Barnes, William

Abstract

William Barnes (1801–86) was born into a poor farming family in Dorset's Blackmore Vale. He became a self‐educated scholar, linguist and philologist, schoolmaster, widely published writer in both poetry and prose, and finally a Church of England clergyman. He was proficient in many languages, wrote book reviews and essays on a wide range of topics in some of the leading nineteenth‐century newspapers and journals, and published poetry in both Standard English and dialect. His Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect , with their understanding of the problems of the rural poor and other social issues of the day, their humor, their lyricism, and their metrical virtuosity, are among the finest examples of dialect poetry in the language.