Printed Voices: Dialect and Diversity in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Lancashire

Abstract

This chapter examines how printing accommodates local voices and whether this affects writing about place and the wider reception of a locality. The discussion will focus on some urban and rural laboring-class poetry from the Manchester area around the mid-nineteenth century to illustrate some of the problems arising from writing in dialect and how its use influences our perception of place and community. Dialect writing had a strong following among urban and rural communities, including establishment audiences, in the early Victorian period. For many local writers and readers, using dialect offered a medium for the expression of ownership of place and also of their own creative productions that was not available, or was diluted, in Standard English. The expansion of printing also ensured that oral forms could be translated into readable material and quickly disseminated among strangers as well as friends. What was particular to a locality might be lost or devalued by a shifting community, producing stereotypical images of identity; it could also be revalued in new varieties of language. Any reduction of language diversity, however it comes about, affects attitudes to its place of origin: differences in language offer different perspectives and enrich stories about locality. Peter Mühlhäusler considers the “repository of past experience” available to future generations through the study of apparently uncongenial systems such as the grammar and syntax of individual dialects: “Linguistic diversity is a diversity of knowledge, philosophies and perspectives, and... this diversity came about precisely because different words are needed to live in different environments.” 1

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