George Eliot’s dialects live on in my corner of Derbyshire

A slow reader but someone who has to plough through stuff for work, I skim and flick uneasily, and by middle age had almost completely lost my teenage habit of unhurried reading for pleasure. But in the last decade I’ve started again in a gentle way to read fiction and biography for amusement alone. It was George Eliot who tempted me back. Middlemarch fair blew me away. The Mill on the Floss followed, then Silas Marner. And while in Africa last month I decided to tackle her first novel, Adam Bede.

Eliot’s reputation has no need of my support. Suffice it to say she’s the reason I’ve never attempted a novel: after George Eliot, what would be the point? The chord she strikes in my soul resonates on every page.

But years of reading-for-work have left me almost unable to tackle a printed page without a pencil in hand; I make marginal notes reflexively, for no particular purpose. So reading Adam Bede in aeroplanes, hotels and on the road — and struck most forcefully with the similarity of the rural dialect in which her characters speak, and that of the more homespun natives of the Derbyshire-Staffordshire borders where I live today, I began to note down similarities and differences between her rural English and that spoken in the same places some 150 years later.

I’m pretty sure they’re the same places. ‘Oakbourne’ must be Ashbourne, of course; but, more tentatively, I think (from her physical descriptions) that Wirksworth is probably her ‘Stoniton’ or ‘Snowfield’. Insofar as the main story is set anywhere, I think it lies not far off the A515 road from Ashbourne to Draycott-in-the-Clay … but enough of my Derbyshire-centric theories. Here is my list of changes and similarities in language.