Poetic Protest: William Barnes’ Dorset Dialect Eclogues

Deborah Maltby

William Barnes (1801-1886), was an Anglican minister, schoolmaster, historian, linguist, and writer who wrote poetry in the Dorset dialect about rural English people and the natural world where they lived and worked. Barnes is usually recognized for poems that present a golden view of the countryside. He was overtly un-political in many ways, whether because of his gentle nature or because his teaching provided his livelihood and he did not want to alienate the parents of his students. However, he also wrote several lesser-known eclogues which contain a surprisingly sharp strain of political protest. In this paper, I first discuss one poem that fits into the pleasant and largely idealistic category: “My Orcha’d In Linden Lea,” and then one of Barnes’ protest eclogues, “The Common A-Took In.” In “The Common A-Took In,” two rural laborers, Thomas and John, talk about how John is selling off his geese and cow because the common is being enclosed for agriculture. The enclosure will deprive the animals of space to run and graze. Without the food supplied by animals, the family’s quality of life will suffer. Barnes’ eclogue allows readers to hear the voices and understand the point of view of the laborers, who were affected by land enclosures but whose opinions about it often went un-recorded. I set my explanation against a background of the land enclosures that drastically affected nineteenth-century working life in the countryside. I argue that reading the two types of poems together shows that Barnes was actually using the pleasant, largely idealistic poems as a subtle form of protest, highlighting the dire rural conditions sparked by enclosures and dramatized in the eclogues.