... cutler, the Barnsley miner, the Bradford handloom-weaver, and the Leeds forge-man to find no outlet in dialect verse for his thoughts and emotions, his hopes and his fears? Or, if dialect poetry must be concerned only with rustic life, was the Craven dalesman to have no voice in the matter? Questions such as these may well have passed through the minds of West Riding men as they saw the steady growth of North Riding poetry in the first forty years of the nineteenth century, and passed from hand to hand the well-thumbed chap-books wherein were included ... — Yorkshire Dialect Poems • F.W. Moorman