The Adventure of English

by Melvyn Bragg

  In case that was not persuasive enough, he supplied a second, a noble reason for laying down your words and following him. “Would it not greatly contribute to put an end to the odious distinctions kept up between subjects of the same king,” he wrote, “if a way were opened by which the attainment of the English Tongue in its purity, both in point of phraseology and pronunciation, ought to be rendered easy to all inhabitants of His Majesty’s Dominions?” Who could resist such a graceful call?

  But of course, in attempting to unite the nation through pronunciation, Sheridan greatly assisted the growth of a deep and continuing social division between “proper” and “non-proper” speech. The latter was stigmatised, a bar to social advancement. The word “accent” itself, which just used to mean how a word was stressed, began to mean the manner of pronunciation.

  The Sheridan effect was partly as he had intended. Official, High English was hounded and tormented into one and only one “proper” way of pronunciation. But it fought back every inch of the way.

  Who decided? Take the first letter of the alphabet as an example. Take “a.” How did you “properly” pronounce “a” in “fast, bath and last”? This became and for years remained the linguistic equivalent of the Wars of the Roses.

  Today, the long “a” in modern southern speech is still thought by many to be the gold standard, the mark of quality. But in 1791, the scholar John Walker, in his Pronouncing Dictionary, said that the long “a” was only used by “inaccurate speakers, chiefly among the vulgar.” He was emphatic. “Every correct ear,” he wrote, “would be disgusted at giving the ‘a’ in these words the full long sound of the ‘a’ in father.” The short “a,” as in “cat” (or in northern sounds today) is, wrote Walker at the end of the eighteenth century, “elegant, accurate and precise.” The fight was on.

  William Smith, in 1795, called Walker’s pronunciation “a mincing modern affectation . . . departing from the genuine [euphonious] pronunciation of our language.”

  Over to Walker. Of Smith’s long “a” he writes: “that this was the sound formerly is highly possible from its still being the sound given to it by the vulgar, who are generally the last to alter the common pronunciation.”

  It was a split decision: short north — south long: one obstinate but antique, the other polite but a latecomer.

  And pronunciation has been an intoxicating, furious, funny and often bitterly serious playground of English ever since. It roared into the nineteenth century with scores of works such as Hard Words Made Easy. The letter “h” alone received as much attention as the ancient scriptures. Poor Little H — Its Use and Abuse ran to forty editions. Mind Your Hs, Harry Hawkins’ H Book. The pronunciation of English provided its speakers with a matchless gamut of prejudices and added greatly to the spleen and gaiety of the nation.

  Sheridan the Irishman went to Scotland, which has a fair claim to be the motor of the British Enlightenment, to tell them the advantages of “an Uniformity of pronunciation throughout his Majesty’s British Dominions.” The Scots then and now were in at least two minds and various tempers about this but it seems that men of the distinction of James Boswell and Adam Smith did wish to sound like the English upper classes. The Select Society in Edinburgh published a set of regulations which were clear. They were aware of the disadvantages they laboured under in Scotland “from their imperfect knowledge of the English tongue.” They were able to write it “with some tolerable purity.” But not enough attention has been paid to the speaking of it which would be an accomplishment “more important and more universally useful” than the writing of it.

  John Walker stepped forward to be of assistance with his Rules to be Observed by the Natives of Scotland for attaining a just Pronunciation of English. Sylvester Douglas waded in with a Treatise on the Lowland Dialect of Scotland (1779). It was no small matter. The centre of power was increasingly insistent on a centralised accent and powerful Scots were not going to be left out even if it meant publicly demoting their own language. It is a good example of the repressive effect of the official language of authority.

  There were two languages in Scotland and oddly the smaller, the Gaelic, is that which has hung on the most tenaciously. As the court and Church were Anglicised, the Gaelic retreated to its brooding fastnesses in the apparently impregnable Highlands and Islands into which even the Romans had not ventured. Lowland Scots had long had close links with the Northumbrian, developing a language separate from though related to the English.

  The Act of Union in 1707 meant that Scotland’s laws and administrative arrangements were defined in London, in English, and by the time of the Enlightenment, to the anguish of many Scots, Gaelic was peripheral. Scots had become what was called the “low” language and metropolitan English was now the medium of law, administration, education and religion. From the eighteenth century onwards, the gentry of Scotland increasingly tended to receive an English education. So in Mr. Sheridan’s “polite” and Adam Smith’s influential circles, English was the standard: no variety of Scots was codified. It even began to be disparaged and by its own people: books proliferated listing Scotticisms to be avoided in polite society. The Scots were assailed and harangued but in one sense of the phrase, they asked for it. And they made English work for them by turning out some of the finest philosophical prose in the language.

  But the tutoring must have been hard to bear. To take just one example: “Mistakes in quantity are not uncommon, and indeed a very principal error in the pronunciation of our northern neighbours is that of lengthening the vowels which we pronunce short, and of shortening those which we make long: thus for ‘head’ they say in Scotland ‘heed,’ for ‘take,’ ‘tak’ etc.” Mistakes! Errors! Too long here, too short there! And if they worked hard they could get a pat on the head (or heed) from Dr. Johnson as he encountered Lowland Scots on his way to the Highlands and Islands. “The conversation of the Scots grows every day less unpleasing to the English,” he wrote, “their peculiarities wear fast away; their dialect is likely to become in half a century provincial and rustick, even to themselves. The great, the learned, the ambitious and the vain, all cultivate the English phrase, and the English pronunciation.”

  Johnson was right and wrong. The Gaelic language spoken in the far north of Scotland and out on the islands is still spoken today but more pertinently, after the Battle of Culloden of 1746, which marked the end of the attempt of the Stuarts to take the English crown. Gaelic still showed its resilience through the Ossian Poems. These may have been a perverse way of demonstrating energy, and most likely a fraud, but they are evidence of the spell the old ignored tongue could still cast on the new proper world.

  In 1760, Macpherson published Fragments of Ancient Poetry, a translation, he claimed, of a great Celtic epic created in the third century by the blind bard Ossian. Ossian’s admirers included Burns, Scott, Wordsworth, Yeats, Beethoven, Ingres and Napoleon, who is said to have carried the epic into battle. But doubt set in when Dr. Johnson denounced the work as a forgery. Despite some recent evidence in its favour, Macpherson is still perceived as a great Scottish cultural con artist. Yet the fact that there was a public, and such a distinguished public, ready to rally to the Gaelic (even in translation, even in a forged translation) demonstrates something of its continuing capacity to command attention.

  And Dr. Johnson was at most only half right when he predicted of the Lowland tongue that in half a century it would become “provincial and rustick, even to themselves.” Robert Burns was born in 1759, and his work refuted Dr. Johnson. His songs may go on to undermine Johnson’s opinion further, given the successful reaching back to its roots to which Scots has recently directed itself in poetry, fiction, drama and song over the past two generations.

  Robert Burns, eldest son of seven children of a poor tenant farmer, who somehow managed to find the means to educate the boy, became a Romantic poet whose life was the essence of Romance and Romantic poetry. He was a “child of Nature,” working as a ploughboy until he was fifteen
or sixteen. He wrote poetry to find “some kind of counterpoise” to his circumstances. He loved women to excess and fathered several illegitimate children, including twins to Jean Armour, whom he married. He loved Scots. He loved Scotch. His first collection, Poems — Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, received much critical acclaim and in Edinburgh he was feted, patronised and ruined perhaps, as “The Ploughman Poet.” He died aged thirty-seven, but his legacy is vast: four hundred songs, some of which are recognised as masterpieces, “The Lea Rig,” “Tam o’ Shanter” and “A Red, Red Rose.” Ten thousand came to pay their respects at his funeral and that was only the beginning of a reputation which is kept alive wherever Scots with even a smattering of literature meet to talk of Scotland, drink whisky and toast the ladies and the haggis:

  Fair fa’ your honest, sonsie face,

  Great chieftain o’ the puddin’ race!

  Aboon them a’ ye tak yer place

  Painch, tripe or thairm:

  Weel are ye wordy o’ a grace

  As lang’s my arm.

  Not only the Scots read him, so did the English; he had readers everywhere. He is not all that difficult to understand. He’ll often throw in an English word to help us out, especially in his word clusters “kiaugh and care” (the same), “furms an’ benches” (the same), “decent, honest, fawsont” (fawsont means decent). But at a time when Dr. Johnson and his heirs appeared to be tramping Scots underfoot, this man from the land itself restored Auld Scotland’s grandeur, gave it an inextinguishable heart of genius which resurrected pride and assured it a posterity.

  English is there in Burns’ work but there is no denying that because it was shot through with Scots, the work did not receive, in the mainstream of English literature, the appreciation its quality deserved. Burns’ fidelity to one of the suppressed languages of Britain to some degree cut him off. For generations, Scots suffered the disregard of non-standard English: only recently has it risen again to claim a place as it were at the high table. For years, Burns’ language became such a powerful touchstone for national identity that it was subsumed in politics. In this it was enacting a part often played by language. It can be language alone that holds a nation together, as it did for the English when Norman French threatened to overwhelm it.

  A few miles south-west of Burns’ country was the Lake District, which had nursed and nourished another poet who sought out the common experience and ordinary language for his subject-matter, William Wordsworth.

  Wordsworth’s contribution to English poetry has been widely recognised. Ted Hughes said that “looking back he is the first eminence we see.” In ascending order, he said, we “see” Wordsworth, Milton, Shakespeare. One of Wordsworth’s contributions to the adventure of English is that, in the preface to his Lyrical Ballads in 1798, he stressed that poetry could be written in “the language really used by men” and did not need a special poetic diction or an elaborate vocabulary or any other “fine clothes” to express deep feelings. He also chose to write about the rural life which had surrounded his childhood, a childhood passed, geographically, not very far from that of Burns. But it was in a different world. Unlike Burns, Wordsworth went to an excellent grammar school and boarded; from there he went to Cambridge, took a walking tour in France and Switzerland, enjoyed advantages available to very few. Perhaps even more remarkable, then, that reimmersing himself in the daily life in the Lake District, he should find his main subject-matter in “low and rustic life.” He explained why: “because in that condition the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity, are less under restraint, and speak a plainer, more explicit language; because in that condition of life our elementary feelings exist in a state of greater simplicity, and, consequently, may be more accurately contemplated.”

  He went even further: “The language, too, of these men is adopted (purified indeed from what appear to be its real defects, from all lasting and rational causes of dislike or disgust) because such men hourly communicate with the best objects from which the best part of language is originally derived.” There is an entire philosophy there, fuelled by Wordsworth’s passion for the first phase of the French Revolution in which he had been caught up.

  Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive

  But to be young was very heaven!

  Given that Dr. Johnson had criticised Shakespeare for using “knife” in Macbeth — “a tradesman’s word,” he called it, “an instrument used by butchers and cooks” — Wordsworth’s determination to use plain words to convey the weight of powerful feelings was a bold and crucial step. He not only set this out as a manifesto, he followed his own commandment in poems which are now rooted into English literature. He was aware how much he was taking on. “Readers accustomed to the gaudiness and inane phraseology of many modern writers,” he wrote, “if they persist in reading this book [the Lyrical Ballads of 1798] to its conclusion, will perhaps frequently have to struggle with feelings of strangeness and awkwardness: they will look around for poetry.” He was reviled at first, and for many years, for daring to bring poetry from the voice of the people. In a way he gave it back to its bedrock of Old English.

  A few years before, in 1790, Thomas Paine had written The Rights of Man in a plain style to demonstrate that “such a style did not preclude precision of thought and expression.” That a political work of great influence on political thought and a young poet who was to exercise even greater influence on poetic practice should agree in this way opened up what has become a major thoroughfare for English. A case was now made for the effectiveness, the poetry, the depth of meaning and feeling which could be mined from “plain English.” It is possible to imagine a world without the influence of Paine, Wordsworth and their followers and one of its aspects would be that a language separate from ordinary English was the only language in which high thinking and profound feeling could be expressed. Wordsworth, I believe, kept English true to its original and tested self. He saved, celebrated and gave lasting literary energy to the ancient language of ordinary speech.

  Meanwhile in polite society the way you spoke became one of the subjects of polite society itself. Polite society was organised around a way of talking. If you could not talk that talk you risked ridicule. Richard Brinsley Sheridan, son of Thomas the Elocutionist, led the charge with the invention of Mrs. Malaprop.

  Her name comes from French “Mal à propos,” meaning inappropriate. Her grave fault was the tendency to substitute a similar-sounding word for the word that she intended to use. “Make no delusions to the past,” she said, in The Rivals (1775), and “I have interceded another letter from the fellow.” “She’s as headstrong as an allegory on the banks of the Nile,” she said, and, “If I reprehend anything in this world, it is the use of my oracular tongue, and a nice derangement of epitaphs.” The noun “malapropism” was first recorded in 1830. Bottom, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, often used the wrong word — “Thisbe, the flowers of odious savours sweet” — and he would be laughed at by the Globe audience, but he was a “rude mechanical” and the laughter came with the territory. Mrs. Malaprop was supposed to be a cultivated lady from the aspiring middle classes and even in a world where another character in The Rivals, Sir Anthony Absolute, could exclaim, “Had I a thousand daughters, by Heaven! I’d as soon have them taught the black art as their alphabet,” she ought to have known better. The accent, the use of correct words, correct grammar, everything to do with language was falling into the hands of Those Who Knew Best. Even when done for satire, as in The Rivals, or for polite enlightenment, as in Fielding’s essay on conversation, in which he gives guidance such as not hogging the conversation or introducing topics not understood by everyone present, with Wordsworth equally with Dr. Johnson, the literary men of England were going to tell you how best to use and speak your language and laugh at you, snub you, doubt you or even cut you if you did not follow their own particular and supreme rules.

  Out of all this came a literary woman and a novelist (novels were
originally seen as way below the salt, even contemptible, suitable only for women) whose prose was to clarify the England of that Enlightenment /Romantic era to a crystalline standard never achieved before and rarely since. Jane Austen, without a single mission statement, came to rule English. Her gifts for description, for conversation, narrative, the sound of her words on the inner ear, to all these gifts English gave of its best and the Jane Austen style was and is a new highroad opened up in this journey.

  Novel reading was taking off in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with the private circulating library, which put expensive books into people’s hands for a small hire charge. As the nineteenth century rolled on, literacy grew, education spread, books became cheaper, novels increasingly popular and the novel itself, as emphasised severely by Jane Austen herself, came to be seen as a form in which wit, brilliance, depth and variety could find expression every bit as impressive as could be found in the more established forms of poetry and drama. The novel became the benchmark for good English. Dr. Johnson would never have believed it. It was “only a novel!”

  That disparaging phrase comes from Northanger Abbey. It is early in the book, when Catherine and Isabella have become close friends, doing everything together, meeting even

  in defiance of wet and dirt, and shut themselves up, to read novels together. Yes, novels; — for I will not adopt that ungenerous and impolitic custom, so common with novel writers, of degrading by their contemptuous censure the very performances, to the number of which they are themselves adding — joining with their greatest enemies in bestowing the harshest epithets on such works, and scarcely ever permitting them to be read by their heroine, who, if she accidentally take up a novel, is sure to turn over its insipid pages with disgust. Alas! if the heroine of one novel be not patronized by the heroine of another, from whom can she expect protection and regard? I cannot approve of it . . . And while the abilities of the nine-hundredth abridger of the History of England, or of the man who collects and publishes in a volume some dozen lines of Milton, Pope, and Prior, with a paper from the Spectator, and a chapter from Sterne, are eulogized by a thousand pens, — there seems almost a general wish of decrying the capacity and undervaluing the labour of the novelist, and of slighting the performances which have only genius, wit, and taste to recommend them. “I am no novel reader — I seldom look into novels — Do not imagine that I often read novels — It is really very well for a novel.” — Such is the common cant. — “And what are you reading, Miss” — “Oh! it is only a novel!” replies the young lady; while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame. “It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda”; or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language.