William Barnes, Dialect Poems in the Dorset County Chronicle
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It is commonly believed that William Barnes (1801 1886) steered clear of politics in his poetry. Yet, the first poem he ever published in the Dorset dialect was an attack on the enclosures of the village commons in the 1830s. His next eight poems dealt with such topics as rural poverty, penury-induced emigration, the Poor Laws and Corn Laws, and the People's Charter of 1838. This edition of his dialect poems arranged in the chronological order of their first publication in the Dorset County Chronicle exposes the fallacy of the old assumptions about Barnes's lack of interest in political affairs. It shows the gradual development of Barnes's artistry as a poet and of the linguistic means through which he set out to represent in writing the key features of the dialect of his native Blackmore Vale.
T. L. Burton is an Emeritus Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Adelaide. He is co-editor of The Complete Poems of William Barnes, 3 vols (2013–) and the author of William Barnes’s Dialect Poems: A Pronunciation Guide (2010) and The Sound of William Barnes’s Dialect Poems, 3 vols (2013–17). Emma Mason is Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. She has written widely on Christianity and literature, and, with Mark Knight, edits the New Directions in Religion and Literature series. Her most recent book is Christina Rossetti: Poetry, Ecology, Faith (2018). John Blackmore completed his PhD on nineteenth-century regional writing and nationhood at the University of Exeter in 2023. A researcher, singer-songwriter, and teacher, he has published in Victorian Literary Languages (2022), English (2024), the Thomas Hardy Journal (2024), and the William Barnes Newsletter (2025). His album, Beauty of Blackmore (2017), includes several musical settings of Barnes’s poems.