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...