Abstract
While a good deal has been written about Hardy’s use of dialect, most discussions of the subject have centred on the novels.1 In fact, dialect also plays an important part in many of the short stories, and we do not have to look far in these for explicit references to the question of standard and non-standard English. Thus, at the beginning of ‘The Son’s Veto’, Sophy is upbraided by her son for using have instead of has. ‘That question of grammar bore upon her history’, Hardy remarks (ii, 34),2 and, indeed, it also bears upon her future, it gradually becomes clear. In ‘On the Western Circuit’ we are told that Anna is taught by her mistress to talk correctly (ii, 95), an accomplishment that stands her in good stead in the initial stages of her relationship with Raye, since if she had been rough-spoken he would hardly have been deluded into believing that she had penned the letters he received from her. Comparable versatility, though with similar consequences, is shown in ‘Dame the Tenth’ by the hotel page-boy, who picks up the polite accent of the summer guests, but in winter reverts to the local dialect in all its purity’ (i, 351f).
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Notes
Among the more wide-ranging studies are: Sabra D. Gilcreast, ‘The Dorset Dialect in the Wessex Novels of Thomas Hardy’ (Columbia University, unpublished M.A. dissertation, 1956);
Patricia Ingham, ‘Dialect in the Novels of Hardy and George Eliot’, in George Watson, ed., Literary English since Shakespeare (London: Oxford University Press, 1970) pp. 347–63;
Norman Page, Speech in the English Novel (London: Longman, 1973).
References are to the hardback issue of the New Wessex Edition: The Stories of Thomas Hardy, ed. F. B. Pinion (London: Macmillan, 1977) vols i, ii & iii.
Harold Orton, Survey of English Dialects: Introduction (Leeds: Arnold, 1962) p. 15.
See Thomas Hardy, Her Shattered Idol or The Romantic Adventures of a Milk Maid (Chicago: Stein, 1910).
Joseph Wright, ed., The English Dialect Dictionary (1898–1905; rpt. London: Oxford University Press, 1970) III, 403.
Randolph Quirk et al., A Grammar of Contemporary English (London: Longman, 1972) p. 14.
William Barnes, ‘The Waggon A-Stooded’, Poems of Rural Life (London: Kegan Paul, 1898) p. 199.
Harold Orton et al., eds, The Linguistic Atlas of England (London: Croom Helm, 1978), maps M9, M15 and M27.
F. B. Pinion, A Hardy Companion (1968; rpt. with alterations London: Macmillan, 1976) pp. 521–30.
I have, however, generally omitted any dialect words explained in the notes to Thomas Hardy, The Distracted Preacher and Other Tales, ed. Susan Hill (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979) pp. 351–61.
I.e., ‘Karren’ and Fährmann’. See Thomas Hardy, Der angekündigte Gast, trans. A. W. Freund (Leipzig: Insel, 1928) pp. 23 and 32.
See Martyn F. Wakelin, English Dialects: An Introduction, rev. ed. (London: Athlone, 1977) p. 98.
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© 1985 Norman Page
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Smith, J.B. (1985). Dialect in Hardy’s Short Stories. In: Page, N. (eds) Thomas Hardy Annual No. 3. Macmillan Literary Annuals. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-07104-3_6
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