SOURCE: Stone, Marjorie. “Bakhtinian Polyphony in Mary Barton; Class, Gender, and the Textual Voice.” Dickens Studies Annual 20 (1991): 175-200.

[In the following essay, Stone discusses Gaskell's use of multiple working-class voices in Mary Barton.]

There's a grim one-horse hearse in a jolly round trot;
To the churchyard a pauper is going, I wot:
The road it is rough, and the hearse has no springs,
And hark to the dirge that the sad driver sings:
          “Rattle his bones over the stones;
          He's only a pauper, whom nobody owns!”

“The Pauper's Drive” with its grimly humorous, jolting refrain of “Rattle his bones over the stones …” was published as an anonymous poem that “nobody owns” in the Chartist newspaper The Northern Star in 1842 (Kovalev 39).¹ The sardonic voice of “Rattle his bones” is one among multiple working-class voices and texts that Gaskell weaves into the “agony” convulsing the “dumb people” of cities like Manchester in England's “Hungary” Eighteen-Forties (Mary Barton 37-38). Death is an absolute dumbness, but ironically the impoverished classes often speak through death in literary discourse before Gaskell's. Carlyle's Irish widow in Past and Present is a notable example, influencing the depiction of Ben Davenport's death in Mary Barton. Gaskell echoes the “The Pauper's Drive” in describing Davenport's funeral, noting that in his case, thanks to the charity of the poor to the poor, “there was no ‘rattling the bones over the stones’ of the pauper's funeral” (112). Yet characteristically, in this double-voiced utterance Gaskell simultaneously calls on a working-class text to articulate the opposing norm. Rather than imitating Carlyle in Past and Present by graphically preaching the agony of the “dumb people,” Gaskell showed her middle-class readers that the “other half” had other ways of speaking its suffering than death. Through her creation of a novelistic discourse that Bakhtin was later to find exemplified by Dostoevsky, in a work that may indeed have influenced Crime and Punishment, as C. A. Johnson notes,² she reveals the power and variegation of working-class utterances themselves. More radically, through her rhetorical and narrative strategies, she subverts the hegemony of middle-class discourse that empowers her to speak.

Mary Barton has customarily been viewed as a technically clumsy “split novel.” In Rosemarie Bodenheimer's view, Gaskell's focus on the domestic sphere fails to resolve the issues raised in the public world of politics; in John Lucas's, she retreats from the “abyss” created by the gulf between her ideological prescriptions and her powerful evocation of the plight of the poor (142). Like Bodenheimer, Stephen Gill objects to the “bewildering shifts” in the narrative voice (Mary Barton 3), while others criticize the split between the “social-problem plot” centering on John Barton and the “romance plot” centering on his daughter Mary.³ More recently, in a refreshing shift of focus, Catherine Gallagher has shown how the contradictions in industrial narratives like Mary Barton grow out of the “ruptures” within the early nineteenth-century critique of industrialism, rather than out of their authors' personal limitations. These divisions reflect “the contradictory structures of the social criticism the novelists tried to embody,” Gallagher observes; and in Gaskell's case, they lead to “formal inconsistencies,” but also to a “high degree of formal self-consciousness” (33-34). This essay will argue more unreservedly for Gaskell's formal self-consciousness, from the viewpoint of Bakhtinian and reader-response theory rather than in the context of the critique of industrialism.

When Bakhtin's model of novelistic discourse is assumed, many of the apparent formal inconsistencies in Mary Barton can be seen as the outcome of Gaskell's innovative artistry and her exceptional ability to incorporate conflicting perspectives and the languages that embody them in the textual voice of her first novel. An operative concept of “textual voice,” incorporating all of the voices that sound in the text, seems called for in Mary Barton because a univocal and static idea of narrative voice or character voice cannot accommodate the effect of polyphony and debate that Gaskell's first novel creates.⁴ “Voice” is itself a keyword in this work, where the reader is immersed in a constant, dynamic interplay of voices, not only in the dialogue of the working-class characters interacting with each other and with the propertied classes, and in the inner mental debate of the characters, but also in the multiple voices of the novel's authorial discourse, which debate with each other, with the character's voices, and with the inscribed readers who also proliferate in the novel. Added to these are the voices that speak in the novel's inset stories, and in its many mottoes and allusions, some derived from working-class or female discourse, others from the canonical texts of a male literary tradition. In Bakhtin's terms, Gaskell actively dialogizes the discourse of Mary Barton by incorporating in it the heteroglossia of multiple languages—languages understood in Bakhtin's stipulative sense, not as linguistically separate dialects, but as “ideologically saturated” embodiments of “socio-linguistic points of view” (271-73). Bringing the heteroglossia of working-class and women's discourse into collision with the official languages of male middle-class culture, Gaskell initiates what Bakhtin terms a “critical interanimation of languages” (296), designed to produce a “relativizing of linguistic consciousness” (323). The result is that middle-class male discourse—principally socio-economic and literacy discourse—is radically deprivileged. At the same time, varieties of middle-class, working-class, and women's discourse in Mary Barton are internally dialogized, as Gaskell reveals the multiplicity of languages and perspectives constituting each. This internal dialogization extends to the narrative voice, so much so that it is more accurate to speak of narrative voices, some female, some male, in this novel which, more boldly than George Eliot's early works, both exploits and disrupts the strategy of male impersonation.

In “Discourse in the Novel,” Bakhtin identifies several “compositional forms for appropriating and organizing heteroglossia in the novel” (301). These include dialogue representative of the “social dialogue” of languages (285, 365); hybridizations, or the combining of two social languages or speech manners in a single double-voiced discourse (304, 358); the creation of “character zones” or fields of action defined by the distinctive features of a character's language (316); “parodic stylizations of generic, professional and other languages” (302); the incorporation and stylization of other genres (308); the incorporation of maxims and aphorisms (322); and, more generally, any activation of the “internal dialogism” or words (279). All of these stylistic features are markedly present in Mary Barton, the last most conspicuously in Gaskell's play with multiple interpretations of keywords such as “duty” and “improvidence,” both in her characters' discourse and in her own authorial discourse. The mixing of regional and occupational dialects, and of fictive and historical voices, and the proliferation of chapter mottoes, quotations and footnotes also contribute to the dialogization of discourse in Mary Barton. Most notably, however, Gaskell further dialogizes the discourse of Mary Barton through combining gender-inscribed languages and plots, a possibility that Bakhtin curiously ignores, as Wayne Booth has pointed out. Those who divide the world of Mary Barton into an implicitly or explicitly male political sphere and a female private sphere, or who split the “social-problem” or “tragic” from the “romance” or “domestic” plot of the novel, endorse gender-inflected paradigms that Gaskell's own novelistic practice repeatedly subverts. As Patsy Stoneman suggests in her critique of the conventional view of Gaskell as a “split” novelist, women and the working classes were alike muted groups in Victorian society, enjoined to “suffer and be still” (13, 63). In Mary Barton, members of both assume the power of speaking subjects, but Gaskell also shows how these two groups, themselves internally divided, act to silence their own warring members and each other.

The most straightforward of the dialogic strategies apparent in Mary Barton is dialogue embodying the social dialogue of classes. In contrast to a novelist such as Jane Austen who, as Tony Tanner observes, excludes “not only the unassimilable roughness and dissonance of working-class speech but also any of the potential discordance of colloquial or vernacular discourse” (38), Gaskell portrays the voices of the poor with the loving and intimate detail that made her such an important follower of Scott and precursor of George Eliot. Her achievement in depicting Lancashire dialect has long been recognized. But less attention has been given to the cumulative effect of her calculated focus on working-class voices that are at once individualized and representative, and to the manner in which these voices interact with those woven into Gaskell's authorial discourse.⁵ Middle-class literary discourse typically frames the polyglot world or working-class discourse in nineteenth-century industrial novels, but in Mary Barton the framed interpenetrates the frame. As for bourgeois socio-economic discourse in Mary Barton, it seems swallowed up in the working-class discourse it is accustomed to suppress. This effect results partly from Gaskell's portrayal of a relatively narrow spectrum of the propertied classes, a feature of her first novel that was strongly criticized and that she sought to redress in North and South. In Mary Barton, only the members of the Carson family are individualized among the propertied classes. Moreover, although Gaskell presents a “medley” of the masters' conflicting voices in Chapter 16, where they meet to deal with the strike, she chooses to do so on an occasion when they do not appear in a particularly positive light. Thus the most humane master weakly suggests that the employers must “‘try and do more’” than make two “‘cow's heads into soup’” every week to feed the starving for several miles around, while the most brutal denounces the strikers as “‘more like wild beasts than human beings’” (232).

Representing the working classes, on the contrary, we encounter a broad spectrum of fully individualized characters, embodying conflicting cultural backgrounds and ideological perspectives, ranging from the Chartist radicalism of the Manchester-born John Barton, to the political passivity of George Wilson, a laborer still shaped by his rural roots, to the Christian pacifism of the aptly named Job Legh. Moreover, John Barton and Job Legh speak with an eloquence that finds no counterpart in the speech of the masters. John's speech is most moving in Chapter 16 in his spontaneous address to the striking workers, when they discover that one of the masters addressed by their delegation has crudely caricatured their tattered appearance in a cartoon:

John Barton began to speak; they turned to him with deep attention. “it makes me more than sad, it makes my heart burn within me, to see that folk can make a jest of earnest men; of chaps, who come to ask for a bit o' fire for th' old granny, as shivers in the cold; for a bit o'bedding, and some warn clothing to the poor wife as lies in labour on th' damp flags; and for victuals for the children, whose little voices are getting too faint and weak to cry aloud wi' hunger. For, brothers, is not them the things we ask for when we ask for more wages? … We do not want their grand houses, we want a roof to cover us from the rain, and the snow, and the storm; ay, and not alone to cover us, but helpless ones that cling to us in the keen wind, and ask us with their eyes why we brought 'em into th' world to suffer?” He lowered his deep voice almost to a whisper.

“I've seen a father who had killed his child rather than let it clem before his eyes; and he were a tender-hearted man.”

(238-239)

By this point in the novel we have already heard the story of John Barton's son dying of disease because his father could not obtain the food he needed. And we have already heard the narrator present the debate between strikers and masters in “technical” economic terms. Critics have often faulted the narrator's remark in Chapter 15 of Mary Barton, “I am not sure if I can express myself in the technical terms of either masters, or workmen” (220), as an example of Gaskell's feminine diffidence and ignorance of economic theory. But such criticisms overlook Gaskell's evident knowledge of Adam Smith, her unconventional and undisguised intervention as a modest female voice in the “masculine” realm of political economy—sometimes with the additional force of an abrupt interruption—and the subversive equality she grants to the workers in acknowledging that they, like the masters, have their own “technical” economic terms.⁶ Clearly, however, she puts less stock in this abstract discourse than in the concrete and moving language that John Barton later speaks, which makes his listeners see and hear what is being described, as Gaskell sought to do through her own art (Sharps 8-9). Indeed, the masters and workers do not themselves think or speak principally in rational “technical” terms, as she reveals through her skillful use of free indirect speech and hybridizations to depict the economic debate. The masters insist that they will not be “bullied” by the workers, while the workers cry “Shame on them!” in response to the masters' low wages (221-22).

The social dialogue of classes is far from the most original element in Mary Barton. Joseph Kestner has shown that such dialogues were a common feature of English social narratives written by women like Hannah More and Harriet Martineau long before Disraeli presented the “two nations” of rich and of poor in Sybil (23-25), 41). Gaskell's greater accomplishment, according to Kestner, is her ability to locate “the expression of social conditions within the consciousness of her characters” (121). This achievement results chiefly from Gaskell's depiction of her working-class characters in dialogue among themselves and, in John and Mary Barton's case, within themselves. Most notably, John Barton's radical language and views are clearly opposed to Job Legh's Christian submission, although Gaskell by no means sets up a simple, one-dimensional opposition between Chartism and Christianity in which her characters becomes walking mouthpieces for social ideologies. Accordingly, she initially depicts Barton engaged in dialogue not with the articulate Job, but with George Wilson, whose ideological position is not clearly formulated. More important, she gives to the Chartist Barton some of the most Biblically resonant language in the novel, a feature that is not out of character since, as Angus Easson notes, the Chartists frequently adapted Christian discourse to their own purposes (57).⁷

Thus it is John who invokes the parable of Dives and Lazarus in the novel's opening chapter, and John who caustically observes that he would rather see his daughter “‘earning her bread by the sweat of her brow as the Bible tells her,’” instead of living like “‘a do-nothing lady, worrying shopmen all morning, and screeching at her pianny all afternoon, and going to bed without having done a good turn to any one of God's creatures but herself’” (44-45). In mixing Chartist radicalism and popular idioms with Christian doctrine and imagery, Gaskell activates the “critical interanimation” of languages in Barton's discourse. A reverse dialogization subsequently occurs when she depicts the delirious Methodist, Ben Davenport, who habitually speaks “‘as good as Bible-words’” about “‘God being our father, and that we mun bear patiently whate'er he sends,’” cursing and swearing in his final illness like the popular middle-class conception of a raving Chartist (103-104).

The central debate between John Barton's radical activism and Job Legh's pacifism gradually emerges as the novel develops, but before Job is introduced Gaskell has embodied this conflict in various ways, most strikingly in the text of the Lancashire song, “The Oldham Weaver,” that she “copies” for her readers in Chapter 4. In this song, the speaker is a poor cotton weaver who laments:

Owd Dicky o'Billy's kept telling me lung,
Wee s'd ha better toimes if I'd but howd my tung,
Oi've howden my tung, till oi've near stopped my breath,
Oi think i' my heart oi'se soon clem to death, …

(72)

The message that he should “howd his tung” is, in effect, Job's answer to John's Chartist criticisms. (Significantly, we learn in the next chapter that Job's hobby of collecting insects keeps him “‘silent’” [79].) Parliament also in effect tells the Chartist delegates to “howd” their tongues when they appeal to it with the 1842 Petition and “all the force of their rough, untutored words,” only to be ignored (141).

“The Oldham Weaver” is not only woven into the debate of working-class submission versus activism in Mary Barton, but is also dialogized through Gaskell's mode of presenting it. Evidently, she deliberately chose not to modify the diction and pronunciation of the Lancashire dialect to make the song more comprehensible to her middle-class readers, as she customarily does even in presenting John Barton's speech.⁸ The result is that the language seems almost grotesquely deformed and the song's pathos is lost in the reader's bewilderment before the alien idioms and the unfamiliar orthography. Indeed, as the narrator observes, though “it is a powerfully pathetic song,” “to read it … may, perhaps, seem humorous” (73). To counteract this effect, Gaskell emphasizes the cultural context of the song and the suffering it reflects. More subtly, she presents Margaret Legh singing it with a “superb and flexible voice,” then going on to “burst forth with all the power of her magnificent voice … in the grand supplication, ‘Lord remember David’” (74). This is a characteristically complex instance of dialogization in Mary Barton because Gaskell's combining of voices mixes social classes, genders, low and high genres—a Lancashire folk “ditty” with a grand Hebrew psalm—and history and fiction, the last through the comparison of Margaret to the historical Deborah Travers, an Oldham factory girl whose singing made her the “darling of fashionable crowds” (74).

The mixing of genders evident in Margaret's singing “The Oldham Weaver”—a song in which the male speaker in turn speaks for his silent wife—pervades Gaskell's depiction of working-class discourse in Mary Barton. Thus, in describing the fire at Carson's mill, the narrator observes that the crowd utters “a sob, as if of excited women,” in watching the dramatic rescue of the entrapped men (90). And in Chapter 9, old Jennings, who accompanied Job Legh to London when his son and Job's daughter fell sick, “‘screeched out as if he'd been a woman’” when he saw the corpses of the unhappy couple (146). This dialogization of speech occurs in a narrative that calls attention to the crossing of gender lines by presenting the spectacle of two old men in their fumbling attempts to nurse a hungry female baby, which gropes around with its mouth and insists on “‘crying for its pobbies’” (148). Old bearded Jennings even puts on a woman's nightcap in an attempt to trick the crying baby into thinking that he is female. In this delightfully comic touch, Gaskell indicates how much the feminine is a social construction, based on gender-inflected meanings attached to arbitrary signifiers.

Job's homely, conventionally female story of nursing baby Margaret is further dialogized by the narrative structure of Mary Barton because it appears in the same chapter as John Barton's historic, conventionally male story of the journey to London with the Chartist petition. Gallagher overlooks the complex interactions between these two stories when she divides the novel into two mutually exclusive plots—a domestic tale focusing on Mary and a tragedy focusing on John—and argues that Job's domestic tale acts to suppress John's tragic story of the fate of the Chartist petition (82; see Bodenheimer, 203, for a similar argument). On the contrary, Gaskell consistently employs the hungry child metaphor to link the two stories, the first of which articulates a desperate cry of hunger on the part of an entire class whose members were often viewed as refractory children or infants by the middle classes. In Chapter 8, for instance, the narrator describes the petition to Parliament as the “darling child” of the Chartists' hopes because they believe that the country's legislators must be unaware of their suffering—much as parents might “make domestic rules for the pretty behaviour of children, without caring to know that those children had been kept for days without food” (127). The rejection of the petition thus symbolically entails a double rejection of children: both of the Chartists themselves, and of the “darling child” of their hopes. In Chapter 9, the child metaphor continues as John Barton recalls being “‘like a child’” lost in wonder at the spectacles of London (143). Then, as Job's story of the rescue of his infant granddaughter closes, John's daughter Mary falls asleep on her father's knee, “sleeping as soundly as an infant” (153). Both stories are much concerned with the cost and difficulty of obtaining food, for working class adults and for children. “‘We were wanting our breakfasts, and so were it too, motherless baby!’” Job says at one point in his tale (151). Job's focus on private hunger reinforces the point of John's story, and brings it home to the reader in personal terms. As the chapter ends, the public and private spheres of the two stories are fused in Samuel Bamford's poem “God Help the Poor,” which again brings together the hunger of forlorn adults and children among the poor.

Both dialogue and narrative structure enter into another notable instance of dialogization at this point in Mary Barton, as Gaskell shows Barton shifting from weeping to cursing, much as she had earlier described the suffering factory workers collectively: “the sufferers wept first, and then they cursed” (126). After telling of the rejection of the Chartists, Barton says to Mary, “‘man will not hearken: no, not now, when we weep tears of blood’” (141); and subsequently he declares, “‘as long as I live I shall curse them as so cruelly refused to hear us’” (145). This transition from a conventionally female response to a conventionally male one is then epitomized in one of the mottoes to the following chapter, which foreshadows Barton's act of cursing Esther, his fallen sister-in-law, in the private as opposed to the political sphere: “‘My heart, once soft as woman's tear, is gnarled hair / With gloating on the ills I cannot cure’” (157).

If Gaskell's working-class men often speak or act in conventionally female ways, so too her working-class women speak in ways that undermine conventional alignments of gender and sphere. Thus in Chapter 8, when John Barton is described in a double-voiced construction as holding “a levée” before he sets off for London with the Chartist Petition, we hear a female as well as male neighbors besieging him with conflicting political messages—most notably, Mrs. Davenport, who urges him to speak out against the laws keeping children from factory work (128).⁹ In Chapter 10 we again hear women, this time unaccompanied by men, promoting factory legislation to prevent married women from working, in contradiction to Mrs. Davenport's earlier stance regarding children. Mrs. Wilson remarks that Prince Albert “‘ought to be asked how he'd like his missis to be from home when he comes in, tired and worn,’” and insists that Prince Albert is the one to approach because, although the Queen makes the laws, “‘isn't she bound to obey Prince Albert?’” (166). This is another interesting example of Gaskell's quietly subversive irony and crossing of gender and class lines, particularly if it is viewed in the context of the popular controversy in 1839 and after concerning gender reversal implicit in Victoria and Albert's courtship and royal relationship. One lithograph, for instance, comically presents Victoria proposing to Albert as royal etiquette required (Marshall 71).

Although P. J. Keating includes no women at all in his catalogue of representative working-class characters in Victorian fiction (26-27), Gaskell portrays a broad spectrum of working-class women in Mary Barton and her other works, as Stoneman notes (46). Like their male counterparts, the working-class women in Mary Barton represent different ideological perspectives and speak different languages in Bakhtin's sense of the term. At one extreme, we encounter the vulgar unchecked “utterance” of Sally Leadbitter (132), whose discourse is chiefly shaped by the popular theater (427) and the “romances” of fashionable life read by Miss Simmonds's seamstresses (121). Sally's “witty boldness” gave her “what her betters would have called piquancy,” the narrator slyly observes, crossing class lines in another double-voiced construction (132). At the other extreme, we meet the pious old Alice Wilson, Job's female counterpart, who preaches and lives by a doctrine of passive submission to God's will, and speaks a biblical idiom—“‘Let the Lord send what he sees fit’” (69). Many around Alice assume as Sally does that her religious discourse is “‘Methodee,’” but Alice is in fact Church of England as Mary points out (134). Thus Gaskell mixes the discourse of denominations, perhaps in an attempt to promote a common Christian spirit of belief. Alice is flanked by Margaret, who emphasizes womanly submission more than Christian submission. Both of these women have been viewed as Mary's better angels opposing Sally the tempter (Bodenheimer 29). But Margaret conspicuously fails Mary when the question of Jem Wilson's guilt is at stake, and Alice quietly dies in the second half of the novel when Mary, who initially plays the role of a passively waiting Mariana in her relation to Jem, decides that it is her duty not to wait and to submit like Alice, but to act and to speak out in Jem's defense.

Mary's inner conflict between submission and action is presented in the context of a running debate about what constitutes “duty” in Mary Barton, a debate that connects class to class, and women to men. The focus on this keyword is clearest in Chapter 14, where Gaskell echoes Carlyle's injunction in Sartor Resartus to “do the duty that lies nearest” as she presents Jem Wilson's successful struggle to subdue his vindictive rage against Harry Carson (216). In Chapter 33, Jem experiences conflict again as he first accepts Job's advice that it is his “duty” to stay with his distraught mother instead of with Mary after the trial (404), and then rejects Margaret's rebuke for going to see Mary on the day of his Aunt Alice's death. You remember the dead “‘without striving after it, and without thinking it's your duty to keep recalling them,’” he points out to Margaret (411). However, Jem's interpretation of his duty is far less problematic than either John Barton's or Mary's of theirs. In depicting these characters and the complexity of their ethical choices, Gaskells plays out Carlyle's authoritarian precept in what Carol Gilligan calls “a different voice,” as she adapts his characteristic strategy of multiplying and interrogating meanings for her own purposes (Holloway 41-47).

When Job reminds Jem of his duty in standing by his mother, he at the same time criticizes John Barton for neglect of his daughter: “‘To my mind John Barton would be more in the way of his duty, looking after his daughter, than delegating it up and down the country’” (404). At this point, Job is still unaware of the assassination John has undertaken in fulfilling a very different conception of duty. In murdering Harry Carson, John Barton speaks on the behalf of the workers, not in an act of private revenge such as Jem considers and rejects, but because “perverted reasoning” had made “the performance of an undoubted sin appear a duty” (436). But although he repents his means of carrying out his “duty,” and the narrator describes it as the result of perverted reasoning, the message of the novel about John's duty is altogether more multivoiced and mixed—particularly if we consider that his desperate attempt to make death speak, middle-class death this time, is the catalyst that brings about old Mr. Carson's conversion and recognition of his “duty” to those less fortunate than himself (457).

Gaskell's dialogization of the Victorian keyword “duty” interacts with her exploration of the meanings of “justice” and “revenge” in the innovative adaptation of the traditional revenge tragedy plot she undertakes in Mary Barton. Old Mr. Carson believes that his desire to avenge his son's death reflects his “duty” (439) and his desire for simple justice, but the narrator asks, “True, his vengeance was sanctioned by the law, but was it the less revenge?” (266); and she later emphasizes his fury when he believes that “the slayer of his unburied boy would slip through the fangs of justice” (398). In fact, John Barton's action in assassinating Carson's son, later correctly interpreted as an act of class revenge by Mr. Carson and Job (455), is less tainted by vindictive motives than Carson's cry for “justice,” since Gaskell pointedly refuses to provide Barton with a direct personal motive for revenge on Harry Carson. The assassination is a dreadful duty that falls to him by lot, not, as it easily might have been in a melodrama or a traditional revenge tragedy, his response to Harry Carson's attempt to seduce his daughter.¹⁰ Bodenheimer argues that the splitting of the stories of Mary's sexual harassment and the economic exploitation of the workers softens the “systemic analysis of industrial oppression” in Mary Barton (208; see Lucas, 173, for a similar view). Yet Gaskell's focus on John Barton's political rather than personal motives foregrounds the unconventional class revenge the novel depicts, and at the same time generates sympathy for her working-class avenger and the sense of “duty” that governs him.

In dramatizing the contradictory interpretations of “duty” embraced by John, Job, and Mr. Carson, Gaskell activates the internal dialogism of words as Bakhtin conceives them. “The word, directed towards its object, enters a dialogically agitated and tension-filled environment of alien words, value judgments and accents,” he observes; “and an artistic representation” may “activate and organize” this “dialogic play of verbal intentions” (276-77). The question of what “duty” means or should mean for John's daughter Mary is brought into this complex field of “dialogic play.” Gallagher, interpreting Mary as the sentimental heroine of a domestic take, suggests that “duty is clear” for women in Gaskell's tales of this sort (79); while Kestner sees Mary's function as merely “focusing the men's interests” in the novel (119). But Mary's “duty” of acting and speaking out on Jem's behalf, so contradictory to the womanly submission enjoined upon her, is dialogized both through her mental debate depicted in Chapter 22, and through her later debate with Job, when she refuses to depute what she sees as “her duty, her right” to a man (340). The parallel between the father's duty and the daughter's—John's taking a life in the name of duty and Mary's saving a life—emerges if one considers how John is driven by the desire to save working-class lives, and how Mary risks ending her father's life by trying to save Jem.

In Gaskell's “interanimation” of diverging definitions of “duty,” Mr. Carson's concluding recognition of his duty to the less fortunate brings a middle-class perspective into the conflicting social and ideological interpretations of this keyword. However, it is Job who points out this duty to him, and who speaks to it most eloquently. Consequently, working-class interpretations of duty, situated in the intricate intersections of private and public responsibility, dominate the novel. This dominance is not surprising since, as I implied in the introduction, everywhere we turn in Mary Barton—in the textual voice of the novel's narrative and commentary as well as in the dialogue of the characters—we encounter working-class languages, texts, and perspectives. Gaskell weaves into her text at every opportunity not only passages from Chartist poems like “The Pauper's Drive” and Lancashire “ditties” like “The Oldham Weaver,” but also proverbs and maxims, nursery rhymes like “Polly put the kettle on” (the motto to Chapter 2), and quotations from ballads, from poets pointedly identified as “Anonymous,” as in the mottoes to Chapters 17 and 24, and from working-class poets like Robert Burns, Ebenezer Elliot, and Samuel Bamford. Subsequent novels by Gaskell do not exhibit this plenitude of working-class discourse to nearly the same degree, and there is much to suggest that it results from deliberate narrative and rhetorical strategies in Mary Barton.¹¹

In Chapter 10 the narrator notes the soothing effect “in times of suffering or fierce endurance” of “the mere repetition off old proverbs” such as “it's a long lane that has no turning” (157), a proverb which Job Legh in fact speaks in the preceding chapter (151). Gaskell also draws freely on working-class idioms that she acknowledges may sound like “trivial, everyday expression[s]” (186), as in depicting Mrs. Wilson's love for her helpless, silly twins: “want had never yet come in at the door to make love for these innocents fly out at the window” (115). In another instance, Margaret reacts to a goodnatured kiss from Jem by asking “‘What would May say?’”, Jem replies, “‘She'd nobbut say, practice makes perfect,’” and in between the narrator observes, “Lightly said, lightly answered” (81). Such hybridizations create a double-voiced effect as the narrative voice fuses with the voices of the working-class characters. Mary Barton is thus typical of the dialogized novel as Bakhtin describes it, in that the heteroglossia entering through dialogue is also diffused through authorial discourse (316).

In addition, Gaskell's chapter mottoes, many of them drawn either from working-class texts like Ebenezer Elliot's, or from the texts of authors associated with working-class causes like Tom Hood and Caroline Norton, do much to establish a matrix of working-class discourse in a novel that is insistently intertextual, although in a different way than more conventional literary works. Stoneman suggests that Mary Barton is a text haunted by literary “fathers” (85), but she does not address the unconventional working-class identity of many of these “fathers,” or the extent to which Gaskell also echoes literary “mothers” such as Norton, Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna, and Elizabeth Stone (see Kestner; also Wheeler, “The Writer as Reader”). Ten out of the first eleven chapters begin with mottoes derived either from popular, anonymous discourse, or from authors associated with working-class causes. Often Gaskell employs these mottoes dialogically, as when she prefaces Chapter 9 with a quotation from Norton's “Child of the Islands” which presents one half of a debate between the rich and the poor. In the motto, the rich ask the poor of what they “complain”—and the chapter itself, incorporating John Barton's narrative of the rejection of the Chartist petition, provides the answer. A similar question and answer relation is set up between the motto and the chapter's contents in Chapter 33, but this time it is the poor who ask if “brothers” would treat them as the rich do (451), a question which both the dying John Barton and Job Legh reiterate in the ensuing chapter, and which Mr. Carson and the reader are left to answer. Elsewhere, as in Chapter 10 discussed below, Gaskell anticipates George Eliot in combining two mottoes to set up a dialogue of opposing voices played out in the ensuing chapter.

Gaskell's principal rhetorical strategy in creating a dialogue of voices, both in the characters' speech and in her authorial discourse, seems to be juxtaposing differing modes of discourse in order to emphasize the common humanity of differing classes and genders, or to foreground conflicting ideologies and cultural perspectives. An example of both effects combined occurs in Chapter 15, where she presents young Harry Carson's contrast of his own dandified appearance to Jem Wilson's grimy appearance in his mechanic's clothes. Recalling his own reflection in his bedroom glass, Harry thinks: “It was Hyperion to a Satyr. That quotation came aptly; he forgot ‘The man's a man for a' that’” (227). Gaskell's focus here on the literacy and ideological intertext shaping Carson's aristocratic prejudices indicates that her own repeated quotations from writers of the people such as Burns—a writer frequently lauded by the Chartists—are a deliberate strategy.¹² Moreover, her opposition of Harry's field of allusion to Jem's is a clear example of dialogization involving what Bakhtin terms “character zones”—that is, textual territories surrounding particular characters that are penetrated by their distinctive discourse. Typically too, the mixing of allusions here is quietly ironic, as we watch the conceited young Harry applying to himself the praise Hamlet applies to his dead father.

The allusion to Hamlet belongs to the other main group of allusions and mottoes in Mary Barton, derived from traditional literary texts rather than working-class discourse: in particular, from Greek and English revenge tragedies, and from Romantic poetry. Michael Wheeler (“The Writer as Reader”) and Graham Handley have shown how intricately patterned some of these allusions are, contrary to Henry James's view of Gaskell as naively unintellectual (Ganz 29), and to Johnson's impression that Gaskell's Biblical and literary allusions are “scattered” while Dostoevsky's are carefully patterned (48). In fact, Gaskell seems to make calculated dialogic use of quotations from the traditional “high” genres of poetry and drama in order to invest her humble characters' actions with heroic or epic significance—much as she uses her footnotes on dialect to connect the humble idioms of her Lancashire working-class characters to writers such as Chaucer, that “well of English undefiled,” Wycliffe and Ben Johnson.¹³ Quotations from such genres are particularly frequent in the second half of Mary Barton, where Gaskell uses them to relate her working-class tragic hero and the middle-class Mr. Carson to the aristocratic protagonists of classical and English revenge tragedy. It is Mr. Carson to the aristocratic protogonists of classical and English revenge tragedy. It is Mr. Carson, however, who emerges as the more bloodthirsty revenger—the “Orestes” who passes as a Christian in the nineteenth century (266). The motto of Chapter 18 from Dryden's Duke of Guise—“‘My brain runs this way and that way; 'twill fix hair / On aught but vengeance’” (254)—applies most directly to Mr. Carson's fury at the close of the chapter, as he confronts the corpse of his beloved son.

Mary is associated even more insistently than her father with epic and tragic figures, a feature often overlooked by those who see her simply as a domestic heroine. Indeed, Maria Edgeworth said that Gaskell's heroine was placed in a “situation fit for the highest Greek Tragedy” (Sharp 67). Mary's divided feelings about her father and her participation in his guilt are intimated in the trial scene through a comparison linking her with Beatrice Cenci (389), while Mr. Carson erroneously sees her as the “fatal Helen, the cause of all” (388). More intriguingly, she is linked with Saturn's wife in Keats' Hyperion through the motto to Chapter 22. This last motto seems intended to add epic stature to Mary at a point when her “innate power” of “judgement and discretion” is called upon in the attempt to free Jem (302). At the same point, Mary is also compared to Spenser's Una in The Faerie Queen. In the next chapter, a gender reversal figures her as the archetypal romance hero: “She was like one who discovers the silken clue which guides to some bower of bliss, and secure of the power within his grasp, has to wait for a time before he may tread the labyrinth” (311).

One other persistent set of textual allusions relates both Mary and her Aunt Esther to Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, and to Christabel and her stepmother Geraldine respectively (Handley 134-36). The connection of Esther, the fallen woman, to the Ancient Mariner is a daring and effective dialogization of the prostitute's forbidden discourse. “To whom shall the outcast prostitute tell her tale!” the narrator asks (207). Gaskell does not let us forget that the “leper's” discourse of the fallen women is suppressed even by those members of the working classes who might be expected to understand the economic deprivation leading to prostitution. The combination of mottoes prefacing Chapter 10 highlights the irony involved in John Barton's refusal to listen to Esther's warning about Mary, immediately after the chapter in which he has described his anger at the legislators' refusal to listen to the Chartists' appeal. Later the reader, like Coleridge's hapless wedding guest, must listen to the “outcast prostitute's” tale along with Jem as Esther insists, “‘I will have the relief of telling it’” (210). Another literary precedent from a high Romantic genre subsequently appears for the telling of this inset story, as Esther is linked through the motto to Chapter 21 to the seduced Margaret in Goethe's Faust.

Gaskell's mixing of genres and genders through her use of allusions and mottoes dialogizes literary discourse internally, at the same time as it democratizes it through collision with the languages of the illiterate and the non-literary. Further dialogization occurs through Gaskell's opposition of the languages of different regions and professions. In a reversal designed to relativize the linguistic consciousness of her London readers, she presents John Barton commenting on the alien sound of “‘tongue-tied’” Londoners who “‘can't say their a's and i's properly’” (144). Sailor Will's nautical “way of speaking” (203), evident in his inset comic story of the scorpion, finds its regional counterpart in the Liverpool ship slang that Mary finds “unintelligible” at times—slang that the narrator says she cannot “repeat correctly” because she is “too much of a landlubber” (352). Young Charley, Mary's waterside guide, says that “‘women know nought about’” such language (349), but ironically even Job is perplexed by the “confused use of the feminine pronoun” that Charley's reference to Will's ship as “she” entails (367).

Much as different regional and professional languages, marked by internal gender differences, are juxtaposed in Mary Barton, so fictional and historical voices intermingle. Indeed, a startling effect of “faction” rather than fiction is frequently created when Gaskell feigns to report the comments of actual witnesses to her fictitious events. Thus, after Margaret is depicted singing the song “What a single word can do,” the narrator says, “As a factory worker, listening outside, observed, ‘She spun it reet fine!’” (139). Presenting Mary at the trial, the narrator comments, “I was not there myself; but one who was, told me … that her countenance haunted him, like the remembrance of some wild, sad melody, heard in childhood” (389). And the discovery of the caricature of the strikers drawn by Harry Carson, one of the most crucial incidents in the plot, is presented in a similar way as a “by-play” at the meeting of the masters and men “not recorded in the Manchester newspapers” (235). These reportorial remarks seem calculated rather than accidental, since Gaskell plays differing versions of the Carson murder off against each other, among them a newspaper version which reduces it to “some dispute about a factory girl” (344) and the opposing legal versions at the trial, in effect forensic fictions streaked with melodrama.

Gaskell's parodic stylization of professional languages thus interacts with the parodic stylization of genres in Mary Barton to reveal how much the apparently factual accounts of Harry Carson's murder produced by the newspapers, the law courts, and the police rely on the conventions of genres such as farce, melodrama, and the detective novel. Gallagher, who observes that “Mary Barton is partly about the ways in which narrative conventions mask and distort reality,” notes how Gaskell parodies the conventions of farce and melodrama even as she employs the latter herself to play upon the reader's expectations (67-68). Much the same can be said of Gaskell's use of the conventions of the Newgate or detective novel noted by Wright (237). When the police are hot on Jem Wilson's trail, the narrator observes how “they enjoy the collecting and collating evidence, and the life of adventure they lead; a continual unwinding of Jack Sheppard romances, always interesting to the vulgar and uneducated mind” (273). The version of the murder the police piece together is not very different from the cruder version told by the “halfpenny broadsides” hawked in the streets, with their “raw-head-and-bloody-bones picture of the suspected murderer” (283). Similarly reductive is the police interpretation of Esther's situation after she is cursed and thrown aside by John Barton when she tries to warn him about Mary. Seeing “the close of these occurrences,” a policeman arrests Esther, and the next day she is charged and committed to the New Bailey. “It was a clear case of disorderly vagrancy,” the narrator says (170). In this ironic hybridization, Gaskell “does the police in different voices” with the virtuosity of Dickens.

Gaskell's sustained and complex “critical interanimation” of voices and discourses—working-class and middle-class, female and male, oral and written, vernacular and literary, historical and fictional, regional and professional—provides a context in which to view the inconsistencies of the narrator in Mary Barton. Existing criticism has typically privileged one or two of the multiple narrative voices in the novel, and objected to contradictions between these, or between the teller and the tale. Bodenheimer, for example, sees Gaskell as shifting awkwardly between the roles of a sympathetic and accurate “domestic observer” of the poor and a stilted middle-class “social historian” (198).¹⁴ However, dichotomizing labels do not capture the flux and diversity of the narrative voicing in the novel. Sometimes the voice is that of a neighborly gossip. “Do you know ‘The Oldham Weaver?’ Not unless you are Lancashire born and bred. … I will copy it for you” (71). At other times, it is an intimate voice urgent as Esther's, as when we hear of Mary's dark suspicion that her father is Harry Carson's murderer: “I must tell you; I must put into words the dreadful secret” (299). Sometimes this intimate voice is oddly intrusive and personal. Most notably, the account of Mrs. Wilson's distressed dreams after her son's arrest is interrupted to reveal the narrator's grief and solace in the land of “dreams—(that land into which no sympathy nor love can penetrate with another … where alone I may see, while yet I tarry here, the sweet looks of my dead child)” (327).

These particular voices seem overtly female, in ways that George Eliot's narrative voice never is in Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss, two works that show the influence of Mary Barton.¹⁵ Yet, when Gaskell's first novel was published anonymously, there was some controversy about the gender of the author: Carlyle and W. R. Greg detected a feminine hand, while reviewers in the Athenaeum and the Independent assumed the writer was male (Hopkins 17; Stoneman 3). The controversy seems understandable if one considers that some of the narrative voices assumed in Mary Barton have the masculine tone of a Carlylean prophet or preacher. Chapter 10, for example, begins with a sermon-like exhortation to middle-class readers to “remember” the suffering of the poor, and then invokes the Old Testament story of Rehoboam in 1 Kings 12. The people had found the “yoke” of poverty hard to bear in preceding years, the narrator observes, “but this year added sorely to its weight. Former times had chastised them with whips, but this chastised them with scorpions” (157). Since in the Biblical story, it is not the “times” that chastised the people, but the “yoke” of oppression imposed by Rehoboam, this allusion sharpens Gaskell's social satire, at the same time as it prophesies the downfall of rulers as oppressive as Rehoboam, subsequently replaced by the people's advocate Jeroboam. Having spoken in the conventionally male voice of the preacher, Gaskell then typically shifts in the next paragraph to a colloquial, conventionally female voice, as she describes how John Barton and Mary tried to subsist on her salary—“But the rent! It was half a crown a week—nearly all of Mary's earnings” (158).

The abstract, univocal concept of the “implied author” cannot accomodate this multiplication of narrative voices in Mary Barton. Nor can the diverse readers posited or actively engaged by Gaskell's multiple narrative voices be accommodated by the concept of “the implied reader,” which many reader response critics now reject as too abstract and reductive (Suleiman 14, 25-26). In Mary Barton, many of these readers are actually inscribed in the text, as opposed to implied, and they shift in identity as the narrative voice shifts. Sometimes addressed as “you,” sometimes as “we,” the inscribed reader is at times individual, at times collective. Sometimes the “you” evokes the careless, anonymous man—or is it woman?—in the streets, who cannot “read the lot of those who daily pass you by. … How do you know the wild romances of their lives … ?” (101). Sometimes the “you” evokes a womanly neighbor or friend: “Can you fancy the bustle of Alice to make tea … ?” (67). At other points, the “you” might be the educated clubman in an armchair whom Thackeray often addresses in Vanity Fair—or it might just possibly be an educated woman or self-educated working man. “If you will refer to the preface to Sir J. E. Smith's Life (I have it not by me, or I would copy you the exact passage), you will find that he names a little circumstance corroborative of what I have said,” the narrator observes in describing the self-educated working men of Manchester like Job (76). Such an address has the potential to cross both class and gender lines, given its context and its juxtaposition with narrative comments conventionally coded as female.

The shifting narrative voices in Mary Barton and the multiplication of inscribed readers further contribute to the actively dialogic nature of the novel's discourse because both narrator and reader participate in the internal and external debates the characters experience. Christine Brooke-Rose describes the dialogical novel as one in which “the author has a constant metatextual dialogue with his characters” (Suleiman 145); while Bakhtin observes that even in Turgenev's works, “substantial masses” of the novelist's apparently monologic language are “drawn into the battle between points of view, value judgments and emphases” embodied by the characters (315-16). This effect occurs in Mary Barton when both narrator and reader are drawn into the debate Mary experiences concerning “duty.” Should Mary submit and wait as Alice and Margaret advise? Or should she act? The narrator asks the reader a propos of Mary's dilemma, “Do you think if I could help it, I would sit still with folded hands to mourn?” (301).

At other points, what seem to be irritating middle-class platitudes on the part of the narrator emerge, when viewed contextually, as components in extended debates pervading the narrative commentary and the dramatic presentation of the characters' thoughts and actions. One notable example of apparently platitudinous commentary in Mary Barton appears in Chapter 3, when the narrator comments on John Barton's anger at the rich who, in his eyes, do not suffer during bad times:

I know that this is not really the case; and I know what is the truth in such matters: but what I wish to impress is what the workman feels and thinks. True, that with child-like improvidence, good times will often dissipate his grumbling, and make him forget all prudence and insight.

(60)

This interruption has seemed jarring to many readers (Bodenheimer 199-200 and Gill, Mary Barton 3-24 are representative). But, rather than being seen as epitomizing Gaskell's subscription to middle-class ideology, this patronizing commentary can be viewed as playing an integral part in a sustained debate in which she elicits the stock opinions of her middle-class readers (and no doubt of one part of her own mind) in order to destabilize those opinions. Precisely this effect occurs as Gaskell progressively complicates and interrogates the assumption that the working classes are “improvident” in the first half of Mary Barton.

The motif of improvidence first appears in Chapter 1, when John Barton's appearance is described as “stunted,” giving the impression that he had “suffered” from the scanty living consequent upon bad times, and “improvident habits” (41). Here the opinion that the working classes are improvident seems something that the narrator is not even conscious of, yet one notes how “improvident habits” hangs in potential conflict with “bad times” as an explanation of the suffering of the poor. The motif next appears indirectly in the narrator's description of the Bartons' domestic belongings in Chapter 2. Here there is a curious insistence on household articles that are “really for use,” like a table, in contrast to more ornamental articles like the “bright green japanned tea-tray” and “crimson tea-caddy,” and the “triangular pieces of glass to save carving knives and forks from dirtying table-cloths,” for which one would have fancied their possessors could find no use” (49-50). It's as if Gaskell were embodying the first impressions of a working-class home in the mind of a typical middle-class visitor representing the Manchester and Salford District Provident Society, to which she herself belonged. A similar voice seems to be speaking in the disruptive narrative commentary of Chapter 3, cited above. After the description of the Bartons' home, the “improvidence” motif is intermingled with the focus on distinguishing between objects of use and objects of ornamentation. The motif recurs in the description of Alice's meagre domestic possessions, which include an “unlackered, ancient, third-hand tea-tray” (66); and it takes on an ironic note when Mr. Carson's home is described as “furnished with disregard for expense”—“many articles chosen for their beauty and elegance adorned his rooms” (105). This description appears in Chapter 6, where we first vividly see, smell, and feel the dark, foetid, clammy Davenport cellar, stripped even of the plainest articles of use (101). Finally in Chapter 10, in a passage remarkable for its quiet but caustic ironies, the narrator describes the stripping of the Barton house itself, as the family of father and daughter sink into penury, not because of improvidence but because of “bad times” aggravated by the blacklisting of John as a Chartist:

“By degrees the house was stripped of its little ornaments. … And by-and-by Mary began to part with other superfluities at the pawn-shop. The smart tea-tray, and tea-caddy, long and carefully kept, went for bread for her father. He did not ask for it, or complain, but she saw hunger in his shrunk, fierce, animal look. Then the blankets went, for it was summer time, and they could spare them; and their sale made a fund; which Mary fancied would last until better times came. But it was soon all gone; and then she looks around the room to crib it of its few remaining ornaments.”

(159)

When blankets become classified with “superfluities” and “ornaments”—when objects of use are so barely defined—life is cheap as beasts', and the assumptions that expect such a life of the poor are shown to be cheap and mean-spirited themselves.

The narrator's apparent platitude about the workers' “child-like improvidence” can thus be seen to exist, like the concept of “duty,” in a “dialogically agitated” environment that destabilizes and subverts it. This dialogical agitation is further intensified because the conjunction of “childlike” with “improvidence” implicates the latter term in Gaskell's complex development of the child metaphor noted above, a development that generates sympathy, not criticism, for the starving workers. Bakhtin emphasizes the potential reductiveness of abstracting “direct authorial speech” from its context in a text and viewing it in isolation as epitomizing the author's “style” or authorial identity (265-66). Unfortunately, this critical practice has led to the under-appreciation of Gaskell's artistry, and to monologic conceptions of a narrative voice that is persistently dialogical.

Of course, not all of the shifts and contradictions in the narrative voicing of Mary Barton can be explained in terms of Gaskell's innovative dialogization of authorial discourse. For instance, the often noted contradictory use of the Frankenstein metaphor in Chapter 15, in which Gaskell seems first to deny, then to affirm, that the uneducated like John Barton have a “soul,” is best explained by Gallagher's analysis of the conflict between social determinism and free will in nineteenth-century narratives (74-75). Other inconsistencies can be interpreted psychologically as unconscious manifestations of what Gaskell, in a striking phrase, referred to as her many “Mes”: “One of my mes is, I do believe a true Christian—(only people call her socialist and communist), another of my mes is a wife and mother. … Now that's my ‘social’ self I suppose. Then again I've another self with a full taste for beauty and convenience. … How am I to reconcile all these warring members?” (Letters 108). However, the point where psychology ends and artistry begins is difficult to determine. Gaskell's conceptualization of her identity as made up of “warring members” is itself notable for its self-reflexive dialogization of consciousness, a feature that casts some light on her remarkable ability—one might say her “negative capability”—to accomodate conflicting discourses and perspectives.

It is not surprising that this ability should have been highly developed in a woman with Gaskell's personal history and experience. Her struggle as a Southerner like Margaret Hale with alien Manchester idioms and viewpoints, her encounter as a middle-class social worker with working-class perspectives, her parallel literary encounter with the working-class poets she studied with her husband, and her struggle as a woman with discourses like political economy conventionally viewed as masculine—all no doubt contributed to the relativizing of her linguistic consciousness. Her tendency to incorporate the heteroglossia of female and working-class discourses in double-voiced constructions can furthermore be seen as the predictable consequence of her status as a member of a “muted” group within a dominant masculine culture.¹⁶ More remarkable is the intricacy and daring with which she challenges the dominant discourses of her culture by opposing these to suppressed discourses, instead of simply translating the latter into some form of dominant discourse.

The success of Mary Barton has traditionally been assessed in light of its formal consistency. A more appropriate measure might be Hans-Robert Jauss's criterion for evaluating the artistry of a work: the “distance between the horizon of expectations and the work, between the familiarity of previous aesthetic experiences and the ‘horizon change’ demanded by the response to new works” (Suleiman 36). Because it is such an intensely dialogical novel, Mary Barton provoked a horizon change in its middle-class readers.¹⁷ It did so not by overt iconoclasm, which might have alienated much of its reading public, but by engaging its readers, like its characters and its author, in a complex series of interlocking debates and encounters with conflicting languages and ideologies. In the process, even the more conspicuously middle-class voices among the narrator's “many mes” play their part because a horizon of expectations can only be changed when that horizon is acknowledged from the inside, as the viewers see it, and simultaneously penetrated by what is outside. This is what Gaskell achieves through the polyphony of voices she orchestrates in Mary Barton.

Notes

1. A poem of six stanzas, “The Pauper's Drive” deftly combines black humour, caustic social satire and pathos. Kovalev does not identify the author. He notes that poems like “The Pauper's Drive” were conventional in working-class writings before the Chartists (371). For a translation of Kovalev's Russian introduction see Chaloner.

2. Mary Barton was the first foreign novel published in translation by the Dostoevsky brothers in their magazine Vremya. Johnson notes that Dostoevsky may have been influenced in Crime and Punishment by Gaskell's “Dantesque scenes” of urban suffering, her Christian ideology, and her depiction of an ideological murderer like Raskolnikov, whose character deteriorates in the course of the novel.

3. See also Michael Wheeler, English Fiction of the Victorian Period (36). Bodenheimer and Lucas offer the most thought-provoking discussions of the divisions within Mary Barton. Margaret Ganz relates these to the split in Gaskell herself between the Knutsford world of Cranford, and the Manchester world of Mary Barton and North and South (31-32).

4. On the complexity of “voicing” in Victorian fiction, though not in Mary Barton, see Mark Kinkead-Weekes.

5. Bodenheimer notes in passing that Gaskell's “society of the poor is so full of its own dictions and traditions, so various in its own right, that the middle-class voices we hear at the Carsons' or before the Liverpool Assizes seem genuine intrusions from another linguistic universe” (214). And Coral Lansbury similarly suggests that, surrounded by these voices, the narrator's own voice begins to sound like a fiction (Elizabeth Gaskell: The Novel of Social Crisis (25). The most useful treatment of dialect in Mary Barton remains Sanders's “A Note on Mrs. Gaskell's Use of Dialect.”

6. Gaskell proposed several readings in political economy to her daughter Marianne: “first I think we should read together Adam Smith on the Wealth of Nations. Not confining ourselves as we read to the limited meaning he attaches to the word ‘wealth’” ([7 April 1851], Letters 148). For one of Gaskell's bolder interruptions of male discourse, see Chapter 16 in Mary Barton where the narrator interrupts the masters' comments on the beast-like workers: “(Well! Who might have made them different?)” (233).

7. Some Chartist poems are entitled “hymns” (see Kovalev, 118, 164). Like the Owenites described by Barbara Taylor in Eve and the New Jerusalem (158), with their Social Hymn Book and millenarianism, the Chartists adapted Christian rhetoric to their revolutionary purposes.

8. Edgar Wright (260-62) and Kathleen Tillotson (213-24) have suggested that Gaskell's depiction of working class dialect is limited, particularly in the depiction of Mary, who often speaks in standard English. But Gaskell's variations in “editing” dialect indicate that she was highly conscious of her own novelistic modifications. She depicts Mary using more dialect terms in speaking to members of her own class than to the middle-class Harry Carson.

9. These political messages from women find an analogue in “The Oldham Weaver,” where the male speaker says that his wife Marget has declared “Hoo'd goo up to Lunnon an' talk to the' greet mon” if only she had “cloo' as to put on” (73). Taylor notes that women weavers were particularly active in labor agitation, in Oldham and elsewhere. “In the desperate years following the Napoleonic Wars,” women weavers had “often served as violent shock-troops,” and “so it was again among power-loom weavers in the early 1830s, when women led the way in riotous confrontations with the military in Oldham and other textile centres” (91).

10. Taylor notes that the “torrid tales of innocent daughters of the people seduced and ruined by dastardly blue-bloods or lascivious employers filled the radical press” in the 1830s and 40s (201).

11. In North and South, the novel where one might most expect to encounter the pervasive presence of working-class discourse again, the principal working-class characters, Nicholas and Bessy Higgins, play marginal roles. Occasional chapters make use of epigraphs from poets such as Elliott (Chapters 21 & 43) and Hood (Ch. 37) or from the Corn Law Rhymes (Ch. 22); several other epigraphs are anonymous (Chapters 5, 11, 17, 34, 48). On the whole, however, the textual voice is much less polyglot, in part because of the use of Margaret Hale as a center of consciousness.

12. Passages from Burns also appear as mottoes for Chapters 11 and 33 in Mary Barton. See Kovalev, 298 & 305, for indications of the popularity of Burns among the Chartists. Kovalev points out that to compare a writer with Burns was “the highest honour Chartist critics could confer” (Chaloner translation, 128).

13. Stephen Gill notes this function of Gaskell's footnotes on etymology (Mary Barton 474), as does Norman Page (52). Gustav Klaus overlooks the complexity of Gaskell's rhetorical strategies when he infers that she “felt obliged to defer to her readers' sensibilities by adding footnotes to, or translating into standard English, the colloquial utterances of her working-class characters” (52).

14. Gill similarly distinguishes between Gaskell as “imaginative artist” and as middleclass “mediator between the classes” (Mary Barton 24); and Lucas opposes the novel's “sensitive exploration” of John Barton's experience to “Mrs Gaskell's prim interpolations” 162-63). Coral Lansbury points to the “disjunctions between the narrative mediator and the action of the plot,” and comments that the “major difficulty” with Mary Barton is “a concilatory narrator who is often so mealy-mouthed and platitudinous that the reader's teeth are set on edge” (Elizabeth Gaskell 10 & 14). Responding to another of the narrative voices in the novel, Gary Messinger observes that “the persona of the authoress is that of a nurse who sees no final remedy for the sorrow she witnesses daily” (Welch 92).

15. In a letter to Gaskell dated November 11th, 1859, Eliot acknowledged the influence of the “earlier chapters of Mary Barton” on her art (The George Eliot Letters III 98). But the entire plot structure of Mary Barton seems to have influenced The Mill on the Floss: both begin with the tragedy of a humble man, and in each the man's daughter replaces the father as the center of interest in the second half of the novel. The depiction of the relationship between Gaskell's depiction of Jem Wilson's relationship with his mother while Esther's moral development in Felix Holt resembles Mary's in some respects. Both begin as rather flippant young women, who grow in stature and who choose working-class lovers in the end.

16. The tendency of “muted” groups to produce “double-voiced” discourse is discussed by Elaine Showalter (31) and by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar. Stoneman notes Gaskell's use of such discourse (12-14).

17. See the “resisting” reviewers, perceptively analysed by Lucas (164-69).

Works Cited

Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist; trans. Carlyl Emerson & Michael Holquist. Austin & London: U of Texas P, 1981.

Bodenheimer, Rosemarie. “Private Griefs and Public Acts in Mary Barton.” Dickens Studies Annual 9 (1981): 195-215.

Booth, Wayne C. “Freedom of Interpretation: Bakhtin and the Challenge of Feminists Criticism,” The politics of Interpretation. Ed. W. J. T. Mitchell. Chicago & London: U of Chicago P, 1983. 51-82.

Chaloner, W. D. “Y. V. Kovalev: The Literature of Chartism,” Victorian Studies (1959): 117-138

Easson, Angus. Elizabeth Gaskell. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979.

Eliot, George. The George Eliot Letters. Ed. Gordon S. Haight. New Haven: Yale UP, 1954. Vol. 3.

Gallagher, Catherine. The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction: Social Discourse and Narrative Form 1832-1867. Chicago & London: U of Chicago P, 1985.

Ganz, Margaret. Elizabeth Gaskell: The Artist in Conflict. New York: Twayne, 1969.

Gaskell, Elizabeth. Mary Barton. Ed. Stephen Gill. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1970.

———. The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell. Ed. J. A. V. Chapple & Arthur Pollard. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1967.

———. North and South. Ed. Martin Dodsworth. Middlesex: Penguin, 1970.

Gilbert, Sandra & Gubar, Susan. “Sexual Linguistics: Gender, Language, Sexuality.” New Literacy History 16 (1985): 515-43.

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