William Barnes (1801—1886) wrote poems in Standard English from an early age. Suddenly, in his early 30s, he began to write poems in the local dialect: “I wrote the first of my Dorset poems … when I was kept to my room in an ailing from a chill. It was one of the dialogues called an eclogue, and was printed in the poet's corner of the Dorset County Chronicle where almost all of them first came out,” he wrote in a notebook now at St John's College, Cambridge. This is not the place for a detailed discussion of the eclogue as a literary form; suffice to say here that the word has come to denote a dialogue between country people, that it takes its form from the Idylls of Theocritus and its name from the Eclogues of Virgil, that it became progressively more artificial over time, moving away from its earthy roots and weighed down by the conventions of the pastoral tradition, and that Barnes restored it to its former vigour and naturalism.

The poem was an immediate success, and became the first in a series of eight eclogues published within the next two years, each originally with a Latin title and an English subtitle:

1. 1. Rusticus Dolens: Inclosures of Common, 2 January 1834

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