William Barnes
William Barnes was a 19th-century English poet and schoolmaster, born on February 22, 1801, in North Dorset, England. He was deeply influenced by his mother, who nurtured his early artistic talents before her death in 1806. This loss propelled him into a life enriched by nature and aesthetics, leading him to explore the connection between beauty in nature and art, as articulated in his essay, "Thoughts on Beauty and Art." Barnes's educational journey began in local schools, and he later took on teaching roles, eventually founding his own school in Dorchester in 1835 to support his growing family.
His literary career spanned over fifty years, during which he produced more than one hundred works, including poetry, educational texts, and folktales, often celebrating rural life and the beauty of the English countryside. Influenced by personal tragedies, including the death of his wife in 1857, Barnes's writings reflect an appreciation for love and beauty, devoid of bitterness or malice. He embraced learning throughout his life, mastering eight languages, and believed that "There is no art without love." Barnes passed away on October 7, 1866, leaving a legacy that intertwines the themes of nature, beauty, and human experience.
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Subject Terms
William Barnes
Poet
- Born: February 22, 1801
- Birthplace: Rush-Hay, near Sterminster-Newton, North Dorset, England
- Died: October 7, 1886
- Place of death: Winterborne Came, Dorset, England
Biography
William Barnes was born on February 22, 1801, at the tenant farm Rush-Hay, near Sterminster-Newton, in North Dorset, England. Inspired by his mother, who often described for him the art she had seen, and who encouraged his drawing talents, Barnes at an exceptionally young age looked forward to becoming an artist.
Barnes’s mother died in 1806, however, and his approach to drawing would change, though his respect for art would not. Enhanced by his roaming the countryside at his uncle’s farm, where he loved to indulge in all that nature offered, and touched by an early exposure to aesthetics, his poetry would embrace what he defined in his nonfiction work, “Thoughts on Beauty and Art,” as the most perfect of unions when he said, “The beautiful in Nature is the unmarred result of God’s first creative or forming will, and the beautiful in Art is the result of an unmistaken working of man in accordance with the beautiful in Nature.”
With this attitude, he went first to a dame’s school in Sturminster-Newton and then to a church school. His encounters with, and fascination-cum-attraction to, Jemmy Jenkins affected Barnes deeply. This local necromancer encouraged the seven- or eight- year-old to peruse his more than two hundred astrology, magic, and black arts books, though Barnes’s father strictly forbade it. The books did no harm to the instinctively rational Barnes but instead gave him license to indulge in the new art of reading.
With the teen’s first two jobs—copy-clerking and engrossing clerking—came his next expressions of artisanship. With a four-year courtship with and 1822 betrothal to Julia Miles, whose father was adamant that he be solvent, came Barnes’s first academic position. As schoolmaster in 1823, he taught at Mere in Wiltshire, made enough money to marry, and took Julia as his wife in 1827. Because having six children and a wife to support made demands on his finances, in 1835, Barnes went to Dorchester and founded his own school, wherein he was a superior schoolmaster in his time. Also superior was his poetic career process, which in three distinct phases over fifty years saw him establishing a voice, defining his subject(s) as the country inhabitants and countryside he knew and loved, and prolifically publishing both verse and philological explications.
Influenced early to read, appreciate, and enjoy the perfection of art and nature, immersed in the lifestyle of the holy orders he took in 1847, and severely impacted by his wife’s death in 1857, Barnes spent the remainder of his life ensconced in reading, learning eight languages, and writing prose, verse, educational books, plays, and folktales. In none of his works—which number over one hundred—does there exist any bitterness, any evil, any misery other than the commonplace and natural of the country and the culture of his Victorian age. Instead, his work is tightly, even when logically, focused on subjects he believed should celebrate beauty and love, for, as he once said, and as he would take to his grave on October 7, 1866, “There is no art without love.”