The Victorians and English Dialect: Philology, Fiction, and Folklore

The Victorians and English Dialect tells the story of the Victorians' discovery of English dialect, and of the revaluation of local language that was brought about by the new, historical philology of the nineteenth century.Regional dialects came to be seen not as corrupt or pernicious, but rather as venerable and precious.The book examines the work of the ground-breaking collectors of the 1840s and 1850s, who first alerted their contemporaries to the importance of local dialect - and also to the perils that threatened it with extinction.It traces the connection between dialect and literature, in the flourishing of dialect poetry and the foregrounding of regional voices in Victorian fiction.It explains how the antiquity of regional dialects cast light on the national past - the Celts, Anglo-Saxons, and Vikings - and how dialect study was also at the heart of the discovery of local folklore and oral culture: old words, old customs, old beliefs. And it tells the story of the three great m