Statue of William Barnes (1801-1886)
St. Peter's Church, Dorchester
Photograph by Charlotte Pabst-Kastner, Köln, Germany
2002
[See commentary below]
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Statue of William Barnes (1801-1886) St. Peter's Church, Dorchester Photograph by Charlotte Pabst-Kastner, Köln, Germany 2002 [See commentary below]
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Although William Barnes was born in the Blackmoor Vale at Rushay, near Sturminster Newton in North Dorset on 22 February 1801, and educated in the vicinity, he is often associated with the town of Dorchester because, after his 1848 graduation from Cambridge as a Bachelor of Divinity and his ordination as a minister in the Church of England, Barnes served at nearby Whitcombe as curate and then rector of Winterbourne Came in 1862. A gifted schoolmaster (he was virtually a polymath interested in mathematics, astronomy, natural sciences, and geography) and brilliant student of languages, Barnes tutored young Thomas Hardy, for whom Barnes's scholarship and dialectal verse served as personal models.
A considerable poet, Barnes published numerous volumes of verse, including Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect (1844), Hwomely Rhymes (1857), and Poems of Rural Life in Common English (1868). A great believer in the power of the language of his native county, which he held to be a purer form of English because of its close relationship to the Wessex dialect of Anglo-Saxon England, Barnes's Dorset Dialectal Dictionary remains a classic reference work; he also published over two hundred engravings based on natural scenes from Dorsetshire. A one-man musical based on his life and writings was staged in the Dorchester Corn Exchange during the Hardy 2002 Conference in July. His most famous lyric is probably "Linden Lea."
Last modified 10 October 2002