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Cornish and Fisher (1937) [1] gave a fourth order approximation for the percentile of the F-distribution by approximating the cumulants of Z = 1 / 2 log F . We obtain an alternative formula by approximating the cumulants of F. Hill and Davis (1968) [2] gave Cornish–Fisher type expansions about any asymptotically normal distribution. We specialize their results to give expansions about the F-distribution.

This article follows on from related articles included within EJM 4-2008 and the “Cornish National Minority Report 2”, contained in EJM 3-2011.The purpose of this article will be to further illustrate the background to Cornish claims to be brought under the protection of the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities of the Council of Europe (FCNM). In doing so, it will expand upon some of the historical references, previously touched on in the above issues, but will also show the constitutional concept, historical perceptions and an insight into campaigns that serve to reinforce the Cornish people’s innate perceptions of themselves.

How does Cornwall Art Library support the cultural life of a county that is a magnet for tourists but has continuing economic problems? The historical background to the development of the internationally renowned art ‘colonies’ in West Cornwall illustrates how the libraries have become embedded within this history. Various initiatives from Cornwall Council should establish the county as a highly networked, vibrant and creative place, which will contribute to its future regeneration. Can the Library continue to reinvent resources in order to combine with the artistic community as a crucial part of the local economy?

Writing pseudonymously in the New Age in February 1909, Arnold Bennett, acerbic chronicler of Edwardian chapel culture, deplored the lack of proper bookshops in English provincial towns. A substantial manufacturing community, he claimed, might be served only by a stationers shop, offering ‘Tennyson in gilt. Volumes of the Temple Classics or Everyman. Hymn books, Bibles. The latest cheap Shakespeare. Of new books no example, except the brothers Hocking.’ Bennett’s lament was an unintended compliment to the ubiquity of the novels of Silas and Joseph Hocking, brothers whose literary careers spanned more than half a century, generating almost two hundred novels and innumerable serials and short stories. Silas Hocking (1850–1935), whose first book was published in 1878 and last in 1934, has been described as the most popular novelist of the late nineteenth century. By 1900 his sales already exceeded one million volumes. The career of Joseph Hocking (1860–1937) was slightly shorter, stretching from 1887 to 1936, but his output was equally impressive. The Hockings’ works have attracted interest principally among scholars of Cornish life and culture. It will be argued here, however, that they have significance for the history of late Victorian and Edwardian Nonconformity, both reflecting and reinforcing the attitudes, beliefs and prejudices of their large and appreciative readership.

Alex Millmow's 'The Power of Economic Ideas' has been a long time coming and its contents are already well known to Antipodean historians of economic thought. The book is the result of Millmow devoting the lion's share of his working life to reconstructing the way in which Australian economists in the 1930s formed a coherent theoretical and policy framework to mitigate the social and economic dislocation that defined Australia's second great depression. We have been drip-fed its contents for a decade with a parade of sound articles by Millmow in the History of Economics Review (and elsewhere) and conference papers delivered (with his typical verve) at local HETSA meetings; earlier manifestations of the narrative circulated freely for some time via the now ubiquitous web-link; and the PhD manuscript on which the book is based won the 2005 bi-annual HETSA prize for best doctoral dissertation. Dedicated readers have vetted its hypotheses, countless referees have probed its archival credentials, speakers from the conference floor have shaved the more daring and speculative of its claims, and multiple examiners have carefully weighed and assessed its numerous protocol statements. The final issue of these slowly revolving cogs of, now dated, scholarly machinery - made positively antediluvian in the face of supervisors from nearby disciplines proudly pumping out phenomenologically-driven PhDs by the thousand (and, without shame, breathlessly adding 'do you know he completed it within two years of starting') - is remarkably free from even minor errors. The author, his supervisor (Selwyn Cornish), the institution that placed its imprimatur on the dissertation (ANU), the society creating the scholarly milieu for the evolution of the ideas lying therein (HETSA), and the publisher (ANU E-Press) should be proud of the final product (even if the last should have insisted on an index for a tome that entails a cast of thousands and tortuous events that ripple out in every direction). And if the undergraduate students under the charge of all of these people did not suffer in the process, this is how it should be.

This article considers the cultural implications of the distinctive use of Old Testament personal names by Brittonic-speaking peoples (Welsh, Breton, and Cornish) in the centuries down to ca. 1100. An argument is made that the origin of the tradition is early, developing among the Britons in the Roman and sub-Roman periods. The case is made for the geographic dispersal of the practice, for the constructedness of British ecclesiastical identity, and the maintenance of the tradition among successive communities of the Brittonic-speaking peoples despite their other differences.

The PEN Club formed in London in 1921 as a dinner circle for writers. Though its founders preferred to emphasize the Club’s cultural significance, this article tracks PEN’s politicization during its first decade. A Cornish novelist named C.A. Dawson Scott proposed the Club as a way to heal the rifts of World War I. British writers of sufficient stature would meet monthly giving writers from abroad a forum to meet their British counterparts. PEN’s first President, the Nobel-prizer John Galsworthy, encouraged the group’s apolitical self-image. Writers should stand aside from politics, he argued, precisely so that they might influence the politicians, diplomats, and powerbrokers who had led the world to war. PEN members rarely spoke of politics when they gathered, instead debating the boundaries of “literary” writing and the role of art itself. By refining their conception of aesthetics and cordoning off a space for cultural activity within civil society, this article argues that PEN members made a bold move into the political sphere they professed merely to influence. In doing so they foreshadowed the position that predominated among centrist and liberal writers on the Western side of the Iron Curtain during the Cold War.

This article is meant to be an introduction to the Cornish National Minority Report 2, which was published in 2011 and whose contents have been printed almost in full in the EJM. At the same time, this article uses the case of Cornwall to highlight how the Council of Europe Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities, which falls short of defining the term “national minority”, may nevertheless provide valuable political and verbal support to those minorities in Europe which are peacefully striving for recognition.

This report comprises a statement requesting the recognition of the Cornish as a minority worthy of protection according to the Council of Europe Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities. This statement has been backed by all political parties represented in the Cornwall Council, the unitary authority for Cornwall in the United Kingdom. The report puts forth arguments in support of the recognition of the Cornish minority and why the Cornish are currently “impeded from maintaining and celebrating their distinct identity”. Finally, the advantages of an inclusion of the Cornish into the Framework Convention are being highlighted.

Modernism tends to be criticised, internationally, as politically conservative. The objection is often valid, although the charge says little about the quality of artistic achievement involved. This article argues that the alliance between Modernism and political conservatism is by no means a necessary one, and that there are instances where modernist vision has been used to convey substantive political insight, effective social critique and solid resistance. To illustrate the contrast, the article juxtaposes the abstract Modernism associated with Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth, working in the remote Cornish fishing village of St Ives during World War 2, with a neglected strain of South African railway poetry which uses modernist techniques to effect a powerful critique of South Africa's apartheid dispensation. The article sustains a distinction between universalising modernist art that requires ethical work from its audiences to achieve artistic completion, and art in which modernist vision ...

The 2009 release of Bright Star, Jane Campion's film about John Keats's last years and his relationship with Fanny Brawne, engendered a range of reactions. Writing for The Guardian, Peter Bradshaw contended, "The movie is vulnerable to mockery or irony from pundits who might feel that ... their appreciation of the poet exceeds that of the director. Nonetheless, I think it is a deeply felt and intelligent film, one of those that has grown in my mind on a second viewing; it is almost certainly the best of Campion's career." A. O. Scott of The New York Times and Frances Wilson in the Times Literary Supplement likewise praised Campion's focus on the end of Keats's life through the lens of his love for Brawne. As Bradshaw anticipated, however, the response from academics was considerably more circumspect. One of the most vocal critics of Bright Star was Christopher Ricks, who took issue with both the actors' voicing of Keats's poems and with Jane Campion's more general approach to dramatizing Keats's lyricism. In The New York Review of Books, Ricks singles out Campion's literal-minded approach of providing concrete visual analogs for the images invoked in Keats's poems; a film should, above all, never offer simple "pictures of the very things that a great writer has superbly--by means of the chosen medium of words alone--enabled us to imagine, to picture. A film that proceeds to furnish competing pictures of its own will render pointless the previous acts of imagination that it purports to respect or to honor. For among the accomplishments of the poet is that he or she brings it about that we see with the mind's eye, as against the eye of flesh" (46). Ricks is not saying that poetry in general, or Keats's poetry in particular, is hostile to the cinematic imagination; rather, he finds fault with Campion's use of literal visual analogs for Keats's poetic images. For her part, Campion has identified her primary source material as Keats's correspondence, rather than his poetry: "I read all the letters. I didn't read all the poems. Then I worked out a storyline" (Sullivan 87). Accordingly, during a voiceover sequence in Bright Star in which Keats (Ben Whishaw) reads from a letter he wrote to Fanny about a walk on seashore, the audience sees a shot of Whishaw standing on a beach looking at the ocean. Similarly, when Whishaw's Keats recites the sonnet "Bright Star" to Abbie Cornish's Brawne, he utters the speaker's sensation of being "pillowed on my fair love's breast" as he is, literally, resting his head on Cornish's bosom. The shortcomings Ricks describes are perhaps difficult to avoid in a film with some extremely ambitious aims. In the panel discussion on the film at the New York Public Library in September, 2009, Timothy Corrigan interpreted Campion's focus on Brawne as a "feminist intervention" even as the director also sought to introduce Keats's achievement to a mainstream, contemporary audience. Campion's dual goal of entertaining and educating reflects the ideological legacy of its producers, which were public service broadcasters from Australia (Screen Australia) and the UK (BBC films). The goal of education and entertainment has been an established part of public service broadcasting, particularly in the British commonwealth, since the earliest days (the 1920s) of the BBC under its first general director, Lord John Reith; a film about Keats would certainly seem to fall within the remit of organizations like the BBC, charged with cultivating a collective appreciation of British cultural traditions. Part of making Keats's life story and work accessible to a wide public means, for Campion, situating that work within a visual formula that straightforwardly translates imaginative transformation into concrete images. Rather than attempting to defamiliarize our experience, Campion aims to make Keats's language familiar by presenting tactile and visually knowable origins for his linguistic processing of reality. …

Based on questions raised by Paul Oliver, this article argues that the blues was integral to the development of jazz rather than an external influence. The blues scale of Winthrop Sargeant and Gerhard Kubik and their relation to blues tonality are considered in relation to “Careless Love” and “Pallet on the Floor.” “I'm Alabama Bound” is also considered. This was a repertoire common to rural songsters and the emerging jazz bands of New Orleans. The 12-bar blues of piano players and the relationship between the blues of Mamie Desdunes and the “2:19 Blues” is explored, as is the role of New Orleans songsters. This essay draws on the oral history files of the Hogan Jazz Archive, Library of Congress, and the Historic New Orleans Collection. In particular the Papers of Frederic Ramsey Jr. and the interview conducted by Charles Edward Smith with Willie Cornish for Jazzmen (1939) confirm that Buddy Bolden played the 12-bar blues in the early years of the twentieth century. From this it is safe to conclude that t...

Newquay Safe is an example of a multi-agency project that was set up as an immediate response to a community safety issue and is now being used as the platform to launch a long-term major town regeneration project. In the short term it helped reassure residents and visitors that Newquay was a safe place to visit. In the longer term it has become the catalyst for the people and community of Newquay to work together to return Newquay to the jewel of the Cornish tourism crown. This paper forms part of the ‘current trends in municipal engineering’ feature.

In 1984 two roundhouses within the Bronze Age settlement at Bosiliack were partially excavated by Jeannette Ratclife and Charles Thomas on behalf of the Institute of Cornish Studies. Six radiocarbon determinations have now been obtained on charcoal from these. The dates fall into two groups, with three in the later part of the Bronze Age in the centuries between 1390 and 1000 cal. BC, and three in the Iron Age between 750 and 200 cal. BC. The radiocarbon dates are important because, although settlements of roundhouses are well known in west Penwith, none had been scientifically dated. They are also significant because they demonstrate the longevity and changing character of occupation within the roundhouses, and demonstrate the differing biographies of adjacent structures. This paper outlines the results from the excavations and the radiocarbon dating programme before moving on to a discussion of settlement on the west Penwith uplands.

Arthur's northern adventures are little recognized. Early hints and seventeenth-century developments led in the later 1700s to the northern Gothic Arthur of Hole, Betham, and Thelwall. More conservative was the king's nineteenth-century representation by Milman; and his apotheosis, and conclusion, came in the arctic adventurer of Bulwer Lytton's King Arthur. (SK) ARTHUR AND THE WALRUSES Over some thousand years Arthur has appeared in strange situations. A Welsh giant threw stone spears at him; King Ryens wanted his beard to complete the collection for a mantle; for Dryden he attacked a tree that turned out to be a fake version of his beloved; Tennyson apotheosized him on a mountain top; Bradley had him impregnate his half-sister at the Beltaine celebrations. But it seems fair to suggest that none of these situations was as unforeseeable, improbable, or downright weird as when in 1848 Bulwer Lytton made him leader of a Viking ship sailing above the Arctic Circle. And then the walruses attacked: Uprose a bold Norwegian, hunger-stung, As near the icy marge a walrus lay, Hurl'd his strong spear, and smote the beast, and sprung Upon the frost-field on the wounded prey;- Sprung and recoiled-as, writhing with the pangs, The bulk heaved towards him with its flashing fangs. Roused to fell life-around their comrade throng, Snorting wild wrath, the shapeless, grisly swarms- Like moving mounts slow masses trail along; Aghast the man beholds the larva-forms- Flies-climbs the bark-the deck is scaled-is won; And all the monstrous march rolls lengthening on. 'Quick to your spears!' the kingly leader cries. Spears flash on flashing tusks; groan the strong planks With the assault: front after front they rise With their bright stare; steel thins in vain their ranks, And dyes with blood their birth-place and their grave; Mass rolls on mass, as flows on wave a wave. These strike and rend the reeling sides below; Those grappling clamber up and load the decks, With looks of wrath so human on the foe, That half they seem the ante-Daedal wrecks Of what were men in worlds before the Ark! Thus rag'd the immane and monster war-when, hark, Crash'd thro' the dreary air a thunder peal! In their slow courses meet two ice-rock isles Clanging; the wide seas far-resounding reel; The toppling ruin rolls in the defiles; The pent tides quicken with the headlong shock; Broad-billowing heave the long waves from the rock; Far down the booming vale precipitous Plunges the stricken galley,-as a steed Smit by the shaft runs reinless,-o'er the prows Howl the lash'd surges; Man and monster freed By power more awful from the savage fray, Here roaring sink-there dumbly whirl away.1 The battle with the walruses is only the most memorable part of Lytton's northernizing of the Arthur myth: Arthur in Odin's hall and Gawain among the Eskimos run it close. The poem, of little impact in its own day and overlooked ever since, is not only a surprisingly scholarly and richly ideological mid-Victorian statement on many topics, but also the last and the most developed element in an almost unknown formation of the Arthurian story, which is hard not to call the Arctic Arthur. While R.S. Loomis said that 'with the Romantic Movement Arthur and Merlin heard the magic horn pealing through fairyland and returned once more to the fellowship of men,'2 and Stephanie Barczewski felt that 'the Arthurian legend possessed such a potent appeal during the years of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars,'3 others, who have looked more closely at the actual evidence, are aware that Arthur's myth did not interest either classical Augustans or the major romantics.4 It did, however, in the period from the late eighteenth century to the early mid-nineteenth century, appeal for reasons of nationalistic alterity to Cornish, Welsh, and some Scottish writers. …

“How do you solve a problem like Theresa?” asks Frances Smith Foster in the Winter 2006 issue of the African American Review. Speaking specifically of “Theresa—A Haytien Tale” (1828), published serially in four installments of Samuel Cornish and John Russwurm’s Freedom’s Journal, Foster notes how it challenges our notions of black literary history. It predates by several decades what were assumed to be the first works of fiction by African Americans (e.g., “The Heroic Slave” by Frederick Douglass in 1852, and William Wells Brown’s Clotel, published in England in 1853). It is not a slave narrative. It is not even set in the United States. And it focuses on the trials and tribulations of three women—a widowed mother and her two daughters—rather than men. Indeed, Foster proclaims, the discovery of this story demonstrates that “neither fiction as a genre, Haiti as a topic, nor (black) women as heroic protagonists were unfamiliar to the readers of Freedom’s Journal” (“Forgotten” 637). More importantly, she writes, its dissimilarity to recognized forms of nineteenth-century African American writing, in particular the slave narrative—which William L. Andrews describes as “the dominant mode of black antebellum narrative” (“Novelization” 23)—indicates “the need for a more complete and accurate corpus, canon, or reconstruction of literary history” (“Forgotten” 633). “Theresa,” however, is not completely anomalous. In fact, it bears many similarities to another work that also departs from the conventions of “African American Literature”: Martin R. Delany’s Blake: Or, the Huts of America, twenty-six chapters of which were serialized in the Anglo-African Magazine in 1859, and serialized in its entirety in the Weekly Anglo-African from November 1861 to May 1862. Both works take the West Indies as their setting, black revolution as their subject, and test the boundaries of believable storytelling. What is most striking about the two works, however, especially in contrast to the slave narrative, is the mobility of the characters as well as the exotic settings they occupy. Theresa, her sisters, and her mother, Madame Paulina, travel across Haiti, unattended and unmolested, while Delany’s Henry Blake foments slave insurrections throughout the American South as well as Cuba. In this, the two works reflected the periodicals in which they appeared. Although Freedom’s Journal, the Anglo-African Magazine, and the Weekly Anglo-African were all published in New York City, they provided readers with a wide range of content. They did not simply cover the day’s (or week’s) events, but also included essays, poetry, anecdotes, and fiction that exposed readers to people, places, and ideas from around the world. Ultimately, when seen in light of their publication in African American periodicals, “Theresa—A Haytien Tale” and Blake demonstrate the extent to which

The boilerplate African American mass media narrative often goes like this: In 1827 Samuel Cornish and John Russwurm launched Freedom's Journal, America's first black-owned newspaper. Frederick Dou...

The first two things that the reader will notice from this manual are the authors and the number of editions. If having W. Cornish, one of the key people in the EU on intellectual property, is not ...

The Cornish Mining World Heritage Site contains a number of industrial settlements which retain townscapes largely created through the influence of hard rock metalliferous mining. This paper will focus on two such settlements, St Just in Penwith and Camborne, which, while being of markedly different scales, present a range of challenges to planners, conservation practitioners and developers as to how best preserve their essential character while permitting appropriate development. In recent years St Just in Penwith has received attention to improve its streetscapes, particularly around the town squares and car park, and local planners and heritage practitioners have dealt with the challenge of how to retain the industrial character and significance of the disused Holman's no. 3 rock drill works, so important to the World Heritage Site. These developments will be compared and contrasted to highlight some of the issues and challenges which relate to the preservation of industrial character, set alongside the need for living spaces to evolve.

‘Broadlees’ exists as an Adelaide Hills hill-station retreat in Australia, established in the 1920s as a permanent residence for the Waite sisters.1 Typically most large hill-station residences and their accompanying private ‘botanic gardens’ were developed as summer residences from the summer onslaught of the Adelaide Plains, but the Waite sisters saw ‘Broadlees’ as their permanent residence. Further, although the design of the residence was not important in the eyes of Misses Eva and Lily Waite, it was the gardens of the property that were their real passion. This article reviews the history and development of the ‘Broadlees’ property and in particular the role played by the writings and gardens of Gertrude Jekyll (1843–1932)2 in its design, form and plantings, which remain the most intact and mature Jekyll-inspired landscape in South Australia today. It is a significant, extant Jekyll-influenced garden developed in the 1920s and 1930s in the Adelaide Hills3 that has been little featured in the coffee-table garden profile literature in Australia, and no article has previously been written about the property. It has been profiled in the Australian Home Beautiful and the South Australian Homes & Gardens magazines in 1932 and 1936 respectively, and also has been subject to a recent comparative assessment as to the role and influence of prominent Adelaide garden designer ElsieMarion Cornish (1870–1946).4 Perhaps because of the wishes of the owners who personally developed and sought to maintain the privacy of the gardens and house, subsequent owners have sought to respect this philosophy in their curatorship of the property.5

In an 1857Saturday Reviewarticleof the novelTwo Years Ago, T. C. Sanders characterizes Charles Kingsley's ideal man: he “fears God and can walk a thousand miles in a thousand hours – [he] breathes God's free air on God's rich earth, and at the same time can hit a woodcock, doctor a horse, and twist a poker around his fingers” (qtd. in Haley 108). Tom Thurnall, the fearless, constitutionally robust, well-traveled doctor and hero ofTwo Years Ago, fits these requirements. His physical strength also manifests itself as a charmed immunity to illness: during a cholera epidemic in Aberalva (a fictional Cornish town), “[Tom] thought nothing about death and danger at all . . . Sleep he got when he could, and food as often as he could; into the sea he leapt, morning and night, and came out fresher each time” (Kingsley,Years288). Charles Kingsley's own self-proclaimed medical and religious philosophies give clear insight intoTwo Years Ago'sintended effects. A sanitary reformer in the mould of Edwin Chadwick and Florence Nightingale, Kingsley felt that disease arose from crowding, filth, and poisonous vapors. Kingsley's contemporaries named his perspective “muscular Christianity,” recognizing that Kingsley “strong arms” his readers by inspiring in them fear and uncertainty about their own health practices and then shows them the way, with examples like Tom, to an active, devout lifestyle.

Our objective was to investigate the attitudes to hearing and ear disease in the Gallo-Celtic society. An approach using historical linguistics to examine changes in words and their implications was used based on the six living Celtic languages and additional data from the Gaulish language found mainly in surviving inscriptions. There appeared to be a broadly negative attitude towards deafness, as implied by the connotations associated with that term. In the Brythonic languages (Breton, Cornish and Welsh), the term ‘hear’ was used in a generic way for all the senses. There was some overlap between the terms ‘hear’ and ‘listen’ in many of the languages despite the presence of early words for both. The houseleek (Sempervivum tectorum) appears to have been used throughout the Celtic world in the treatment of ear disease. The results of these analyses indicate that historical linguistics can provide a source of useful additional information when the practices of a pre-literate society are being invest...

Please click here to download the map associated with this article. The British Population retains a strong sense of regional identity, epitomized by periodic campaigns for Scottish and Welsh devolution, or for Cornish self-government. There have been few studies into the regionalization of British surnames and none that utilize any register that can claim to be nationally representative. The National Social Map presented in this paper is the first comprehensive attempt to create a regional geography of Great Britain based upon the clustering of surnames. The resulting map illustrates a strong relationship between the populations surnames and geographic location. The homogeneity within each of the surname regions identified is striking given that spatial contiguity constraints were not included within the clustering process. The map will hopefully set a bench-mark for future work by geographers in the field of surname research.

In 1984 the entrance grave at Bosiliack, Cornwall, was excavated by Charles Thomas on behalf of the Institute of Cornish Studies. It was a comparatively small example, approximately 5 m in diameter encircled by a substantial kerb. A deposit of cremated bone was found within the chamber accompanied by sherds of plain pottery from three vessels. Two radiocarbon determinations were obtained on the cremated bone. The dates were almost identical, falling between 1690 and 1500 calbc.Because Bosiliack is the only entrance grave in Cornwall to have been excavated to modern standards, and to have had any analyses undertaken on the contents of its chamber, it is significant to the study of small chambered tombs elsewhere. This paper outlines the results from the excavations before moving on to a discussion of the use of monument and a consideration of its possible affinities with monuments elsewhere.

This paper presents the results of an analysis of a ceramic assemblage excavated from a nineteenth century dugout home in Burra, South Australia. It traces living standards around the world to establish that the dugouts were ordinary homes. The role of ceramics in class, status and ethnic identity in nineteenth century cultures is discussed. British regional cultures, including the Cornish, are explored, their differences from their English contemporaries are exposed, and a proposal is made to determine whether the inhabitants of this dugout were Cornish. Methods of excavation and artefact analysis are then described and results provided. The discussion considers the ceramics as both utilitarian and display items, and concludes that the preponderance of one class of food consumption item illustrates that the inhabitants were probably of British regional extraction.

Present-day historians of English are widely agreed that, throughout its recorded history, the English language has absorbed linguistic influences from other languages, most notably Latin, Scandinavian, and French. What may give rise to differing views is the nature and extent of these influences, not the existence of them. Against the backdrop of this unanimity, it seems remarkable that there is one group of languages for which no such consensus exists, despite a close coexistence between English and these languages in the British Isles spanning more than one and a half millennia. This group is, of course, the Insular Celtic languages, comprising the Brittonic subgroup of Welsh and Cornish and the Goidelic one comprising Irish, Manx, and Scottish Gaelic. The standard wisdom, repeated in textbooks on the history of English such as Baugh and Cable (1993), Pyles & Algeo (1993), and Strang (1970), holds that contact influences from Celtic have always been minimal and are mainly limited to Celtic-origin place names and river names and a mere handful of other words. Thus, Baugh & Cable (1993: 85) state that ‘outside of place-names the influence of Celtic upon the English language is almost negligible’; in a similar vein, Strang (1970) writes that ‘the extensive influence of Celtic can only be traced in place-names’ (1970: 391).

A number of nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century dialect descriptions refer to an unusual adverb + infinitive construction in southwestern and west Midlands dialects of English. The construction is most often reported in the form of a formulaic phrase away to go, meaning ‘away he went’, though it is also found with a range of other adverbs. In addition, the same dialects also make use of a possibly related imperative construction, consisting of a preposition or adverb and a to-infinitive, as in out to come! ‘Come out!’ and a negative imperative construction consisting of the negator not and the base form of the verb, as in Not put no sugar in!. These construction types appear to be marginal at best in earlier varieties of English, whereas comparable constructions with the verbal noun are a well-established feature of especially British Celtic languages (i.e. Welsh, Breton, and Cornish). In this article I argue that transfer from the British Celtic languages offers a possible explanation for the use of these constructions in the traditional southwestern and west Midlands dialects of English.

This article argues that despite traditional skepticism among most specialists on the history of English that Brythonic Celtic languages could have had any significant structural impact on English's evolution, the source of periphrasticdoin Cornish's equivalent construction is virtually impossible to deny on the basis of a wide range of evidence. That Welsh and Cornish borrowed the construction from English is impossible given its presence in Breton, whose speakers left Britain in the fifth century. The paucity of Celtic loanwords in English is paralleled by equivalent paucity in undisputed contact cases such as Uralic's on Russian. Traditional language-internal accounts suffer from a degree of ad hocness. Finally, periphrasticdois much rarer cross-linguistically than typically acknowledged, which lends further support to a contact account.

Thomas Hardy's poem 'Under the Waterfall' has some striking parallels with Cornish legends surrounding the St Nectan's Kieve, a waterfall site on a similar small valley some three and a half kilometres to the south west of the river Valency — the setting for Hardy's poem. The author explores these parallels which were likely to have been known to Hardy and his wife Emma.

Castle Dor (1962) offers a different model of history and place to that explored in du Maurier's other works, in particular her Cornish novels. Whereas her novels have often been criticised for employing a nostalgic view of history that sees the past as irretrievably lost, in Castle Dor time is intimately connected to space, aligning the novel with two critical treatments of time and space. The first, contemporary with du Maurier's work on the novel, is the situationist theory of psychogeography: the study of the effects of spatial environment on emotion. Similarly, in Castle Dor, characters’ actions are motivated by a history embedded in their environment. The ambiguous politics of psychogeography–in one respect a radical manifesto of subverting bourgeois uses of space, but in another a conservative stance that denies the possibility of historical change–are similarly reflected in the tension in du Maurier's work between liberal transgression and reactionary nostalgia. Reading Castle Dor in the context o...