ABSTRACT
Christopher Murray Boustead was a ‘road man’, a road-maker and mender from Keswick in the Lake District, who in 1892 published a volume of Rustic Verse and Dialect Rhymes with a local printer, priced at a shilling. In a familiar type of Preface the roadman says he has published his ‘verse and rhymes’ at the ‘request of many friends’, and apologises for the ‘many defects’ of his ‘untutored efforts’. In fact Boustead moves easily enough between ‘standard’ and dialect English, formal and popular verse styles. His poems are celebrations of community, work and leisure, individuals and family. They have a strong sense of place and a degree of local pride, informed with a knowledge of the history and meaning of the roads he builds and repairs for a living. For example, the first poem included here, ‘Oft Jack an’ Me’, which describes a long-planned and satisfying fell-walk, shows a remarkably detailed knowledge of the landscape, its features and history. Clearly Boustead has read Burns and Wordsworth, and also makes good use of the Cumbrian traditions of Susannah Blamire, and Robert Anderson (q.v., eighteenth-century series, Vol. III). Keith Gregson notes in his selection of Cumbrian Songs and Ballads (Clapham: Dalesman, 1982) that Cumberland and the border counties made a rich contribution to the British song and ballad traditions in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, being ‘bounded’, as he says, ‘by the works of Robert Burns to the north and those of Geordie Ridley, Joe Wilson [q.v.] and Ned Corvan to the east’ (p. 4). Boustead offers a modest contribution to an important regional tradition of popular rhyme and song. He published a second volume, A Few Rustic Lines, in 1902.
