ABSTRACT
The middle decades of the nineteenth century saw a vast outpouring of dialect verse, songs, ballads and broadsides, produced to service the imagination and morale of the sons and daughters of the industrial revolution. Edwin Waugh was a shoe-maker’s son, who had received a fairly basic education until he was apprenticed to a printer at the age of twelve. Free access to a wider range of literature rendered him quite at ease in standard English. His poem ‘Eawr Folk’ delicately lampoons a family of polymaths, seemingly addicted to Emersonian ‘self-cultivation’, yet Waugh’s perspective is warmly communitarian. Despite the seeming turbulence of his existence, Waugh’s literary output was immense and for a time enjoyed huge success. Waugh exercised a profound influence on regional dialect literature and was lauded for having ‘immortalized a dialect and made it classical’.
