ABSTRACT
Life and writings William Barnes was born in 1801 in the parish of Sturminster-Newton, Dorset. This part of the country was later to receive famous treatment as 'The Valley of the Great Dairies' in Hardy's novel Tess of the d'Urbervilles. He was educated in Dorchester, and there he married Julia Miles, the central motive of his poetry. He had been planning to be an artist, but meeting with discouragement took to school-teaching, first at Mere in Wiltshire, then in Dorchester. In 1844 he produced Poems of Rural Life, in the Dorset Dialect, and thereafter three more collections of dialect poetry, as well as poems in what he called 'National English'. His life was retired and uneventful; he cultivated a very varied range of interests, and was among the best informed of all English poets on matters of language. Palgrave, not unjustly, compared his learning to that of Virgil, Tasso, Spenser and Milton; his first collection of poems was prefaced by a 35-page dissertation on the Dorset dialect, expanded to 50 pages in the second edition. Yet he remained remote from the metropolitan literary scene, and almost the only literary figure he knew was Lady Caroline Norton. He was ordained in 1847. His wife died on 21 June 1852; he was given a Civil List pension of £70 p.a. in 1861 and presented with the living of Winterbourne Came in 1862. He died on 7 October 1886, still not a household name, but cherished and admired by Allingham, Patmore, Tennyson, Hopkins and Hardy.
