Readers familiar with William Barnes's dialect poems are likely to be taken aback by the unfamiliarity of the spellings they encounter in this volume. That is because the text of all modern editions of the poems (the only text with which readers are likely to be familiar) is based on that of the final collection published in Barnes's lifetime, Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect (1879), a book containing a revised version of each of the three separate collections of dialect poems that Barnes had published previously, brought together for the first time in a single volume; and that volume uses a spelling system which differs markedly from that of the first edition of the first collection (published in 1844), the text that is reprinted here.

As a young man in his late teens and early twenties Barnes had published two collections of poems in the standard English of his day: Poetical Pieces (1820) and Orra: A Lapland Tale (1822). In 1834 (at the age of thirty-three) he published his first poem in dialect, in the Dorset County Chronicle (DCC). Ten years later, after publishing about 120 poems in dialect in the DCC, gradually refining the spelling system he used to portray dialect speech, Barnes brought out his first collection of dialect poems, containing all those poems that had first appeared in the DCC.