Dimensions
170 x 250 x 10mm
The child of an agricultural labourer in Dorset's Blackmore Vale, William Barnes (1801-1886) rose to be a lawyer's clerk, schoolmaster and much-loved clergyman. Engraver, musician, and craftsman, he also became an innovative educationist and taught himself over seventy languages. No pedant, however, his was a genial and enthusiastic nature, imbued with common humanity. His courting of Julia Miles, and their subsequent life together in `Linden Lea' is one of the great love stories of nineteenth-century literature. Uniquely, his dialect poems presented the lives of preindustrial rural people in their own language. This biography serves an anthology, and an account of how the poems came to be written. It also recounts how by scholarship Barnes defended the controversial notion that the dialect of the labouring people was the purest form of English. Thomas Hardy described him as 'probably the most interesting link between present and past life that England possessed'.
