This series, developed from Tom Burton's groundbreaking study, William Barnes's DIALECT POEMS: A PRONUNCIATION GUIDE (The Chaucer Studio Press, 2010), sets out to demonstrate for the first time what all of Barnes's dialect poems would have sounded like in the pronunciation of his own time and place. Every poem is accompanied by a facing-page phonemic transcript and by an audio recording freely available from this website. The free PDF includes links to the audio files as well.

When William Barnes began publishing poems in the Dorset County Chronicle in the 1830s in the dialect of his native Blackmore Vale, the first poems that appeared were in the form of eclogues - dialogues between country people on country matters. The phonemic transcripts in this book, based on the findings in T. L. Burton's William Barnes's Dialect Poems: A Pronunciation Guide (2010), show what the poems would have sounded like in Barnes's own time; the accompanying audio recordings (made at the 2010 Adelaide Fringe) give living voice to the sounds noted in the transcripts.