ABSTRACT
Gaskell The first chapter of Mary Barton is preceded by an epigraph said to be from a 'Manchester Song'. It isn't. As far as we know, snippets with this attribution-there's another one as epigraph to Chapter 6-are the work of William Gaskell, who was quite a lively and competent versifier. 1 These lines might therefore be deemed to come from Manchester, but are not songs in the sense of being complete pieces composed for music. Still less are they what the attribution seems to imply, the locally produced voice of an urban working class. In using such epigraphs, and in making allusion to or actually quoting songs from a variety of popular sources, Elizabeth Gaskell too is following in the Scott tradition. Like Scott, she is not averse to creating the occasional false intertext; here, it seems to have been created by her husband.2 Gaskell uses common forms of attribution for this sort of epigraph such as 'old song', 'old play', the adjective being used to stress the continuity of tradition or literary wisdom implied in the act of quotation. Popular material such as folk song or nursery rhymes may be included, but it is deracinated from its original sung context.
