Tim Bobbin Made Gradely: Transfictional Character and Lancashire Dialect Writing

This article draws on recent studies in Victorian transfictions and performance sociolinguistics to explore how Tim Bobbin, the pen name of eighteenth-century writer John Collier (1708–86), became a fictional character appearing in melodramas, pantomimes, and puppet shows. This popular character was subsequently transformed and deployed in the works of nineteenth-century Lancashire dialect writers, including Ben Brierley (1825–96) and Margaret Rebecca Lahee (1831–95). This article shows how during the nineteenth-century, depictions of the Lancashire dialect and its speakers differed between ingroup and outgroup members, the latter relying on negative stereotypes of the Lancashire boor or clown. Using third-wave sociolinguistic frameworks, I demonstrate how ingroup members reclaimed the figure of Tim Bobbin and how this character’s transformation was instrumental to the valorisation of the Lancashire dialect and the construction of the Lancashire identity.