Speaking Volumes: Dorset and Lancashire dialect in Victorian Literature

There is a dislocation between Williams Barnes’s use of a dialect he didn’t himself use as schoolmaster and clergyman, and the vernacular he employs throughout his Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect (1862). He was a highly educated, middle class poet and polymath, and his use of dialect is thus highly wrought and calculated. When Terry Eagleton wrote, then, of Thomas Hardy that ‘he was not from the common people. Not everyone who lives outside London is a country bumpkin’, he could just as well have been describing William Barnes, an intellectual figure who thought deeply about philology and dialect. Although Coventry Patmore wrote that he was ‘of no school [...] but nature’, this was a thinker who rejected the study of Russian due to its lack of ‘old lore’,  and who poached Celtic tropes – such as cynghanedd (internal rhyme) – for his own poetic creation. His poetry, and his active choice to write in the Dorset dialect, carries subtle undertones of class critique.

Much of the poetry produced during the Lancashire Cotton Famine of 1861-5 similarly blends specific uses of dialect with [its fraught opposite], an odd, distancing effect – some of Lancashire’s poetic output is written by working class members of society (such as boat-builder John Parry and the anonymous ‘Oldham Weaver’), but the majority is written by professionals and members of the clergy. The Lancashire Cotton Famine poetry is the more overtly political foil to Barnes’s Poems. When Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote in 1864 that poetical language should be ‘the current language heightened [...] unlike itself, but not obsolete’, he echoed Wordsworth’s thinking in his 1800 ‘Preface’ to Lyrical Ballads: that poetry should mirror ‘language really used by men [...] purified [from] real defects’. Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848) also accommodates working-class experience through her consistent use of a Lancashire dialect (also non-native to her), seeking to ennoble their modes of speech – a further testament to Jenny Uglow’s description of the novel’s preoccupation with ‘the difficulty of speaking’. This is why there is a subtle distance which abides despite the writers’ efforts to bring their poetry closer to the vernacular – they not only replicate the vernacular, but actively try to elevate and ennoble the dialects they articulate, almost seeking aesthetic vindication and justification for their use of dialect. This complicates their use of dialect, but does not necessarily detract from their reformist political intent.

Barnes describes nature in dialect, using the natural world as a vector of loss, a signifier of the changes wrought on the Dorset landscape. These changes were tangibly felt by the working class – the county relied on ancient industries such as cordage and sailcloth manufacture, and small-scale silk working and farming – industries impacted heavily by the two overarching Victorian principles of change: industrialization and population growth in cities. Between 1801 and 1891 the urban population increased sevenfold to the rural’s 25% increase. ‘Blackmwore Maidens’ is perturbed by an underlying sense of loss and defensive watchfulness. It opens with abundant lyricism, as Barnes invokes an inventory of flora and fauna – ‘thyme’, ‘clote’, ‘cowslip’. The reader is apostrophised as the poet hypothesises their direct observation of the scene: ‘if you could zee [...]. But the poet’s staunch, repeated assurance of the maidens’ belonging to ‘Blackmwore by the Stour’ denotes the necessity of such emphatic claims – as if there is a challenge or threat to their secure belonging in the ‘pleace’. The following stanzas bolster this sense of uprooting, as the conditional returns, an entreaty to the reader and a dissemination of persuasive rhetoric – again, ‘if you could zee [...] you’d cry to bachelors back hwome’, spreading the news that these ‘maidens’ belong in ‘Blackmwore’. The poet extols their ‘beauty’, ‘still in bud’ – but his use of the ambivalent adverb ‘still’ adds to the poem’s quiet roster of defiance and resistance; ‘still’ paradoxically signifies both stagnation and perpetuation – two principles steering Victorian social and economic life, and certainly germane in Dorset’s context.

‘Pentridge by the River’ uses ‘still’ to a similar effect. Nature’s appearance, her ‘feace’ is changed unrecognisably, but ‘still the neame do bide the seame’ – dialect, locality, and place trumps the hegemony of urbanisation. The duplicate repetition of ‘Pentridge’ at the poem’s close grounds and immortalises the threatened community, lending the poem – and its celebration of dialect – a tone of triumph. Although not critically acclaimed, Barnes was popular amongst readers, and he replicates the Dorset dialect to defend their right to place, ventriloquising voices that would otherwise have remained voiceless. Barnes’s influence was responsible for the Dorset dialect’s pervasion into other creative media – his student was the painter Joseph Clarke, whose domestic paintings were often entitled in the Dorset dialect.

The Reverend Thomas Freeman’s ‘The Starving Cotton Spinner’s Christmas Lament’ (1862) also seeks to articulate working-class experience through dialect, but, unlike Barnes, insists he does not observe them from a distance, but in close proximity. He implicitly assimilates his identity with the working classes, pluralising their selfhoods with repeated ‘our’’s and ‘we’’s. More explicitly polemic than Barnes, the ‘well warmed hearths’ of comfortable middle class domesticity are juxtaposed with the working class abodes, ‘where suffering has a seat’. He magnifies working class piety in an effort to ennoble them, imploring the reader to ‘think of us, who shudder with the cold’. Freeman’s working class characters become a configuration of Gaskell’s ‘deserving poor’ – notably they have pawned all their possessions ‘save the big Bible, and that prayer book old’. Freeman seeks resolution and salvation through Christianity, finding ‘this trial’ as a means to be ‘nearer to thee’ – and his emphatic ‘we’’s and ‘our’’s extend outwards, bringing both author and reader in communion with, at one with, the working class experience articulated. J Harvey Perry’s ‘Drooping Hearts in Lancashire’ (1863) blends Barnes’s tone of ‘Blackmwore Maidens’ and Freeman’s ‘Cotton Spinner’, simultaneously vocalising working class voices through dialect whilst distancing them through topographical displacement. Each sestet concludes with standalone, choric affirmations of place – ‘Lancashire’ – just as each of Barnes’s stanzas concluded with ‘Blackmwore by the Stour’. Perry directly solicits the sympathetic, middle class reader to ‘let your kindness quickly cheer’ Lancashire’s ‘drooping hearts’, a didactic call to charity, distancing the poet’s status as polemicist and campaigner, from the working class figures he ventriloquises. They, for their part, are relegated to the third person, unlike Freeman’s collectivisation: their ‘mournful lays’ plea for ‘bounteous aid’. 

James Bowker’s ‘Hard Times: or the Weyveur to his Wife’ (1866) makes far more ample use of dialect than Freeman and Perry, ennobling the working class dialect through its poeticisation, as Barnes does. His lengthy syntax – 12-15 syllable line lengths – belies the poem’s ostensible rollicking charm, precluding it from appearing puerile or infantile. In an era where ⅘ of the population were either manual workers or their dependents, male redundancy – the loss of the father’s status as the family’s breadwinner – is characterised by a deep shame: ‘sittin’ here schaming for th’ choilt an’ thee’. Bowker’s elision of vowel sounds – ‘th’ dark an th’ snow’ – expedites the reading process, but this clipped rapidity is countered by an equal and opposite slowing force: ‘a weary heawr i’ th day’, drawing out the vowel sounds and phonetically spelling-out the vernacular. The effect is a demand for tongue-twisting verbal dexterity, and because Bowker provides no glossary, the reader is forced to grapple with the challenging dialect, rendered even more difficult by Bowker’s toying with verbal pacemaking. His aim is more explicitly reformist than Barnes’s, but each poet employs dialect to ennoble the working class experience in their own language and terms.

Mary Barton makes rich use of dialect, as Gakell fulfils her promise to ‘write truthfully’ – going beyond mere ‘truth’ to verbal verisimilitude, as she seeks to express working class experience in their own parlance. Her husband, William Gaskell, added glossarial notes to the novel, which also ennobles her use of a dialect which could otherwise have prompted critical castigation. The British Quarterly were, after all, sceptical enough, describing the novel as ‘mischievous’ and of ‘very great injustice to the employers’. William Gaskell’s footnote to Mary’s use of the dialect word ‘liefer’ in chapter 11, is a judicious instance of the writers’ endeavours to dignify dialect: ‘‘liefer’, rather./ yet had I levre unwist for sorrow die’, Chaucer, ‘Troilus and Criseyde’. Elsewhere, Gaskell’s footnotes amalgamate the Lancashire dialect with allusions to Shakespeare, Ben Johnson, Mandeville and Spenser. By alluding to a seminal historic lyric – accessible only to those privileged with a literary education – the Gaskells’ relationship to dialect becomes complex and bifurcated. Their own verbal practice is distanced from the working class vernacular, as they relegate it to an explanatory footnote, but it also entrenches dialect in veneration, in unimpeachably, dignifying, canonical literature.

In Chapter 4, Alice implores Margaret to sing ‘Th’ Owdham Weaver’, and the narrator instantly – and unnecessarily – translates the title for the reader, directly addressing them: ‘do you know ‘The Oldham Weaver’?’. The ‘ditty’ is then copied-out, replete with a phonetic rendition of its vernacular: ‘he ne’er picked ower i’ his loife’, endowing it with the dignifying attention which would otherwise have been withheld. The narrator anticipates a wry reception on the reader’s part: ‘to read it, it may, perhaps, seem humorous’. In admitting this, Gaskell articulates Hardy’s later criticism of readerly assumptions towards dialect. In his 1908 introduction to Barnes’s Select Poems (the only editorial work he ever undertook), Hardy refuted the ‘burlesque and ridicul[ous]’ associations dialect inspires. He insisted that dialect is just ‘as consonant with moods of sorrow as with moods of mirth’, and is actually empowering, amounting to an ‘intense localisation’ of place in literature. Gaskell also celebrates the dialect – now portrayed as inaccessible to the reader – ‘to those who have seen the distress it describes, it is a powerfully pathetic song’. Unlike the lucky reader, it is heavily implied, Margaret ‘had both witnessed the destitution, and had the heart to feel it’. Any opportunity for readerly ridicule is deftly subdued, and Alice’s ‘enjoyment of tears’, provoked as it is by a seemingly humble dialect song, is redolent of a middle class aesthetic sensibility, as the evening’s musical entertainment is revealed to be not so different from middle class evenings of divertissement. Gaskell’s dialect then, is different but not inferior to, her, her husband, and her reader’s voices. Although the irony abides that without her status as middle class wife to a minister, the work’s power of fictional philanthropy would have been severely weakened, she, like the Lancashire poets and Barnes, replicates working class speech for politically reformist aim, subtly ennobling and celebrating their voices.

Each writer examined here mediates between a unity with dialect, and a differentiation from it. In her own words, Gaskell’s Mary Barton sought to delineate the struggles of ‘those who elbowed me daily in the busy streets of the town’. The novel’s philanthropic dint is tacit here, as is the slight displacement between author and her subjects which will complicate and distance her narrative voice: instead of direct interaction, Gaskell’s proposed subject, the anonymous ‘those’, merely encounter her as an obstacle in the harried course of their days. Patricia Ingham insists that Mary Barton is entangled by Gaskell’s ‘somewhat confused desire to exonerate the middle classes’, and indeed, there is a level to which Gaskell and the poets are distanced by their writerly, authoritative alterity from the ‘starving’ working classes they present. Suffering is palliated by bromidic religious affirmations, or by unconvincing transformations (such as Carson’s turn-around) – but, each writer does seek peaceful political unity through the optimistic teaching that ‘rich and poor, masters and men, were then brothers in the deep suffering of the heart’. Tolkien’s phrase – that of ‘the philological instinct’ – shapes and articulates working class experience in these novels, and is not simple appropriation or replication, but a complex mediation between the author and their subject content.