The History Press, £14.99
Alan Chedzoy published William Barnes: A Life of the Dorset Poet in 1985. Now, 25 years later, we have a companion volume, a considerably more extensive exploration of Barnes’ intellectual and imaginative development that places his achievement in its socio-historical and critical context. Barnes’ is a unique voice, speaking from a specific historical moment, and conjuring up a particular quality. At the outset Dr Chedzoy quotes a few lines by EM Forster as an effective curtain raiser: “To read Barnes is to enter a friendly cottage where a family party is in full swing. One misses many of the allusions, one is not connected to the party by blood, yet one has no sense of intrusion. The party, like all unsophisticated gatherings, welcomes the entire human race.”
Chedzoy puts forward good reasons for granting Barnes more significance in our literary and cultural history. He is more than just the great dialect poet of Dorset; his verse is the link that connects us with a world that disappeared during the enclosures and the agrarian revolution. Barnes spoke for and to the country folk of Dorset in their own language; ordinary people turned up in numbers to hear him read. And Barnes fully realized the Wordsworthian ambition to write poetry not in a specially “heightened” poetical language, but in the language really used by men. For generations the fact that he wrote in the Dorset dialect obscured the quality of his poetry. But he was also an extraordinary philologist and innovator in the study of our language’s etymology and its connections with the Indo-European family of languages.
For many years many readers assumed Barnes was a peasant poet and, in a way, they were right, for Barnes was born in 1801 at Rushay in the Blackmore Vale, North Dorset, the son of a farm labourer. But he was to become the Reverend William Barnes BD (Cantab), a magisterial scholar and poet. He began work as a solicitor’s clerk and went on to be a schoolmaster and run his own boarding school. A prodigious autodidact, he would master some 70 languages. Over several years he studied part time at St John’s College, Cambridge, took orders and became the Rector of Winterbourne Came in the county of Dorset. These were difficult and troubled times and the author does not shrink from discussing Barnes’ reactionary social and political views in the face of the terrible hardship brought about by the enclosures and the agricultural revolution. Tolpuddle is, of course, a village in Dorset.
Barnes was writing poetry from an early age and much of his verse appeared in newspapers before publication in volume form as Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect in 1844. He was convinced that rural dialect was the purest form of English, the least affected by Norman French and the classical influence during the Renaissance. Chedzoy writes: “Until about the middle of the 19th century, the majority of working people were employed in agriculture and spoke regional dialects. Yet among many educated people at that time, such speech was despised, at best an unsuccessful attempt at standard English and at worst little better than the grunting of the beasts in the field. Little wonder then that the language of poetry was never that of the great mass of the English labouring class. Until he took their dialect, which hitherto had possessed no literature, and shaped it into art.”
Chedzoy reveals beneath the surface of supposedly idyllic rural nostalgia, a story of the most impressive intellectual originality, vigour and tenacity. Denied by poverty and unremitting toil as a provincial schoolmaster and rector of the resources and support for scholarship and research, he nevertheless displayed a considerable linguistic knowledge and philological insight quite advanced at the time. Chedzoy produces evidence demonstrating that the great dialect poet of Dorset also had a knowledge of classical, Oriental and modern European languages sufficient to begin tracing out as early as 1828 the origins of the Indo-European family of languages.
Barnes seems to anticipate the work of the major continental philologists of the first half of the 19th century that traced the interconnections and linguistic relationship of Sanskrit, ancient languages and the modern Indo-European language family. Barnes published Se Gefylsta: An Anglo-Saxon Delectus in 1849; Philogical Grammar in 1854; Tiw, or a View of the Roots and Stems of the English as a Teutonic Tongue in 1862 and A Glossary of Dorset Dialect in 1863. This is an impressive record. Barnes seems to have doggedly and independently been unearthing the family connections of Sanskrit, classical and modern European languages along the same lines as Grimm, Schlegel, Rask, Schleicher and Bopp. Yet, although he might have read these German and Danish scholars in their original languages, he seems not to have been aware of them. But Barnes almost reached the stage of connecting up all the dots and anticipating the definitive work later in the century of Karl Brugmann’s Comparative Grammar of the Indo Germanic Languages in 1886.
Apparently Coventry Patmore was irritated when he visited Barnes at Winterbourne Came because all the poet wanted to talk about was his obsession with philology. Barnes was working on Tiw, or, A View of the Roots and Stems of the English as a Teutonic Tongue. This poet was not only a maker, he was a finder also. l
