In 1823, at the start of what was to be a thirty-nine-year career as a schoolmaster, William Barnes was studying Latin, Greek, French, Italian, and German. "I began Persian with Lee's grammar," he wrote years later in an autobiographical notebook for his daughter, "and for a little time Russian, which, as being wanting in old lore, I soon cast off." The anecdote says much about the whole of his life and work: pressing financial necessity which drove him to a defunct school at Mere in Wiltshire, where he did not want to go; a quick, ready, and practical mind which, coupled with a taste for hard work, gave him mastery of a prodigious variety of skills and subjects; a taste for the exotic, the old, and the arcane which ran counter to worldly interest; and a complete trust in nature and the domestic passions which enabled him patiently to...