Nonetheless, medieval at this time became a slur, and it was the mechanical impulse that predominated in an age where even human behaviour was codified as if to be manufactured. Chesterfield’s notions of etiquette were now formalized. The emphasis was on practicality, on systems of regulated decorum. In Henry John Todd’s revision of Johnson’s Dictionary, published in 1818, etiquette was explicitly calibrated against ‘rank, and place’. Conduct could be quantified; manners were not the equivalent of morals, but were instead a question of knowledge, of rules and conventions. The bestselling Enquire Within Upon Everything, a guide boasting expertise in matters from burying a relative to making a wax model of a flower, advises, ‘Be discreet and sparing of your words’, ‘A gentleman walking, should always wear gloves’ and ‘Never be without a handkerchief.’ ‘Moderation, decorum, and neatness distinguish the gentleman,’ readers are counselled. ‘The correctness of his mind induces him to bend to etiquette, but not to stoop to adulation.’21 Significantly, books of this kind were written for financial gain, rather than out of any great sense of moral urgency.22
The Great Exhibition of 1851 highlighted the quasi-religious ardour with which Victorian Britain cultivated domestic virtues. Its 2,000-page catalogue boasted of being ‘a book of reference to the philosopher, merchant, and manufacturer’. Dickens complained that the exhibition contained too much – that the atmosphere of this temple to material abundance was thoroughly oppressive. But for its apologists, such as Charles Babbage, it was a chance to give the intricacies of technology an aura of religious magnificence. Six million visitors paid homage. One of the exhibitors was Adolf Sax, a Belgian, who proudly displayed a set of instruments to be played by military bands, including his recent invention the saxophone. Other exhibits propelled new words into the limelight: lorry, lithograph , hydromechanics, and some long since forgotten articles, like dhoop, a piney resin from Bhutan, the commercially worthless hyawaballi wood of Guyana, a Philippine fabric called jusi, and serpentcleide, a wooden bass bugle.
Technology promised to extend the domain of the human mind, and British pre-eminence in the field was considered a given. Less secure, though, was the status of the language needed to maintain this. One recurrent theme among technophiles was that mechanical sophistication mattered more than elegance; as far as language was concerned, it was better to avoid felicitous foreign novelties and instead concentrate on ‘correctness’.
Techniques of correctness were strenuously moralized. The Habits of Good Society, a volume on etiquette dating from 1859, suggests that ‘Perhaps the most useful accomplishment … is a knowledge of languages … [for] you are liable in really good society … to meet with foreigners having a very slight acquaintance with English. From them you may derive a vast amount of information … [and] you will rarely meet with a Frenchman, Italian, or German, from whom you may not gather much curious information which will serve you elsewhere.’23 However, ‘the worst vulgarity is an assumption of refinement in the choice of language’: the author explains that ‘the best speakers will never use a Latin word where an Anglo-Saxon one will do as well.’24 Another publication, more directly concerned with languages, was A Dictionary of Daily Blunders (1880), whose author, Thomas Preston, assailed such vices as Americanisms and inept metaphors, while reserving special distaste for those who ‘introduce foreign words and phrases into ordinary writing at every opportunity, when there are English words to express the same meaning equally well’.25 ‘A slip of the tongue is bad enough, but how much worse is a slip of the pen!’ Preston exclaims, adding that, while ‘blunders are occasionally frivolous,’ for any reader who ‘discovers he has been innocently blundering, the book will be well worth its cost’.26 Resistance to this kind of attitude was common. In Middlemarch it is summed up by Fred Vincy, who denounces ‘correct’ usage as ‘the slang of prigs’.
Anxieties about the state of the language were nothing new, but there was a fresh sense that urgent efforts were needed in order to keep barbarisms at bay. In part this was cultural xenophobia, in part moral anxiety. To the most extreme purists, each new word that entered the language seemed to mark a cultural trauma. In some cases we can precisely determine the moment this happened. There may be no better example than radioactive, first used by Pierre and Marie Curie in a report to the French Academy of Sciences on 18 July 1898; ten days later the word appeared in the British magazine Nature. Sociology was coined by the philosopher Auguste Comte in 1830, was first used in an English text in 1843, and was eagerly taken up by Herbert Spencer, who was responsible for the phrase often wrongly attributed to Darwin, ‘the survival of the fittest’. The Crimean War gave rise to cardigan and balaclava, and popularized ambulance, which derived from hôpital ambulant, a ‘walking hospital’. At the risk of merely listing instances, I’ll briefly note a few more. The omnibus, which drew its name from the Latin meaning ‘for all’, was launched in Nantes in the 1820s and introduced to Britain by George Shillibeer in 1829 – his service ran from Paddington into the City of London. Mascot was made known by Edmond Audran’s comic opera La Mascotte, which premiered in December 1880; the word derives from a Provençal term for a magic charm. We should be aware, however, that La Mascotte’s first performance would not have been called a premiere, for that word was not used in its theatrical sense until 1889. It was short for première représentation, a mouthful that certainly wasn’t going to catch on. Early in the next century we find superman, which is George Bernard Shaw’s calque of the German Übermensch, a motif of Nietzsche’s philosophy. Shaw also introduced Wunderkind, and was a great one for turning people’s names into adjectives, coining for instance Tiepolesque and Rodinesque, Strindbergian, Mendelssohnic and the clumsy Beethovenian. (Is the dreadful Shavian his payback for doing so?) More usefully, he brought in realpolitik and, long before D. H. Lawrence employed the phrase in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the muckily erotic nostalgie de la boue.
For its part, the word neologism first appeared in 1799, and in 1841 Isaac D’Israeli, so savage in his criticism of the verbose Hamon L’Estrange, could write of the way ‘neologisms have fertilised the barrenness of our Saxon, and the finest geniuses in Europe have abandoned the language of Cicero, to transfuse its grace into an idiom whose penury was deemed too rude for the pen of the scholar.’27 Irony abounds here, and others took up the cudgels in unambiguously moral terms. Henry Alford, a pious cleric who had at the age of ten produced a pamphlet with the wonderfully earnest title Looking unto Jesus: The Believer’s Support under Trials and Afflictions, published A Plea for the Queen’s English in 1864 – by which time he was fifty-four and dean of Canterbury. Alford was much concerned with misspelling in newspapers, the overuse of commas, and the abundance of silly nicknames. He worried about ‘American debasements’ – ‘their reckless exaggeration’ and ‘blunted sense of moral obligation’ – and counselled readers to ‘avoid … all slang words,’ as this kind of talk was fit only ‘for raw schoolboys, and one-term freshmen, to astonish their sisters with’.28 He would doubtless have been shocked to read a letter Queen Victoria wrote in December 1863, in which she described the sky as lilacky. And still more painful to him would have been those American imports of the period we have already seen: blizzard, graveyard, loafer and lengthy.
The number of words borrowed from French decreased in the early part of the nineteenth century, after the heyday of post-Revolutionary loans, but it was still the living foreign language that English-speakers were most likely to learn, and by 1840 imports were on the rise again. Peter Mark Roget’s celebrated Thesaurus (1852) contains a noticeably large volume of French terms and phrases, as we might expect given his francophone background. New words and phrases from French included rapprochement and camaraderie, clairvoyance and allure, noblesse oblige and amour propre. Abattoir, a word current in French after Napoleon’s reforms of 1810, began to displace the less hygienic-sounding slaughterhouse. French was usually associated with politesse and fashionable living, although it was often criticized, as for instance
by Thomas De Quincey, who claimed that its ‘very power … as a language for social intercourse, is built on its impotence for purposes of passion, grandeur, and native simplicity’.29 It was also associated with louche living, epitomized in new borrowings of the period like agent provocateur and indeed louche itself, which derived from the French word for ‘squinting’. In Vanity Fair (1847-8), the brilliantly scheming Becky Sharp is welcomed into Parisian society and is courted by ‘English men of fashion’, but is dismissed by their wives, who label her a parvenue.
In her account of nineteenth-century English, Lynda Mugglestone notes the popularity of engougement – a word meaning ‘unreasoning fondness’ – and observes as well Benjamin Disraeli’s liking for betise and the widening adoption of words like luxe and débâcle. Robert Peel was known for his foreign turn of phrase – or rather tournure de phrase.30 Modish Gallicisms included cachet, milieu, enfant terrible, aide-mémoire (often with its acute accent), pastiche, risqué, savoir faire, and that insipid word for a decent thing, bonhomie. Slice of life was a calque of the French tranche de vie. Croquet migrated via Ireland into England in 1851, achieving considerable popularity in the 1860s. Another vogue was for using the French femme in combinations such as femme du monde, femme de ménage and femme incomprise. In a volume from 1879 entitled Society Small Talk the anonymous author, a self-styled ‘member of the aristocracy’, is determined to stamp out ‘vulgarisms’ yet displays a grating enthusiasm for snippets of French: rencontre, tapis, gaucherie, mauvaise langue.
Nevertheless, the use of foreign words and phrases – especially those from French – was commonly ridiculed. Jane Austen was one author who had fun at the expense of characters who went in for pretentious Gallicisms. Another, in the Victorian heartland, was Elizabeth Gaskell; in Wives and Daughters (1866) Mrs Gibson takes a particularly risible pleasure in referring to her household ornaments as objets d’art. The less well-known John Moore, in Mordaunt: Sketches of Life, Characters and Manners, in Various Countries (1800), has one character refer slightingly to a Lady Mincing, who often prefers French words to English ones and uses embonpoint instead of plumpness.
Others were defensive when they introduced snippets of French. In Shirley (1849), Charlotte Brontë refers to a character’s bonté and explains, ‘I use this French word, because it expresses just what I mean; neither goodness nor good nature, but something between the two.’ Later in the novel she uses the noun reflets and in a note avows, ‘Find me an English word as good, reader, and I will gladly dispense with the French word.’ In Disraeli’s novel Vivian Grey (1826) a character uses the French verb résumer; the author comments in a footnote that ‘I have ventured on using this word, in spite of the plaintive remonstrances contained in a pretty little article in the last number of the Quarterly Review’, and adds, ‘I deprecate equally with the reviewer “the hodge-podge of languages” now so much in vogue … although I am not quite prepared to say that I consider this practice “as nauseous as wearing perfumes”.’ As for the reviewer’s taste for ‘the tritest Latin quotations’, he feels only regret: the enthusiasm is ‘worthy of a very young schoolboy, or a very ancient schoolmaster’.
If French had to be used, it was advisable to mangle it. R. S. Surtees’s Mr Jorrocks refers to blanquettes de veau as ‘blankets of woe’, while poissons fatally loses an s. Foreign learners of English were encouraged to dispense where possible with French turns of phrase. A guide to English and Portuguese conversation presented by Pedro Carolino in 1869 emphasized that the phrases it contained were ‘clean of Gallicisms, and despoiled phrases’. Paradoxically, in a section entitled ‘For to speak French’, Carolino offered readers such alarming locutions as ‘It must to study for to learn it. How long there is it what you learn it?’ and ‘I know him it is long; he has teached a many of my friends. Don’t he tell you that it must to speak french?’ Another significant phrase was ‘You do well the french language becomes us all days too much necessary.’31
The Victorians were the first to have a vision of English as a true world language. Right across Europe, national languages were blossoming, but English was, as the German philologist Jacob Grimm recognized, ‘a language of the world’ and ‘destined to reign … over all parts of the globe’. Lord Macaulay hailed ‘our own language’ as ‘pre-eminent even among the languages of the West’. Matthew Arnold, a more restrained writer, was no less fervent an apostle of English and its culture, intuiting their capacity for achieving ‘moral effects’. Britain’s imperial reach could be secured and even extended by means of a standard language. Literacy rose sharply at this time, and publishing flourished. Moreover, free trade was embraced – a process begun in the eighteenth century, but shaped by Robert Peel in the 1840s and completed by Gladstone in the next decade. During this period, for the first time, English began to export more words than it imported.32
Simultaneously, there was a new interest in the language’s history and diversity. The study of its history, invigorated by Sir William Jones, now led to the creation of The Oxford English Dictionary under the stewardship of James Murray. Concerted work on the OED was begun in 1860. The principle of accepting the testimony only of written texts meant that many colloquialisms went unrecorded. So did dialect forms, although Joseph Wright’s English Dialect Dictionary (1898-1905) would compensate for this. But for the makers of the OED there were other pressing concerns. Their work was a celebration of what they considered a unique cultural tradition. It was also an attempt to catch up with the philological progress of German scholars and improve on Dr Johnson’s delightful yet outdated volumes. Predictably, they worried about including French words such as cahier, and some even dubbed them ‘vermin’.33 It says something, surely, about Victorian morality that the word condom was deliberately omitted from the first edition. Yet fiancé managed to displace betrothed, and menu to supplant bill of fare.
William Hodgson, in his Errors in the Use of English (1881), is fidgety about ‘spurious words’. He quotes the amusingly conservative Kington Oliphant – ‘Our hard-working fathers had no need of the word ennui; our wealth, ever waxing, has brought the state of mind; so France has given us the name for it.’Then he cites John Camden Hotten’s recent dictionary of slang:‘an unmeaning gibberish of Gallicisms runs through English fashionable conversation’, and ‘servants … appropriate the scraps of French conversation which fall from their master’s guests at the dinner table, and forthwith in the world of flunkeydom the word “know” is disused, and the lady’s-maid, in doubt on a particular point, asks John whether or no he “saveys” it.’ To Hodgson, the plural forms of adopted nouns were a significant irritant: ‘None but the grossly uneducated commit gross errors in the use of English nominal inflections, these being as familiar as they are few and simple; but foreign nouns, borrowed by English, yet retaining their original inflections, have often provided pitfalls to unwary writers.’ Problem nouns included miasma, cherub, bandit and magus. ‘Of pseudo-Latin plurals one need not speak at length,’ he adds. ‘It is enough to remark that men have been heard to talk of “the throngs of omnibi that ply the London streets” … [and] that Thackeray is said to have known an eminent female grammarian who spoke of witness “taking their affiesdavit”.’34
In volumes like Hodgson’s and Henry Alford’s we see the strong Victorian sense of nationhood, grounded in the idea that the few should lead the rest. The same belief resonated in Sir John Seeley’s The Expansion of England, published in 1883, which emphasized the unity of the nation and the Empire. Seeley argued that ‘the English Empire … broadly may be said to be English throughout,’ and declared that ‘England has left Europe altogether behind it and become a world-state.’35 For Seeley, the nation’s future was not at home, but abroad. Its unity was achieved through language, literature and religion. His book stayed in print until 1956, the year of the Suez Crisis. Seeley characterized his country as ‘pre-eminently … maritime, colonising and industrial’, dating this ‘vocation’ to the age of Elizabeth. But he saw also that �
�bigness’ was not the same as ‘greatness’, and that Britain should not dilute its moral character simply in order to expand its possessions. The contemporary image of empire was steeped in contradiction: on the one hand it was the creation of military triumph, and existed to be exploited, yet on the other it was an instrument of benevolence. Questions about the nature of empire were a feature of the period’s public discourse. What did empire ‘mean’? What obligations did it entail?
This interrogative spirit was a mark of a time when social and technological change were not just brisk, but also highly visible. The structure of the known world was being rearranged. Yet, as social changes unfolded, language preserved distinctions that were highly suggestive of users’ class, education and position. Certain words, for instance, were not used by anyone who could lay serious claim to the qualities of which they were tokens: genteel folk did not speak of being genteel, and to refer to someone as a lady or a gentleman suggested a certain plebeian unctuousness. In Thomas Hardy’s A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873), Elfride Swancourt is chastised by her stepmother for referring to ‘gentlemen’: ‘We have handed over “gentlemen” to the lower classes, where the word is still to be heard at tradesmen’s balls and provincial tea-parties.’36
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