William Barnes’s dialect poems: a pronunciation guide

William Barnes (1801–1886) wrote his dialect poetry at a time when scholarly and popular interest in dialect was at an unprecedented height, partly due to the perceived threat posed to dialectal diversity by industrialisation and universal education. Barnes’s poetry addressed these issues not only in its content, with the recurring theme of a lost rural idyll, but also in its form. Unlike the majority of dialect writers, Barnes went beyond the conventions of eye dialect and semi-phonetic spelling to create an orthography designed to represent a much fuller account of the dialectal pronunciation of this time and place. Any author attempting to represent dialect must balance authenticity against accessibility, and, in Barnes’s case, authenticity tipped the scales. His obituary in the Saturday Review, after praising Barnes as “the best pastoral poet we possess”, added “the dialect is but a very thin veil hiding from us some of the most delicate and finished verse written in our time”. In William Barnes’s Dialect Poems: A Pronunciation Guide, Thomas Burton attempts to lift this veil by providing a full account of the pronunciation represented in Barnes’s poetry. Burton admits from the outset (1) that Barnes has not attempted to reproduce the dialect of the Blackmore Vale either at the time when the poems were written (mid-19th century) or the time to which they look back (early 19th century), but he does claim to have rediscovered “how [Barnes] wished his poems to sound when read out loud”. Burton’s methodology is strictly and soundly philological: the primary evidence comes from close study of Barnes’s rhymes, spelling systems and commentaries, but this is triangulated by reference to other scholarly studies of the dialects of the south-west of England, including Ellis (1889), Urlau (1921), Widén (1949) and the relevant volumes of the Survey of English Dialects (Orton & Wakelin 1967–8). For historical background, Burton refers to Dobson (1968) and for comparisons with the ‘book English’ or ‘proto-RP’ of the 19th century, he relies on MacMahon (1998), admitting that he has “not attempted any new research on 19th-century English” (42–3). This pronunciation guide is aimed at several readerships: linguistic scholars with interests in historical English dialectology, literary scholars, and aficionados such as the members of the William Barnes Society (http://www.william-barnes-society. org.uk). Burton has balanced the needs and expectations of these groups well, providing detailed phonetic information for the first group, glossing phonetic terminology for those with less technical knowledge, and organising the contents so that those who simply want to know how Barnes’s poems would have sounded or to seek guidance on how to recite them can turn directly to the transcriptions of the 18 poems read by Burton on the accompanying CD (148–213). The poems are presented in parallel texts with Barnes’s orthography on the left hand page and broad IPA transcription on the right. For readers who are less familiar with IPA, Burton provides a moveable laminated card with the relevant IPA symbols and their descriptors on one side and the IPA vowel chart on the reverse, which avoids them constantly having to turn back to a listing elsewhere in the book. Burton’s readings are both accurate and animated, and would provide an excellent teaching resource. For readers with more knowledge of and interest in phonetics, Burton provides an extensive and detailed account of Barnes’s pronunciation. In chapter 7 (45–118) the vowels are discussed, using a classification system based on Wells’s keywords (1982, xviii–xix), whilst the “less troublesome” (119) consonants are dealt with in