by Melvyn Bragg
Fielding was just one of several of the best writers in the language — Dr. Johnson and Goldsmith were others — who served time as hacks in Grub Street. The idea of a public and professional writer was spreading and hundreds of hopefuls poured in even though the majority ended up rather like Samuel Boyse, skint, writing wrapped in a blanket with his arms thrust through two holes, or like Richard Savage, under the pen name of Iscariot Hackney, who described how he wrote for the notorious fraud and pornographic publisher Edmund Curll “obscenity and Profaneness under the [assumed] names of Pope and Swift . . . Mr. John Gay . . . or Addison. I abridged histories and travels from the French they never wrote and was expert at finding out new titles for old books.” Curll was made to stand in the pillory for publishing The Memoirs of John Ker of Kersland. But he was unstoppable. So was print. English was taken to the streets in sheets hot off the press. The language was gorged up by new and excited readers who were delighted to see their language pry into as many crannies of life as was legally possible.
But coexisting with that exuberance, possibly as a result of it, there was a deep anxiety about the state of the language and that anxiety was expressed not by a bunch of busybodies but by those who used the language with the greatest force and elegance.
Chaucer is important here. The poets and other writers recognised and bowed to his greatness but the harsh truth was that his words were very hard to read (they have become much easier, ironically, over the last few generations with the organised study of old varieties of language and the increased interest in dialects) and events like the Great Vowel Shift seemed to have robbed them of song. Chaucer, the writers feared, would very soon be lost to posterity. And if Chaucer was in danger, what could they hope for? It is feared by the greatest. In his Essay on Criticism Pope wrote: “And such as Chaucer is, shall Dryden be?” The writers believe that this can be prevented only if they themselves take action to prevent “the corruption” of the language. “Corrupt,” “corrupted,” “corruption” occurs again and again and will continue to do so for the next two hundred fifty years. It is very clearly expressed in 1824 by Anon, On the Dialect of the Craven, which speaks for the centuries which precede and follow it: it looks for purity in the country and in the past:
Pent up in their native mountains and principally engaged in agricultural pursuits, the inhabitants of this district had no opportunity of corrupting the purity of their language by adopting foreign idioms. But it has become a subject of much regret that since the introduction of commerce, and in consequence of that, a greater intercourse, the singularity of the language has, of late years, been much corrupted.
The late sixteenth century, which had ransacked the world for words, coined them, traded in them, made new words a fashion, poured a golden vocabulary into the word-hoard of English, was not an example these men wanted to follow. They wanted language to be fixed. And their confidence, even in the middle of the fury of new print, was ebbing away: Shakespeare had written in his Summer’s Day Sonnet that writing (his at least) lasts for ever:
Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st;
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
Edmund Waller, in Of English Verse as early as 1645, was both expressing and setting the scene for a crucial change of mind and mood:
But who can hope his lines should long
Last in a daily changing tongue?
He went on to express what became the battle plan of the new republic of letters:
Poets that lasting marble seek
Must carve in Latin or in Greek:
We write in sand, our language grows
And like the tide, our work o’erflows.
Early in the next, the eighteenth century, Jonathan Swift echoes and confirms the lament of Edmund Waller. He writes: “How then shall any Man who hath a Genius for History equal to the best of the Ancients be able to undertake such a Work with Spirit and Chearfulness, when he considers, that he will be read with Pleasure but a very few Years, and in an Age or two shall hardly be understood without an Interpreter?”
Never mind the irony that Jonathan Swift rides into the twenty-first century well able to take care of himself; never mind that most of those who write have very little hope that they will be read at all in the future. Swift’s complaint assumed his genius (rightly) and wanted and demanded a language good enough to take it down to a comprehending posterity.
Swift mounted a campaign and one of the first things he did was to rout his enemies, the first of whom were the British aristocracy whose barbaric use of English, he thought, set no example but a bad one. He slated it in his opening salvo, a letter to The Tatler in 1710. It was a letter he claimed to have received.
Sir, I cou’dn’t get the things you sent for about Town. I thot to ha’ come down myself, and then I’d ha’ brout’um; but I han’t don’t and I believe I can’t do’t, that’s pozz. Tom begins to g’imself airs because he’s going with the plenipo’s. ’Tis said the French King will bamboozl ’ us agen which causes many speculations. The Jacks and others of that kidney are very uppish and alert upon’t as you may see by their phizz’s . . .
It is fascinating that across the Atlantic Mark Twain would embrace and celebrate even less “correct” dialect but in London the author of Gulliver wanted to eradicate it. Swift is mostly worried about innovations of the past twenty years. He detested words that were clipped: “rep” (for “reputation”), “pos” (for “positive”), mob, penult, and others (this seems to have been no temporary fad; look at the clipped words of today: phone, bus, taxi, ad). He did not like verbs to be contracted, as in “drudg’d,” “disturb’d,” “rebuk’d,” “fledg’d,” “where by leaving out a Vowel to save a Syllable,” he wrote, “we form so jarring a Sound, and so difficult to utter that I have often wondred how it could ever obtain.” He hated words he thought merely fashionable — “sham,” “banter,” “bubble,” “bully,” “cutting,” “shuffling” and “palming” — the language of the Mohocks.
In the early eighteenth century on the streets of London there were the Mohocks (the posh thugs with their high slang) and the bullies (the common thugs with their coarse slang). One of their “new inventions” was to roll persons down Snow Hill in a tub; another was to overturn coaches on rubbish heaps. They were said to be armed with razors and knives and “scared our maids and wives.” As often, it was what they did as much as what they said which caused their language to be disliked and the object of exclusion. The upper classes, the aristocracy, or rather their Mohock sons, were to be of no use in the battle for purification.
It was these aristocratic “bloods,” maybe even a Mohock at the end of the seventeenth century, who had introduced the word “bloody” as an emphatic, an intensifier. It quickly infected the lower orders. Shakespeare had used the word descriptively: “What bloody man is that?” but this usage turned it into “a horrid word.” “Bloody drunk,” i.e. drunk as a blood (cf. drunk as a lord) seems to have diverted it towards obscenity and soon it colonised the mouths of those wishing to be or unable not to be coarse. It alarmed the ears of the polite. Its association with the ancient blasphemy “Christ’s blood” or “’sblood” probably helped it along, as did its gory relationship to battle and butchery. Literature, always on the lookout, published it early: in 1684, Dryden writes of bullies who enter “bloody drunk”; in 1742, Richardson wrote, “He is bloody passionate. I saw that at the Hill”; in 1743, Fielding, sometimes called the Father of the English Novel after Tom Jones and Joseph Andrews, wrote, “This is a bloody positive old Fellow.” Even Swift, in his later years, answered the question “Are you not sick, my dear?” with “Bloody sick.”
Swift saw no salvation in the aristocracy and so he turned to his fellow writers, part of that stratum of middle-class talent which was embarking on the remarkable journey of turning the damp little offshore islands of Europe into the centre
of trade, science, philosophy, commerce and industry for the entire planet.
To do this, Swift was happy to play politics and appeal, directly, to Queen Anne herself. A stable language, he pointed out, would “very much contribute to the Glory of Her Majesty’s Reign.” If the task of fixing the language were not completed, he argued, then it is possible that future generations would not know of the queen’s glory since the texts which record history will be incomprehensible due to changes in the language. If history is not recorded “in Words more durable than Brass and such as Posterity may read a thousand Years hence” then it cannot be guaranteed that “Memory shall be preserved above an Hundred Years, further than by imperfect Tradition.”
There is more than one way to interpret this: you could say it was a cynical manoeuvre to get the crown on his side in the fight for his pet project; you could accuse him of overweening ambition in his almost mad attempt to “fix” something as unfixable as the meaning of words; you could say he was simply besotted by a dubious comparison with classical authors whose reach for posterity depended on circumstances very different from the restless history of English. Or you can, as I do, see it as something of a cry of pain that his words, his life’s work, the visible evidence of his racked life and relentless imagination, should be at the mercy of a language whose changes would dilute it, obscure it, finally even bury it alive. He looked on his mighty works and despaired.
His friend Addison, of the Spectator, the essayist so influential on so many writers of his time on both sides of the Atlantic (Benjamin Franklin used him as a model for his prose), rolled up in support of Swift. In 1711 he wrote:
I have often wished that as in our Constitution there are several Persons whose Business it is to watch over our Laws, our Liberties and Commerce, certain Men might be set apart, as Superintendents of our Language to hinder any Words of a Foreign Coin from passing among us; and in particular to prohibit any French Phrases from becoming Current in this Kingdom when those of our own stamp are altogether as valuable.
Needless to say, we were at war with the French again. Addison used the war as an example of the pestilence he abhorred: “When we have won Battels which may be described in our own Language, why are our Papers filled with so many unintelligible Exploits, and the French obliged to lend us a Part of their Tongue before we can know how they are Conquered?” (Addison must have known that both the above assertions are laced with words derived from French — for instance: “liberties,” “commerce,” “language,” “current,” “valuable.”)
What was happening was that the young men, perhaps even the young bloods, over in the wars were having a high old time sending letters home full of new words designed to show off their new knowledge and to baffle, perhaps to provoke, their parents. They wrote of a “Morass” and a “reconnoitre,” of “pontoons” and “fascines,” spoke of “hauteur” of the “Corps de Reserve” and a “Charte Blanche” — and many of these, of course, the home tongue quietly digested and served up new as English. Even Addison, even with the fashionable and influential Spectator magazine behind him, was unable to dam up the torrent.
Swift wanted an academy — such as French (1635) and Italian (1582) had already — in order to ascertain (in the sense of “fix”) the language. Dryden and Evelyn had suggested it some years earlier but they had not got very far: even forming a committee seemed beyond them. Swift goes on the offensive. He wants the academy to formulate rules for grammar, to discard improprieties, to make corrections and to set up a permanent standard. In 1712, he wrote a Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue. “Ascertaining” was the big word. He wanted the language fixed so that (unlike Chaucer) it would be easily and correctly readable for centuries to come. “I see no absolute Necessity why any Language should be perpetually changing,” he wrote. He wanted it to be as fixed as classical Latin and Greek, even though they themselves had changed hugely in their development and only became fixed when the written form had become a “dead” language. In Gulliver, Swift ridicules and caricatures attempts to change the language.
Like Wilkins’ unused “original” language, Swift’s academy did not catch on. As a riposte to Swift’s proposal, John Oldmixon spoke for many empirical English speakers when he said that he would rejoice if the language could be fixed but it can’t be: “the Doctor [Swift] may as well set up a Society to find out the Grand Elixir, the perpetual motion, the Longitude and other such discoveries, as to fix our Language beyond our own times . . .” Oldmixon was wrong about longitude.
And observers noticed that the French, for instance, still changed their language despite their academy. In 1714, Queen Anne died, Swift’s Tory supporters were replaced by Whigs in office and the throne was taken by a German with little English and very little interest in it. The idea of the academy crumbled before a stone had been laid.
There is also a telling phrase in John Oldmixon’s objection — “our Language.” Many of the English were very proud of “our Language.” They saw their character stamped on the words and they were right. They believed it embodied, preserved and encouraged the English spirit of individual liberty, of a resistance to central regulation, of not liking being told what to do. If anyone were to make “the first major attempt to impose order on the language” (David Crystal’s phrase), it would have to be an individual and a rare, almost superhumanly knowledgeable, bloody-minded, determined, prodigiously energetic individual. That was what English wanted: a champion, but one who understood the uniqueness as they saw it of the language they relished.
Came the hour, came Dr. Samuel Johnson, an intimidating scholar, the monarch of London wits, a beacon of his age, a savage melancholic and, like Newton, an effortless eccentric.
In 1755, Johnson’s Dictionary was published in two folio volumes. It was the result of seven years’ work with little assistance. Forty members of the Académie Française took about fifty-five years in compiling Le Dictionnaire de l’Académie Française (1694) and spent another eighteen years revising it. In a conversation with John Adams, Johnson calculated his position with regard to the inevitably envied and denigrated French and their forty members and concluded that three Englishmen were worth at least a hundred Frenchmen. This went down very well. (There’s an even more flattering figure — 1:500! Forty Frenchmen times forty years divided by one Englishman in three years.) Despite the boast, Johnson’s achievement remains awe-inspiring. He rounded up forty-three thousand words and defined them. He pointed out what he had omitted and why, and whatever the occasional prejudices, blunders and blemishes, it set the mark for English dictionaries. It was the first time there had been a dictionary with illustrative quotations, and this was central to its importance. And as he pointed out on the title page, he was careful to use only the “best writers.”
He began, as his initial plan shows, very much on the side of the Swift–Addison party. His idea was to make “a dictionary by which the pronunciation of our language may be fixed and its attainment facilitated; by which its purity may be preserved, its use ascertained and its duration lengthened.” Which seems very much like Swift’s academy but within two volumes rather than four walls.
But after he had worked on the dictionary and come to write the preface in 1755, his pragmatism and his honesty in face of the force and life of English saw a rueful but radical change of mind:
Those who have been persuaded to think well of my design, will require that it should fix our language, and put a stop to those alterations which time and chance have hitherto been suffered to make in it without opposition. With this consequence I will confess that I flattered myself for a while; but now begin to fear that I have indulged expectation which neither reason nor experience can justify.
With that calm sentence English bade farewell to any serious idea of an academy: just as in its eleventh-century vernacular written form it had been leagues ahead of its “European” rivals, so now through its non-elected word keeper, Dr. Johnson, it declared it would be for ever le
agues behind any elected word-fixers. In both cases there is something to celebrate. English would never be lashed down and the power of its freedom gave it, I think, an extra cylinder when it came up against the obstacle or the opposition of other languages. In a sense, Johnson’s admission of defeat by the language says as much for English as Alfred’s insistence on its powers after his victory. The 1755 preface goes on:
When we see men grow old and die at a certain time one after another, from century to century, we laugh at the elixir that promises to prolong life to a thousand years; and with equal justice may the lexicographer be derided, who being able to produce no example of a nation that has preserved their words and phrases from mutability, shall imagine that his dictionary can embalm his language, and secure it from corruption and decay, that it is in his power to change sublunary nature, or clear the world at once from folly, vanity, and affectation.
Game, set and match to English. The masters had been mastered by it. It would yield to an alphabetical order but to nothing else. To fix pronunciation, as Johnson had said he would do, was equally impossible: “sounds are too volatile and subtile for legal restraints.”
He made many rules for himself. These included the omission of “all words which have relation to proper names . . .” such as “Calvinist,” “Benedictine,” “Mahometan.” Foreign words introduced, in his opinion, through ignorance, “vanity or wantonness, by compliance with fashion or lust of innovation, I have registered as they occurred though commonly only to censure them.” This first comprehensive dictionary in our language continues on its individual way with such dictates as “compounded or double words I have seldom noted . . . of thieflike or coach-driver no notice was needed.” He goes on: “the verbal nouns in ‘ing,’ such as the keeping of the castle, the leading of the army, are always neglected.” Participles are usually omitted. Obsolete words are admitted when they are found in authors not obsolete and also included if they deserve revival. He confesses to omitting words he has never found in books and words which “I cannot explain, because I do not understand them.” On he goes in a manner which enraged, amazed or struck dumb all future lexicographers and pleased so many general readers. “That many terms of art and manufacture are omitted,” he says, “must be frankly acknowledged; but for this defect I may boldly allege that it was unavoidable: I could not visit caverns to learn the miner’s language, nor take a voyage to perfect my skill in the dialect of navigation, nor visit the warehouses of merchants, and shops of artificers, to gain the names of wares, tools and operations, of which no mention is found in books.”
