Dialect, Victorian Poetry, and the Voices of Print

Dubois, Martin

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.

Citation

Dubois, M. (2023). Dialect, Victorian Poetry, and the Voices of Print. ELH: English Literary History, 90(4), 1069-1098. https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2023.a914016

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Jan 4, 2022
• Online Publication Date: Dec 8, 2023
• Publication Date: Dec 8, 2023
• Deposit Date: Feb 7, 2023
• Publicly Available Date: Feb 7, 2023
• Journal: ELH: English Literary History
• Print ISSN: 0013-8304
• Electronic ISSN: 1080-6547
• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 90
• Issue: 4
• Pages: 1069-1098
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2023.a914016
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1183579