Georgic at Home in Nineteenth-Century Dialect Poetry

Victorian literary dialect can be used for many things: cries for help, nostalgia, or comedy. My interest is in how it can be used to subversive didactic effect in order to point up the environmental linguistic connections that strengthen reciprocal relations between human and nonhuman, sentient, and other material beings in working lives. The georgic genre is best known in English writing as encompassing late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century poetry on various forms of farm labour and land management, ownership, and empire-building, although with some recognition that the work itself is hard and subject to all kinds of problems. Georgic as a more subversive mode has shifted the field over the last two centuries to encompass materiality other than farming, often from the viewpoint of the workers and the workplaces of artisan, self-taught, or labouring-class writers, who were often unwilling to separate their creative expression from their everyday tasks. These writers experienced problems first hand; they also wrote about them in technical as well as poetic terms, being close to home in their relationship with labour. The specific language of work gave writing from labouring-class lives a perceived authenticity that could be drawn on in reformist prose — by the Gaskells, for example — but could also be used and recognized by the writers themselves to highlight known abuses within labour and the working environment, as well as celebrating the more raucous aspects of everyday life. Literary dialect offers a collective way of ‘working from home’, whether on a farm, down a mine, or at the weaving loom.