I have just posted a link on the Audiobooks page to Andy Minter's wonderful Librivox recording of The Lancashire Witches by Harrison Ainsworth, which brings me to my third Old Mancunian, as former pupils of Manchester Grammar School (or some of them at least) like to call themselves. Although Harrison Ainsworth made a name for himself in London, he was a Lancashire and he dedicated Mervyn Clitheroe to his 'contemporaries at the Manchester school'. The book is set mainly in rural Cheshire, but also in smoky, industrial 'Cottonborough', where Mervyn spends his schooldays at the 'Cottonborough Free Grammar School'. 'I cannot say much in praise of the architectural beauty of the school', he writes, 'for, if truth must be spoken, it was exceedingly ugly'. 'It was a large, dingy, smoke-begrimed brick building, with copings of stone, and had so many windows that it looked like a lantern. In front, between the angles of the pointed roof, was placed a stone effigy of the bird of wisdom, which seemed to gaze down at us with its great goggle eyes as we passed by, as if muttering, "Enter this academic abode over which I preside, and welcome, but you'll never come out as clever as I"'.
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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.
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.
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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