Dialect, Victorian Poetry, and the Voices of Print

Abstract:This essay addresses the status of voice and print in dialect poetry through a study of its mid-nineteenth-century heyday in British literature. Dialect poems are often imagined to render oral forms into print, so that their writtenness appears secondary and belated. This essay argues differently, proposing that the Victorian poets it considers—William Barnes, Janet Hamilton, and Ralph Ditchfield—instead develop original forms of expression from the interaction of speech and text. Rather than needing to be liberated from print by voice, Victorian dialect poems play on the difficulty of their being spoken, thriving on the difference between types of language and varieties of audience.