I have just finished Silas Hocking's best seller, Her Benny (1879), and was struck by how the author represents the accents and dialects of the various Liverpool characters in the book. The book is tale of two street children, Benny and sister Nell, who along with the reprobate Perks, are given distinctive accents and the unusual, to me, forms of the verb to be 'I's', 'You's' and 'It are'. I also tried to read their dialogue in a modern Liverpool accent are failed miserably, but that could be more due to my ignorance than anything else. The speech of the adult characters on the other hand, is represented in what appears to have become the standard for Lancashire dialect writing, which suggests that Hocking was sensitive to generational differences in the Liverpool speech of the time. Anyone who knows their northern English accents will know that the modern Liverpool accent is distinctive and doesn't spread far beyond the suburbs. Hocking's representation of late 19th-century Liverpool speech makes me wonder when this came about.
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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.
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? 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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