Nineteenth-Century Illinois Dialect: Robert Casey

Abstract

IN 1906 ROBERT CASEY, Denver educator and businessman, published a fictionalized account of his own boyhood in southern Illinois in the late 1850s and early 1860s. Entitled The Parson's Boys, his book is a specimen of that type of literature which includes Tom Sawyer and Penrod--stories about children growing up in what already seemed to be a simpler and better past. And like many other books that were popular near the turn of the century, The Parson's Boys uses literary dialect extensively in its characterizations. Robert Casey was born in southern Illinois in 1856, the son and grandson of itinerant Methodist ministers.' grandfather, a native of Kentucky and a descendent of a prominent Virginia family, arrived in Illinois in 1818 as part of the settlement pattern discussed by Albert Marckwardt (1957), Raven and Virginia McDavid (1960), and Timothy Frazer (1978), among others. father, the model for the parson in the story, was an early settler of Franklin County, Illinois, and was pastor of a church in Alton, Illinois, during the Civil War. Casey wove these biographical details into The Parson's Boys, using actual or thinly disguised place and family names to create the pseudonymous Parson Flint and his family. Parson Flint, his two young sons Nathan and William (in real life, respectively, the author and his brother William Van Cleve Casey), and the family's neighbors are the principal users of the book's literary dialect. Casey describes the dialect when he introduces Parson Flint to the reader: His early education had been scant .... When talking with his parishioners, his speech was usually that of the backwoods where he had been born and reared; it was rude and ungrammatical, though often forceful (p. 16). This description reveals Casey's literary intention clearly: like Twain, Eggleston, Harris, and numerous Old Southwest humorists, he sought to produce a literary dialect in which uneducated and often colorful departures from standard usage are themselves the source of entertainment at the same time that they give dimension to the story's characters. Casey was far removed in time, distance, and experience from his Illinois boyhood when he published his book in 1906.2 The exact date of