dave,

 

The quick and dirty answer is that the Larry poem originates as a printed text in Dublin in the 1780s, and it’s about twenty years before the first Anglicised version appears (in _The Festival of Anacreon_, which whoever wrote the Wiki entry actually manages to note, but fails to register the earlier non-Anglicised version).

 

There are actually two different Anglicisations, one stemming from _The Festival of Anacreon_ text and another, which is the one which gets into Farmer’s anthology, _Musa Pedestris_, arriving via Father Prout’s French (sic!!!) translation.  Heavy weird.

 

And yes, they did speak that way then (and to a degree apparently do in Dublin still) with

alveolar stops ( [t] and [d] ) taking the place of dental fricatives ( [th] ) – thus the AAVE connection.

 

It’s not just a single text (Larry) but a set of texts representing something like language as she was actually spoke on the Street then, there.  None of the others get Anglicised, and all the texts date from a very specific place and period – late eighteenth century Dublin.

 

Whether the Larry text would have become as popular and (relatively) familiar in England as it does, if it hadn’t been doctored, is a question.  I’m inclined almost to classify the familiar version as a translation rather than simply a regularisation or Anglisation.

 

An Irish civil servant who produced the only (relatively full) collection of the texts, in 1938, remarks at the end of his article *** that he’s going to go on and produce a study of the language of the texts, but he never did.  And more to the point, *no one* has.  It’s as if they vanish from history.

 

There was a market for such texts – most of them come from a downmarket printer called Grogan – but they were never as popular or as widely-distributed as Standard English/Irish texts, even in Ireland.

 

Hm ...  Think of the difference in distribution of Tom Leonard’s work vs. the distribution of work in the less densely Glasgwegian register of James Kelman.  It’s (I think) more than simply poetry vs. prose, though this is obviously an aspect of it.  Jim did write one story, “Nice tae be nice”, in a denser Glasgow speech than he later employed.  I’m majorly aware of this because that story was originally censored – as in, the printer refused to print the bloody text, along with, which is partly why I’m aware of this, a poem of my own in the same issue of the magazine in which it eventually appeared.

 

I’m not sure how much of my own experience in Glasgow in the sixties, and the whole brouhaha around the Glasgow Language Wars at the time, I’m reading back into Dublin in the 1780s, especially having been there at the moment when it all started, when Tom Leonard read (sic! the voice!) “The Good Thief” aloud at Philip Hobsbaum’s flat in I think 1967 or 1968.

 

As it is, the bastards managed to neuter Larry in a way that they didn’t with Tom’s “Six Glasgow Poems” and subsequent texts.

 

As is probably apparent, I’m carrying a lot of heavy baggage in this area.  (There was a time when I would have been offended, deeply offended, if someone had used the word “dialect” in my presence.  That, along with the avoidance of an apostrophe, is one of the stopped-at-the-frontier signals by which you can identify a veteran of the Glasgow Language Wars.)

 

Best,

 

Robin

 

*** 

O’Sullivan, Donal, “Dublin slang songs, with music,” Dublin Historical Record  Vol. I, no. 3 (September 1938), pp. 75-93.

 

---

 

From: [log in to unmask]" href="mailto:[log in to unmask]" target="_blank">David Bircumshaw

Sent: Tuesday, October 14, 2014 9:02 PM

To: [log in to unmask]" href="mailto:[log in to unmask]" target="_blank">[log in to unmask]

Subject: Re: Larry from Dublin (continued)

 

that's very interesting Rob but an assumption is made that there was an 'original' text in in non-Anglicised English whereas surely any text rather than orally transmitted version would have been liable to be set up by the printers in the King's English, as it were?  What I am asking is whether there is any evidence of a market for printed texts in non-standard English orthography in the eighteenth or early nineteenth century and if so why? For if pupils were taught to read it would have been in the standard English style not a modern attempt at restoring a lost vernacular?

best

dave
 

 

On 14 October 2014 06:09, Robin Hamilton <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

Crucially

John Edward Walsh, _Ireland sixty years ago_ (1851), Chap. 8 -- Slang Songs [etc.] , for background on Larry, who he was, who might have written the poem, etc.

 

http://books.google.ie/books?id=NSENAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA68&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=3#v=onepage&q&f=false

 

There are (at least) nine texts from Dublin in the 1780s relevant to Larry – six poems dealing with criminals and their associates, one written in the same mode of speech, and two parodies: