Abstract
Tennyson’s dialect poems, though composed in the later part of his career, represent an instinctive and symptomatic return to his Lincolnshire roots. As Sir Charles Tennyson remarks, the poet ‘used dialect in dramatic monologue to recreate the life and character of the countryside in which he spent his youth’.2 Edward Campion has suggested that there is ‘plenty of evidence to suggest that all through his long life [Tennyson] continued to speak with a Lincolnshire accent’, and he further notes that ‘Alfred had a sympathetic and retentive ear for the dialect of his neighbours and his memory was remarkable’.3 The Laureate himself considered what he termed his ‘Lincolnshire sketches’ some of his ‘best things’, but, he warned, ‘it needs humour to understand them’.4 Tennyson’s series of dialect poems, published from the early 1860s onwards,5 testifies to, and is marked by, the beginnings of systematic dialect study in England. Indeed, he was alert to the new models of classification, accuracy and mapping, remarking for instance of ‘The Northern Farmer’,
When I first wrote ‘The Northern Farmer’ I sent it to a solicitor of ours in Lincolnshire. I was afraid I had forgotten the tongue and he altered all my mid-Lincolnshire into North Lincolnshire and I had to put it all back.6
There is no longer any homeland.
T. W. Adorno1
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
T. W. Adorno, Notes to Literature, I, tr. S. W. Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press), 85.
Sir Charles Tennyson, ‘Foreword’, to G. Edward Campion, A Tennyson Dialect Glossary with The Dialect Poems (Lincoln: Lincolnshire & Humberside Arts, 1969), I. Subsequently cited as Glossary.
See K. M. Peyt, The Study of Dialect (London: Andre Deutsch, 1980), ch. 3. By a coincidence of naming, one of Ellis’s chief sources was Thomas Hallam, a railway book-keeper.
Peter Trudgill, The Dialects of England (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 5.
Thomas Hardy, ‘Dialect in Novels’ (1881), in Thomas Hardy’s Personal Writing, ed. H. Orel (London: Macmillan, 1967), 93.
Alan Chedzoy, ‘Mr Barnes and Mr Hardy: An Uneasy Friendship’, Hardy Society Journal 5(2) (2009), 42.
Sue Edney, “‘Times be Badish Vor the Poor”: William Barnes and his Dialect of Disturbance in the Dorset Eclogues’, English 58 (222), (2009), 212.
G. Edward Campion, Lincolnshire Dialects (Boston: Richard Kay, 1976), 17.
Donald S. Hair, Tennyson’s Language (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), 72, 136.
Patrick Joyce, Visions of the People (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 275.
Philip M. Tilling, ‘Local Dialect and the Poet: Dialect in Tennyson’s Lincolnshire Poems’, in Patterns in the Folk Speech of the British Isles, ed. M. F. Wakelin (London: Athlone, 1972), 89.
Alan Chedzoy, “‘Those Terrible Marks of the Beast”: Barnes, Hardy and the Dorset Dialect’, Hardy Society Journal 4 (3) (2008), 57.
Arthur Coleridge, ‘Notes of Tennyson’s Talk’, in Tennyson and His Friends, ed. Hallam, Lord Tennyson (London: Macmillan, 1911), 271.
Virginia Blain, ‘Tennyson and the Spinster’, Essays in Criticism XLIX (1999), 223.
Walter Benjamin, ‘The Storyteller’, in Illuminations, tr. H. Zohn (London: Pimlico, 1999), 93.
James Obelkevich, Religion and Rural Society: South Lindsey 1825-1875 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 236.
F. M. L. Thompson, English Landed Society in the Nineteenth Century (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963), 223. 34. Yopie Prins, ‘Victorian Meters’, in The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Poetry, ed. J. Bristow (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 91.
Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, tr. J. Weinsheimer and D. G. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 1998), 392, 393.
Hans-Georg Gadamer, Heidegger’s Ways, tr. J. W. Stanley (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 78.
Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), 92.
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Typography, tr. C. Fynsk (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 243.
T. W Adorno, Minima Moralia, tr. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: NLB, 1974), 102.
T. W Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies, tr. S. W Nicholsen (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 118.
T. W. Adorno, Towards a Theory of Musical Reproduction, tr. W. Hoban (Cambridge: Polity, 2006), 69.
T. S. Eliot, ‘The Music of Poetry’, in On Poetry and Poets (London: Faber & Faber, 1957), 31.
Larry McCauley, ‘“Eawr Folk”: Language, Class, and English Identity in Victorian Dialect Poetry’, Victorian Poetry 39 (2001), 287.
Brian Maidment, The Poorhouse Fugitives (Manchester: Carcanet, 1987), 356.
Kirstie Blair, ‘Tennyson and the Victorian Working-Class Poet’, in Tennyson among the Poets, ed. R. Douglas-Fairhurst and S. Perry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 284.
Martin Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking, tr. J. Anderson and E. Freund (New York: Harper, 1966), 47.
Martin Heidegger, ‘The Nature of Language’ (1958), in On the Way to Language, tr. P. D. Hertz (San Francisco: Harper, 1982), 98–9.
Martin Heidegger, ‘Hebel — Friend of the House’ (1957), tr. B. V. Foltz and M. Heim, Contemporary German Philosophy 3 (1983), 90. Subsequent page references given in the text.
Gerald Bruns, Heidegger’s Estrangements: Language, Truth, and Poetry in the Later Writings (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 3.
Oscar Wilde, ‘A Note on Some Modern Poets’, Woman’s World (December, 1888), 110.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2013 Roger Ebbatson
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Ebbatson, R. (2013). ‘The Northern Farmer’: Language and Homeland. In: Landscape and Literature 1830–1914. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137330444_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137330444_5
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-46102-8
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-33044-4
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)