This dissertation considers the politics and practices of incorporating regional dialects into the nineteenth-century English novel form. After roughly 1850, there is a distinct expansion of publications written in dialect in England. This is owing to both a peak in academic interest in comparative philology and publishers’ recognition of the market potential of urban working-class readers. Using writers from both working- and middle-class backgrounds from the region of Lancashire, this study argues that dialect novelists engage in a form of performative recording to compose dialect texts, wherein the success of a dialect novelist relies on both accuracy of dialect terms and a performance of authenticity. While critics have previously considered the dialect ballad and lyric, this thesis reveals the specific work that the dialect novel undertakes to present regional language. Chapter One compares the work of Edwin Waugh (1817-90) and Oliver Ormerod (1811-79), two working-class Rochdale novelists whose differing perspectives on dialect orthography provide rich ground for debate and humour. Waugh’s dynamic invocation of nostalgia in his ‘Besom Ben’ serial is accompanied by a reliance on modern print conventions. My second chapter focuses on Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-65) and her late novel, Sylvia’s Lovers (1863), where the novelist attempts a Yorkshire orthography for the first time in print. This chapter maps the bruising revision process that Gaskell was compelled to undertake by reader responses, as well as the productive links that can be drawn between dialect novels and dialect dictionaries of this period. Chapter Three explores Benjamin Brierley’s dialect Readings that were popular in the 1870s and 1880s, illuminating the elements of performance that were latent in his dialect prose. This chapter uses playbill and local newspaper material to analyse the politics of laughter and the mechanics involved in the staging of regional voices on the Reading platform. My fourth chapter takes the dialect novel composed away from or read at a distance from one’s region of origin as its focus. This chapter analyses the early Lancashire dialect novels of Frances Hodgson Burnett (1849-1924), as well as Gaskell’s involvement in the Soldier’s Reading Room project. This chapter reflects on the intensely local novel form amidst increasingly global and portable print cultures. This thesis explores the value of committing local languages to print in the latter decades of the nineteenth century by putting forward considered analysis of texts and regional cultures that have previously been regarded as peripheral.