Unless you were very unfortunate or on a strict diet, it's unlikely that anyone will have been ooinin you this Christmas or New Year.

Ooinin? It's a Yorkshire dialect word that means "depriving of food". I hadn't come across it until I read a little poem called A Hawpoth by John Hartley, the title being again dialect for "a ha-porth", or what you could buy for a halfpenny.

In the poem the writer finds a little lad all alone and in tears and says to him: "What do they call thi, lad? Tell me thi name; Have they been ooinin thi? Why, it's a shame."

So the writer gives the child a halfpenny and advises him to go and spend it on "some spice", or sweets. And the poem concludes: "But his little face breetened wi' pleasure all through; Ah, it's cappin, sometimes, what a hawpny can do!"

"Cappin" is another word which might puzzle modern readers. It means "surprising" and crops up most usually as a verb, as in "ah were reet capped".

In recent times dialect has faded from the everyday speech of many people, to be replaced by slang and slovenly pronunciation. But in the second half of the 19th century, when John Hartley was making a name for himself, it was all the rage.

"Dialect-writing among the Yorkshire urban classes was already well established when Hartley was a boy," writes Keighley-raised John Waddington-Feather, a life member of the Yorkshire Dialect Society and a vice-president of the J B Priestley Society, in a new book, The Best of John Hartley.

"Indeed, Yorkshire dialect had flourished as a literary medium since the seventh century and throughout the middle ages; but it developed strongly among the new workers swelling the towns."

Dialect poetry, though, wasn't John Hartley's day job. Born in Halifax in 1839 to a tea-merchant/draper father and a Quaker mother, the young John was apprenticed at 12 as a designer in worsted tapestries at the firm of James Ackroyd & Sons where he worked for more than 20 years.

He joined The Beacon Club, which met at the Corporation Arms and was one of the literary clubs which were fashionable at the time among working-class men, a by-product of the Mechanics' Institute movement during an age of self-improvement. There he recited his first poem, Bite Bigger.

"It still remains a great favourite despite its tear-jerking sentiment," writes the Rev Waddington-Feather. "More important, it does record a real situation of the time, the appalling poverty in Victorian Yorkshire, which drove pauper children to eating gutter garbage. The poem was an immediate success and like many dialect poems of the day, it sold hundreds of copies at a penny a time."

That poem propelled Hartley into the front ranks of dialect poets. Mr Waddington-Feather notes: "It brought him to the notice of the son of Alfred Wilson, an auctioneer and hatter in Halifax who had established an almanac in 1865, primarily as an advertising journal.

Wilson's son was so impressed by Hartley's poetry that he offered him the editorship of The Original Illuminated Clock Almanack."

Hartley's first annual edition came out in October 1866. The last came out after his death in 1915.

There are plenty of examples in this book of his dialect prose writing from what by 1877 had become known as John Hartley's Original Clock Almanack published in this book, along with an entertaining selection of Hartley's poetry.

And there's a fascinating biography which follows the writer through his first, second (and brief third) marriages, his travels in America (where for a while he became a theatre manager), his time in London and his return to the North where he briefly became landlord of The Druid Arms in Bradford before moving to Leeds.

Mr Waddington-Feather suggests that it was Hartley's "unfailing optimism" which endeared him to the public.

"He shared with them the many knocks life hands out; and he frequently expressed the experiences and philosophies of life, which were the lot of the West Riding worker," he writes.

Here's an exchange between two of his readers' favourite characters, Sammywell and his wife Mally, after he has returned from his travels: Well, aw says, aw dooant knaw at aw'm altered mich, but tha sees aw've leearned summat wi' goin away.' Tha's gain'd a lot o'knowledge reight eniff,' shoo sed, but if all tha knaws wer i't Yorksher Pooast an' all tha doesn't were i't Bradford Observer aw've a gooid idea which ud be t'biggest paper.' When he was 70, in 1909, a banquet in his honour was held at the Great Northern Hotel in Bradford at which he was presented with a life-sized portrait and a purse containing the then substantial sum of 100 guineas.

Writes Mr Waddington-Feather: "His death in 1915 marked the end of an era in dialect writing as, indeed, the war which was then raging brought to an end the social order of which Hartley was so much a part."

  • The Best of John Hartley - An Account of his Life and The Clock Almanack, by John Waddington-Feather, is published at £6.99 by Waltersgill Photography & Publishing, 17 Wrenbeck Drive, Otley, West Yorkshire LS21 2BP. Tel: (01943)467041; e-mail waltersgill@btinternet.com.