Silas Marner's accent

[kev67]

Can anyone place Silas Marner's accent? He is clearly from the north of England. He sounds like he is from around Manchester way, but I cannot identify any closer than that. To give an example of his speech, here is a bit from chapter 16:

"Yes, I could do it, child, if you want a bit o' garden: these long evenings, I could work at taking in a little bit o' the waste, just enough for a root or two o' flowers for you; and again, i' the morning, I could have a turn wi' the spade before I sat down to the loom. Why didn't you tell me before as you wanted a bit o' garden?"

[Jackson Richardson]

She may not have been reproducing a specific accent, just a generic lower orders one. Adam Bede is set in a fictional county of Loamshire which is a rural area like her native Warwickshire, but within reach of an industrial area. (That might be Birmingham, which is near to Warwickshire but my recollection is that it was in the north.)

The country people of Loamshire speak in dialect and since Loamshire is fictional the dialect must be also.

I wonder if we are meant to think that the industrial area Silas came from was the West Midlands rather than the North? I’ve not read the book for years.

[prendrelemick]

I agree with Jonathan it's a generic working man's Northern accent, badly done, but acceptable to her readers. It could be Nottinghamshire - it's a bit DH Lawrencey. But North of there we would never say "child" to one of our own, it could only be "lass" and we don't do the o' that much either. We say "ah" not "I" and we never ever say "the" if we can possibly avoid it, we simply miss it out and imply a silent t'. But most strikingly a Northern man would never use so many words (especially that redundant "as") to say so little. It's an educated sentence with slight adjustments to the sounds.

[Jackson Richardson]

I’m very wary when characters’ dialogue is given in phonetic spelling to be comic or quaint. I find it patronising.

The two obvious exceptions are Walter Scott’s Scottish characters where there was already a tradition of written Scots and Dickens’ Sam Weller in Pickwick Papers. I find Sam’s cheery Cockney banter tiresome, but he is clearly the most intelligent, humane, capable and emotionally mature character in the book.

[kev67]

I don't know, I quite enjoyed working out what Joseph was saying in Wuthering Heights. I would not have liked to have waded through pages of it, but they were fun interludes. It was interesting that his accent was similar to the accents recorded in the James Herriot books a century later. Sadly, I don't suppose you hear those accents very much these days. It is interesting to hear Dickens' London characters speak in their own accents. I cannot remember hearing anyone pronounce 'v' as 'w' myself, except when impersonating a German to comic effect, so that characteristic of Cockney speech must have died out. Dickens attempt at a Northern accent in Hard Times was very poor though. God knows what Stephen Blackpool really spoke like. It is generally the working class characters that have their speech spelt phonetically, but that actually makes it more difficult to imagine how the more upper class characters really sounded like. George Gissing was actually pretty good at accents and speech patterns. There was a characer in New Grub Street called Mr Whelpdale who sounded very plummy to me.

With Silas Marner, I suppose the point of his phonectially spelt accent was to reinforce his outsider status. He looks different, he sounds different, he keeps himself to himself.

[mona amon]

I love Joseph's dialogue, and other examples of the Yorkshire dialect (if that is what it is) in the Bronte novels. It sounds simultaneously down to earth and poetical, and so expressive!

[prendrelemick]

Joseph's accent is still current round here, (I am a local) although "Ye" has almost gone, replaced by Thee or Thi or Tha. I have nieghbours with very broad accents who sound as he is written, and I tend to respond in kind. (It so happens their family used to farm at Top Withens - the real Wuthering Heights).

Accents can get very localised. A man from Barnsley sounds different from a man from Doncaster, I suppose the same is true throughout the country.

[Diggory Venn]

Regarding Joseph`s accent - it must not be forgotten that Haworth is a mere seven miles to Wycoller (Mr Rochester`s residence, by the way), for example, which is in Lancashire, the border of which is even nearer to Haworth.... food for thought - Joseph`s accent cannot therefore be said to be pure Yorkshire in my opinion.
The matter of dialects and local accents interest me a lot. Where I was born and bred and still live, in South Lancashire (Wigan, in fact), one needs only to travel say ten or fifteen miles in any direction of the compass, and the accent will be totally different, albeit using the same dialect.

I think that to lose one`s own accent and dialect is a shame, and to lose it on purpose is quite frankly, a disgrace !

Si thi fer now, a`m gooin fo`mi tay !

[kev67]

Regarding Joseph`s accent - it must not be forgotten that Haworth is a mere seven miles to Wycoller (Mr Rochester`s residence, by the way), for example, which is in Lancashire, the border of which is even nearer to Haworth.... food for thought - Joseph`s accent cannot therefore be said to be pure Yorkshire in my opinion.

That thought had occurred to me. I thought the Brontes were west of the Penines, yet Joseph definitely sounded like the locals out of the James Herriot books, who lived in the Dales. Hareton is brought up to speak a similar way. Liverpool was apparently the closest port, but a day's ride away.

[Jackson Richardson]

I've just re-read Silas Marner. It is a wonderful work. But what I hadn't noticed before is the way the speech of the gentry is often rendered phonetically as well as that of Silas, Dollie and the villlagers.

[prendrelemick]

Regarding Joseph`s accent - it must not be forgotten that Haworth is a mere seven miles to Wycoller (Mr Rochester`s residence, by the way), for example, which is in Lancashire, the border of which is even nearer to Haworth.... food for thought - Joseph`s accent cannot therefore be said to be pure Yorkshire in my opinion.
The matter of dialects and local accents interest me a lot. Where I was born and bred and still live, in South Lancashire (Wigan, in fact), one needs only to travel say ten or fifteen miles in any direction of the compass, and the accent will be totally different, albeit using the same dialect.



I think that to lose one`s own accent and dialect is a shame, and to lose it on purpose is quite frankly, a disgrace !

Si thi fer now, a`m gooin fo`mi tay !

Wycoller is only a few miles from Haworth but it is over the watershed and down t'other side, where tongues are rolled in a Lancashire fashion, rather than hanging slack, as per in Yorkshire. It's all a question of where your social compass is orientated to. Here on this side of the border we face East for our culture and accent (and shopping) even though the towns of Burnley, Nelson and Colne are just over the hill.

An old man I knew, said our local accent was ruined when the buses started running through to Todmorden (5 miles away but in the wrong direction.) He has a point.