ABSTRACT
Provincialism and regionalism as categories map contested territory in the nineteenth century. The provincial/metropolitan binary provide the basis for understanding a canon of provincialism, one heavily reliant on the scenic, the rural, and the picturesque. But Victorians also had different understandings of the provincial and later of the term “regional” that went beyond the rural picturesque. The provincial could be defined by differences from the metropole as represented in urban locations beyond London, by lifeways expressed in regional dialects, and by a Britain made up of four nations—Scotland, England, Ireland, and Wales. These understandings of region and province were exported, adapted to, and sometimes rejected in the larger empire. Who speaks to whom, where, and in what dialect became key questions in the representations of the cultural differences that constituted provincialism and regionalism.
