The Writings of John Stevenson

The following is an abridged excerpt from A Boy in the Country (1912) by John Stevenson. His previous work, Pat M‘Carty, Farmer, of Antrim: His Rhymes with a Setting, published in 1905, proportionately contains much more poetry, of a good standard. Like many authors of his time who attempted to write in Ulster dialect, he tended towards the use of forms that are perhaps verging on Northern Hiberno-English. However, this is more true of his prose than his poetry.

Academic researchers have noted that, more recently, Ulster-Scots speakers prone to code-switching (which means changing their speech according to the perceived status of the person they are addressing) generally revert to a form of Northern Hiberno-English rather than to accented Standard English. Over time this results in a dilution of their Ulster-Scots vocabulary. For instance, it is now common for Ulster-Scots speakers to use tuk for the past tense of the verb ‘take’, and rarely is the older Scots form taen heard. At the time when Stevenson was writing, Ulster authors of the vernacular aspired to have their books read by an English audience, and this undoubtedly influenced the density of the dialectal content in their texts.

The author, writing in the first person as a young boy who has temporarily moved to the country, locates the scene on a country lane that starts ambitiously and virtually peters out after three fields’ length. It begins well and wide at a gate of the courtyard.

“A little house is mine beneath the hill.”

From A Boy in the Country