17 Facts About William Barnes

William Barnes was an English polymath, writer, poet, philologist, priest, mathematician, engraving artist and inventor.

William Barnes was born in the parish of Bagber, Dorset, to John William Barnes, a tenant-farmer in the Vale of Blackmore.

William Barnes married Julia Miles, the daughter of an exciseman from Dorchester, in 1827.

William Barnes was ordained into the Church of England in 1847, taking a BD degree from St John's College, Cambridge, in 1851.

William Barnes served curacies at Whitcombe Church in Whitcombe, Dorset, from 1847 to 1852, and again from 1862.

William Barnes became rector of St Peter's Church, Winterborne Came, with Winterborne Farringdon, Dorset, from 1862 to his death.

Shortly before his death, he was visited at Old Came Rectory by Thomas Hardy and Edmund Gosse; in a letter, Gosse wrote that William Barnes was "dying as picturesquely as he lived":.

William Barnes had a scarlet bedgown on, a kind of soft biretta of dark red wool on his head, from which his long white hair escaped on to the pillow; his grey beard, grown very long, upon his breast; his complexion, which you recollect as richly bronzed, has become blanched by keeping indoors, and is waxily white where it is not waxily pink; the blue eyes, half shut, restless under languid lids.

William Barnes first contributed the Dorset dialect poems for which he is best known to periodicals, including Macmillan's Magazine; a collection in book form Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect, was published in 1844.

William Barnes's philological works include Philological Grammar, Se Gefylsta, an Anglo-Saxon Delectus, Tiw, or a View of Roots, and a Glossary of Dorset Dialect, and among his other writings is a slim volume on "the Advantages of a More Common Adoption of The Mathematics as a Branch of Education, or Subject of Study", published in 1834.

William Barnes is buried in Winterborne Came churchyard beneath a Celtic cross.

The plinth of the cross has the inscription: 'In Memory of William Barnes, Died 7 October 1886.

William Barnes had a strong interest in linguistics; he was fluent in Greek, Latin, French, Hebrew, Hindi, Italian, Russian, Welsh, Cornish and Old English.

William Barnes called for the purification of English by removal of Greek, Latin and foreign influences so that it might be better understood by those without a classical education.

William Barnes's coinages included such words as sun-print for photograph, wortlore for botany, and welkinfire for meteor.

Uniquely fond of the Dorset dialect, which he felt to be particularly near to English's Anglo-Saxon roots, William Barnes wrote many of his poems in the local parlance of Dorset.

Additionally, as well as avoiding the use of foreign words in his poetry, William Barnes frequently employed alliterative verse, the repetition of consonantal sounds.