The People's Poet

William Barnes of Dorset

Alan Chedzoy

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780752455389
• eBook ISBN: 9780752472409
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

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'.

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 – ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• 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