Writing in The Spectator in 1711, Sir Richard Steele complained about the poor delivery of those leading church services, suggesting that it stemmed from ‘the little Care that is taken of their Reading, while Boys and at School, where when they are got into Latin, they are looked upon as above English’. Over the rest of the eighteenth century, as Latin, which had already ceased to be the shared language of European scholarship, ceased also to be the language of classroom instruction, it increasingly became a symbol of an intellectual rigour of which the modern world seemed incapable. Known only in its written form, it seemed impeccably formal and secure. It connoted discipline, justice and equilibrium. Conservative writers on English wanted their language to resemble Latin in its precision and stability.
‘When in Rome, do as the Romans do’ – or rather, if you dream of recreating the spirit of the Roman Empire, start by exalting the spirit of its language. In the latter part of the eighteenth century and for most of the nineteenth, the idea that Britain was a new Rome seduced grammarians, and their enthusiasm for the Latin way of doing things was not so much nostalgic as self-legitimizing. The story of Latin should really have been a cautionary one, though that is more apparent now than it would have been then. Here was a language which spread through the political aggression of its original speakers, became the lingua franca of urban trade all around the western Mediterranean, and was disseminated further through the medium of its literature and by Christianity, but which later became a sort of arcane scholastic code, trampled into the minds of hapless schoolchildren, and later still became merely obscure.9 A further cautionary point: the decline of Latin was brought about by its supporters more than by its opponents.
There is a delightful table in John Stirling’s A Short View of English Grammar (1735), which shows – in the style of a Latin declension – the various forms of the adjective wise: the masculine, feminine and neuter, both singular and plural, of its nominative, vocative, accusative, genitive, dative and ablative. Delightful, that is, because all thirty-six entries in the table are the same: ‘wise’. In his preface, Stirling assures readers that his little volume will ‘particularly be of singular Service to young Ladies’.10
Stirling, who also translated Virgil and Ovid, has not been canonized as one of the eighteenth century’s most valuable thinkers about grammar, but he is representative of the period’s polite amateurism in matters to do with language. While we may doubt whether Stirling’s declension of wise was of singular service to any of his readers, his mention of young ladies is significant, reflecting the emergence of a new audience for ideas of correctness. In Britain in the second half of the eighteenth century, grammatical instruction was a commodity. Advertisements from the period make this clear. When schools, and especially new academies for young women, sought teachers, the ability to provide ‘proper’ and ‘grammatical’ instruction in English was to the fore. The largely middle-class parents of prospective pupils saw a command of grammar as a guarantee of social opportunity: their children, properly instructed, could enter the upper ranks of society.
English was being gentrified and commercialized. The first half of the century had witnessed a massive surge in printing and the appetite for print. Books circulated freely thanks in part to the new commercial lending libraries, and second-hand copies could be picked up cheaply from dealers who traded from stalls or barrows. Even those on modest incomes could afford chapbooks, the contents of which might include recipes, jests and reports of sensational events. The most notable new form of literature was the novel; Daniel Defoe was a trailblazer, creating his plot lines in accordance not with history, myth or legend, but with his own sense of what his invented characters might plausibly do. Original fiction had a sizeable female readership, and creating it became a way for women to earn a living, although anonymous or pseudonymous publication was in many cases deemed necessary in order to get the books a fair critical hearing. By mid-century it was normal to think of women as the likely readers of these works, and this prompted comment – applause, certainly, but also sneers – about the democratization of literature.
At the same time there was a wealth of other printed material: newspapers, magazines and pamphlets, in addition to calendars, posters, price tags, labels, tickets and maps. Readers became consumers of words – often silently and in private – and society was seized by a mania for ink and paper. As this happened, printed matter began to seem less precious. Books became commodities. The increased public visibility of books, and the busy trade in them, created opportunities for writers to set themselves up as instructors of popular taste. The entire system of literature seemed new. The society in which Dr Johnson lived experienced a ‘literacy crisis’ that was the opposite of the one we worry about today.11 There was immense anxiety that the increasing literacy of people outside the social elite would upset the established cultural and political order.
From the 1750s on, there was a flood of not just grammars, but also dictionaries, spelling books and theories of language, as well as guides to penmanship, letter-writing and other ‘small literary performances’. Books that showed how to write a letter tended to include some rudimentary advice about grammar: one of the best examples is Charles Johnson’s The Complete Art of Writing Letters (1770), which presented twenty pages of ‘useful’ grammar before its instructions about how to write letters appropriate to courtship, friendship, business, education and compliment. Equally, grammars gave guidance on letter-writing. The literary historian Jack Lynch explains, ‘These were not books by aristocrats for aristocrats; they were written by aspiring middle-class writers who hoped to pull other middle-class would-be writers up with them,’ and ‘the middle classes were imitating their social betters, hoping to pass among them unnoticed.’12 While not exactly subversive, these books were far from being prim endorsements of the status quo.
There was, fundamentally, more sharing of the written word. In the nineteenth century this would escalate – for instance, the Penny Post was introduced in 1840, and within thirty years almost a billion letters were being sent annually in Britain13 – but it was in the eighteenth century that attitudes to this word-traffic crystallized. Although language was not in great flux, discussions of language and the formation of opinions about it were fervent. Assessing Charles Wiseman’s A Complete English Grammar on a New Plan in the Monthly Review in 1765, the satirically minded critic William Kenrick wondered, ‘How many complete English Grammars on new plans, have we not already had, or been threatened with?’14 It is easy to lose sight of the fact that the authors of these proposals all believed they had something genuinely original to offer.
There were, essentially, two schools of thought about such plans. On the one hand, there were those who believed that language could be remodelled, or at least regularized; they claimed that reason and logic would enable them to achieve this. On the other hand were those who saw language as a complicated jungle of habits that it would be impossible to trim into shape. The former were more numerous. Beginning around 1700, and especially after 1750, the orthodox approach to English was prescriptive. Much of the time the intent was not to establish new rules, but to be explicit about existing ones, and to insist on them. Unfortunately, these existing rules were often misapprehended. Moreover, the grammarians neglected the possibility that several kinds of English can exist at once; they made little allowance for the different contexts in which the language is used and the ways in which context affects people’s practices.
It was common to suppose that language was a gift from God. Common, too, to think of language as an entity; to believe that it possessed something often dubbed a ‘genius’, an ideal form ordained by its original theorist, the Creator; and to conceive of it as a mirror, reflecting the qualities of its users. The wonders and copiousness of English were a consequence of the excellence of English-speaking society – its refinement, the magnitude and multitude of its achievements. The ideas of Locke were available to inform a different view – namely that language was a ty
pe of behaviour, lacking any inherent correspondence with reality – but the linguistic amateurs of the eighteenth century tended not to have much time for him. One of the more complex engagements with Locke came in a novel: Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759–67), in which the patterns of thought are realized with great imagination. Many of today’s wonky ideas of language in general – and of our language in particular – can be traced back to the eighteenth-century neglect of Locke’s philosophy.
This may seem an odd thing to say, given that Locke was, with Isaac Newton, the greatest influence on eighteenth-century thought in Britain. These two, moreover, can in retrospect be seen as responsible for ending the role of Latin as the language of higher thought and learning; Newton wrote Principia Mathematica (1687) in Latin, but switched to English for Opticks (1704). But Locke was mainly valued as a political thinker, and Newton’s thought was popularized by means of simplified versions and public lectures. For most people, the prevailing voices were the authoritarian ones of the period’s grammarians. These were often retired gentlemen of a pious disposition; commonly they had been clerics or schoolmasters. They revered the elegance of Latin and, to an even greater extent, Greek. English constructions were measured against their Latin and Greek prototypes; differences were seen as unfortunate departures from these models. The grammarians had little concern with the actual problems of daily usage, preferring instead to take language out of context. They viewed it under the microscope, but theirs was a limited notion of language – brief and easy summary was their goal, though brevity and easiness were not always manifest in the results.
As I have suggested, the market for grammatical law-making was a result of increased social mobility. But it was not just the socially aspiring who wanted rules and guides; an upper-class revulsion at the thought of being contaminated with middle-class vulgarity was a strong motive for the eighteenth-century codification of grammar. There was an intricate relationship between linguistic intolerance and the twin energies of aspiration and insecurity. This remains.
However, close attention to the books that advanced the doctrine of correctness shows that they were not so very doctrinaire. It has become orthodox to lay into ‘eighteenth-century prescriptivists’ and accuse them of establishing silly rules. Yet while there really were some hardcore prescriptivists in this period, it is an oversimplification to say that eighteenth-century thinking about English was militarily rigid. In truth, it is the uncertainties and ambivalences we can find in eighteenth-century books about the language that are their most lasting legacy.
8
‘Bishop Lowth was a fool’
Getting under the skin of prescriptivism
Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of 1755 stands as the great monument of eighteenth-century philology. Like most great monuments, it has its dusty corners, and while the structure is impressive, what strike us most are its little ornaments of idiosyncrasy. Before Johnson, there was no authoritative dictionary of English. It is a mistake to say that there had been no work whatsoever in this vein; in fact, there had been dictionaries of English for the previous 150 years. But these had at first been glossaries of difficult words, and even when their scope became more ambitious their content remained patchy. Johnson’s is the first really good English dictionary. By the time he began work on it, in the late 1740s, the lack of such a reference book was a national embarrassment. The French and the Florentines had impressive dictionaries. Where was their British counterpart? ‘We have long preserved our constitution,’ Johnson wrote in the preface to the Dictionary. ‘Let us make some struggles for our language.’1
A consortium of London booksellers, led by Robert Dodsley, realized that the publication of a good English dictionary might be an opportunity to make a handsome amount of money. Dodsley, who had been in domestic service before embarking on a career in publishing, had a gift for spotting gaps in the market. In Johnson, whom he had previously published, he identified an author fit for this particular task.
Johnson was not an obvious choice. He was a self-tormenting, sickly man whose domestic arrangements were irregular, and he was given to bouts of debilitating melancholy. He did not have a degree, and he had failed in his attempts to run a school, mainly because he suffered from tics and convulsions that disconcerted the parents of prospective pupils. However, Dodsley knew his appetite for hard work and his formidable erudition. While Johnson’s main motive for compiling a dictionary was financial – the booksellers were prepared to pay him the apparently grand sum of £1,575 – there can be little doubt that the project appealed to his unfulfilled ambitions as an educator.
Setting out his plans, Johnson declared that he would record only those words he could find in books, and consequently the Dictionary does not include a good deal of slang that was in use at that time. In principle, it was not enough for him to hear something as he passed along Fleet Street or through the gin-soaked slums of the parish of St Giles; if he could not find a word or expression in a printed source, it would not be included. In practice, he did pick up some words ‘as industry should find, or chance should offer’. Yet the emphasis on printed texts was crucial to his achievement. Thanks to his insistence on having documentary evidence and on supporting his definitions with quotations that illustrated words in use, he achieved a much fuller portrait of the language than his predecessors had.
Instead of beginning with a word list, Johnson began with books, reading widely in the literature of the previous two hundred years. In drawing his evidence about the language from books, he was implicitly accepting that words mean what people use them to mean. In the Plan of the Dictionary he published in 1747, he claimed that etymology would be the mechanism for producing his definitions, yet in the finished work he does not pay much attention to it. Precedent was his guide; most of the time he did not issue proclamations about what words ‘should’ mean. Whereas initially he presents a strict and limited system for distinguishing the meanings of each word, in the end he demarcates a vast number of senses for some common words. His illustrations of the word etymology suggest a complete loss of faith in the power of that discipline, as in his citation of the historian of theatre Jeremy Collier: ‘When words are restrained, by common usage, to a particular sense, to run up to etymology … is wretchedly ridiculous.’
Nevertheless, for all his skill in discerning the different senses of a word and for all his aplomb in writing definitions, Johnson displayed some prejudices, stigmatizing particular words and types of word. He identified some words as ‘low’, ‘cant’ or ‘barbarous’. Other labels included ‘ludicrous’, ‘improper’, ‘redundant’, ‘bad’ and even ‘vicious’. He was not the first English lexicographer to do this, and in fact more of his usage labels are descriptive than evaluative. The vast majority of words are not labelled in this way at all, and, had he really been the hard-line prescriptivist of myth, he would surely just have excluded words that he disliked. Still, the evaluations stand out.
Johnson was suspicious of words imported from French. In the preface he ominously declared that if the ‘idleness and ignorance’ of translators be ‘suffered to proceed’, it will ‘reduce us to babble a dialect of France’.2 He omitted from the Dictionary words such as bouquet, liqueur and vignette. Perhaps he did not find them in the texts he consulted, but his attitude is apparent in his condemnation of borrowings such as ruse (‘a French word neither elegant nor necessary’) and trait (which is ‘scarce English’). He defines to Frenchify as ‘to infect with the manner of France; to make a coxcomb’ and provides a pungent illustrative quotation from William Camden about the unpopularity of the ‘Frenchified’ Edward the Confessor.
Although Johnson’s hostility to French was not unusual, many of his contemporaries admired the language. The position was well stated by Hugh Blair in Lectures on Rhetoric (1783), in which he collected material he had been using for more than twenty years in his university teaching at Edinburgh. Blair claimed that ‘It is chiefly, indeed, on grave subjects, and with respec
t to the stronger emotions of the mind, that our Language displays its power of expression. We are said to have thirty words, at least, for denoting all the varieties of the passion of anger.’ However, ‘the French Language surpasses ours, by far, in expressing the nicer shades of character; especially those varieties of manner, temper, and behaviour, which are displayed in our social intercourse with one another,’ and ‘no Language is so copious as the French for whatever is delicate, gay, and amusing. It is, perhaps, the happiest Language for conversation in the known world.’ ‘National character’, Blair concluded, will ‘always have some perceptible influence on the turn of Language’.3
Johnson’s view of national character is apparent in the Dictionary. For instance, he explains that bulldogs are ‘so peculiar to Britain, that they are said to degenerate when they are carried to other countries’. Some of his assertions feel implausible. He claims that ‘The English language has properly no dialects’, which implies a unity that a time-traveller touring the country in 1755 would struggle to recognize.4 There are other statements that suggest linguistic partiality. ‘I could not visit caverns to learn the miner’s language, nor take a voyage to perfect my skill in the dialect of navigation,’ he says. Nor did he visit merchants and shops – but then, ‘of the laborious and mercantile part of the people, the diction is in a great measure casual and mutable’. This has been interpreted by many modern critics as an arrogant dismissal of the language of the working man and the poor. But the ‘laborious and mercantile part’ includes many middle-class people, and in any case Johnson is saying these things to manage readers’ expectations. In truth, one of the strengths of the Dictionary is its coverage of these very areas. He argues that the ‘fugitive cant’ of such people ‘is always in a state of increase or decay’ and ‘cannot be regarded as any part of the durable materials of a language’. Accordingly, it must be allowed to ‘perish with other things unworthy of preservation’.5 This, too, has been seen as evidence of Johnson’s middle-class dismissal of demotic speech. But examination of the cant that does find its way into the Dictionary shows that what he had in mind was not the language of the disenfranchised. Rather, it was often the smart talk of the upwardly mobile – the sort of modish hypocrisy that had troubled Swift.
The Language Wars Page 11
