36.2237, Reviews: The Victorians and English Dialect: Matthew Townend (2024)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-36-2237. Tue Jul 22 2025. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 36.2237, Reviews: The Victorians and English Dialect: Matthew Townend (2024)

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Date: 22-Jul-2025
From: Christine Wallis [c.wallis at sheffield.ac.uk]
Subject: Historical Linguistics: Matthew Townend (2024)


Book announced at https://linguistlist.org/issues/35-2648

Title: The Victorians and English Dialect
Subtitle: Philology, Fiction, and Folklore
Publication Year: 2024

Publisher: Oxford University Press
           http://www.oup.com/us
Book URL:
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-victorians-and-english-dialect-9780198888123?utm_source=linguistlist&utm_medium=listserv&utm_campaign=linguistics

Author(s): Matthew Townend

Reviewer: Christine Wallis

SUMMARY
This book deals with the activities of a group of nineteenth-century
researchers who laid the foundations of English dialect study, giving
an account of their methods, works and intellectual context. Central
to the book is the claim that ‘the nineteenth-century discipline of
philology is the primary context in which the period’s dialect study
should be placed and understood’ (13), and a twin thread running
throughout is the rise and eventual fall in popularity of this
approach. Townend emphasises the regional nature, not only of the
subject matter, but also of the participants who undertook the bulk of
nineteenth-century dialectal study; not only were the fieldworkers
themselves often part of the communities where they collected their
material, but the English Dialect Society itself owed much of its
vitality (and at times its existence) to the civic world beyond London
and the universities. After an introduction, six chapters deal with
different facets of dialect study in Victorian Britain, from
collectors of dialect glossaries and phonology, to the symbiotic
relationships between dialect, folklore and creative writing, to the
compilation of the English Dialect Dictionary (EDD). The book’s
chapters fall into two parts: the first three chapters introduce some
of the movement’s main figures and areas of interest in dialect
(vocabulary, phonology and literary uses of dialect), while the final
three chapters focus on the activities of the English Dialect Society
and folklorists, culminating in the creation and publication of the
EDD. An Epilogue discusses the fate of philology in the twentieth
century, as it gave rise to the new disciplines of literature and
linguistics, and largely fell from favour.
The introduction contextualises the nineteenth-century dialect
movement by outlining the rise and popularity of the ‘new philology’
as it spread from its German and Danish roots in the early part of the
century. This ‘fresh, exciting, revolutionary’ (4) discipline was
based on three modes of thinking: historical (language changes over
time), comparative (change was systematic) and oral (spoken language
was primary, and written language secondary). Townend points out that
some of the major scholars of nineteenth-century historical English
work (e.g. Walter Skeat (b. 1835), James Murray (b. 1837) and Henry
Sweet (b. 1845)) were youngsters caught up in the enthusiasm of this
new discipline in the 1850s and 1860s, and he captures the
philologists’ sense of discovery as they realised the wealth of
existing data waiting to be collected. Philology was a popular and
influential movement (its principles also underpinned the compilation
of the Oxford English Dictionary, begun by the Philological Society of
London in 1857) and Townend emphasises the variety of people caught up
in the movement, as ‘many of the leading philologists were autodidacts
from a working-class or lower middle-class background’ (10). Dialect
study was therefore accessible to enthusiasts who had traditionally
been excluded from a (Latin-based) university education, such as women
or lower class researchers. Although made up of individuals with
varying priorities and outlooks, the group was characterised by its
interest in variation in regional and local speech and customs, often
explicitly contrasted with the contemporary national standard. Townend
sets out three main research questions: firstly, why did the
Victorians start investigating local speech? Secondly, why was it so
important to them? And thirdly, how were dialect researchers connected
with other intellectual networks, such as local historians,
folklorists, novelists, and poets? Despite the abundant surviving
evidence of their activities, parts of this movement have received
comparatively little attention so far.
Chapter 1, ‘The Pioneers’, begins with a survey of early studies of
local language by writers such as John Ray, Francis Grose and Joseph
Hunter. There was a recognition of language change even among some of
these early writers, especially in lexical and semantic domains, while
social variation – usage peculiar to educated or rural speakers – was
also commented on. The subsequent influence of the new philology led
to an awareness of the conservative nature of rural speech and its
links to earlier states of the language, as exemplified in medieval
texts, and the strong interests of antiquarians meant that dialects
became increasingly valued for their preservation of an older, ‘purer’
state of English. The perception that dialects were under threat from
contemporary developments such as widespread education and the rise of
the railways leant a degree of urgency to the collection of dialect
vocabulary in the form of regional glossaries. The chapter concludes
with a case study of one such collector, J.C. Atkinson, whose 1868
Glossary of the Cleveland Dialect drew on his decades of experience as
a vicar in that district.
Like many early collections, Atkinson’s book provides abundant detail
of Cleveland’s vocabulary, however, much less attention is paid to
phonology, which is the subject of Chapter 2, ‘The Phoneticians’.
Phonetics had its roots in areas such as spelling reform, shorthand
notation and elocution, and because of the technical expertise
required, fewer collectors focused on this level of detail. The
chapter focuses predominantly on two researchers, Alexander Ellis and
Thomas Hallam. Ellis was responsible for the development of two
alphabets, Palaeotype and Glossic, designed to represent speech more
closely than standard orthography (a practical issue also faced by
writers of early pronouncing dictionaries, who resorted to various
schemes to represent sounds (Sen et al. 2020)). His dialect
investigations culminated in the multi-volume The Existing Phonology
of English Dialects; much of the fieldwork, however, was undertaken by
volunteers such as Thomas Hallam, whose job as a railway clerk enabled
him to travel widely through the country, collecting and transcribing
speech samples from a variety of informants as he went. Hallam’s own
comments on his fieldwork allow for an insight into his methodology,
and Townend notes how Ellis and Hallam’s preoccupations foreshadow a
number of present-day linguistic theories, such as the Uniformitarian
Principle (Bergs 2012) and the Observer’s Paradox (Hallam observes
that ‘peasants do not speak naturally to strangers’ (77)). Other
observations, naturally, stand up to present-day scrutiny less well;
recent research projects such as The Language of the Labouring Poor in
Late Modern England (LALP) complicate Ellis’s view of peasants as
‘entirely untaught’ (69).
The third chapter, ‘Dialect and Literature’ surveys the rise of
dialect as a feature of literature from the 1840s onwards. This
chapter focuses, not only on the use of dialect by novelists, but also
on the philological framing that authors provide for their use of
regional features. For example, Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton was
provided with extensive footnotes by her husband William, which
glossed dialect words and provided commentary on non-standard
features. Townend highlights how authors used their own observations
and experiences of regional speech, but also how they made use of
published glossaries (with varying levels of success) to provide
detail for individual characters. Novelists were not the only creative
writers making use of dialect; the works of poets such as William
Barnes and Thomas Hardy are also analysed to illustrate the
contribution of dialect to the ‘new register’ (135) these writers were
able to create.
Chapter 4, ‘The English Dialect Society’, focuses on what Townend
describes as ‘the forgotten society of Victorian language study’
(144). In existence for only a short period of time, from 1873-1896,
the society left no archive, and comparatively little historiography
exists of its members’ efforts. Townend therefore uses the society’s
annual reports and the (sometimes limited) surviving personal papers
of members such as Walter Skeat to build a picture of the society’s
activities and achievements, including the publication of original
glossaries, the re-publication of earlier, important dialect
collections, and the establishment of the society’s library at
Manchester Free Library, which enabled researchers access to useful
and rare materials. Three main phases of the society are traced:
firstly, its inauguration and early years, when it was run by Skeat
from Cambridge, followed by its move to Manchester under the
leadership of John Nodal, where it flourished as part of that city’s
vibrant intellectual life. The society’s final phase saw its
relocation to Oxford under Joseph Wright, whose publication of the
English Dialect Dictionary is dealt with in Chapter 6.
Chapter 5, ‘Folklore and the Past’ leaves off the story of the English
Dialect Society to consider the interests of Victorian philologists in
the lives of people in the past. These scholars ‘studied the languages
of the present for the purposes of understanding the past’ (187), in
an early application of the Uniformitarian Principle. This led to a
virtuous circle, whereby dialects were consulted in order to elucidate
the language of the past, while medieval literature provided a
pedigree for regional speech. Publications such as the dictionaries by
Joseph Bosworth (1838), and Richard Cleasby and Gudbrand Vigfússon
(1874) were important tools for the investigation of linguistic
parallels in Old English and Old Norse respectively. For many
fieldworkers, the collection of local customs, children’s games and
other folkloristic details went hand in hand with an interest in the
local vernacular, and the chapter traces the intellectual context and
activities of the Folklore Society, producing records not only of
local language, but also the way of life that this vernacular was
embedded in. Novelists of the period did not restrict themselves to
dialect features to lend an air of authenticity, or a sense of time
and place to their works, and the chapter also investigates the use of
folkloric details by writers such as R. D Blackmore and Sabine
Baring-Gould.
The final main chapter, Chapter 6, presents the crowning achievement
of Victorian dialect collectors, ‘The English Dialect Dictionary’
(EDD), published between 1898 and 1905. The creation of the dictionary
was one of the long-standing aims of the English Dialect Society,
which appointed firstly Abram Palmer, and subsequently Joseph Wright
as its editors. The dictionary’s compilers were able to rely on works
of poetry and fiction, as well as the substantial number of regional
glossaries published by the society. The bulk of the chapter is
devoted to the processes involved in making the dictionary – its
compilers, scope, organisation and the shape of its entries – as well
as spin-off projects. In addition to the dictionary itself, Wright’s
English Dialect Grammar offered a companion-piece in the form of a
study of dialect phonology. While Wright’s plans for an abridged
version of the EDD never came to fruition, Elizabeth Wright’s Rustic
Speech and Folk-Lore used material from the EDD in her thematic
digest, demonstrating the EDD’s enduring utility and popularity.
EVALUATION
Townend successfully puts human faces to the names involved in
nineteenth-century dialect collection, pointing out the sheer number
and variety of people involved, including academics, clergymen and
their families, teachers, and industrialists. The role of women is
also highlighted, as collectors, fieldworkers, novelists and compilers
of the English Dialect Dictionary. It has become a commonplace that
older linguistic surveys restricted their informants to NORMS
(Non-mobile, Older, Rural Male Speakers (Chambers & Trudgill 1998:
29)); yet this study shows that, in the case of Victorian dialect
collectors this is an oversimplification. Thomas Hallam not only
included women and children among his informants, but also noted
differences in the usage of different groups, while Alexander Ellis
was well aware of the importance of factors such as age and gender in
language variation. Differences in opinion and motivation within the
research community are also dealt with, giving a real insight into the
varied language attitudes of the time. The book offers a more nuanced
understanding of the methods, aims and preoccupations of these early
collectors, who were simultaneously pro-dialect, yet deeply imbued
with with standard language ideology (Milroy & Milroy 2012). Dialect
was perceived as having dignity because it represented an older and
purer state of English than the nineteenth-century standard; however
the the value of the standard was apparently never criticised by
Victorian philologists. A key strength of this book, then, is its
exploration of the diversity of thought among nineteenth-century
philologists, in several cases providing clear forerunners of later
linguistic theories. We are also reminded that crowdsourcing and
public engagement are not new scholarly endeavours. In this respect,
Townend’s research questions on the motivations of this group and the
different networks involved are explored in depth and detail.
The book is philological, rather than linguistic in its focus. Links
to linguistic theory are made where relevant, but there is plenty for
those interested in branches such as historical linguistics to pursue
here, especially in areas such as enregisterment, language attitudes
and communities of practice. It is clear that an abundance of evidence
exists to investigate these and other questions in more detail, and
this book provides an excellent jumping off point for further avenues
of research. This fascinating book will be of interest to scholars
working in many areas, for instance, history of linguistics,
historical dialectology, historical sociolinguistics, or dialect and
literature. The book is well written and easy to read, considering its
wealth of detail, and is an exciting contribution to the field.
REFERENCES
Bergs, Alexander. 2012. The Uniformitarian Principle and the Risk of
Anachronisms in Language and Social History. In Juan Manuel
Hernández-Campoy & Juan Camilo Conde-Silvestre (eds.), The Handbook of
Historical Sociolinguistics. Malden MA: Wiley. 80-98.
Bosworth, Joseph. 1838. Dictionary of the Anglo-Saxon Language.
London: Longmans.
Chambers, J. K., & Peter Trudgill. 1998. Dialectology. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Cleasby, Richard, & Gudbrand Vigfússon. 1874. Icelandic-English
Dictionary. Oxford: Clarendon.
LALP = The Language of the Labouring Poor in Late Modern England.
www.wp.unil.ch/lalp
Milroy, James, & Lesley Milroy. 2012. Authority in Language:
Investigating Standard English, 4th edn. London: Routledge.
Sen, R., J. C. Beal, N. Yáñez-Bouza, & C. Wallis (eds.). 2020.
‘Studies in Late Modern English Historical Phonology using the
Eighteenth-Century English Phonology Database (ECEP)’, Special Issue
of English Language and Linguistics 22(3).
Wright, Joseph (ed.). 1898-1905. English Dialect Dictionary. Oxford:
Frowde.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Christine Wallis is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of
Westminster. Her research interests include language variation and
change, literacy, and the material text in Old, Middle and Late Modern
English. She has worked on digital humanities projects, including the
Eighteenth Century English Phonology Database, and the Mary Hamilton
Papers. Her current project investigates the production and reception
of manuscripts of John of Garland’s Dictionarius, a thirteenth-century
text for teaching Latin vocabulary, and will provide a digital edition
of the text, its commentary and its multilingual glosses.



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