Lancashire Sketches ... Edited with ... an introduction by G. Milner

Preface

AND INTRODUCTION, BY GEORGE MILNER. FIRST SERIES. JOHN HEYWOOD, Deansgate and Ridgefield, Manchester'; 2, AMEN CORNER, LONDON, E.C. CONTENTS Portrait of Edwin Waugh, after a Photograph by Warwick Brooks Frontispiece. Vignette, by Randolph Caldecott Title page Editor's Preface v Editor's Introduction _ ;x Author's Preface xj|-; The Birthplace of Tim Bobbin t The Cottage of Tim Bobbin cr Ramble from Bury to Rochdale (including "A Birtle Carter's Story of Owd Bodle") 03 Ramble from Rochdale to the Top of Blackstone Edge 125 The Town of Heywood and its Neighbourhood 202 The Firelit Shed

PREFACE.

. The first collected edition of the works of Edwin Waugh was published in ten consecutive volumes during the years 1 88 1-2-3. The author was alone responsible for the selection and arrangement adopted; and no other hand could have accomplished the task so well. His various contributions to literature had been sent forth during the course of more than thirty years in numberless leaflets, broadsides, pamphlets, and volumes by many publishers, and in continually changing forms, the contents being often recast and adapted to fresh uses. It was almost impossible to compile a complete bibliography of his writings, and his admirers never knew whether they possessed all that he had written or not. The collected edition, therefore, was received with much pleasure and satisfaction. It contained, in well-ordered form, all that he considered worthy of preservation among that which he had produced up to the year 1883. In 1889 he issued a second series of "Poems and Songs" uniform with the previous ten volumes. These eleven

PREFACE.

. VI volumes were published in "large paper" and in "small paper " form ; and it is a gratifying and almost unexpected proof of his popularity in Lancashire— if not over a wider area — that so soon after his death both these editions should have become so scarce as to command very high prices— a "small paper" copy having been recently sold for £9. In the present edition the eleven volumes are reduced to eight. In the interests of the author and his fame, no less than of the reader, this curtailment is desirable. The eight volumes, it is believed, will contain all his best and most characteristic work. No abridgement of separate papers, sketches, or poems has been attempted. The Editor is responsible for such omissions as occur, but in all that does appear the author's own text has been scrupulously retained.

In the two volumes entitled " Lancashire Sketches," the whole of the papers originally published under that title have been reproduced, together with a few others which seem to come naturally under the same designation. The little cluster of stories — full of the finest pathos and humour — which circle round the homely character of Besom Ben, have been given complete and in one volume. In this form they furnish the best instance of Waugh's power in the art of sus tained and consecutive story-telling. The " Chimney Corner Stories " and the two series entitled " Tufts of Heather," are practically complete. In the volume which appears in this edition as " Rambles in the Lake Country and other Travel Sketches," will be found a selection of his best pieces in purely descriptive writing. The papers in that class which are not reprinted are inferior to his other works in merit as

PREFACE.

. VII well as in general interest. To this volume of " Rambles" an index and a map have been added. The small book called " Factory Folk," which was written in 1862, has not been reproduced, but two articles from it, " Among the Preston Operatives" and "Wails of the Workless Poor," have been given with the object of preserving some record of the Lanca shire Cotton Famine. The Editor's most difficult task has been to deal with the Poems, which in the last edition filled two volumes. He felt that one volume — larger indeed than either of the other two — should be made to contain all that might be expected to live. The selection of poems now offered has been made with as much care and discrimination as the Editor was able to supply ; and, although it is too much to expect that every reader's taste will be satisfied, it is hoped that few, if any, pieces will be missed among those which have made them selves dear to the hearts of Lancashire people. G. M.

Introduction

. The publication ofthe works of Edwin Waugh in a form so extended as to occupy eight volumes may seem to need justification. The distinction between national and provincial literature has never been clearly laid down. That distinction is probably incapable of anything like accurate definition. It is not merely a question of subject. There are writers who have taken rank with the highest, notwith standing the essentially local character of their material ; on the other hand, there are men who will always be classed as provincial although their themes are of the most general and cosmopolitan character. It is the power which a writer displays, rather than the particular character of his subject, which determines acceptance ; and, in the long-run, it is acceptance mainly which fixes his position in the open field of letters.

Waugh's case, however, is peculiar. Any valid estimate of his merits must proceed upon the assumption introduction. X that he is provincial. He never regarded himself as anything else. He is intentionally and deliberately local. His subjects all spring, so to speak, from his native soil ; and he is always at his best when he uses the dialect of the county in which he was born. In short, he asked for no higher honour than to be entered on the roll of Lancashire writers ; and among these he holds a place of undisputed eminence. I am not disposed to admit that what is now being said should be regarded as, in any sense, a depreciation. In choosing his line he acted wisely. In all honesty of purpose he delivered the message that was in him, after such fashion as was natural to his genius ; and, granting this standpoint, he did his work well.

To do this, and to have taken high rank among local men, is surely better than to have passed into the unnumbered and undistinguished throng of third rate writers. But there is another consideration. Such books as his are not without their influence on the literature of the country ; for, just as the rural population gives bone and sinew to the dwellers in the city, so those ideas which are often sneered at as provincial, and those dialectal forms of speech which are ignorantly regarded as vulgar, bring the qualities of freshness and vigour into writing which has become enervated by a too assiduous cultivation of what are called the graces of style. It would be invidious to specify modern instances, but we are all familiar with certain literary exquisites who, if they only knew what was good for them, would take a short course of study in the rugged and nervous dialect of Lancashire. It is worth while, therefore, it seems to me, to re -issue the

INTRODUCTION.

. XI prose and verse of Edwin Waugh. We know how valuable, for instance, is a good county history, not only to those who belong to the county itself, .out also to the general reader, and to the national historian. Of equal value, at least, are the tales, sketches, and poems of Waugh ; for there one may find, in irregular form it is true, and with certain limitations, a singularly accurate picture of what rural Lanca shire was like during the middle third of the nineteenth century — a period of stress and storm and change. I am quite conscious that in the eight volumes which follow this Introduction much inferior matter will be found. Waugh often wrote for bread and against time ; and his pro fuse use of padding, as well as his constant repetitions, are often of the most provoking character.

To get rid of these excrescences, however, it would be necessary to pull all his work to pieces. Such a course would be most undesirable. The articles, therefore, which have been selected for final issue must stand as he wrote them, and the reader may be assured for his consolation that he will often find embedded in a common-place and unpromising page some vivid delineation of character, some quaint and pithy proverb, some suggestive piece of folk-lore, some world-wide touch of nature, or some richly humorous story told in few and simple words. In estimating the value of his prose I should say that its first characteristic is its obvious sincerity and genuineness. He is fond of quoting long passages of antiquarian history, but he never describes either nature or man at second-hand. The thing he writes down is the thing he saw or felt. He does not seem to think about style except, perhaps, when

INTRODUCTION.

. XII he is describing a sunset ; he exercises but little art in the arrangement of his material ; and his usual error is on the side of redundance, for he sets down everything with ar. almost youthful love of minute detail. Although, as I have already said, his most satisfactory work is in the dialect, it must not be supposed that his literary English is without distinction. The quality of idiomatic strength which is characteristic of all good dialectal writing communicates itself to his ordinary speech. When he wishes, for instance, to describe the country round Manchester he calls it "The green selvedge of our toilful district." The twilight is " the edge of dark." " At the edge of dark I bade adieu to Tim's cottage." A tall man is "long-limbed," and a gaunt man is "raw-boned." The following passage is a fair speci men of his prose.

" It was in that pleasant season of the year when fresh buds begin to appear upon the thorn, when the daisy, and the celandine, and the early primrose, peep from the ground, that I began to long for another stroll through my native vale up to the top of Blackstone Edge. Those mountain wastes are familiar to me. When I was a child, they rose up constantly in sight, with a silent, majestic look. The sun came from behind them in the morning, pouring its flood of splendour upon the busy valley, the winding river and its little tributaries ; and oft as oppor tunity would allow I rushed towards them ; for they were kindly and congenial to my mind."* He is familiar with all the wild flowers of Lancashire, and often makes a nose gay of them for the decoration of his pages. The following * Lancashire Sketches. "Rochdale to the Top of Blackstone Edge."

INTRODUCTION.

. XIII beautiful passage occurs in the Besom Ben Stories, and is used with considerable effect as a contrast to the rough humour by which it is surrounded. " Near the Bridge Ben left the main road, and turned up a green lane. It was hemmed in by old sprawling hedges, thickly clothed in the wild luxuriance of the season ; a rambling fretwork of many patterned foliage, pranked all over with floral prettiness — the rich overflow of nature's festal cup of beauty. A posied crowd of hedge-plants were gathered there at the year's great holiday. Thyme, and mint, and mugwort ; docks, and sorrel, and nettles, and cotton-flowered thistles ; the purple privet ; the tall, proud foxglove, with its gaudy bell ; the wilding rose, and yellow agrimony ; the solemn, dark crimson-tinted hound's-tongue ; and the little blue forget me-not ; burdock, and the lilac-flowered mallow, and the pretty harebell, with its pendant trembling cup; the golden flowered broom — beautiful crest of the Plantagenet kings ; and the scarlet pimpernel that shuts its flower at noon, and tells the watchful farmer what sort of weather's in the wind.

Trailing honey-suckles, with their creamy, sweet scented flowers ; and the rambling bramble, with its small white rose and 'gauzy satin frill' — the fairy's nightcap peeping out prettily on long, flexile sprays ; and here and there a thick-leaved tree, growing by the lane side, hung over all its friendly robe of green." Of his dialectal work it is impossible to speak too highly. There he moves without restraint, and in an element that is entirely congenial to him. He never once strikes a false note. His rustic dialogues are always in dramatic harmony, and are as true in sentiment and in verbal form as if they had

INTRODUCTION.

. XIV been taken down word for word upon the spot. His dialect is not the result of philological study ; he has no pre conceived notions of what it ought to be, or of how it ought to correspond with our Early English, but it is absolutely true and inevitable. He never seeks for a dialectal word or phrase ; it comes unsought because it is his native speech. What William Barnes says of himself in reference to his Dorset dialect is entirely applicable to Waugh — " To write in what some may deem a fast out-wearing speech-form may seem as idle as the writing one's name in snow of a spring day. I cannot help it. It is my mother tongue, and it is to my mind the only true speech of the life that I draw."* Although, as I have indicated, Waugh's dialect does not rest upon an academic base, to the philologist it is invaluable.

It is the purest form of Lancashire Folk-speech — much purer, for instance, than that of John Collier,.- which was adulterated by importations from Cheshire on the one hand and from Yorkshire on the other. The words are those which are or were actually in use ; the declensions are grammatically correct ; and, although the spelling is never uselessly encumbered by uncouth forms, the pronunciation is as accurately rendered as it can be without the use of phonetic symbols. As a specimen of powerful writing and of pure dialect I would refer the reader to one of Waugh's earliest compo sitions — the "Ramble from Bury to Rochdale" — which appears in the Lancashire Sketches. Embedded in this * Preface to Poems of Rural Life by William Barnes. Third Collection. Second Edition. + The early Lancashire writer who is best known as "Tim Bobbin."

INTRODUCTION.

. XV article will be found the inimitable " Birtle Carter's Story of Owd Bodle," which has been often separately printed, and which was always a favourite Reading with Lancashire audiences. The main incident of the story is grotesque even to rudeness, but the humour is of the richest kind, and the delineation of character, as well as the reproduction of dialect, are as faithful as it is possible to make them. If the general reader could only master the peculiar form of speech he would be surprised to find what power and pathos there is, for instance, in the dialogue about the " Corn Laws " and the "clemmin" of little children. Take two short specimens, — " Iv they winnot gi' me my share for wortchin' for," says Jone, the Birtle Carter, " aw'll have it eawt o' some nook,- — if aw dunnot, d Jone !

(striking the table heavily with his fist.) They's never be clemmed at our heawse, as aw ha' si'n folk clemmed i' my time, — never whol aw've a fist at th' end o' my arm ! " The reply comes from the landlady of a roadside inn — " Ay, ay. If it're nobbut a body's sel', we could manage to pinch a bit, neaw and then ; becose one could rayson abeawt it some bit like. But it's th' childer, mon, — it's th' childer ! Th' little things at look'n for it reggilar ; an' wonder'n heaw it is when it doesn't come. Eh, dear o' me ! To see poor folk's bits of childer yam merin' for a bite o' mheyt, — when there's noan for 'em, — an' lookin' up i' folk's faces, as mich as to say, ' Connot yo' help me ? ' It is enough to may (make) onybody cry their shoon full ! " The two sides of the old Lancashire character are here — the rudeness, the fierceness even, of the carter who, if work will not give him his share of bread, will have it by other means, and who will not see his household starve

INTRODUCTION.

. XVI while he has " a fist at the end of his arm ;" and the tender ness of the landlady, who says, that to see the children " yammerin " for meat is enough to make us cry our shoes full of tears. It may be observed that in these extracts two words occur which have no exact synonyms in literary English — clemmed, which means to starve from hunger, and yammering which is quite untranslatable, but which may be approximately expressed by — to cry and yearn for piteously and earnestly. The form of wortchin' for working, of shoon for shoes, the old sign of the plural in en added to the verbs look and wonder, and the addition of the aspirate to the word meat (mheyt) to express a peculiar pronunciation may also be indicated as typical instances of careful rendering and as illustrating the points which would be brought out by an intelligent study of Waugh's dialectal writing.

I have spoken, so far, only of his prose. Some attempt should be made to estimate his position as a poet. Although his prose far exceeds his verse in quantity, it is upon the latter chiefly that his fame must rest. By his songs and humorous poems he first became widely known, and it is through them that he will be longest remembered. He had the instinct and the heart of a poet. His love of nature was intense and genuine. The moorland hills "haunted him like a passion," and that alone would have compelled him, whether successfully or not, to seek expression in verse. With regard to his poems in ordinary English it may be admitted at once that they are sometimes common-place ; and that, even when they rise to a higher level, all that we can venture to say of them is, that they are graceful and pleasing.

INTRODUCTION.

. XVII But in the dialect it is altogether different. There, as one might expect, the thought finds adequate and congenial expression ; his singing-robes are on, and though his muse may never be anything but homely, still the inspiration is genuine ; and, without allowing partiality to silence the voice of criticism, we may claim for him that in the dialect, at least, he is entitled to the name of a true poet. Of course to write in a dialect is to narrow one's audience ; but so much attention has been paid of late to the nature and importance of folk speech in relation to the study of English in general, that one may reasonably expect the number of those who are willing to master the difficulties of a dialect will increase rather than diminish. It is quite certain that sounder views have come into vogue ; and one does not often meet now (at least among educated people) with the opinion, once so freely expressed, that all dialectal writing is necessarily synonymous with coarseness and vulgarity.

In speaking of Waugh it is natural to think of Burns, and to ask in what relation they stand towards each other. There are several minor Scottish poets — Tannahill is one of them — who have written single pieces of a finer character than anything to be found in Waugh ; but, if we take the whole body of Waugh's dialectal poetry, and com pare it with that of Burns, I think we may say that, although the distance between them is confessedly great, our Lancashire moorland poet comes next in rank — not, of course, as poet pure and simple, but as dialectal poet — to his great Scottish predecessor. Burns, by his fiery passion and his wide sympathies both with man and with the brute creatures, compelled, not Scotland only, but all English^ B

INTRODUCTION.

. XVIII speaking people to accept his Doric verses as their own. Waugh, of course, has neither accomplished nor attempted anything so ambitious ; but he has made himself the poet of Lancashire, and, consequently, of no small or unimportant section of England. We may venture to go farther, and say that the more his verses are studied in the light of recent research, the more they will be found worthy of English consideration, providing always that the reader will rid himself, first, of the prejudice to which we have already alluded, namely, that there is some innate vulgarity in a dialectal word ; and, second, of the equally erroneous impression that the Lancashire dialect is not capable of expressing poetic conceptions with delicacy or force. What holds good, singular as it may seem, is, in fact, the very opposite of this, for any really fine poem, dealing with the elementary emotions, is capable of translation, without loss, into the dialect ; whereas a spurious or artificial piece of verse would inevitably refuse to come within the limits of folk-speech.

Leaving out of consideration the occasional and experi mental poems in the Lincolnshire dialect by Tennyson (which, by the way, are as strong as anything he ever wrote), there is no English writer in dialectal verse who comes near to Waugh except William Barnes. But Barnes is inferior to Waugh. He is more idyllic, but he has less humour ; and the dramatic element in his poems is not sustained. The language is philologically correct, but the ideas expressed and the images used are often such as would not be used by the rustic persons supposed to be speaking, although they would be quite proper to the poet himself. Into this error

INTRODUCTION.

. XIX Waugh never falls. While Barnes frequently gives you the impression of a poet expressing himself by intention, and with great skill, in a dialectal form, Waugh seems to be setting forth the ideas natural to his characters in the only language which either he or they had at command. No writer could possibly have grown more naturally out of his surroundings than Waugh. Granted some native genius, some mpulse in the blood, and the rest is obvious. The sequence of his development is transparent ; he offers you no surprises, and there are in his career no unexplained triumphs. Out of the life he lived there came inevitably the books he wrote. He was born in Rochdale on the 29th of January, 1817. All his paternal ancestors were Bordermen. His great-grandfather, John Waugh, was what is known in the north country as a "statesman," and farmed his own land at Coanwood, near the village of Haltwhistle, in Northumberland.

William Waugh, being a younger son of John, was apprenticed to a shoemaker and leather-dealer. At the end of his apprenticeship he travelled south, intending to reach London ; but, calling in Rochdale, where he had friends, he lingered there, became attached to a Miss Grindrod, married, settled in the Lancashire town, and ultimately began business as a leather-dealer on his own account. He built houses, was a man of substance, and brought up a family of three daughters and seven sons. He is described as "a quaint, staid, and persevering man, stout and square built, dressed in brown cloth coat and breeches of the Queen Anne cut, with large buckles on his shoes, and wearing a brown wig with long curls flowing down into the neck behind." The records which remain give you the XX

INTRODUCTION.

. impression that these Waughs were all men of some mark, strong both in body and mind, but with a vein of eccentricity running through them. Of the seven sons, some were of a " bookish " and mentally speculative turn. One listed as a marine, and was killed at the battle of Trafalgar. He is said to have been "as strong as a lion and as broad as a pack of wool." This simile of the wool-pack is noticeable, for the words " broad as a pack of wool " would be no inapt description of Edwin Waugh, the poet. Of William's seven sons, the youngest was Edward, the father of Edwin. He followed the trade of a shoemaker, and, though a poor man, he had received a good elementary education at the Roch dale Grammar School. Waugh's maternal ancestors all came from the hills of South Lancashire. His mother was a Howarth, and was born on the moorland between Bury and Rochdale.

This particular locality I have always regarded as the one place where the purest Lancashire dialect might be found, and there is very little doubt that Waugh's admirable dialect was that which his mother used, rather than that which he heard abroad ; and that more than half of the shrewd sayings and pithy proverbs for which he was so famous were those which came from his mother's lips. Two things are conspicuous with regard to his relatives on the mother's side — they were remarkable for musical ability and for attachment to the doctrines of John Wesley. Among them was James Leach, who published a fine set of tunes which are popularly known as Leach's Psalmody, and John Leach, who was one of Wesley's earliest preachers, and about whom there is a note in Southey's Life of Wesley. Waugh's own

INTRODUCTION.

. XXI mother used to tell with pride of Wesley's visits to her father's cottage, and of how the great man had spoken kindly to her and stroked down her hair. Among these uncles on both sides — the Waughs, and Howarths, and Leaches, will be found, I think, the originals of the men who are so graphi ca'ly described in the well-known poem of " Eawr Folk." Edwin Waugh was between two and three years old at the time of Peterloo, and he could just remember the coronation of George IV. He was but nine years old when his father died. Of him he had but few reminiscences, but he cherished the recollection of walking out with him at night, and being taught the names of the constellations. Up to this time the family appears to have been in fairly comfortable circumstances, but when the widowed mother was left to struggle with the business of the shoe-shop alone they soon began to feel what he calls himself, quoting fiom John Collier, "the iron teeth of penury."

For three years they were driven to reside in a cellar-dwelling, and knew what it was to eke out their scanty food with nettles and passion-dock, or "poor man's cabbage," as it is often called in Lancashire, " boiled, strained, and eaten with bacon or bacon dripping." This poverty, however, never meant squalor or untidiness. In after life he spoke of his mother as " the most cleanly woman he had ever known, both in house and person and attire." No reader of his works would need to be told this. Nothing comes out more strongly than his inbred hatred of dirt, and his keen sympathy with all poor, struggling, and clean persons. Waugh had no schooling before he was seven years of age, but his mother taught him to read very early, and the

INTRODUCTION.

. books which his father had left were always handy on the window sill — the usual bookcase in a poor man's cottage. In " An Old Man's Memories " — to which I am indebted for many of the facts included in this sketch — Waugh gives a list of these books— "The Bible, the Book of Common Prayer, ' Wesley's Hymns,' ' Baxter's Saints' Rest,' ' Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress,' ' Foxe's Book of Martyrs,' a ' Compen dium of the history of England,' ' Culpepper's Herbal,' a large quarto copy of ' Barclay's Dictionary,' and a few small elementary books." All these, he says, he read with avidity, except the 'Saints' Rest,' which he neglected. "Barclay's Dictionary" he studied more or less every day, and upon the " Book of Martyrs " he pored so long and earnestly that he often "imagined himself living in the reign of Queen Mary."

Many of Wesley's hymns he learned by heart, a venerable and kindly Welshman having offered him a penny for each hymn which he would commit to memory. Subsequently the boy's modest library was increased by the addition of an "Enfield's Speaker." This he regarded as a delightful book, probably because it would reveal for the first time something of what awaited him in the field of general litera ture. He carried it about with him, he says, in the day time, and took it to bed at night. The Rochdale in which the growing lad lived was, it should be remembered, a very different place to the town as we know it now. It was still small and picturesque. The moorland ridges were close at hand, and had not to be approached through long streets of houses; the green country could always be seen, and in the woods, within a few hundred yards of his mother's house, he could gather

INTRODUCTION.

. XXIII posies and acorns, and hear the church bells ringing curfew and chime. Quite within the town itself there was still standing the old haunted manor house of the Byrons (the author of " Childe Harold " was the last lordjof the manor), a place which Waugh describes as being for him as a child " steeped in romance." Like Wordsworth, he owed much to the river of his birthplace. The Roche was his Derwent, and — From his alder shades and rocky falls, And from his fords and shallows, sent a voice, That flowed along his dreams. To him it was "the fairest of all rivers." It could not be said to " blend its murmurs with his nurse's song," for no nurse watched over his gambols ; but on long summer days, when yet a mere infant, he angled and paddled in it untrammelled from morning till night. Not less attractive or fruitful were the human aspects of the place.