ENGL383
‘Otherness in our own land’
As part of ENGL383: English Language and Literature, third-year BA Combined
Honours student Charlotte Ryan-Fenton asks: How does amateur Lancashire
Dialect Poetry help to form an understanding of Wigan culture and society?
In his review of Wigan Council’s ‘Wigan Pier Experience’ project, undertaken in the early
2000s, Stephen Catterall states that:
“Wigan has become less a place than a state of mind in the British
psyche. Successions of visitors… including Ruskin and Orwell, have
echoed the theme of ‘otherness’ in ‘our’ own land. Wigan… has
come to symbolise the ‘other’ Britain associated with the legacy of
industrialisation and the social deprivation and squalor this produced.”
In light of these comments,
this essay seeks to explore
the use of dialect in the
amateur poems ‘Aspirations’
and ‘Posh Visiters’ , written
by Jeff Unsworth, to see
how traditional Lancashire
Dialect
literature
uses
dialect to illustrate the
realities of life in the county,
and, for the purpose of this
essay, Wigan in particular.
It will seek to examine the
way in which Lancashire
Dialect poetry often tries to
present the idea of there
being a distance between
the working-class people
of Lancashire and the
rest of society. The essay
will also seek to examine
the indexical meanings of
words and phrases used
within these poems in order
to gain understanding of the
factors many working-class
people from Wigan have
historically seen as being
those that set them apart
from the rest of the nation.
The tradition of Lancashire
Dialect Poetry stems back
hundreds of years, and the
Lancashire Dialect Society
published a collection of
amateur work in 1982 with
the aim of showing that
‘our beloved dialect is well
and living in Lancashire’.
In the introduction of this
collection, they argue that:
“There is nothing here to
rival the works of the best
writers of the past, yet
there is some well-written
material, and there is living
dialect as well as Lancashire
accents…. We apologise for
any irregularities you may
find. The writer’s spellings
have been maintained as
far as was possible rather
than having it altered to
uniformity” (Dobson and
Topping, 1982: 4).
Lancashire Dialect Literature
has never been part of
mainstream literature, and
the vast majority of the
works that can be described
as part of this tradition are
produced by local, amateur
poets, as Jeff Unsworth is.
This is the reason that there
is not a comprehensive
prescribed or uniform way of
representing the Lancashire
dialect in literature, and
accounts for the variety
of respellings seen within
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literature of this tradition. It
is important to distinguish
however, that the two
poems discussed in this
essay would be described
most accurately as dialect
literature, rather than dialect
representation in literature
– or more basically, that the
poems are written entirely
in dialect from a first-person
narrator, rather than the
speaker being represented
mainly through dialogue.
Dobson
and Topping’s
comment - “There is nothing
here to rival the works of the
best writers of the past, yet
there is some well-written
material” - is highly indicative
of the general sense among
the people of Lancashire
that they are in some way
‘beneath’ the rest of society.
Yet, simultaneously, there is
a notion that the people of
Lancashire are happy with
their lives and are proud of
their accomplishments, no
matter how small they may
be. This supports Bahktin’s
(1998) theory that dialects
exist not only in the linguistic
sense, but also in the socioideological sense; that is,