"Eawr Folk": Language, Class, and English Identity in Victorian Dialect Poetry

Abstract

The introduction to the collected writings of Samuel Laycock, one of the most popular Victorian working-class dialect poets, comments that Laycock wrote "for the elevation, the enjoyment, and the consolation of . . . the 'toilers and moilers' of Lancashire's towns and villages." 1 Such poetry--the literary fruits of an expressive impulse arising from the conditions of working-class life, aimed at the betterment of that life and formed in the very idiom of that life--would seem to offer much promise to the contemporary reader and scholar. One might hope to find here a poetic engagement with the material conditions of the Victorian working class and perhaps a significant counter-voice to the dominant middle-class discourse of Victorian England. Yet scholars who write on Victorian dialect poetry often seem disappointed, their commentaries ranging in tone from apologetic to overtly critical. Brian Maidment, for instance, characterizes Victorian "homely rhyming" as predominantly "conciliatory and conservative," 2 while Susan Zlotnick argues that "after the failure of Chartism, the working class and its writers turned inward by turning indoors, embracing the ideology of domesticity, and participating in an apotheosis of the home and family similar to that of the Victorian middle classes." 3 Generally, the alleged failings of dialect poetry are ascribed at least in part to the influence of middle-class patronage, 4 but whatever the cause, two conclusions are prevalent: first, dialect poetry tends to re-inscribe rather than resist middle-class ideology, and second, this poetry is ultimately stylistically conservative--written in a conventionalized poetic idiom with a tenuous relationship to the actual speech of its writers.