Description

The Westmorland Dialogues were written at the end of the eighteenth century after Ann Wheeler, born in Cartmel in 1734, returned north from London on the death of her sea captain husband, to be companion to her brother, William Coward at Arnside Tower.  The Dialogues feature homely conversations between local women, which amusingly tell of superstitions, merry-nights, cock fights, courting, weddings, christenings and bereavements, fashions and hair styles, army recruitment, spinning and cockling, fairs and markets.

The author’s original  intention was to capture on paper the sounds associated with the local speech but, as she admitted, it frequently obscured the original meaning of words and idioms.  In this book, local researcher and historian, Leonard Smith, seeks to uncover what the Dialogues reveal about social life in the most southerly parts of Westmorland in the closing years of the eighteenth century by offering a translation and interpretation of the original Dialogues, to make them intelligible for a modern audience.

This publication is made available to the Landscape Trust online shop by Arnside Archive.

104pp. Lensden Publishing 2011  ISBN: 978-0-9551992-7-1