BARNES, William. Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect. London: C. Kegan Paul & Co. 1879.
8vo. Original green cloth lettered in gilt to spine and front panel, front and rear panels with double ruled in blind to upper and lower edges, spine with single gilt ruling to upper and lower edges, publisher’s monogram in blind to rear panel; pp. xii, 467, [1], 32 (publisher’s catalogue dated 8/79); mild spotting to early pages and publisher’s catalogue at the back (page block edges without spotting), cloth clean, gilt sharp; neat ownership names (one in ink, one in pencil) of two previous owners to upper edge of half title; a very presentable, near fine copy.
An attractive copy of the first collected edition, prepared by the author, of Hardy’s beloved William Barnes’s dialect poems.
Born in the parish of Bagber, Dorset, Barnes, the son of a tenant-farmer in the Vale of Blackmore, like Thomas Hardy (who later became a friend and edited a selection of Barnes’s poems) received little formal education, working in Dorchester as a solicitor's clerk between the age of seventeen and twenty-two, when he relocated to Mere in neighbouring Wiltshire and opened a school, where he began writing poetry in Dorset dialect and, again like Hardy, assiduously studied languages – Greek, Latin, but also Italian, Persian, German and French – played violin, piano, and flute and practised wood-engraving. In 1835, now married, he moved back to Dorchester to run another school which, after a change of location to South Street, became a close neighbour to James Hicks’s architectural practice, where Hardy was serving as an apprentice. Hardy would occasionally consult Barnes regarding matters of linguistic disagreement that occasionally arose between Hardy and Hicks. Barnes also counted Tennyson and Gerard Manley Hopkins among his acquaintances.
In the brief preface, dated June 1879, to what is essentially the poet’s own Collected Poems, Barnes writes of the three individual volumes it brings together that “I have little more to say for them, than that the writing of them as glimpses of life and landscape in Dorset, which often open to my memory and mindsight, has given me very much pleasure; and my happiness would be enhanced if I could believe that you would feel my sketches to be so truthful and pleasing as to give you even a small share of pleasure, such as that of the memories from which I have written them”. The volume concludes with a glossary: “a list of such Dorset words as are found in the Poems, with some hints on Dorset word shapes, and I hope that they will be found a fully good key to the meanings of the verse.”
SKU: 2124078