Ann Wheeler (1734-1804)

Ann Wheeler from Arnside published her The Westmoreland Dialect in Three Familiar Dialogues in a period when the standard of correctness of language was a hot political issue. In analysing Wheeler’s work, published in 1790 by the Kendal printer James Ashburner, Daniel Dewispelare has noted a “subversive affiliation with radical linguistic localizers like Thomas Spence, Joseph Ritson, and James Elphinston, all of whom resisted standardized language in favor of pluricentric, nonhierarchical writing systems.”

Dewispelare also stresses that by drawing from the methods of contemporaneous grammar books like Anne Fisher‘s, Wheeler “schools Standard English readers in how they might digest Westmoreland English.” Her dialect text “progressively trains the reader to read it” as she constructs her dialogues such that speech patterns are repeated “so regularly that they gradually become legible; the internalization of grammar happens through practice, after all”.

Consideration of ‘Ann of Arnside Tower’ allows for a contemporary understanding about what ‘local culture’ might have meant to a woman from Westmorland in the late eighteenth-century. Wheeler suggests that dialect-speakers like her were being ‘othered’ by fashionable visitors to the region whose picaresque tourism was little more than voyeurism. Although she may not have identified as a political radical her work can therefore be considered truly subversive as she places the provinces at the centre forcing most of her readers to undergo a shift from the acrolect of Standard English to a more unfamilar but perfectly coherent perspective.