ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on Josiah Relph than previous accounts by performing an examination of the textual history of his slim body of dialect verse in the first century after its initial appearance. It examines the route by which the concept of dialect literature came into existence, via the textual history of Relph's work. In rendering the Cumberland dialect, Relph makes use of a range of orthographical forms similar to those found in Scots vernacular verse and songs of the period. More so than that of any other author, the textual history of Relph's works reveals that the genre of dialect poetry was a retroactive category, applied by mid-nineteenth-century editors and commentators to earlier authors who, to varying degrees, had made use of regional language. Relph has been identified as an important precursor of Burns and Wordsworth on the one hand, and the nineteenth-century Cumberland dialect writing tradition on the other.
