John Castillo’s ‘Awd Isaac’

John Castillo (1792–1845) is remarkable as the author of the poem ‘Awd Isaac’, written around 1823 for circulation among friends in his Cleveland dialect community. Previously their appetite for verse in a familiar tongue had to be satisfied by the few individual items frequently republished in pamphlets as Specimens of the Yorkshire Dialect. Demand was apparently sufficient to stimulate many editions of ‘Awd Isaac’, usually unattributed, after the first pirated edition in 1832. Castillo was not particularly early among the poets from the labouring class, but he was unusual in continuing to rely for his livelihood on his trade as a journeyman stonemason. Perhaps uniquely for a poet in his own native dialect he remained inside his class and community.¹ His poems in dialect were not the majority of his poems, but they secured his reputation with, and limited his appeal to, readers and publishers in Yorkshire.

Castillo: a brief biography

Cleveland was formerly the north eastern corner of Yorkshire, bounded by the southern watershed of the River Esk. Castillo’s mother Hannah was from Lealholm in the Esk valley, and his father Patrick worked there as a papermaker. Although there is no official record of John’s birth, there are no grounds to doubt his belief that ‘I was born at … Rathfarnum … about the year 1792’.² Castillo spent his childhood years in Lealholm and the Esk valley, returning frequently as an adult especially when frozen out of his trade. The area was the setting and material for many of his poems, and the source of his epithet ‘The Bard of the Dales’.³

His family name appears in church registers as variations of ‘Costellow’, always with the first ‘o’. The name ‘Castillo’ in print first appears in Nelson’s 1832 anthology, and shortly afterwards as ‘John Castillo’ in a review of his poems in a local Whitby journal article of 1833. The poet’s surname has no Irish connotation; ‘Costello’ is in Matheson’s list of Irish surnames, but not ‘Castillo’, and O’Donoghue’s 1912 catalogue of Irish poets includes only this Castillo, but several surname variants of ‘Costello’.⁴

When Patrick disappeared around 1805, Castillo was ‘taken from school, and turned out into the world’. He was in service until May 1814, the last two years in Lincolnshire, and then indentured himself as a mason’s apprentice. Dating on manuscript poems shows he worked as a journeyman mason in Leeds, Liverpool, and Bishop Auckland for significant periods, and other poems show he was ‘on the tramp’ in Penrith, London, and Hull.⁵ After 1834 he seems to have settled in and around Lealholm, living by his craft whilst preaching as an itinerant Wesleyan, formally joining the Pickering circuit in 1838. His working life was marked by ill-health, probably the asthma that is recorded as the cause of his death on 16 April 1845.⁶

By some accounts Castillo was illiterate for much of his life.⁷ Sometime around 1838 the poet dictated ‘Awd Isaac’ to a literate youth in the farmhouse where he was working. The inference that he couldn’t write was first documented sixty years after the event by Smith, then repeated uncritically by Quinlan, among others.⁸

Castillo the poet

Castillo’s earliest surviving poem, dated 1819, records his traumatic separation from the Roman Catholic faith and community. That competent, workmanlike, but emotionally descriptive poem ‘Address to my Roman Brethren’ seems to be the product of a practised author, but no earlier work survives.⁹ The creative period to 1833 was markedly less moralistic than his later poems were to become, often humorous and experimental in form and theme. After the printing in 1832 and 1833 of pirated versions of his poems, an article and critique in a Whitby journal in 1833 established his identity as a poet, and author of ‘Awd Isaac’. Despite its popularity it is the only poem in dialect that can be dated to this period.

The period 1834 to 1837 is notable for the number of Castillo’s nature poems, often based on specific localities around his home, usually...