William Barnes’s time in Dorchester
He may have been born in Bagber and married at Nailsea, but Dorchester was the defining home of William Barnes, says Michael Handy
Published in December ’19
E The statue commemorating William Barnes outside St Peter’s Church
The first statue to be erected in the town centre of Dorchester on 4 February 1889 was just outside St Peter’s Church. The bronze, full-height statue memorialises the poet, philologist and teacher, William Barnes who had died two and a half years before.
One of his former pupils, the surgeon and author Sir Frederick Treves, wrote of the act of ‘tardy grace’ in erecting the statue, that: ‘the folk of Dorchester ignore Barnes while he lived,’ only honouring him ‘when he had passed beyond the sound of their applause’.
One of Barnes’s daughters, Lucy, wrote of her father’s bitter exclamation that: ‘They might be putting up a statue to me some day when I am dead, while all I want now is leave to live. I asked for bread and they gave me a stone.’
Yet Barnes’s time in the town was not of unalloyed sorrow. He had the best of times and the worst of times in the two periods when he lived in Dorchester: 1816-1823, when he moved to Mere, and then 1835-1862 after he returned, up to his being offered the living as priest at Winterborne Came.
He originally moved to Dorchester from the Blackmore Vale when his then employer died. It was there he met his beloved wife Julia and there where he wrote much of his most important work.
Nappers Mite, next to one of the schools Barnes founded and opposite another
His meeting of Julia is slightly shrouded in mystery, at least in terms of chronology. His daughter Lucy, writing many years later, stated that Barnes saw Julia stepping from a coach in 1819 as the family arrived in Dorchester. That seems a little too good to be true, and it seems likely it is. The Miles family had already been living in Dorchester for five or six years before the Barnes and Julia first saw each other.
They did, however, certainly meet, and by the following year, Barnes was smitten if frustrated. He decided a written invitation was required. At some time in 1820 Barnes wrote to Julia requesting that she accompanied him to a concert. She was now fifteen years of age.
The invitation, undated and almost certainly delivered by hand late at night, is believed to be their first and only letter during that year.
It reads: ‘Miss Miles,
There being no possibility of my having an oral communication with you, I have presumed to trouble you with a Letter, to request that you will grant me the happiness of conducting you and your Sister to the concert tomorrow Evening.
Intreating you to pardon my presumption
I remain
Yours devotedly
Wm Barnes
Dorchester
Tuesday.’
Barnes tried to carve out a niche as an engraver in his younger days
Theirs was a clandestine courtship, meeting mainly by accident but doubtless also by design. In this instance speculation is increased when Barnes suggests that he was unable to talk to Julia on that day. He was certainly in haste as the invitation was given at such short notice. The adverse interpretation of Barnes’s comments is that Mr and Mrs Miles had banned any contact between the two as they were unhappy with this shy young man paying court to their youngest daughter.
In 1820, Barnes produced, at his own expense a pamphlet entitled ‘Poetical Pieces’
One of these was entitled Destiny, and it is clear that tings hadn’t been going quite according to plan.
‘Her fortunate stars had to Julia given,
Of lovers a numerous train,
Who for twelvemonths, or more, had incessantly striven To win her fair hand – but in vain.
They were all youths of merit, although they were poor
And to one she’d nigh given her heart:
and her father he lik’d the pecun’ary ore,
Insomuch that in one of his passions he swore
That Julia should ne’er again enter his door,
If to him she her hand should impart.’
Despite roundly insulting his proposed in-laws, Barnes eventually managed to convince them of his worthiness for their daughter’s hand.
Julia and he eventually married and spent twelve years in Mere, where he went to take over a school.
In 1835 The Barnes family, including by now three children, moved back to Dorset to set up a school. The first was in a house in Durngate Street, Dorchester. Later they moved to a house next door to Napper’s Mite in South Street.
Two years later, tragedy struck, when William and Julia’s fist son, Julius, died, just four months after Barnes’s biographer daughter Lucy was born. What is odd about Julius’s birth and death is that nowhere is either happening mentioned in any family journal.
In 1847 they settled in the house on the west side of the same street which bears a tablet commemorating his fifteen years residence there. His life was full, with his school, his children and his friends, amongst them, a young Thomas Hardy.
Another Dorset writer, Llewelyn Powys, in a pen portrait of Barnes, wrote: ‘William Barnes was a man of old- fashioned tastes and habits. Up to the day of his death he was accustomed to wear the eighteenth-century dress. Thomas Hardy gives us this delightful glimpse of him: “Few figures were more familiar to the eye in the county town of Dorset on a market day than an aged man, quaintly attired in capel cloak, knee breeches, and buckled shoes with a leather satchel slung over his shoulders and a stout staff in his hand …..
The first photo of Barnes from 1852, in the year his beloved wife Julia died. In a painting seven years before, he had a neatly trimmed beard with dark hair.
Every Saturday morning he might be seen trudging up the narrow South Street of Dorchester till he reached the four crossways. Halting here opposite the public clock, he would pull his old-fashioned watch from its deep fob and set it with great precision to London time.”‘
Barnes, as well as teaching, was in the most fertile writing period of his life. His first collection of ‘Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect’ was published in 1844. His interest in archaeology and geology (and being instrumental in preventing the railway companies from destroying Poundbury and Maumbury Rings) led him to become co-founder of Dorset County Museum in 1845.
In 1846 his ‘Poems of Rural Life in National English’ was published and a philological grammar in 1854, having mastered not only the classics but sixty other languages.
In between times, though, 1852 was an annus horribilis for Barnes. In his scrapbook of that year, he wrote: ‘June 21. A day of sorrow and beginning a train of sorrows – At half after eleven o’clock in the morning, my great loss. I took my sadness to constant work, out of work as well as in it.’
Barnes’s engraving of St Peter’s Church, outside which his statue would later be erected
He also wrote in his diary: ‘Monday 21st June: Oh! day of overwhelming woe! That which I greatly dreaded has come upon me. God has withdrawn from me his choicest worldly gift. Who can measurethe greatness, the vastness of my loss? I am undone. Lord have mercy upon me. My dearest Julia left me at 11.30 in the morning.’
Llewelyn Powys gives a very positive review of Barnes’s work in his time in Dorchester: ‘In many of his poems, also, we come upon the expression of that sturdy devotion [of the men of Dorset]for the actual soil out of which they have sprung, which time and again has enabled the simple folk of the west “to show the mettle of their pastures” in England’s hour of need.
‘We Do’set, though we mid be hwomely
Be’nt asheamed to own our pleace
An we’ve zome women not uncomely
Nor asheamed to show their feace:
We’ve a mead or two wo’th mowen
We’ve an ox or two wo’th showen
In the village.
At the tillage,
Come along and you shall vind
That Dorset men don’t sheame their kind.
The primrwose in the sheade do blow,
The cowslip in the zun, The thyme upon the down do grow,
The clote where streams do run;
And where do pretty maidens grow
And blow, but where the tow’r
Do rise among the bricken tuns,
In Blackmwore by the Stour.’
As Powys put it, ‘In his power of portraying the pathos inherent in the transitory nature of all things human, he may be said to rival Wordsworth. He understood only too well the sorrow of a man for the woman he has lost, or a mother for her child, amongst a people whose deep natures are not easily to be comforted.’
Powys concluded with a signally tragic addendum: ‘It is said that he himself for nearly forty years wrote down each day in his journal the name of his dead wife.’
