Landscape and Other Poems (York, 1815) by the same
author. A dialogue poem by Lewis, entitled The Pocket Books," appears in
later chap-books. It cannot be claimed for him that his poetic power
is of a high standard, but as the first Yorkshire peasant poet to write
dialect verse he calls for notice here. His "Elegy on the Death of a
Frog" is perhaps chiefly interesting as showing the influence of Burns
upon Yorkshire poets at the beginning of the nineteenth century. In
idea, and in the choice of verse, it is directly modelled on the famous
"To a Mouse."

The reader will doubtless have noticed that in this historic review of
Yorkshire dialect poetry it has always been the life of rural Yorkshire
which is depicted, and that the great bulk of the poetry has belonged to
the North Riding. What we have now to trace is the extension of this
revival of vernacular poetry to the densely populated West Riding, where
a dialect differing radically from that of the, north and east is spoken,
and where, an astonishing variety of industries has created an equally
varied outlook upon life and habit of thought. Was the Sheffield cutler,
the Barnsley miner, the Bradford handloom-weaver, and the Leeds forge-man
to find no outlet in dialect verse for his thoughts and emotions, his
hopes and his fears? Or, if dialect poetry must be concerned only with
rustic life, was the Craven dalesman to have no voice in the matter?
Questions such as these may well have passed through the minds of West
Riding men as they saw the steady growth of North Riding poetry in the
first forty years of the nineteenth century, and passed from hand to hand
the well-thumbed chap-books wherein were included poems like "Awd Daisy,"
"The Sweeper and Thieves," and the dialect-songs. The desire to have a
share in the movement became more and more urgent, and when the West
Riding joined in, it was inevitable that it should widen the scope of
dialect poetry both in spirit and in form.

A West Riding dialect literature seems to have arisen first of all in
Barnsley and Sheffield in the fourth decade of the nineteenth century.
Between 1830 and 1834 a number of prose "conversations" entitled, The
Sheffield Dialect.' Be a Shevvild Chap, passed through the press. The
author of these also published in 1832 The Wheelswarf Chronicle, and in
1836 appeared the first number of The Shevvild Chap's Annual in which the
writer throws aside his nom-de-plume and signs himself Abel Bywa