{"id":184,"date":"2008-11-24T10:15:12","date_gmt":"2008-11-24T14:15:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/houghtonmodern\/?p=184"},"modified":"2014-11-21T10:05:40","modified_gmt":"2014-11-21T15:05:40","slug":"william-barnes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/houghtonmodern\/2008\/11\/24\/william-barnes\/","title":{"rendered":"William Barnes"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>The Library’s traditionally strong holdings of texts in English dialects, particularly dialect poetry, have been further enhanced with the acquisition of the James Stevens-Cox Collection of William Barnes of Dorset. Barnes (1801-1886) was one of those remarkable self-educated Victorian polymaths: schoolmaster, clergyman, philologist, artist, and (most importantly) poet.<\/p>\n

Born into a farming family of seven children, Barnes was educated at the village school. His excellent handwriting won him his first job as an engrossing clerk at a solicitor’s office at the age of 13, which marked the end of his formal education. However, determined to further educate and better himself, he pursued music, engraving, classical and modern languages, science, archaeology, and a host of other subjects on his own. He was further spurred to better himself when he fell in love with Julia Miles, the daughter of a supervisor of the excise. Barnes began teaching in 1823, and he and Julia were married in 1827. Julia’s organizing ability, combined with Barnes’s scholarly and teaching accomplishments, made their school flourish; and Barnes published on a wide range of topics, from mathematics to philology to local history to, most importantly, poetry.<\/p>\n

Barnes secured his reputation as a poet with the publication of Poems in the Dorset dialect <\/em>(1844). His admirers included Matthew Arnold, Robert Browning, Edmund Gosse, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Alfred Tennyson, his Dorset neighbor Thomas Hardy (who edited his Selected Poems<\/em>) and, in succeeding generations, W.H. Auden, Siegfried Sassoon, and Christopher Ricks. While Barnes did publish poetry in “standard” English, it is his dialect poems that are most admired. As Hardy put it: “\u2026his ingenious internal rhymes, his subtle juxtaposition of kindred lippings and vowel-sounds, show fastidiousness in word-selection that is surprising in verse which professes to represent the habitual modes of language among the western peasantry” (Preface, Selected Poems)<\/em>. Much of his best poetry was inspired by his wife. The poignant “The Wife a-Lost,” written after her death, gives a flavor of his verse, beginning:<\/p>\n

Since I noo mwore do zee your feace,\"\"<\/a>
\nUp steairs or down below,
\nI’ll zit me in the lwonesome pleace,
\nWhere flat-bough’d beech do grow;
\nBelow the beeches’ bough, my love,
\nWhere you did never come,
\nAn’ I don’t look to meet ye now,
\nAs I do look at hwome.<\/p>\n

The Stevens-Cox collection is a near-complete assemblage of Barnes’s scholarly and poetical works, in multiple editions, issues, and binding variants. In addition to Barnes’s published works, it includes some unpublished poems in manuscript, documents, important family letters, proofs of his wood engravings, and photographs, and well as posthumous publications of his poetry. The collection provides the raw materials for a much-needed bibliography of the work of a major, somewhat neglected, nineteenth-century poet.<\/p>\n

Manuscripts and images, MS Eng 1647<\/a>.\u00a0 Images may not be reproduced without permission.<\/p>\n

Researchers should contact the curator to obtain access. A list of items in the collection may be found here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Library’s traditionally strong holdings of texts in English dialects, particularly dialect poetry, have been further enhanced with the acquisition of the James Stevens-Cox Collection of William Barnes of Dorset. Barnes (1801-1886) was one of those remarkable self-educated Victorian polymaths: schoolmaster, clergyman, philologist, artist, and (most importantly) poet. Born into a farming family of seven […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1761,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[64929],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-184","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-houghton-library"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5TUly-2Y","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/houghtonmodern\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/houghtonmodern\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/houghtonmodern\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/houghtonmodern\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1761"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/houghtonmodern\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=184"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/houghtonmodern\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5294,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/houghtonmodern\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184\/revisions\/5294"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/houghtonmodern\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=184"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/houghtonmodern\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=184"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/houghtonmodern\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=184"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}