My reading of John Ackworth's Clog Shop Chronicles has been up on Internet Archive for around 24 hours and in the first day it has attracted a couple of interesting comments. I am pleased with the comments (in fact I am pleased that someone has downloaded it and listened!), especially one that includes an objection to 'the reader's use of an accent that is extremely hard to comprehend'. Well, this was a challenge for me as it was my first foray into real Lancashire dialect literature and I must confess that, at times when I was editing, I sometimes couldn't understand what I had said myself without referring back to the book. Clog Shop Chronicles is actually about half way along the scale of dialect literature, with the main text in standard English and the dialogue mostly in dialect. Eventually, I am hoping to get to stuff that is written entirely in dialect. But for the moment, trying to get at the way that the author was hearing the dialect passages is kind of the point of reading the book aloud. Nevetheless, I get the point that listeners don't want to download a book and then find that they are enjoying the story but can't understand large chunks of it. In this case, I feel that even if you don't understand some parts of the dialogue, Ackworth usually gives quite a bit of context in the main text so that the story as a whole remains comprehensible. The alternative to trying to 'read it as it was written', I suppose, is to soften it out so it comes out more in a modern northern accent. I have considered that, but then the dialect was a feature of the writing at the time and part of the fun of reading a book like Clog Shop Chronicles.
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I finished reading Mary Francis's In a north country village a while ago and after short holdup after the Librivox server migration, it is now online and available for download via the audioboowks page. This was my first dip of the toes into dialect reading and by and large I think I have survived. Right now, though, I am taking a step back and reading Wordsworth's River Duddon sonnets, which is a different kind of challenge as I have never really got the point of Wordsworth. It is fun, nevertheless to read a series of poems that takes you down a river from its source to the sea.
With F. A. Bruton's Lancashire now behind me, I have embarked on reading M. E. Francis' In a North Country Village as my next LibriVox read. Apart from it being a book that it is well worth reading the logic behind this is simply that the dialect passages are relatively light and not too difficult to get my tongue around. It is impossible, in fact, to read 19th century Lancashire fiction aloud without engaging with the dialect, which can at times be impenetrable to an outsider - which nowadays means more or less everybody, Lancashire folk included, as the 19th century forms of the various dialects have now died out. Who nowadays, for example, would answer a polite inquiry as to whether it had been raining with, "Nobbut a spot or two, and we'st ha' no moor while the wind's in yon quarter'?
There are basically two kinds of dialect writing, one where the text is entirely written in dialect and one where it is mainly in the spoken passages. M. E Francis' writing is of the second kind. Having grown up in Manchester, some Lancashire pronunciations do not trip easily off my tongue, and anyone who cares to listen will here me struggling to say 'old' as 'owd', 'home' as 'whoam', and to manage 'running t' th' gate' with a soft 'th' and without enunciating the vowels in 'to' and 'the'. It is not so much the pronunciation that is difficult as making it all flow. Perhaps I should get myself a dialect coach, but until I do I must thank Philip Dunkerley for his excellent pages on Lancashire dialect and especially for his mp3 recordings of Lancashire poetry, which have been the greatest of help. I have also come up with two rules - I don't know if others would agree. (1) Read what is written on the page, even if it appears to be inconsistent or wrong. This is reading aloud, after all, and it is not for me to correct authors if I think they have their dialect wrong. (2) Concentrate on the flow of the words and don't worry too much if listeners will understand the dialect or not. After all, these books were written to be read and if the authors thought they would be understood, who am I to differ? Just finished reading Wm. Blundell's Cavalier's notebook, which has a few interesting comments on language from a late 17th century perspective. Blundell prided himself on his knowledge of languages, especially his Latin. Having lived through a century, in which English acquired an entirely new vocabulary, he remained something of a purist, though he seems to have become more philosophical about these changes as he grew older. Here are a couple of his notes:
"It is to be marked that many things which I put down as strange expressions to within a year or two become so familiar that even I myself do wonder why I took notice of them. Which may put us in mind how the English language changeth in the age of man." (p.138) "The inseparable difficulties of Latin do arise chiefly from hence, that we pretend to the understanding of Latin which hath been writ in all places and ages for about 2,000 years, whereas we are not able to understand our English Chaucer who lived but 300 years ago. And the several dialects of our own little country used at this day are not understood by any one person." (p.149) There is much to entertain in the notes as well as Blundell loved a tall tale. The following is all the more poignant for the fact that Blundell was himself severely disabled by a gunshot wound in his leg early in the Civil War. "A servant maid, at the siege of Hardin (Hawarden) Castle, was shot in the mouth and the bullet came out of her fundament, and she recovered the hurt. She served Sir William Neale, who affirmed this to be true in my hearing. But the bullet (you must know) came, many days after it was shot, through the common passage" (p.119). The Wirral village of Meols is pronounced 'mels', but go up on the other side of Liverpool to North Meols and it is pronounced 'mee-ols'. Really?
Having thought that Lancashire books would be easy for me to read aloud, I find unexpected traps and pitfalls that regularly have me cutting and pasting corrections into completed audio files. I'll come to the dialect passages another time. For now, I'll mention a few place names. Blackley ("Blakely"), Rawtenstall ("Rottenstall"), Bacup ("Bakeup") and Horwich ("Horritch"), I knew. Euxton ("Exton"), Myerscough ("Mersco"), Burscough ("Bersco"), Samlesbury ("Samsbury"), Haigh ("Hay") and Brathay ("Braythee), I have learned the hard way. And then there are Darwen ("Darren") and Whalley ("Worley") that I have seen mentioned, but don't quite believe. I suppose there's often one way that those who are born and bred in a place say its name and another that outsiders use, and I'm guessing that this may well be the case with Darwen and Whalley.
This is going to be a website all about Lancashire books - books written by Lancashire people, books written in Lancashire, books written about Lancashire, and most of them out of print. A couple of months ago, I started reading audiobooks for LibriVox and pretty soon realized I'd be best off looking for books I can read in my own voice. There's a fair few on the web and I'll try to link to as many as I can here.
I don't have a Lancashire accent, whatever that may be. I have a Manchester accent, or at least I had one once. It's been slipping away since I left the city 40 years ago. This is a nice way to try and get some of it back. To start with, I've posted a link to my first LibriVox book on the Peterloo Massacre by F.A. Bruton. Right now I am reading a book on Lancashire by the same author and illustrated by Albert Woods. As I can't read his paintings aloud, I've made a slideshow of them here. |
Phil Benson
Born in Manchester when it was still part of Lancashire, which it still is really. Exiled in sunny Sydney, I love to read Lancashire books Archives
March 2013
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