Wit, Character, Folklore & Customs of the North Riding of Yorkshire With a Glossary of over 4,000 Words and Idioms Now in Use — Edition Insights

A Collector’s Voice Between Platform and Page

Blakeborough’s narrative voice is that of a raconteur who expects a live audience. He addresses readers as if they were listeners in a room, using colloquial asides and self-deprecating remarks. In the preface, he notes that collaboration with the Rev. M. C. F. Morris proved 'quite impracticable,' so he undertook the work 'single-handed.' This personal framing continues throughout: he recalls an old servant who taught him a nonsense rhyme, and he presents folk tales with a storyteller’s timing. The tale of the boy with the magic stick is told with direct speech and repeated cues—'Now open it,' said the boy—that mimic oral delivery. Yet Blakeborough also shifts into a scholarly mode when he interprets the tale’s 'mythological essentials,' comparing it to Eastern stories and early religious creeds. This oscillation between folk narrator and amateur mythologist is a defining feature of the book’s pace.

Dialect as Living Record: The Glossary’s Reach

The glossary, advertised as containing 'over 4,000 Words and Idioms Now in Use,' is the book’s most systematic element. Blakeborough does not simply list definitions; he embeds dialect in the surrounding chapters, so that terms like 'leeak' (to look) appear in context before being catalogued. The transcriber’s note records a correction on page 262: 'To leeak a bad leeak' was originally glossed as 'to leeak ill' but changed to 'to look ill,' showing the editor’s care with phonetic spellings. The glossary entries are cross-referenced, though some target words are missing, hinting at the work’s incomplete state. Blakeborough’s method is to capture speech as he heard it, not to standardise. This gives the glossary a documentary quality: it preserves pronunciations and usages that were already fading in 1898, making the book a valuable record of North Riding vernacular.

Pacing Through Tale and Commentary

The book’s rhythm alternates between lengthy folk narratives and brief, puzzling fragments. The 'gold-dropping ass' story unfolds over several paragraphs, with Blakeborough interrupting to explain its symbolism. Then, without transition, he presents a doggerel rhyme learned from an old servant: 'There was a man who lived in Leeds, / He set his garden full of seeds…' The rhyme’s surreal logic—snow melting into a ship without a belt—contrasts sharply with the preceding mythological analysis. Blakeborough admits the rhyme’s meaning is 'beyond me' and invites a student to work it out. This abrupt shift from interpretation to bewilderment is characteristic. The reader moves from a tale with a clear moral (the stick beats the wicked) to a nonsense verse that resists explanation. Such juxtapositions create a varied reading experience, where the pace slows for folkloric exegesis and quickens with cryptic snippets.

Blakeborough’s work is best approached as a miscellany rather than a unified treatise. Readers may dip into the glossary, sample a tale, or follow the thread of a custom. The author’s chatty voice invites browsing, but his mythological asides reward closer attention. The book’s value lies in its accumulation of detail—a word, a rhyme, a story—that might otherwise have been lost. Treat it as a cabinet of curiosities, not a systematic study.

Blakeborough’s Yorkshire volume holds its words like river stones, worn smooth by generations of telling. I find the same patient trust in Stories the Iroquois Tell Their Children — A Closer Reading, where each tale waits quietly, expecting a listener who knows that a story’s true weight lies not in its plot, but in the shared breath between teller and child. Both books keep that old, gentle faith.