a sudden spring of sisterly love had gushed up in her heart’²¹, and this would appear to be a direct echo of

A spring of love gushed from my heart,
And I blessed them unaware:(22)

After the epigraph from ‘The Pains of Sleep’ the echoes of The Ancient Mariner in the text are much thicker. The first is particularly significant in its associative suggestion:

And then Heaven blessed her unaware, and she sank from wandering, unconnected thought and thence to sleep, … and once more the dead were alive again in that happy world of dreams.²³

There is little need for me to refer to the opening phrase here, but there is a strong and insistent parallel with the Mariner's situation at a certain stage in the poem. That ‘the dead were alive again’ is his fervent wish; ‘wandering, unconnected thought’ is his frequent state. Shortly afterwards we are told of Mary ‘Was she not lonely enough to welcome the spirits of the dead’²⁴, an approximation to the Mariner's inner feelings in his isolation. Coleridge continues to be present in Mrs. Gaskell's mind, and his mystical-religious imaginative predilections, exemplified in a related poem, leads her to Christabel. Thus Esther feels ‘as if some holy spell would prevent her (even as the unholy Lady Geraldine was prevented in the abode of Christabel) from crossing the threshold of that home of her early innocence’.²⁵ Here the omniscient author intrudes, for Esther is the victim snared by natural rather than supernatural sin.

It is when Mary goes to Liverpool, and follows the John Cropper in the pilot-boat, that the verbal reminiscences of Coleridge recur forcefully, and in these verbal images there is sometimes the deeper association of atmosphere and mood. Below is a loosely connected passage which runs over several pages:

When the wind, which had hitherto been against them, stopped, and the clouds began to gather over the sky, shutting out the sun, and casting a chilly gloom over everything … The boat gave a bound forward at every pull of the oars. The water was glassy and motionless, reflecting tint by tint of the Indian-ink sky above. Mary shivered, and her heart sank within her … the same wind now bore their little craft along with easy, rapid motion … the ship began to plunge and heave, as if she were a living creature, impatient to be off … Mary sat down looking like one who prays in the death agony. For her eyes were turned up to that heaven where mercy dwelleth … She arose and followed him with the unquestioning docility of a child.²⁶

Finally, there is the reference at the trial of Jem Wilson to the ‘awful tranquillity of the life-and-death court’, at least a half echo of the ‘Nightmare Life-in-Death was she’ of the poem. Readers of the latter will undoubtedly recognize that the sequence quoted above has its equivalents in the poem, for example

But in a minute she gan stir,
With a short uneasy motion(27)

and

The harbour-bay was clear as glass
So smoothly was it strewn(28)

and

Then like a pawing horse let go
She made a sudden bound(29)

and

Forthwith this frame of mine was wrenched
With a woeful agony.(30)

Barton is certainly mindful of the ‘curse in a dead man's eye’, but the impressive and moving quality of Mrs. Gaskell's writing, a pervasive sympathetic tension, is heightened by her conscious and perhaps sub-conscious derivations from Coleridge. The message of the Mariner is that of love for one's fellow creatures; the theme of Mrs. Gaskell is movingly the same. The legacy of sin is penance, but it is a penance which knits suffering with reconciliation, so that the sinner moves from isolation to participation in life. Admittedly the Mariner only enjoys ‘the goodly company’ from time to time, but his transfixing of the Wedding Guest is profoundly for good. Esther comes home to die, having shown a great and self-sacrificing love to Mary, and John, as I have said, tells his terrible tale to Mr. Carson. The effect of these echoes is to deepen the imaginative experience of the reader; the texture of the novel is all the richer for their inclusion.

Mrs. Gaskell's main concern in Mary Barton is with the poor and their reaction to the conditions in which they live. She has Job Legh read Samuel Bamford's poem which begins ‘God help the poor’ to Mary and her father, and in successive chapters she uses epigraphs from the Corn Law Rhymer, Ebenezer Elliott. The first (to Chapter IV) fits the blameless existence of Alice Wilson:

To envy nought beneath the ample sky:
To mourn no evil deed, no hour misspent.(31)

and the second, which has a reminiscence of Goldsmith and Crabbe, refers to Job Legh:

Learned he was; nor bird nor insect flew,
But he its leafy home and history knew;
Nor wild flower decked the rock, nor moss the well
But he its name and qualities could tell.(32)

Now in point of fact Mrs. Gaskell and Ebenezer Elliott share a religious and moral concern for the aged and the young in a suffering society. One has only to read the ‘Village Patriarch’ to see where Elliott's heart lies when he contemplates the old and infirm, or ‘Preston Mills’, for example, when he writes of child labour.³³ But there would appear to be a stronger connection than that. Having used two epigraphs from Elliott, Mrs. Gaskell describes the terrible ordeal of the Davenport family in the following chapter (being careful too, to include an account of the passing plenty of the Carson family as ironic contrast). The actual situation of the Davenports is given in the ‘Manchester Song’ epigraph to the chapter; it is also given in the following Corn Law Rhyme by Elliott which is set to ‘Robin Adair’:

Child, is thy father dead?
          Father is gone!
Why did they tax his bread?
          God's will be done!
Mother has sold her bed;
Better to die than wed!
Where shall she lay her head?
          Home we have none!
Father clammed thrice a week—
          God's will be done!
Long for work did he seek,
          Work he found none.
          Tears on his hollow cheek
Told what no tongue could speak:
Why did his master break?
          God's will be done!
Doctor said air was best—
          Food we had none;
Father with panting breast,
          Groan'd to be gone:
Now he is with the blest—
Mother says death is best!
We have no place of rest—
          Yes, ye have one!(34)

One sees also that this is the situation of John Barton when his child is dying—one of the powerful retrospective sequences of the novel—for many times he has wished for death. Ben Davenport worked at Carson's before the fire; he gets a fever, almost certainly typhoid, and raves, occasionally obscenely, in delirium before he dies. But he has been a strict Methodist all his life, and Wilson tells us of a letter he wrote to his wife while he was searching for work:

It was as good as Bible-words; ne'er a word of repining; a' about God being our Father, and that we mun bear patiently whate'er he sends.³⁵

This is the acceptance of the ‘God's will be done’ of the poem, and although Carlyle, in a very favourable review of the Corn Law Rhymes, urged the author to ‘lay aside anger, uncharitableness, hatred, noisy tumult; avoid them, as worse than Pestilence, worse than “Bread-tax” itself’³⁶, Elliott's general tone has the compassion, the simple human charity which characterizes Mrs. Gaskell's sustained mood in Mary Barton. Once again, it would seem, Mrs. Gaskell chose her epigraphs, and found the author of them remaining in her imagination, so that in her own plot she used a situation basically the same as one used by the poet. Both, too, were interested in the Chartist movement; Mrs. Gaskell records the rejection of the petition in London as one of the bitterest experiences of Barton's life. She tells us that ‘whole families went through a gradual starvation’ (she is writing of 1839-41), but one of the greatest of nineteenth century historians is more explicit:

In reality Chartism was not a creed. It was the blind revolt of hunger.³⁷

Ebenezer Elliott, and Mrs. Gaskell, who admired him, were both intent on exposing the enforced degradation of the poor.

The associations revealed by Mrs. Gaskell's reading, transformed by her imagination, indicate, I think, the depth of her work. When any author took her attention, she used that attention to enhance the quality of her own writing. There is no suggestion of plagiarism; it is merely that, living in Manchester at a time when she was recovering from the loss of her son, she looked outwards and saw the suffering, past and present, treating what she saw and knew with abiding compassion. So it was with her reading; she responded to beauty and humanity, tracing their associations with her own pen, and these associations must be duly explored when we are considering the nature and status of her achievement as a novelist.

Notes

1. See particularly pages 101-170 (Methuen's University Paperbacks) 1963.

2. R. W. Livingstone, The Legacy of Greece (1928), p. 287.

3. Mary Barton, p. 269. (All references are to the Knutsford Edition (ed. A. C. Ward) 1906.)

4. Mary Barton, p. 239.

5. Mary Barton, p. 96.

6. Mary Barton, p. 98.

7. Quoted at the head of Chapter XXII, Mary Barton, p. 281.

8. Keats, Hyperion: A Fragment, lines 35-36 (Oxford English Texts Second Edition, ed. H. W. Garrod (1958). All references are to this edition.

9. Hyperion, lines 72-78.

10. Mary Barton, p. 286.

11. Hyperion, lines 1-2.

12. Mary Barton, Introduction, lxiii. Quoted by A. W. Ward (letter from Mrs. Gaskell to Mrs. Greg).

13. The Ancient Mariner (The Poems of Coleridge, with an introduction by Ernest Hartley Coleridge, John Lane, N.D.) lines 614-18).

14. Mary Barton, p. 431.

15. The Pains of Sleep, lines 27-30.

16. Mary Barton, p. 253.

17. Mary Barton, pp. 257 and 258.

18. The Pains of Sleep, lines 21-24.

19. Mary Barton, pp. 92, 111 and 157.

20. Mary Barton, p. 184.

21. Mary Barton, p. 221.

22. The Ancient Mariner, lines 285-6.

23. Mary Barton, p. 268.

24. Mary Barton, p. 269.

25. Mary Barton, p. 275.

26. Mary Barton, pp. 341-348.

27. The Ancient Mariner, lines 354-5.

28. The Ancient Mariner, lines 472-3.

29. The Ancient Mariner, lines 389-90.

30. The Ancient Mariner, lines 578-9.

31. Quoted in Mary Barton, Chapter IV, p. 28.

32. Quoted in Mary Barton, Chapter V, p. 40.

33. By a strange coincidence, this poem also echoes The Ancient Mariner: ‘Like Death-in-life they smiled’ … ‘a ghastly crew’ … ‘the pang their voices gave.’

34. The Poetical Works of Ebenezer Elliott, edited by his son Edwin Elliott (1876) Vol. I, p. 381.

35. Mary Barton, p. 72.

36. Thomas Carlyle, Critical and Miscellaneous Essays Vol. II (1888), p. 180.

37. Élie Halevy, A History of the English People in the Nineteenth Century Vol. III (Translated by F. I. Watkin), 1950, p. 323.