Dialect poetry, William Barnes and the literary canon

Abstract

Dialectologgy was one of the triumphs of Victorian scholarship. Yet anthologists .argely ignore Victorian dialect poetry. Its marginality is attributed to the teaching of standard English in schools, metropolitan and middle-class condescension towars regional and working-class speech, and the impossibility of representing phonological variance in a print culture without resorting to bizarre spellings or phonetic symobls. Apropos William Barnes's Poems of Rural Life, in the Dorset Dialect (1844), this paper argues that new media technologies will extend the present aural range of Victorian poetry by enabling dialect poems to be heard effortlessly instead of read laboriously.