Posts
Some posters from William Barnes' Scrapbooks, Dorset County Museum, William Barnes Archive, with enormous thanks to Marion Tait, Honorary Curator of the William Barnes Gallery and Archive - this posting is intended for possible linking to the William Barnes Society website. NB - these posters are pasted down in a precious scrapbook (except for the final Mere poster) hence the impossibility of photographing them on a flat surface.
"It has been calculated that Barnes gave at least 178 lectures to working mens' institutes throughout Dorset, Hampshire, Wiltshire and Somerset". Alan Chedzoy, William Barnes, A Life of the Dorset Poet, 1985. In a note, Alan Chedzoy cites Trevor Hearl's William Barnes the Schoolmaster, 1966 (page 311). In Trevor Hearl's words: "Well into his 70's, he travelled some ten thousand wintry miles over the roads and railways of Wessex, lecturing to Mechanics' Institutes from Bristol to Southampton, from Wellington to Salisbury, often in remote villages, at the invitation of a score of societies. The evidence of 178 recorded lectures shows that instructive topics yielded to popular demands for poetry readings".
No comments:
Post a Comment