William Barnes, Dialect Poems in the Dorset County Chronicle

It is commonly believed that William Barnes (1801–1886) steered clear of politics in his poetry. Yet the first poem he ever published in the Dorset dialect was an attack on the enclosures of the village commons in the 1830s. His next eight poems dealt with such topics as rural poverty, penury-induced emigration, the Poor Laws and Corn Laws, and the People’s Charter of 1838. This edition of his dialect poems – arranged in the chronological order of their first publication in the Dorset County Chronicle – exposes the fallacy of the old assumptions about Barnes’s lack of interest in political affairs. It shows the gradual development of Barnes’s artistry as a poet and of the linguistic means through which he set out to represent in writing the key features of the dialect of his native Blackmore Vale.