Georgic at home in nineteenth-century dialect poetry.

Research output: Contribution to journalArticle (Academic Journal)peer-review

Abstract

Family life was often inseparable from daily labour for many Victorian working-class men and women, home and work supporting each other. In close communities, families and neighbours created dynamic expressions of solidarity, celebration, humour, anger and sorrow, in their own words. Local dialects were even more specific to particular occupations: mining, weaving and farming as examples. In the Georgics, Virgil used vivid ‘terms of art’ to communicate relentless, but productive agricultural labour. This paper argues that dialect and colloquial languages shape powerful depictions of Victorian working family life that have a direct relationship to Virgil’s earthy, lyrical amalgamation of instruction, legend, warning and moral tale. I explore several poems, from Thomas Wilson’s Tyneside pit-life tale to John Clare’s communitarian subversion, William Barnes’s detailed agricultural portraits, and Mary Leapor’s anti-hierarchical scorn. Through an examination of dialect ‘terms of art’, as Joseph Addison (1712) noted in Virgil’s work, we can trace a persistent thread of expressive story-telling that situates these writers’ poetic labours in an abiding, resilient georgic field of hard work and scarce leisure. Work secured the home, and home supported the endless effort needed to survive.
Original languageEnglish
Journal19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century
Publication statusAccepted/In press - 17 Jul 2024

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