The People's Poet E-Book

Alan Chedzoy

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

Born the child of an agricultural labourer in Dorset's Blackmore Vale, by self-education William Barnes (1801-1886) rose to be a lawyer's clerk, a schoolmaster, a much-loved clergyman, and a scholar who could read over seventy languages. He also became the finest example of an English poet writing in a rural dialect. In this book, Alan Chedzoy shows how, uniquely, he presented the lives of pre-industrial rural people in their own language. He also recounts how Barnes's linguistic studies enabled him to defend the controversial notion that the dialect of the labouring people of Wessex was the purest form of English. Serving both as an anthology and an account of how the poems came to be written, this biography is essential reading for anyone who wants to discover more about the man who, in an obituary, Thomas Hardy described as 'probably the most interesting link between present and past life that England possessed'.

Leseprobe

The People’s Poet

WILLIAM BARNESOF DORSET

It would be a great blessing if some genius would arise who had a talent of writing for the poor. He would be of more value than many poets living upon the banks of lakes…

Sydney Smith

It is [Barnes’s] naturalness that strikes me most; he is like an embodiment… of the country, of Dorset, of rustic life and humanity.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

To read [Barnes] is to enter a friendly cottage where a family party is in full swing. One misses many of the allusions, one is not connected to the party by blood, yet one has no sense of intrusion. The party, like all unsophisticated gatherings, welcomes the entire human race.

E.M. Forster

The People’s Poet

WILLIAM BARNESOF DORSET

ALAN CHEDZOY

For Peter Day, in gratitude.

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

Biography:

William Barnes: A Life of the Dorset Poet

A Scandalous Woman: The Story of Caroline Norton

Sheridan’s Nightingale: The Story of Elizabeth Linley

Seaside Sovereign: George III at Weymouth

Early Years by Robert Young (Ed.)

Poetry:

William Barnes: Poems Grave and Gay (Ed.)

Language:

A Bit of a Bumble: An Affectionate Look at the Dorset Dialect

First published 2010

The History Press

The Mill, Brimscombe Port

Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

This ebook edition first published in 2013

All rights reserved

© Alan Chedzoy, 2010, 2013

The right of Alan Chedzoy to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

EPUB ISBN 978 0 7524 7240 9

Original typesetting by The History Press

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

A Note on the Text

Fore-say

1.

Going Home: The Wareham Road, 1880s

2.

The Little Astrologer of Blackmore Vale, 1801-1818

3.

Love and Literature: Dorchester, 1818-1822

4.

Teaching Himself: Mere, 1823-1828

5.

The Universal Genius of Chantry House, 1827-1835

6.

Something to Say, 1827-1835

7.

Tilling the Ground, 1830-1835

8.

Foothold: Durngate Street, 1835-1837

9.

Almost a Gentleman, 1830-1840

10.

Establishments: Norman’s House, 1838-1847

11.

Voices From Home, 1838-1846

12.

Wilderness, 1847-1850

13.

Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, 1846-1852

14.

Two Summers, 1851-1852

15.

Bereft, 1852-1853

16.

The Language of Mankind, 1852-1854

17.

Radical Shift, 1853-1859

18.

Performance, 1853-1859

19.

Deliverance, 1859-1862

20.

In Paradiso, 1862-1870

21.

Siren Voices, 1864-1870

22.

Pilgrims, 1862-1867

23.

Pure English, 1862-1880

24.

Hermit and Enchanter, 1874-1885

25.

Falling To, 1884-1886

Afterwards

Coda

Notes

Select Bibliography

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Literary research is a cooperative endeavour, and this book owes a great deal to the labours of others. It is over twenty years since the publication of my William Barnes: A Life of the Dorset Poet, and since that time there have appeared several important contributions to the study of the man and his achievements. Richard Bradbury’s six-volume edition of the collected prose, in which he describes Barnes as ‘this scandalously neglected voice of Dorset’, has proved most helpful, as has Douglas Ashdown’s recently published research into the Barnes family. Other new studies have considered Barnes’s methods of poetic composition, his literary friendships, his sermons, his contribution to working-class education and even his favourite flowers.

As for the poems, in 1987 Christopher Ricks significantly re-evaluated them by including no fewer than twenty-three in his New Oxford Book of Victorian Verse, and since that time Andrew Motion has brought out two new anthologies of his poems within the space of a few years. The work goes on. Even as I write these acknowledgements, the post has delivered a new edition of Barnes’s dialect version of a biblical text and, from Australia, the first draft of a comprehensive pronunciation guide to his poems. Such fresh interest calls for a new account of this extraordinarily original Victorian, whose art and teachings still offer significant challenges to the way we live now. This book, therefore, is not a reprint of my previous biography but an entirely new appraisal of the man and his work.

I would thank the following: the Trustees of the Dorset County Museum and the officers of the Sturminster Newton Museum Society, for permission to publish a number of illustrations.

Douglas Ashdown for advice on the Barnes family; Dr Frances Austin-Jones; Dr Katherine Barker for material on William Charles Macready at Sherborne; Richard Bradbury for his edition of collected prose; Dr Tom Burton of the University of Adelaide; Professor David Crystal for his advice on Barnes’s philology; Warren Davis for permission to inspect the Old Rectory at Winterborne Came; the staff at the Dorset County Library; Professor Jean-Marc Gachelin of Rouen; Professor Robert Giddings for advice on Orwell and Wordsworth; Jonathan Harrison, Special Collections Librarian of St John’s College, Cambridge; Andy Hutchings for his expert knowledge of the nineteenth-century railroads of Dorset; Helen Gibson for information on the Thomas Hardy collection at the DCM; Basil Greenslade and Dr Michael Irwin of the Thomas Hardy Society; Hugh Jacques, sometime County Archivist, Robin Ansell and their colleagues at the Dorset History Centre; Judy Lindsay, sometime Director of the DCM; Dr Jon Murden, the current Director of the DCM, and Dr Jenny Cripps, Curator; the staff of the London Library; Peter Loosmore and Steve Case of the Sturminster Newton Museum Society for advice on Robert Young; Professor Michael Millgate of Toronto for his knowledge of the movements of the young Thomas Hardy; Canon Hugh Mumford who has daringly embarked on a study of Barnes’s sermons; Stephen Poulter for advice on Sir Frederick Treves; Dr C.S. Rodd for his unpublished edition of Barnes’s Song of Songs; Furse Swann for information on the history of Cambridge University; Weymouth Library; the late Richard Wilding for his pamphlet on the Revd Osmond Fisher.

I have derived much pleasure, over many years, from conversations prompted by my readings of Barnes’s poems in towns and villages throughout Dorset. Further stimulation has come from folk musicians, such as Bonny Sartin and the Yetties, and Tim Laycock of the New Scorpion Band, with their splendidly imaginative settings of the poems. Most especially, I remember with gratitude the late Fred Langford, sometime Editor of the Dorset Yearbook. Together with Douglas Ashdown and myself, Fred was a founder member of the William Barnes Society. Another great admirer of Barnes was our first President, the late Trevor Hearl, the most assiduous of all Barnes’s biographers, whose splendid book on his career as a schoolmaster has proved invaluable to me. Whenever I telephoned Trevor to raise an obscure point about Barnes, he always seemed to know the answer. I have also profited greatly from discussions with members of the Society and thank: Alfred Barratt, Jill Bryant, Richard Burleigh, Brian Caddy and the late Tom Fox and his family of Oak Farm, Sturminster Newton, who taught me much about Barnes’s early days.

In preparing the text for publication, I have been especially grateful to the following: Furse Swann for his meticulous proof-reading; Judith Stinton of the DCM for her knowledge of the Hardy and Barnes picture collections; George Wickham; and my son, Robert, for technical advice.

What mistakes that appear here are entirely my own.

A.C.Weymouth, 2010

A NOTE ON THE TEXT

In early editions, some of William Barnes’s dialect poems were published with an apparatus of textual markers (‘diacritics’) intended to indicate how certain words should be pronounced. Though a fervent admirer of Barnes, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch advocated omitting such ‘hieroglyphs’, observing that, ‘One should get rid of archaisms and superfluous difficulties, not add to them’. In his collected edition of the poems, Bernard Jones has left them out, and it his versions I chiefly quote here.

In the notes, therefore, to allow the reader easy access, I have referred to Jones as the source, but, so far as I have been able to trace them, I have also recorded the previously unpublished dates of the original printed versions, as they appeared in the Dorset County Chronicle. Often, however, there are differences between these earliest versions of the poems and the later ones as printed by Jones, because Barnes frequently revised his poems to move them more closely to standard English.

Furthermore, the date of the Chronicle publication does not necessarily indicate when the poem was written, because, as is explained here, after 1844 there was a gap of some twelve years in which Barnes published no dialect poems at all, though he must have been writing and storing them.

From his earliest days as a philologist, Barnes advocated the expulsion from the English language of foreign words, particularly those of Greek, Latin and French origin. Indeed, he took his Saxonising so far that the prose he wrote in later life was itself obscurely larded with Saxon expressions. For all that, he remained an early advocate of plain English. Consequently, in deference to his opinions, in writing this book I have tried to explain his often quite complex ideas in the simplest way possible. Nevertheless, he has often made me feel linguistically guilty, as at the present moment when, in looking this piece through, I find I have written the word ‘deference’. Perhaps I should have said that I ‘heeded’ his views.

A.C.

FORE-SAY

In the darkest time of the year, just four days after Christmas in 1869, an elderly woman sat down in a cheerless London basement to write a letter. She was a servant, one of over 1 million at that time, mostly women who had long ago left their homes in the country to work in great cities, drudging out their days in the service of others. Fatigued by the extra demands of the season, she now stole a few minutes of her employer’s time to address a man who had given her a little solace amidst the bleakness of her life:

Reverend Sir,

I wish you most heartily a happy New Year, and hope you will excuse a poor Woman writing to you. I had to dust some Books the other day that came from a sale, and amongst them was your poems in the Dorset dialect. Sir, I shook hands with you in my heart, And I laughed and cried by turns. The old Home of my Youth and all my dear ones now mouldering in the earth came back to mind. How happy we used to be at Christmas time.

And sometimes I sit down in the gloom of an underground London Kitchen and try to fancy I am on Beaminster Down, where I have spent many a happy hour years ago. But I try to think we must be content wherever the Lord has cast our lot, and not to hanker for the past. May God bless you and all yours, Is the true wish of an old Domestic Servant, who loves the very name of Dorsetshire.1

Eventually finding its way to an obscure hamlet outside Dorchester, her letter was dropped into a green postbox hanging within the verandah of a thatched cottage. It was the home of William Barnes.

Such expressions of love and reverence for him were not uncommon among working people. Few poets at any time could fill a hall as he did, with his neighbours, mostly work folk, coming to hear him read his verses. This was partly because in these poems they discerned an intimate knowledge of their own obscure lives. So it was with this old servant who, in turning his pages, would have glimpsed scenes of her own country Christmases past; of farm girls huddling and giggling their way across frozen bartons; of great backbrand branches dragged in to feed the fire; of neighbours round the hearth; of a grandmother shyly showing off her wedding shoes; of fiddle music and dancing; of games, jokes, forfeits and tale-telling; of old songs, and good healths pledged in ale and cider. And here too, she found an invitation to come home again:

The Vrost

Come, run up hwome wi’ us to-night,

Athirt the vield a -vroze so white,

Where vrosty sheades do lie below

The winter ricks a-tipped wi’ snow,

An’ lively birds, wi’ waggen tails,

Do hop upon the icy rails,

An’ rime do whiten all the tops

O’ bush an’ tree in hedge an’ copse,

In winds a-cutten keen.

Come, maidens, come: the groun’s a-vroze

Too hard to-night to spweil your clothes.

You got noo pools to waddle drough,

Nor clay a-pullen off your shoe:

An’ we can trig ye at the zide,

To keep ye up if you do slide:

Zoo while there’s neither wet nor mud,

‘S the time to run an’ warm your blood,

In winds a-cutten keen...2

(‘trig’ – support you)

Especially comforting to many such as her was the language of the poems. This was because they were not written in the literary idiom that so delighted genteel readers, which common people found hard to understand, but in the homely talk of her own folk.

This led many urban readers, coming across his poems by chance, to suspect that they were probably the work of some ‘peasant poet’; a ploughman, shepherd or carter perhaps. They were partly right. For Barnes was the child of a ‘labourer in husbandry’, and was rumoured to have started his working life collecting cow pats in a field.3 But what might have surprised the curious was that the author of the Poems of Rural Life was no humble farmhand, but the Reverend William Barnes BD (Cantab), the Rector of Winterborne Came, and author of some forty books and pamphlets. Conscious of his elevated social status, the old servant’s letter was, therefore, suitably deferential. Yet she had recognised certain signals in his use of dialect which gave her sufficient confidence to write to him. Despite his elevated social position, his dog collar and his book learning, she understood that they shared a culture which admitted of no class distinctions. She also sensed, correctly, that he was a man of great humanity and kindness of heart.

For three centuries after Shakespeare, the lives of the rural poor altered very little. Then came the ‘Great Change’4, brought about by agricultural collapse, proliferating enclosures, mechanisation and the coming of the railways. In the depression that followed the Napoleonic Wars, many small tenant farmers were evicted from their land and obliged to find work elsewhere. Within a few decades, the age-old culture of rural England, with its yearly round and folk traditions, was largely destroyed, and many members of the ‘bold peasantry, their country’s pride’ were reduced to day labouring. Fortunately, William Barnes was at hand to record something of what had been lost. As Thomas Hardy wrote in 1886, he was ‘probably the most interesting link between present and past forms of rural life that England possessed’, becoming ‘a complete repertory of forgotten manners, words, and sentiments’ of the English rural community.5

Astonishingly, Barnes had made himself into a formidably philogical scholar, having taught himself to read over seventy languages. And it was this work that provided him with unexpected insights into the family speech that he had heard as a boy in the Blackmore Vale in north Dorset. From these studies, he now deduced that this same dialect had ancient origins and was probably the purest form of English. To say the least, this was an unorthodox conclusion. Until about the middle of the nineteenth century, the majority of working people were employed in agriculture and, like his parents, spoke regional dialects. Yet among many educated people at that time, such speech was despised. It was reckoned to be at best an unsuccessful attempt at standard English and at worst little better than the grunting of the beasts in the field. As for poetry, had not Matthew Arnold declared loftily that this was a matter of noble natures and a grand style? Little wonder then that the language of poetry was never that of the great mass of the English labouring class. Consequently, these people simply had no voice. Until William Barnes. Until he took their dialect, which hitherto had possessed no literature, and shaped it into art.

His story is an inspiring one. It tells of a luminous childhood, humble circumstances, early promise, courageous endeavour, profound learning, deep love, tragic loss, the threat of catastrophe, last minute rescue and contented neglect. Here are loyalty and aspiration, contempt and admiration, disappointment and achievement. And beneath it all flows the personality of a sweet-natured, modest genius.

Greeted with a patronising amusement by the middle-class readers of the provincial newspaper in which his poems first appeared, it took many years for their true worth to be understood, and many more until he was recognised to be ‘an English classic’.6 It is among other poets and writers that he has been most prized. Gerard Manley Hopkins understood him, Tennyson imitated him, Coventry Patmore praised him, William Allingham encouraged him, Francis Kilvert revered him and Thomas Hardy deferred to him. His more recent admirers have included Llewelyn Powys, E.M. Forster and Philip Larkin.

Separated from Victorian writers, as we now are by more than a century, it is at last becoming easier to determine which of them were truly great. Barnes was. Rising from provincial obscurity, he now emerges as a major figure, the only significant English poet to draw on the culture and language of thousands of the rural poor, a class of people otherwise neglected by the literary world. Because of this, his poems constitute an important contribution to the history of the English people. But this is not to say that their interest is merely antiquarian. Suffused by his own passionately held convictions, they continue to challenge our own contemporary assumptions. For us too, they pose the ultimate question of how to live.

Almost fifty poems are quoted here, whole or in part, so that readers new to Barnes may come to appreciate something of his appeal. He was a unique artist and a complete original. His achievement owed nothing to anybody else, though Thomas Hardy learned a great deal from him. When turning these pages, we may hear across the years faint voices from another, earlier land, which resonate beyond Dorset and even beyond England. Their talk goes out to those from all societies who sense their rural past, half recalling experiences buried deep in the folk memory. And here in these old poems they will glimpse once again scenes of haymakings, club walkings and apple-gatherings; of mowing, nutting, and evenings in the village. And here once more, those times come alive.

1

GOING HOME: THE WAREHAM ROAD

1880s

One gloomy January afternoon, some sixteen years after the old servant had written her letter, two figures might have been observed trudging southwards out of Dorchester. They had come from the market, by way of High East Street and Fordington Green, where the tower of St George’s stood out against the rain-swept sky. Here they took the Wareham Road and soon the Victorian villas fell behind them. Now they felt the full force of the weather. What few words they attempted to exchange were blown from their lips so they battled on silently, their heads bowed to the blast.1

The smaller of the two men was neatly bearded and fashionably dressed with a soberly cut coat and a hat, though this could not prevent the water trickling down his face. He was middle-aged, a one-time architectural assistant and now a successful novelist, come back to live in his home county after years of absence. About a mile out of the town, on the site of Mack’s toll gate, stood his new house which was near completion. This was his destination. He was Thomas Hardy.2

The other man was much older, with a long white beard that emphasised his curiously outlandish appearance. For many years, William Barnes had paid a weekly visit to Dorchester market and he was now returning from one of these, with nothing better for protection than an antique hat and a piece of sacking over his shoulders. At a later time, Hardy wrote an affectionate memoir of his companion making just such a visit:

Until within the last year or two there were few figures more familiar to the eye in the county town of Dorset on a market day than an aged clergyman, quaintly attired in caped cloak, knee-breeches, and buckled shoes, with a leather satchel slung over his shoulders, and a stout staff in his hand. He seemed unusually to prefer the middle of the street to the pavement, and to be thinking of matters which had nothing to do with the scene before him. He plodded along with a broad, firm tread, notwithstanding the slight stoop occasioned by his years. Every Saturday morning he might have been seen thus trudging up the narrow South Street, his shoes coated with mud or dust according to the state of the roads between his rural home and Dorchester, and a little grey dog at his heels, till he reached the four cross ways in the centre of the town. Halting here, opposite the public clock, he would pull his old-fashioned watch from its deep fob, and set it with great precision to London time. This, the invariable first act of his market visit, having been completed to his satisfaction, he turned round and methodically proceeded about his other business.3

Suddenly the weather got worse. Gusts of wind now blew more fiercely and the rain became incessant. There was no shelter. The road they had taken ran along the top of a ridge and there were few trees, only low hedges and a few bare thorns. Below, the fields dipped away. When the sleet and mist briefly cleared it was possible to glimpse a line of trees ahead, but these were too far off to be of immediate help. Fortunately, they were nearing the brick villa which was to be Hardy’s new home. Work on it was not finished at this time, so the former field in which it stood was now a sea of mud, littered with tools, trenches, piles of bricks, upturned wheelbarrows and perhaps a workman’s hut.

Such rawness contrasted with the antiquity of the landscape around them, for the whole area was scattered with barrows and earthworks. Barnes was familiar with them all, for he had spent a lifetime learning the languages of the ancient peoples and excavating their burial sites. Farther back from the road lay the Romano-British cemetery on Fordington Hill, and 300yds to the east of Hardy’s home stood the ‘commanding tumulus called Conquer Barrow’.4 By contrast, Max Gate was almost the last word in modernity, though still lacking bath facilities which the old Romans took for granted. Designed by Hardy himself, the builders were nominally his own father and brother, though the latter did most of the work. Here Hardy was later to plant thousands of Austrian pines for privacy and protection from the weather. Here too, beneath layers of mud and chalk, were found three Roman skeletons, folded for 1,500 years like little chickens into their egg-shaped graves.5

On coming to his gate, Hardy begged the old man to take shelter at his house but he only shook his head and went on alone. He had still half a mile to go to reach his home, the Rectory at Winterborne Came. There was a shorter route to it through the fields but because these were so wet, he kept to the road. There was no let up. Rain fell all over his little world; over Roman Dorchester and the village of Fordington; over the great hill fort of Maiden Castle, and over his son’s rectory at Winterborne Monkton. His own parish church, and the little hamlet of Came, lay under a pall of cloud while water scudded in streams from the pilastered splendour of Came House, the home of his patron, Captain Dawson-Damer. Water deluged his little church at Whitcombe and laced across the ruined arch of his other ‘church’, standing in a field at Winterborne Farringdon. Farther off still, rain clouds loured over Came Wood and soused the tumuli on Bincombe Hill. Out in the Channel, drenched fishermen drew in their nets and turned their tossing boats towards Weymouth Harbour.

Completely drenched, the old man at last turned off the road into his own gate, which was always left unlatched. His little lawn had already been reduced to a swamp. As he crunched his way up the pebble path, conifers and pampas grass bowed their tops towards him under the force of the wind. Large drops fell from the manes of two stone lions, crouching 6ft apart on their plinths on either side of the path, their glistening heads turned to each other as if in eternal leonine conversation.

Beneath the cover of the verandah, he proceeded to stamp his boots and shake the water off. Anxious eyes were looking out for him. At his approach, the door was flung open and he was greeted by scolding, fussing women. Here was his spinster daughter, Laura Liebe, come to shush him in and help him off with his wet cape and shoes. Mary Cozzens, their cook, rushed off to fetch him hot tea, and pretty Rosanna Shepherd, the housemaid, settled him into his armchair in the dark little sitting room and pumped the bellows to get the fire roaring to warm his old legs.

It did no good. For many years he had tramped the roads of his parish in snow and rain, never minding the weather at all. His magnificent constitution had always pulled him through. But this time it was different. He soon found himself shivering and feverish. He was put to bed. The lamp was turned down.

His bedroom also served as his study. In summertime, he might look up from his desk to glance over his fruit garden, or inspect his apple and apricot trees, or watch the breezes waving the feathery heads of his asparagus. But this late winter afternoon, the room was dark. Behind his bedhead the wall was hung from ceiling to floor with a faded tapestry, while round the others ranged his books, his life’s epitome. For this little room was his treasure-house; here were stored his grammars and glossaries, his dictionaries and lexicons. The mere sight of them set off half-forgotten phrases in his head, a silent chorus in the tongues of half mankind. Though his eyesight was weak and the room dark, even now from this bed he could still make out the spines of these old familiar friends. Though he could not read their titles by sight, he could still do so in memory. For many years past, even in his darkest days, these faded volumes had brought him company and comfort.

Warm and peaceful at last, he could hear the wind and rain beating on his window. Faint sounds came up from below; kitchen clatter, female voices, footsteps, doors opening and closing. Lying there, his thoughts ranged back over eighty years: to his children and grandchildren, some in Dorset and others far away in Florence; to his parishioners, working the fields of the Came estate; to a favourite pupil, whose face would float before him, though he might struggle to put a name to it. That boy was one of many now grown up and scattered all over the world. Then his thoughts drifted to St John’s College, where Queen Victoria had once crossed the quadrangle in front of him. And long before that, to his impecunious clerking days in Dorchester with his friends, James Carey and Edward Fuller, and their studying together, their rowing parties, their jolly suppers and little concerts. Dorchester. The very name still had romance for him. It was there he had first glimpsed a youthful form stepping down from a coach at the King’s Arms. That moment was followed by their long, long courtship and then their blissful years at Linden Lea. He remembered it still.

Most vivid of all were the recollections of his days as a boy, larking his summers away with Charlie Rabbets along the banks of the Stour. He could still glimpse them, even as he lay there dozing and dreaming.

Then he went to sleep.

2

THE LITTLE ASTROLOGER OF BLACKMORE VALE

1801-1818

An exceptionally clever child born into the home of working people is at first an object of amusement and pride, but later one of embarrassment and increasing concern. For, as time goes by, a question presents itself ever more forcibly to his anxious parents: ‘Yes, but how will he earn a living?’

This was the situation when the young William Barnes was living at home in a farm worker’s cottage and scribbling little verses to amuse his brothers and sister. His hobby provoked a deal of good-humoured derision from the neighbours:

To meake up rhymes, my mind wer zoo a-fire

’Twer idle work to try to keep me quiet,

O’ meaken rhymes my heart did never tire;

Though I should never be a gainer by it.

‘You meake up rhyme!’ vo’k said, ‘why who would buy it?

Could you write fine enough to please a squire?

An’ rhyme’s what plain vo’k woudden much require;

You’d vind your rhymes would earn but scanty diet,

An’ if I’d any cure vor it, I’m sure I’d try it’.1

His parents were quick to reinforce the message. What was the use of their son daydreaming about becoming a writer? Poetry, to their minds, was an esoteric affair, somehow connected with Latin and learning and other mysteries far beyond the reach of a mere farm boy. Besides, there was no future in it. Though living far from the literary world, even John and Grace Barnes had heard about famous poets almost starving to death in a place named Grub Street:

An’ father too, in learnen noo great crammer,

Zaid rhymen were a treade but few got fat in:

That men wi’ neames a-ringen wi’ a clamour

Did live in holes not fit to put a cat in,

An’ sleep on locks o’ straw, or bits o’ matten;

An’ mother zaid she’d sooner hear me stammer

Than gauk about a-gabblen rhymes an’ Latin.

I’d better crack my noddle wi’ her patten,

She used to zay, or crack en’ wi’ a hammer,

Than vill en up wi’ rhymes, an silly stuff o’ grammar.

(‘gauk about’ – look round gaping; ‘patten’ – overshoe with wooden sole)

In later life, William Barnes would repeat the sad history of a Blackmore farming family, in which the children were encouraged to aspire to things beyond their station. One day an old-fashioned farmer observed his nieces walking by to their piano lessons. Shocked by the sight, he involuntarily shouted out, ‘Moosic and it be milken toime! Zummat will come o’ that!’ Sure enough, it did. Their father was later obliged to sell up his farm.2 A popular jingle summarised the inevitable result of such presumptuous behaviour:

Man with his tally-ho

Wife’s squalling pian-o

Girl with her satin-oh!

Boy with his Latin-oh

Is splash, dash and must end in ruin-oh.3

Not that the barely literate John Barnes, William’s father, could ever have afforded a piano and satin dresses for his wife and daughter, but the mere notion of his son going in for book learning was evidently enough to alarm him.

In the last decade of the eighteenth century, the Barneses lived up a long, straight drove road, set among common land and small fields in the hamlet of Bagber. It was situated in a loop of waters where the tiny River Lydden meets the Stour. Their home was about a mile and a half west of Sturminster Newton, the ‘capital’ of the Blackmore Vale in Dorset. Here, John Barnes rented Rushay, a property so small that his son described it as a mere ‘farmling’. Perhaps because it offered more room to a growing family, in later years they moved nearby to Golden Gate, which may originally have been an inn. ‘Barnes’s Oak’ still grows in the hedgerow nearby. Sometime after 1816, they moved yet again to a property still known as Barnes’s Orchard. There is little sign of them left in these sites. In the late nineteenth century, the aged Sturminster poet Robert Young took a visitor across the fields to look for the cottage where ‘the honest old labourer’ John Barnes lived, ‘but alas, the only remains were a few old bricks, there were scarce a vestige of the garden to be seen, a withered tree covered with moss and lichen, from which my companion plucked a morsel’.4

John Barnes continued to work that patch of ground for years, long after William and two other sons had left the Vale. He was a quiet man, one of thousands of rural drudges worn down by repeated setbacks and never-ending labour. His portrait, painted by the Blackmore artist John Thorne in 1838, suggests diffidence and apprehension, as if he were expecting that at any moment life would deliver him yet another blow.

In the 1801 census, John Barnes described himself as a ‘labourer in husbandry’; that is to say he worked his own bit of land and for the rest of the time hired himself out to local farmers. The family had once been property owners, with farms in various places as far away as Hampshire. But John’s parents, who had their own farm in Manston, near Sturminster, had died of smallpox within a few months of each other in 1776, leaving their five children to the care of a relative who had lost the estate through bad management. In later days, John may still have owned a freehold house and land elsewhere but, if so, he did not live in it and it probably brought in very little extra income. The grim reality was that, like many another small tenant farmers at that time, he was perilously close to becoming a mere journeyman. Things might have been worse for him had he not had the support of his sister and brother-in-law, Anne and Charles Rabbetts (or Roberts), the tenants of Pentridge Farm, just a mile or so away on the banks of the Stour at Hinton St Mary.

In May 1789, at Lydlinch Church, John Barnes had married Grace Scott of Fifehead Neville. He was twenty-seven and she was twenty-nine. If the Barneses had been reduced to comparative poverty, the Scotts had tasted actual destitution. Grace came from a one-parent family. Her father had died when she was three and her mother would most likely have had to labour in the fields or work as a servant to support her three daughters.5 Grace was barely literate – she could only make her mark on the marriage register – but her granddaughter recorded that she was ‘a woman of refined tastes with an inherent love of art and poetry… a slight, graceful figure with delicate features… [who] recited to [her son William] passages of poems which she had learned’.6 This artistic trait created a special link with the boy, for as he grew older he too revealed similar leanings. He became his ‘mother’s pride’.

Grace had already given birth to one son, christened William, in 1791, but he died on 2 October 1800. In accordance with a common custom at that time, when her next baby was born five months later, he was given the same name as his deceased brother. At his birth on 22 February 1801, ‘our’ William had four surviving siblings. John was the eldest, though his exact age is unknown; then came Charles who was eight, James who was six, and Anne or Ann, who was three. The Barneses last child, Henry, was born four years after William in November 1805.7

Home was a poor, thatched cottage, probably with just two rooms and a flagstone floor. From out of a patchwork of little fields, studded with oak and enclosed by thick elm hedges, a rutted track led up to their door. The rhythm of their life was determined by the seasons. In the short, dark days of winter, John Barnes might have little to do but to stay at home, feeding his animals in the barn and fetching in root crops and wood for the fire. Soon after it was dark, they went to bed. Summer days were very different. In the morning, he would be up with the sun and out into the cowlease with his three-legged stool and two milking pails hanging from a yoke. Having milked for himself he would be off, trudging miles across the Vale, to take what work was on offer, whether milking, hedging, haymaking or harvesting.

It was the hearth that illuminated the earliest memories of William Barnes. This was his mother’s domain, where family life gathered. In winter, the room was full of dark recesses, save where the firelight fringed her hair with gold. As an infant, he would be plumped down on damp flagstones, back a bit from the fire, and here he would prattle and listen to the kindling crackle and spit. Here too he played with his sister, Anne, and here his older brothers fetched in bundles of ‘fuzz’ (furze) to make the flames roar. His mother was always coming and going, carrying in buckets of water from the well, filling her stock-pot hanging from its hook, or turning her salt-box over to dry out the other side. From time to time she would insert her long spade, or ‘peel’, into the bread oven and triumphantly lift out a loaf. She was always there. His mother was his whole existence.

When John Barnes stamped in from work on those winter evenings, she would stir up the fire to make a cheerful blaze for him and set one of the older boys to help him unlace his gaiters and boots. Come perhaps from a day of timber-felling in driving rain, exhausted, wet and chilled to the bone, he would slump in the settle, spread his legs and hold his hands up to the heat. William would watch, fascinated, as his father’s clothes steamed gently. On summer evenings John came in much later, announced by the jingling of horses’ chains. Having unharnessed and seen to his beasts, he would enter hot and sweaty from the hayfield. If he were not too tired, after supper he might take a little stroll outside with Grace while the light still lasted. They would walk arm in arm round their little orchard and sit for a bit outside on the bench to watch the sun go down, while young John or James would be sent to the cider-house to fill a can for father.

The stock-pot and the bread-oven were Grace’s entire means of cookery. Her family’s diet was perforce very plain, both because of their lack of elaborate cooking facilities and also because they were too poor to eat meat often. For though Blackmore people boasted that an acre and a quarter of its thick clay was sufficient to feed a Devonshire ox for a year, the same measure of land could barely support a farm worker and his family.8 And as for many other country people, it was the success of the recent harvest that determined how well the Barneses ate. Bread was their staple of life, ‘supplemented by tiny quantities of butter, cheese, bacon and tea; fresh meat was a luxury rarely seen at the table of the poorest labourers’.9 Many farm workers subsisted almost entirely on a diet of potatoes and tea.10 Things were probably better than this for the Barneses, however, because there was sometimes a rabbit or hare for the pot. Besides, John Barnes’s little farm still provided the greater part of their diet and he also retained his commoner’s rights, which entitled him to graze his pigs and geese, to collect firewood and to gather mushrooms, herbs and medicinal ‘simples’ from Bagber Common.

With the coming of warmer spring days, the life of the growing boy expanded into a vista of shimmering grasses and blue skies. When the weather allowed, Grace Barnes would take her young children out into the meadows and along the banks of the Stour. Here in May, marsh marigolds clogged the river, followed in summer by yellow flag irises and ‘clotes’ (water lilies). These banks became the childhood playground for William and his brothers and cousins. When tired of paddling and splashing, he would lie overlooking the stream, dreaming the afternoon away, watching great castles of reflected cumulous drifting across the surface. In the meadow, he noticed, almost without noticing, purple loosestrife, marsh orchids, lady smock and ragged robin. Above the stream, clouds of gnats dipped and flicked. Water-boatmen trod the tenuous skin while pond-skaters pursued their mysterious lives. Flitting from one lily pad to another came the brightly coloured dragonflies: ruddy darters, emperors and banded demoiselles. Below the surface shoals of small fish, minnows, trout and grayling nosed their way upstream. Sometimes the boy might glimpse a water vole, an otter, a grey heron or even the flash of kingfisher blue.

All these things were stored in his memory, only to resurface years later in his poetry:

No city primness train’d our feet

To strut in childhood through the street,

But freedom let them loose to tread

The yellow cowslip’s downcast head;

Or climb above the twining hop

And ivy to the elm-tree’s top;

Where southern airs of blue-sky’d day

Breathe’d o’er the daisy and the may.

I knew you young, and love you now,

O shining grass, and shady bough.

Or in the grassy drove by ranks

Of white-stemm’d ashes, or by banks

Of narrow lanes, in winding round

The hedgy sides of shelving ground;

Where low-shot light struck in to end

Again in some cool-shaded bend,

Where we might see through darkleav’d boughs

The evening light on green hill-brows.

I knew you young, and love you now,

O shining grass, and shady bough.11

As he grew older and more adventurous, William’s roving took him further downriver. He always remembered the time when he steered his ‘fleet’ on the Stour. It consisted of himself in a large tub and the cat towed behind in a wooden bowl, ‘her back arched and her tail extended in the agonies of terror’. Sometimes his wanderings would take him across the meadows to the little footbridges and the weir at Newton. Here, near the six-arched bridge which joined Newton to Stur, stood an ancient flour mill. It was a noisy place. Even when far off, the boy could hear the constant clatter from the water wheel and the roaring of the weir, accompanied by heavy thumpings from the brick-built fulling mill next door. Here, great hammers beat at woollen fabric, impacting it into heavy duty ‘swanskin’ cloth.

Wandering the higher meadows and looking towards the south and east of the Vale, he could glimpse a circle of blue hills, the last ridges of the bare chalk country of the Dorset ridgeway. He soon learned to name them: ‘Hambledon, Bulbarrow, Nettlecomb-Tout, Dogbury, High Stoy and Bubb Down’.12 These hills remained unclimbed for the time being, but already they provided the framework of his days. Blackmore was his own world, entire unto itself.

Grace Barnes was quick to notice that her son had started to reveal unusual talents and that he seemed to share her delight in artistic things. When quite young he liked to draw, though the only materials he had were a piece of chalk and the flagstone floor. Barnes never forgot the occasion when she led him by the hand ‘through the pleasant country lanes to where some figures in molten lead, representing the seasons, stood on the parapet of an old bridge near her old home in Fifehead. Another of his recollections was of his mother holding him up in her arms to see a statue [a stone boy] on the pillared gate of an old disused manor-house’.13

The Barneses were Anglicans and very pious. From his earliest years, William would be carried or walked across the fields with his family to worship at St Mary’s, the parish church of Sturminster Newton Castle, as it was then called. His birth was registered there in the parish records on 29 March 1801. As he grew older, the church organist, Tom Spinney, noted his flair for music and set about coaching him in singing and the violin. This link between the Barnes family and St Mary’s was maintained over many years. Long after William left home, John Barnes was still a faithful worshipper there, sitting in the (now demolished) lower gallery in his old brown coat.14

The mile-and-a-half walk across the fields to attend church now became a regular feature of the boy’s childhood. He also went to Stur for his education. He remembered that, ‘After sitting awhile on the low form of a Dame school, at the feet of a good Mrs Humphries, I went through a common course of schooling in a boys’ school at Sturminster Newton’.15 His walk there took him along the track across the fields used by cowherds when driving their cattle to market. The building which served as his school was a three-storey house in Tanyard Lane, adjacent to St Mary’s Church.16 Here, he quickly made friends. The master, Tommy Mullet, soon perceived the boy’s talents and took extra pains with him. From Mullet, Barnes gained three things: a habit of application, a good grounding of elementary knowledge and a lifelong interest in mathematics. And perhaps surprisingly for an exceptionally bright child, Barnes seems to have been popular with the other pupils. One old lady who had been his classmate told his daughter that at school he had been called ‘little Willie Barnes’ and that ‘all the scholars, both boys and girls, would willingly, if necessary, have fought and protected him’.17

Nevertheless, like many another shy but gifted children, Barnes had to earn this popularity with a talent that his classmates could readily understand. In his case it was magic. At the age of seven or eight he became friends with a local ‘witch’ or ‘wizard’ named Jemmy Jenkins who kept a library of magic and astrology. From Jenkins he learned ‘tricks’ which he demonstrated to his school friends, who were no doubt awed by his display of recondite lore. They began to call him ‘the little astrologer’. His parents had differing views about this. Grace was superstitious but her husband was not. John Barnes did not hold with the practices of his neighbours, some of whom, when a horse or cow or even a family member took sick, would send to Shepton Mallet for the advice of the ‘cunning man’.18

As the boy grew older, Grace became progressively anxious about him, and went to the local ‘witches’ for reassurance. She was convinced that an imaginative child like this, with such a quick, fanciful nature, delicate physique and tapering, sensitive fingers, would never be able to tolerate a life of manual labour on a farm. So she confided these worries to the wise women of the village, one of whom, after examining his ‘psychic’ hand, pronounced that the boy was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. Another declared, ‘Never you mind what he looks like, he’ll get his living by learning-books and such like’.19

Of all William’s boyhood friends, his cousin, Charlie Rabbets, was the closest. Charlie’s home, Pentridge Farm, was a lively, welcoming place with numerous cousins to play with. Uncle Charles was an affable man and his Aunt Anne a motherly woman. Another Barnes aunt, Jenny, lived with them as a sort of family servant. She too was kindly but hot-tempered. When in one of her tantrums, she was given to slamming doors, kicking the cat and flinging milk pails about.20 Signs of these coming tempests were cues for the boys to race off across the summer meadows, to swim in the Stour or climb trees to gather birds’ eggs or nuts. Sometimes they would braid horsehairs to make fishing lines, cut ash-twigs for whistles, or skin eels to make whips for their tops.

By the age of ten the boy was set on becoming an artist. For a few pence he would draw portraits of his friends and relatives in pen and ink. He even painted an inn sign for the Black Horse at Sturminster and walked six miles to exhibit it at Shroton Fair. But though proud of his attainments, his mother still could not see how they might lead to any gainful employment. There was not much call for artists in the Vale.

Her worries were allayed to some extent by a Sturminster solicitor named Thomas Henry Dashwood, a man celebrated locally for his benevolent nature. Robert Young recalled that, ‘numberless were this good man’s deeds, many… the boys and girls that he clothed’.21 Dashwood’s offices at Vine House were adjacent to the church and school and close to the leather-making quarter of the town. In Barnes’s day the street was called Tanyard’s Lane, but this was later changed to Penny Lane, so-called after a certain John Penny who met his death after felling a tree on Dashwood’s premises. In 1814 or 1815, Dashwood needed a new engrossing clerk; that is, one whose job it was to copy out deeds. There was an increasing amount of such work required at this time because of the many enclosures of common land that were taking place.

There are two accounts of how William Barnes came to be taken on by Dashwood. According to Lucy Baxter, the solicitor called at the school one day to enquire whether there was a pupil capable of copying documents in a clerkly hand. Mullet did not hesitate to recommend William. So the boy was asked to take a quill and paper and demonstrate his skill. As a result, he was appointed on the spot. An alternative version was offered by Frank Lemon, who was a clerk at the same office from 1897 until 1906. He wrote, ‘While crossing a field [Mr Dashwood] saw a boy who had been sent to clear the meadow of cow dung. Instead, he had turned his wheelbarrow on its side and was sitting on it, sketching a cow. Mr Dashwood admired the drawing, became interested in the artist… and took him into his office’. Every morning from then onwards, William would make his way across the fields to sit at his desk in Vine House, copying out deeds. ‘Later, when [Dashwood] and his wife were looking through the office one evening they found the shelf under Barnes’s desk full of Greek and Latin books’.22

Stur, in William Barnes’s time, was a small manufacturing town set among miles of fields. Its chief industry was cloth-making, and its most celebrated product was the ‘swanskin’ which, before oilskin was invented, offered mariners some degree of water resistance in their garments. So effective was this cloth that swanskin was exported as far away as North America and particularly prized by the fishermen in the Newfoundland trade. Robert Young remembered that in the early years of the nineteenth century, ‘the spinners and weavers were kept well employed’ and ‘the racks on which the [swanskin] cloth was fixed covered one or two fields’.23 Most of the work was done in people’s own homes. The town’s inhabitants included fifty-three male weavers, and 295 women spinners. Apart from cloth-making, there was also Mitchel’s soap and candle works, a patten factory (pattens were overshoes, essential to people living in the muddy country who wished to keep their shoes clean), and people employed in the manufacture of both ‘ring’ and ‘sugarloaf’ buttons. These, together with the cattle market and all the trades necessary to service and supply the local farmers, were the principal occupations in Stur.24

The young solicitor’s clerk would have soon become familiar with the sight of some of the town’s more eccentric characters. There was old Mr Thomas, who got fidgety when he could not find supplies in his tiny, dirty shop and would bustle about muttering, ‘Butter me and sugar me and then I shall be good’. Another well-known resident was Billy Sweet’s toad, a creature he called Marier (Maria). Billy was an enthusiastic gardener and employed his toad to eat slugs and other vermin. Not liking to leave his pet alone when he went to the ale-house in the evenings, he would frequently carry her along in his pocket. Sitting round the table with his cronies, he would eventually take out Marier and invite them all to admire her beautiful eyes.

Parts of Stur were filthy. Near to a manure heap, beside an old stable, pigs would congregate to feast on the refuse thrown out from the local cider-house. Predictably, the pigs were often tipsy. Stur was also a violent and cruel place. There was bull baiting, badger baiting, pigeon shooting, cock fighting and cudgel fighting. Drunkenness was rife and would lead to frequent affrays in the ale-houses. The streets could be menacing at times to those especially vulnerable. One well-known inhabitant was a half-witted old woman named Gimmer Nan, who mumbled to herself when she walked through the streets and who was frequently surrounded by groups of idle boys calling out, ‘Which way did the bull run, Nan?’ At this she would cackle and call out, ‘Over the bridge, over the bridge’, and they would all roar with laughter and ask her again.

Young William may have witnessed a public whipping that took place in the town. The victim was a quiet, inoffensive man but his wife was a known ‘tartar’ and in the end he could take no more of her scolding. So he ran away, leaving her a charge on the rates. Having been arrested in Poole, where he had been working as a cooper, he was hauled back to Stur and the local magistrates ordered him to be flogged. Robert Young remembered:

It was a painful and degrading spectacle to witness, the poor man stripped to the waist, his hands fastened to a frame fixed to a wagon his outstretched arms unable to move, his naked back streaming with blood under the lash, while many among the crowd of witnesses were women fainting and screaming was [sic] carried from the scene.25

William Barnes cannot have failed to observe the grossness of this society, its ignorance and cruelty. Even in his moments of leisure in Vine House, when from beneath his desk he discreetly pulled out his Latin grammar or Greek lexicon, he was still assailed by pitiful bleatings and odours from the market and tan yard to remind him of the brutality of life. Yet he seems to have been untouched by these experiences, and in his later writings, Stur never featured at all. This was because his whole emotional and imaginative existence was still bound up in his home life in Bagber, in the familiar fields and orchards by the Stour, in the neighbours, their jokes and tricks and sayings, and in his family and all their usages and ways. It must have seemed to him that things would go on like this forever.

They did not. In quick succession there now came a series of events which were to bring this life to an end. The first was the financial failure in 1813 of his uncle, Charles Rabbets, who had worked Pentridge Farm for over thirty years. At that time, landowners were seeking to enclose as much acreage as possible for their own use. Higher profits were to be made from bigger farms. Accordingly, many tenant farmers were either given notice to quit or their rent was put up so much that they could no longer pay. Furthermore, now that the war with France was nearly over, there was a resumption of agricultural imports from the Continent. Both these tendencies were bringing about a recession in English farming. The small man just could not compete. Why exactly Rabbets had to leave Pentridge is not known; perhaps his landlord, Lord Rivers, had raised his rent. Whatever the reason, the eviction and subsequent sale of the farm were deeply painful to all concerned. Barnes never forgot it:

A sale of… an uncle’s stock, and which I saw when a boy, made on my mind a strong impression. My uncle was a farmer in the West of England, but became insolvent from the depression of the agricultural interest after the end of the French war. My aunt had a numerous family, and her long exercised solicitude as a mother, and her continual struggles against misfortune had nearly brought her with sorrow to the grave; she was calm, and it was only when one of her daughters passed her, that a tear rolled down her sallow cheek.

The young men were in that severe and reckless mood in which men are usually thrown when assailed by misfortune which they can still resist.

The girls were bewildered and scarcely knew what happened around them; then were driven away the cows under which the weeping milkmaid had so often sung the simple songs of the country; then went the wagon in which the merry haymakers had so many times ridden to the feast of harvest-home, and in short, then everything that was dear from familiarity was taken away, and my uncle as he looked on the fields he had so long cultivated with hope, and of which he had taken the produce in grateful joy, sighed and dropped a tear.26

Later he put his feelings into verse:

Pentridge! – oh! my heart’s a -zwellen

Vull o’jay wi vo’k a-tellen

Any news o’ thik wold pleace,

An’ the boughy hedges round it,

An’ the river that do bound it,

Wi’ his dark but glis’nen feace.

Vor there’s noo land, on either hand,

To me lik’ Pentridge by the river.

Be there any leaves to quiver

On the aspen by the river?

Doo he sheade the water still,

Where the rushes be a-growen,

Where the sullen Stour’s a-flowen

Drough the meads vrom mill to mill?

Vor if a tree were dear to me,

Oh! ’twer thik aspen by the river.

Bleaded grass is now a-shooten

Where the vloor wer woonce our vooten,

While the hall were still in pleace.

Stwones be looser in the wallen;

Hollow trees be nearer vallen;

Ev’ry thing ha’ chang’d its feace.

But still the neame do bide the seame –

’Tis Pentridge – Pentridge by the river.27

(‘jay’ – joy; ‘thik wold’ – that old; ‘drough’ – through; ‘vooten’ – footing; ‘wallen’ – walls)

Saddened as he was by the sale, the boy also sensed that there was something profoundly wrong about it. It should not have happened. For his uncle and aunt were the salt of the earth, kind to their work-folk, contented with their lot and generous. Moreover, they were hard-working and independent. People more useful to the country would be difficult to find. Yet despite their constant labour, they had failed. Why was it? He was too young at that time to understand the causes of this catastrophe, but he pondered the matter for years to come. Meanwhile, with a heavy heart, he resumed his daily walk through the fields to Dashwood’s office, to copy out yet more deeds of enclosure.

Victory was in the air the following year. In March 1814 Lord Wellington captured Bordeaux and the allied armies entered Paris. In April, Napoleon abdicated and was sent into exile in Elba. Surely, thought English people, he had been conquered at last. Wellington’s triumphant return called for national celebrations. In London, 1,700 guests attended a masquerade at Burlington House. Lord Byron appeared as a monk and his mistress, Lady Caroline Lamb, sported green pantaloons.

Celebrations in Stur were more homely. They were held in Gough’s Close, a field running down to the river. The thirteen-year-old William Barnes learned that the ‘respectable inhabitants’ had combined to treat the poor with a dinner of beef pudding and strong beer. There was a band, dancing on the grass and sports, including sack-racing, grinning through horse collars and chasing a pig with a greased tail. As a finale, an effigy of Bonaparte, ‘the arch enemy of England’, was paraded round the field, then hanged, shot and finally burnt.28