Edward Eggleston on Dialect

Abstract

HE ANNOTATIONS TO THE LIBRARY EDITION of The Hoosier School-Master, issued in I892-twenty-one years after the first edition--comprise the most obvious evidence supporting recognition of Edward Eggleston as a pioneer student of dialect. There is other evidence, however, including two unpublished fragments among the Eggleston Papers in the Collection of Regional History at Cornell. One of these fragments concerns the Hoosier dialect; the other, the speech of the Southern Negro. After 188o, the year Eggleston deliberately became an historian, he viewed his early novels as contributions to social history. Today we endorse that view, but we also insist they have other values too, among them their trail-blazing use of Western dialect. The 1892 annotations might suggest a retrospective rationale of an effort made without clearly conscious purpose, but the facts show otherwise. As early as 1863, while pastor of a Methodist church in St. Paul, Minnesota, Eggleston wrote down a list of 'Hoosierisms'2 and pondered how he could use them. The first chance came in 1864, when he sent to the St. Paul Press a 'Letter to General Gorman from a Hoosier.'3 He used the