ABSTRACT
Vigorous efforts to spread Standard English in the eighteenth century and after were countered by exhortations to retain dialect speech (Wakelin, 1977) and by superb literary accomplishments in dialect. Written political debates were often couched in dialect in broadsheets and newspapers, with ‘outside’ views, as often radical as not, stigmatized by expressing them in Standard English (Langton, 1984). Publication in dialect increased rapidly through the nineteenth century, especially after 1850 (28.6). This did not occur in all the industrializing areas of England, as the Midlands show. There were, too, great variations of language and practice even across the north. The translations of the Song of Solomon shown on Map 28.6 recognized different dialects within Lancashire and Yorkshire, and Edwin Waugh, the foremost ‘Lancashire’ dialect poet, was more at home in textile districts outside Lancashire and in towns to which textile workers had migrated in the cotton famine of the 1860s than he was in southwest Lancashire (28.7). Dialect poems and dialogues were meant to be read aloud, to give vivid expression to the extremes of coarse jollity, painful sadness and intense personal affection to which dialect pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar are particularly suited. The self-conscious use of broad dialect was not simply a means of workingclass identification. It expressed intense localism and a preoccupation with personal feelings and intimate relationships, a set of values far removed from the dutiful nationalist conformity, the ‘stiff upper lip’ and objective empiricism of metropolitan English culture.
