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  • Working Class Professors in the Nineteenth Century February 24, 2017

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
    Working Class Professors in the Nineteenth Century

    Imagine that you are born in the industrial heartlands of England to a working class family in the mid nineteenth-century. Aged six you are already sent out to earn a crust: let’s say you have to drive a donkey for a cruel master. You never get an education worth the name and still by your […]

    Boggart Stones and Boggart Smells April 2, 2016

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
    Boggart Stones and Boggart Smells

    Joseph Wright has, in his Dialect Dictionary, this absolutely unexpected definition for ‘boggart stones’, something associated with Eastern Lancashire (the ‘e. Lan. 1’ in his reference is to a local word list from those parts, A Glossary with Rochdale and Rossendale Words, the relevant entry for which is put in a screen capture below). Wright’s […]