Hardy’s Friend William Barnes

Abstract

That Wessex which we call Hardy’s Wessex is only an idea of course. There is something magical or fey about the maps of it that Hardy began to publish in 1895, but they do represent something real — a dialect the boundaries of a way of life — and it was undoubtedly that deeply original, deeply provincial poet William Barnes who first established it as a literary province. Tennyson talked of Wessex dialect: he got some notes on it from Thomas Hughes of Uffington, and used them in the dialect scenes of his play Becket, where they make a preposterous impression, which the dialect poems of Barnes never did. I have argued in a life of Tennyson¹ for the virtual certainty that it was Barnes who inspired Tennyson in 1861 to the first of his own Lincolnshire dialect poems. Thomas Hardy grew up very conscious of his provincial origins, in the shadow of Barnes who was the monarch of literary Wessex and a successful poet, one of whom there was a cult when Hardy was born. Hardy, in his early poems, followed Barnes in dialect verse, and in his Welsh and Persian tricks also. And Hardy never lost a certain respect, admiration, affection for the old man, although there were some forty years between them, thirty-nine between Barnes’s birth at Rushay in 1801 (or possibly 1800) and Hardy’s in 1840, and forty-two between Barnes’s death at Winterborne Came in 1886 and Hardy’s at Max Gate in 1928.