Tim Bobbin: A View of the Lancashire Dialect
The text and the LibriVox collection
John Collier’s A view of the Lancashire dialect was first published in 1746 together with a 628 word glossary. Five hundred words were added to the 1750 edition and by 1757, the glossary added up to 2017 words. The story had also been revised, notably by the addition of the episode at the Falcon Inn in Littleborough. By 1763, the story had reached is final form with the addition of the horse-stealing episode. According to Heywood, at least 27 editions were published after 1786. The later editions were mostly copies of an edition published in 1775. Heywood also mentions reviews of the book in The Monthly Review in 1750 (#4, p. 156) and 1776 (#55, p. 23)
The edition I read for a LibriVox collection on A view of the Lancashire dialect was reprinted in John Corry’s 1862 collection of Collier’s works (first published in 1819). It consists of a short introduction to the Lancashire dialect, a Preface in the form of a dialogue between the author and his book, the Thomas and Mary story, and the glossary.
The collection includes, from the same book, Elijah Riding’s (1860) version of the story, ‘rendered into simple English’ and Corry’s ‘Memoirs of John Collier’. In addition to Corry’s memoir, there are also several other commentaries on John Collier’s life and work.
Three poems conclude the collection: ‘Tim Bobbin' Grave’ (Samuel Bamford), ‘The Ghost of Tim Bobbin’ (George Richardson, 1850), and ‘At the Grave of Tim Bobbin’ (William Baron, 1903). ‘The Ghost of Tim Bobbin’ is of some historical interest, as the poet has Collier rise from his grave in St. Chad’s churchyard, Rochdale, to berate Samuel Bamford not only for his suggestion that Collier was a drunkard, but also for opportunistically reprinting Colliers glossary under his own name.
Several texts by or related to John Collier await another Librivox collection. They include prose texts and poems by Collier reprinted in Corry’s 1862 collection, and an interesting parallel text edition, published in London in 1828, with Collier’s text and a ‘translation’ by an unknown writer on opposite pages.
Collier was not primarily a writer, although he profited from sales of A view of the Lancashire dialect over the course of his life. His main business was as an artist and caricaturist and some of his work is preserved in an online edition of the The Human Passions Delineated. He supplemented his income as a teacher by selling his books and art in public houses along the road from Rochdale to Halifax, and episodes in the Thomas and Mary story allude to efforts to market his work.
The dialogue between Thomas and Mary – a summary
Thomas and Mary meet on the road where Thomas declares he is on the run from his master. As Mary’s mistress is away she stops to listen to his tale.
On a recent holiday for the circumcision of our Lady, Thomas was charged by his master to deliver a cow and calf to a buyer in Rochdale. He mentions, ominously that his bitch, Nip, insisted on going along.
Along the road, Thomas stops at an alehouse where the calf, mistaking a mare for its mother, attempts to suckle and is killed by a blow from the horse’s hoof. After failing to sell the calf to a butcher who comes out of the inn, Thomas decides to skin it and sell the hide. Unfortunately, the butcher is the only one with a thibble to skin it with and he will not lend. Thomas has no choice but to sell the hide, ‘growing to the carcass’, to the butcher for a pittance. Later he discovers that the meat has been sold at Oldham market for a handsome profit. Meanwhile, Thomas proceeds on his journey, delivers the cow without the calf, and makes his way home.
On the way, Thomas runs into Hal o’ Nabs and his cronies. They invite him to climb a ladder and ‘hold the riddle’, while they flush an owl out of a loophole in a nearby barn. Thomas enjoys the sport until he is met full in the face, not by an owl, but by a foul smelling mixture of ‘lant’ and ‘loosings’. He falls, but luckily lands on a sow at the bottom of the ladder.
At this point, Mary points out that Nip had nothing to do with these misfortunes, but Thomas has more to tell. Continuing on his way, Thomas meets a man who tells him that, had he met him three days ago, he would have paid him 20 shillings for Nip, for he is as fine a ‘bandyhewit’ as the one he has just bought from another. The man then directs Thomas to the house of a justice who is looking for just such a bandyhewit himself. When Thomas arrives, the justice praises the dog, but tells Thomas that he bought a similar one just the other day. Nevertheless, he knows of another prospective buyer only a three-mile walk away.
Back on the road, Thomas manages to fall off a bridge into a brook and then gets himself lost. Meeting a boy with an improbably long name, he is directed to Littleborough, where he settles himself in an alehouse (the Falcon Inn) for the evening, where he has the good luck to witness to an old-fashioned bar fight. Cheered by the fight and warmed by the fire, he decides to spend the night. In the morning, Thomas finds not only that the bill comes to the princely sum of 13 pence, but that he also lost what little money he was carrying in the brook. He escapes, but only the cost of the ‘sneeze horn’ that Sara o’ Richards gave him last Christmas.
After two more failed attempts to sell his bandyhewit in Littleborough, Thomas is sent back to Rochdale to meet yet another potential buyer. Suspecting at last that he is the victim of a prank, Thomas decides to give it one more chance. Finding once more that the buyer, a Rochdale shopkeeper, is ‘fitted’ already, Thomas takes out his anger on a boy who asks him if he has managed to sell Nip. He knocks him down with a punch, but in the ensuing melee the lad’s mother takes him by surprise and pushes him into the ‘rindle’. Soaked and foul-smelling yet again, Thomas escapes to the churchyard where he realises that Nip has disappeared. Afraid to return to the town to search for the dog, Thomas disconsolately wends his lonely way home.
The next day, after a night spent in a barn swarming with ‘boggarts’, Thomas is overtaken on the road by a man riding a ‘tit’ and leading another behind. Tired and hungry, Thomas accepts his offer to ride the second horse, but as this is the slower of the two, the man rides on and arranges to meet Thomas at an alehouse further up the road. No sooner is he gone than Thomas is overtaken by the real owner of the horse and a constable, who arrests him and takes him back to Rochdale to appear before the justice. In the course of questioning, the justice discovers that the horse was stolen from Colne Edge two days earlier. What is more, it turns out that he is the very same justice to whom Thomas had tried to sell Nip on the same day. Acknowledging his innocence, the justice releases him, but not before his clerk has unsuccessfully attempted to extract a bribe.
Back at home, Thomas tries to explain to his master, but he is pelted with household objects and makes an escape to Nick o’ th’ Farmer’s barn. Mary shudders at this, because the barn is haunted by boggarts. At the barn, Thomas meets the new man, Yed o’ Jeremy’s, who finds him a place to sleep. Yed dares not stay the night with him, but explains that he will be back at one o’clock to feed the horse. Offering to do the job for him, he settles down on a pile of hay. Before long, a second Sarah arrives from his master’s house with some food from the kitchen. In his eagerness to eat, Thomas falls off the hay on top of Sarah and scattering the food. Thomas eats what he can and they say goodbye.
Thomas sleeps well, but when he wakes up to feed the horses he falls from the hay pile on to the back of what he can only imagine is ‘old Nick’. He is carried through the barn and across the field to be thrown into a water pool and drenched yet again. The rest of the night he spends standing outside the barn in fear and when Yed arrives the two of them resolve to run away together. On closer inspection it turns out that the boggart may well have been no more than a young colt that had wandered into the barn after Sarah had departed, leaving the door open. But Mary is not convinced.
His story over, Thomas engages Mary in a little parting banter. He asks her for a kiss. Mary suggests he asks Sarah o’ Richard’s instead, telling him she is a ‘dirty, daggle-tailed, good-for-nothing’, who was caught in bed with Bill o’ old Katty’s only last Sunday. Thomas is shocked, but before long, Mary admits that it was all lies and the two part as good friends.
The text and the LibriVox collection
John Collier’s A view of the Lancashire dialect was first published in 1746 together with a 628 word glossary. Five hundred words were added to the 1750 edition and by 1757, the glossary added up to 2017 words. The story had also been revised, notably by the addition of the episode at the Falcon Inn in Littleborough. By 1763, the story had reached is final form with the addition of the horse-stealing episode. According to Heywood, at least 27 editions were published after 1786. The later editions were mostly copies of an edition published in 1775. Heywood also mentions reviews of the book in The Monthly Review in 1750 (#4, p. 156) and 1776 (#55, p. 23)
The edition I read for a LibriVox collection on A view of the Lancashire dialect was reprinted in John Corry’s 1862 collection of Collier’s works (first published in 1819). It consists of a short introduction to the Lancashire dialect, a Preface in the form of a dialogue between the author and his book, the Thomas and Mary story, and the glossary.
The collection includes, from the same book, Elijah Riding’s (1860) version of the story, ‘rendered into simple English’ and Corry’s ‘Memoirs of John Collier’. In addition to Corry’s memoir, there are also several other commentaries on John Collier’s life and work.
- An extract from The History of the Environs of Manchester: A Description of the Country from Thirty to Forty Miles Around (1795) by Collier’s friend, Richard Townley (published in John Aikin’s 1818 collection of Collier’s miscellaneous works).
- Samuel Bamford’s Introduction to his Dialect of South Lancashire (1850), which includes the Thomas and Mary text and a considerably revised glossary. Bamford claims that Collier’s glossary was ‘far from correct’ and excessively influenced by the Cheshire dialect spoken close to Collier’s birthplace in Urmston.
- An extract from Edwin Waugh’s ‘The cottage of Tim Bobbin and the village of Milnrow’, from his Sketches of Lancashire Life and Localities (1855), which recounts a visit to Collier’s former home in Milnrow.
- An extract from Thomas Heywood’s (1861) On the South Lancashire Dialect. This is by far the most scholarly account of the history of the text and Collier’s understanding of the Lancashire dialect. Heywood also gives credits Collier’s scholarship far more than Bamford and other writers allows, observing that he had learned Anglo-Saxon and made repeated corrections to his glossary.
- Francis Espinasse’s essay on Collier from Lancashire Worthies (1874) relies on the earlier accounts. W. E. A. Axon (Lancashire Gleanings, 1883) concentrates on Collier’s work as an artist, while his son E. A. Axon (Bygone Lancashire, 1892) follows the fates of Collier’s children.
Three poems conclude the collection: ‘Tim Bobbin' Grave’ (Samuel Bamford), ‘The Ghost of Tim Bobbin’ (George Richardson, 1850), and ‘At the Grave of Tim Bobbin’ (William Baron, 1903). ‘The Ghost of Tim Bobbin’ is of some historical interest, as the poet has Collier rise from his grave in St. Chad’s churchyard, Rochdale, to berate Samuel Bamford not only for his suggestion that Collier was a drunkard, but also for opportunistically reprinting Colliers glossary under his own name.
Several texts by or related to John Collier await another Librivox collection. They include prose texts and poems by Collier reprinted in Corry’s 1862 collection, and an interesting parallel text edition, published in London in 1828, with Collier’s text and a ‘translation’ by an unknown writer on opposite pages.
Collier was not primarily a writer, although he profited from sales of A view of the Lancashire dialect over the course of his life. His main business was as an artist and caricaturist and some of his work is preserved in an online edition of the The Human Passions Delineated. He supplemented his income as a teacher by selling his books and art in public houses along the road from Rochdale to Halifax, and episodes in the Thomas and Mary story allude to efforts to market his work.
The dialogue between Thomas and Mary – a summary
Thomas and Mary meet on the road where Thomas declares he is on the run from his master. As Mary’s mistress is away she stops to listen to his tale.
On a recent holiday for the circumcision of our Lady, Thomas was charged by his master to deliver a cow and calf to a buyer in Rochdale. He mentions, ominously that his bitch, Nip, insisted on going along.
Along the road, Thomas stops at an alehouse where the calf, mistaking a mare for its mother, attempts to suckle and is killed by a blow from the horse’s hoof. After failing to sell the calf to a butcher who comes out of the inn, Thomas decides to skin it and sell the hide. Unfortunately, the butcher is the only one with a thibble to skin it with and he will not lend. Thomas has no choice but to sell the hide, ‘growing to the carcass’, to the butcher for a pittance. Later he discovers that the meat has been sold at Oldham market for a handsome profit. Meanwhile, Thomas proceeds on his journey, delivers the cow without the calf, and makes his way home.
On the way, Thomas runs into Hal o’ Nabs and his cronies. They invite him to climb a ladder and ‘hold the riddle’, while they flush an owl out of a loophole in a nearby barn. Thomas enjoys the sport until he is met full in the face, not by an owl, but by a foul smelling mixture of ‘lant’ and ‘loosings’. He falls, but luckily lands on a sow at the bottom of the ladder.
At this point, Mary points out that Nip had nothing to do with these misfortunes, but Thomas has more to tell. Continuing on his way, Thomas meets a man who tells him that, had he met him three days ago, he would have paid him 20 shillings for Nip, for he is as fine a ‘bandyhewit’ as the one he has just bought from another. The man then directs Thomas to the house of a justice who is looking for just such a bandyhewit himself. When Thomas arrives, the justice praises the dog, but tells Thomas that he bought a similar one just the other day. Nevertheless, he knows of another prospective buyer only a three-mile walk away.
Back on the road, Thomas manages to fall off a bridge into a brook and then gets himself lost. Meeting a boy with an improbably long name, he is directed to Littleborough, where he settles himself in an alehouse (the Falcon Inn) for the evening, where he has the good luck to witness to an old-fashioned bar fight. Cheered by the fight and warmed by the fire, he decides to spend the night. In the morning, Thomas finds not only that the bill comes to the princely sum of 13 pence, but that he also lost what little money he was carrying in the brook. He escapes, but only the cost of the ‘sneeze horn’ that Sara o’ Richards gave him last Christmas.
After two more failed attempts to sell his bandyhewit in Littleborough, Thomas is sent back to Rochdale to meet yet another potential buyer. Suspecting at last that he is the victim of a prank, Thomas decides to give it one more chance. Finding once more that the buyer, a Rochdale shopkeeper, is ‘fitted’ already, Thomas takes out his anger on a boy who asks him if he has managed to sell Nip. He knocks him down with a punch, but in the ensuing melee the lad’s mother takes him by surprise and pushes him into the ‘rindle’. Soaked and foul-smelling yet again, Thomas escapes to the churchyard where he realises that Nip has disappeared. Afraid to return to the town to search for the dog, Thomas disconsolately wends his lonely way home.
The next day, after a night spent in a barn swarming with ‘boggarts’, Thomas is overtaken on the road by a man riding a ‘tit’ and leading another behind. Tired and hungry, Thomas accepts his offer to ride the second horse, but as this is the slower of the two, the man rides on and arranges to meet Thomas at an alehouse further up the road. No sooner is he gone than Thomas is overtaken by the real owner of the horse and a constable, who arrests him and takes him back to Rochdale to appear before the justice. In the course of questioning, the justice discovers that the horse was stolen from Colne Edge two days earlier. What is more, it turns out that he is the very same justice to whom Thomas had tried to sell Nip on the same day. Acknowledging his innocence, the justice releases him, but not before his clerk has unsuccessfully attempted to extract a bribe.
Back at home, Thomas tries to explain to his master, but he is pelted with household objects and makes an escape to Nick o’ th’ Farmer’s barn. Mary shudders at this, because the barn is haunted by boggarts. At the barn, Thomas meets the new man, Yed o’ Jeremy’s, who finds him a place to sleep. Yed dares not stay the night with him, but explains that he will be back at one o’clock to feed the horse. Offering to do the job for him, he settles down on a pile of hay. Before long, a second Sarah arrives from his master’s house with some food from the kitchen. In his eagerness to eat, Thomas falls off the hay on top of Sarah and scattering the food. Thomas eats what he can and they say goodbye.
Thomas sleeps well, but when he wakes up to feed the horses he falls from the hay pile on to the back of what he can only imagine is ‘old Nick’. He is carried through the barn and across the field to be thrown into a water pool and drenched yet again. The rest of the night he spends standing outside the barn in fear and when Yed arrives the two of them resolve to run away together. On closer inspection it turns out that the boggart may well have been no more than a young colt that had wandered into the barn after Sarah had departed, leaving the door open. But Mary is not convinced.
His story over, Thomas engages Mary in a little parting banter. He asks her for a kiss. Mary suggests he asks Sarah o’ Richard’s instead, telling him she is a ‘dirty, daggle-tailed, good-for-nothing’, who was caught in bed with Bill o’ old Katty’s only last Sunday. Thomas is shocked, but before long, Mary admits that it was all lies and the two part as good friends.