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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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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