Social Roles and Language Practices in Late Modern English (Pragmatics & Beyond New Series)

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Author: Prof. Dr. Päivi Pahta | Minna Nevala | Arja Nurmi | Minna Palander-Collin

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Social Roles and Language Practices in Late Modern English

Pragmatics & Beyond New Series (P&BNS) Pragmatics & Beyond New Series is a continuation of Pragmatics & Beyond and its Companion Series. The New Series offers a selection of high quality work covering the full richness of Pragmatics as an interdisciplinary field, within language sciences.

Editor

Associate Editor

Anita Fetzer

Andreas H. Jucker

University of Würzburg

University of Zurich

Founding Editors Jacob L. Mey

Herman Parret

University of Southern Denmark

Belgian National Science Foundation, Universities of Louvain and Antwerp

Jef Verschueren Belgian National Science Foundation, University of Antwerp

Editorial Board Robyn Carston

Sachiko Ide

Deborah Schiffrin

Thorstein Fretheim

Kuniyoshi Kataoka

University of Trondheim

Aichi University

Paul Osamu Takahara

John C. Heritage

Miriam A. Locher

University College London

Japan Women’s University

University of California at Los Angeles

Universität Basel

Susan C. Herring

Indiana University

Masako K. Hiraga

St. Paul’s (Rikkyo) University

Georgetown University Kobe City University of Foreign Studies

Sandra A. Thompson

Sophia S.A. Marmaridou University of Athens

University of California at Santa Barbara

Srikant Sarangi

Teun A. van Dijk

Cardiff University

Marina Sbisà

University of Trieste

Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona

Yunxia Zhu

The University of Queensland

Volume 195 Social Roles and Language Practices in Late Modern English Edited by Päivi Pahta, Minna Nevala, Arja Nurmi and Minna Palander-Collin

Social Roles and Language Practices in Late Modern English Edited by

Päivi Pahta University of Tampere

Minna Nevala University of Helsinki

Arja Nurmi University of Helsinki

Minna Palander-Collin University of Helsinki

John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam / Philadelphia

8

TM

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Social roles and language practices in late modern English / edited by Paivi Pahta...[et al.]. p. cm. (Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, issn 0922-842X ; v. 195) “Social roles and language practices in late modern English, organized as a workshop in the Third Late Modern English Conference in Leiden in August 2007.” Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. English language--18th century. 2. English language--19th century. 3. English language-Social aspects--England. 4. English language--Usage--England. 5. England-Languages--18th century. 6. England--Languages--19th century. I. Pahta, Päivi. PE1083.S65 2010 2010006374 420.9’09033--dc22 isbn 978 90 272 5440 5 (Hb ; alk. paper) isbn 978 90 272 8823 3 (Eb)

© 2010 – John Benjamins B.V. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. John Benjamins Publishing Co. · P.O. Box 36224 · 1020 me Amsterdam · The Netherlands John Benjamins North America · P.O. Box 27519 · Philadelphia pa 19118-0519 · usa

Table of contents

Preface Language practices in the construction of social roles in Late Modern English Päivi Pahta, Minna Palander-Collin, Minna Nevala and Arja Nurmi Mr Spectator, identity and social roles in an early eighteenth-century community of practice and the periodical discourse community Susan M. Fitzmaurice How eighteenth-century book reviewers became language guardians Carol Percy

vii 1

29 55

“if You think me obstinate I can’t help it”: Exploring the epistolary styles and social roles of Elizabeth Montagu and Sarah Scott Anni Sairio

87

Reporting and social role construction in eighteenth-century personal correspondence Minna Palander-Collin and Minna Nevala

111

Preacher, scholar, brother, friend: Social roles and code-switching in the writings of Thomas Twining Arja Nurmi and Päivi Pahta

135

The social space of an eighteenth-century governess: Modality and reference in the private letters and journals of Agnes Porter Arja Nurmi and Minna Nevala

163

Building trust through (self-)appraisal in nineteenth-century business correspondence Marina Dossena

191

vi

Social Roles and Language Practices in Late Modern English

Good-natured fellows and poor mothers: Defining social roles in British nineteenth-century children’s literature Hanna Andersdotter Sveen Name index Subject index

211

229 235

Preface

The idea for this book came from the work carried out in our joint project, “Socio-cultural Reality and Language Practices in Late Modern England” (SoReaL), funded by the University of Helsinki in 2005–2007. The project examined communication patterns in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English public and private writings, developing and testing corpus-aided methods in sociopragmatic analysis for diachronic purposes. One specific area that interested us in the interplay of language and the social was the various ways in which writers used their linguistic resources to position themselves in relation to their interlocutors in the texts. The notion of “social role” began to appear significant and useful as one of the factors in operationalizing the analysis of language practices of writers of past periods. With this concept in mind, we invited a group of scholars to a think-tank on Social Roles and Language Practices in Late Modern English, organized as a workshop in the Third Late Modern English Conference in Leiden in August 2007. The event proved fruitful and inspiring, as witnessed by this book. Six of the eight empirical studies included here are based on papers initially presented in the Leiden workshop, and two articles were solicited afterwards to complete the volume. The articles examine language practices in a variety of communicative situations, and draw on a range of theoretical and methodological approaches in the interface between social sciences and language analysis, combining a social and anthropological approach with (corpus) linguistics. Together they provide a rich view of the multiplicity of the means by which language users of the late modern period could and did construct and perform their social personae in written texts. We hope that these studies also inspire other researchers to follow suit and explore the dynamics of language and society in identity work and interaction in other written materials. We would like to thank the contributors for their excellent co-operation in the different stages of the book project, and the participants of the Leiden workshop for inspiring discussions. We thank the anonymous Benjamins reviewers for their comments on the manuscript. A very special word of thanks to Jan Blommaert, Jonathan Culpeper, Marina Dossena and Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade, who took time to read parts of the manuscript and comment on the introductory chapter. We are thankful to Anita Fetzer for accepting the volume to

viii Social Roles and Language Practices in Late Modern English

the Pragmatics and Beyond New Series, to Isja Conen and the Benjamins team for co-operation in the editorial process, and to Mikko Hakala, Saija Peuronen and Heidi Äijälä for help in preparing the manuscript. We gratefully acknowledge the support we have received during the production of this volume from the projects on “Socio-cultural Reality and Language Practices in Late Modern England”, “Multilingualism as a Problematic Resource”, “We and Others: The Socio-pragmatics of Referential Terms and Expressions in Early and Late Modern English 1500–1900” and the following institutions: University of Helsinki, Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, Research Unit for Variation, Contacts and Change in English (VARIENG), University of Jyväskylä, Academy of Finland, and University of Tampere.

The editors

December 2009

Language practices in the construction of social roles in Late Modern English Päivi Pahta, Minna Palander-Collin, Minna Nevala and Arja Nurmi Universities of Tampere and Helsinki

1.

Social roles and language practices

Social roles are part of the social personae that make up a person’s identity, together with their social status, position in society, relationships and institutional and other relevant community identities one may attempt to assign or claim in the course of social life (Ochs 1993: 288). Like identities, social roles can be seen as particular forms of semiotic potential, organized in a repertoire, and constructed and enacted by linguistic and other semiotic practices in social interaction (Blommaert 2005: 207). The relationship between social roles and language use is intriguing. Particular social roles can imply particular linguistic choices that are appropriate to enact those roles, but at the same time individuals can make linguistic choices and mobilize parts of their linguistic repertoire to index, negotiate and construct their social roles. The studies in this volume address the relationship of social roles and language use in texts written in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain. They all examine language use as social practice, social behaviour and human interaction – as communication by which people build, index and maintain social relationships and influence other people in various ways. The focus is on the “identity” and “relational” functions of language, which, in addition to the “ideational” functions, are present in all texts and communicative situations.

Päivi Pahta, Minna Palander-Collin, Minna Nevala and Arja Nurmi

1.1

Theories of social roles in social sciences

The notion of “role”, deriving from the theatre, began to appear in the social science literature in the 1920s and 1930s (Biddle and Thomas 1966), and has since then been widely studied and theorized in sociology and social psychology. There are two basic perspectives on roles in social sciences, structural-functionalist and symbolic-interactionist, which use the term “role” in two different but related senses. In structural-functionalist approaches to roles, growing from the work of anthropologist Ralph Linton (1936), roles are attached to socio-cultural expectations and knowledge schemata (Ribeiro 2006: 50). They are defined as sets of behavioural expectations associated with given positions in the social structure, and seen as functional for the social systems within which they are embedded (Ashforth 2000: 3–4). In this approach, a role is a largely fixed attribute. Roles are created by society as a whole; they are relatively inflexible and universally agreed upon taken-for-granted positions, learned through the family, peer group, school and work (Haslett 1990: 332). Individuals take on their designated roles and “perform” them, attempting to fulfil their roles by doing what is expected in them. In addition to expectations, the notions of norms, patterns, rights and obligations are also important. According to structural-functionalist role theory, social roles can be experienced and understood in terms of specific role relationships (e.g. parent-child, doctor-patient, teacher-student), memberships in general social categories (e.g. parents, medical professionals, academics), or as more or less institutionalized positions in given social structures (e.g. mother in a family, doctor in a hospital, professor in a university). Groups of interlocking roles, interdependent or complementary, create social institutions. In social institutions, various more or less directly interlinked roles will form role sets, where the roles tend to be differentiated by function and power. Because of this differentiation, the nature of the interaction between any two roles in a role set tends to be more or less unique. According to Ashforth (2000: 6–7), the notion of differentiation has several implications for the enactment of a role. Firstly, it suggests that a role identity is largely defined by its role set, and as such, complementary roles serve as foils for one another. The role identity of the doctor, for example, is largely defined by the complementary role of the patient. Second, the notion of differentiation suggests that any given role is multifaceted in the sense that a role occupant will display a certain characterization of the role toward each member of the role set. Furthermore, individuals have multiple roles, sequential and simultaneous, that tend to be bounded by time and space and imply interrole transitions from one role to another. Some of these transitions are macro role transitions, defined as

Language practices in the construction of social roles

the psychological, sometimes also physical, movement between sequentially held roles (e.g. becoming a mother or getting a promotion at work). Some are micro role transitions, or role alternations, involving the psychological and possibly physical movement between simultaneously held roles, including shifts between one’s home and work roles, one’s at-work roles of supervisor and subordinate, one’s at-home roles of parent and spouse, and between work or home roles and roles embedded in other social domains, such as church or a health club. An interesting question concerning multiple simultaneous roles is how and to what extent these different roles are and can be differentiated (Ashforth 2000: 260–261). The total role of an individual in society is often described as consisting of sets of relations of various types linking this person as ego to sets of others (see e.g. Lorrain and White 1971; Brewer and Gardner 1996). The interactional and interpersonal nature of roles is emphasized in socialpsychological role theory, symbolic interactionism, based on the work of George Herbert Mead (1934), and social action theory, which has its foundations in Max Weber’s interpretive sociology (1947). In these approaches, providing a very different view on roles, a role is seen primarily in an interactionist frame, as a more fluid and subtle concept, depending on the situation, not on a fixed social structure. A role is not something that is simply prescribed and enacted, but, like identity, something that is constantly negotiable – an emergent and negotiated understanding between individuals in social interaction (Burr 2002: 71–73). The ideas of role-taking and role-making are important: in social interactions, each individual actively tries to define the situation, understand his or her role in it, choose a role that is advantageous or appealing, construct that role, and persuade others to support it. Here roles, like identities, can be self-claimed, or they can be appointed by others – achieved or ascribed (Blommaert 2005: 205–206). Instead of moving between fixed positions in a social structure, individuals are seen as having multiple roles that they are “capable of fulfilling or representing in the socio-cultural relationships in which they participate” (Omoniyi 2006: 12), and foregrounding different roles in different situations. Or, as Agha (2007: 242) puts it, actors semiotically display a range of roles in different kinds of interactional scenarios. For Goffman (1959), for example, the “presentation of self ” to others in the various multiple role scenarios in which individuals participate forms a major daily enterprise of social life. Contemporary social psychology aims at establishing a general theory of the self that attends to both macro and micro processes (Stets and Burke 2000; Stryker and Burke 2000). Stryker and Burke’s discussion integrates the social structural sources of identity and relations among identities with internal, cognitive identity processes, and they use the term identity to refer to “parts of a self composed of the meanings that persons attach to the multiple roles they typically play in highly


differentiated contemporary societies” (2000: 284). Similarly, Stets and Burke discuss the different bases of identity, including group, role and person, posited in different strands of social identity theory and identity theory, and conclude that “a complete theory of the self would consider both the role and the group bases of identity as well as identities based in the person that provide stability across groups, roles, and situations” (2000: 234).

1.2 Language and social roles Social interaction enables us to develop a sense of who we are, our self (Burr 2002: 71). It also enables us to acquire language, and remains at the core of how we use language to communicate with others – to present ourselves, define, construct and negotiate our identity and roles, and those of others, in the varying socio-cultural relationships or interactional scenarios in which we find ourselves in the course of our social life (Heiss 1976: 5). How exactly this construction and negotiation is done through language is a question that over the past decades has received a fair amount of attention in various branches of linguistics. The idea of speakers displaying variation in the ways they use language in different communicative situations, something that now seems a commonplace, is a major contribution of early sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology to our understanding of the relationship of language and the social (e.g. Labov 1966; Gumperz and Hymes 1972; Hymes 1974; Gumperz 1982). According to Hymes, for example, each language user has at his or her disposal a verbal repertoire, a complex of linguistic resources or a set of ways of speaking, consisting of “speech styles, on the one hand, and contexts of discourse, on the other, together with relations of appropriateness obtaining between styles and contexts” (1996: 33). The ideas about the relationship of these basic components of the communicative situation have been developed in various ways in subsequent research studying language use in its social embedding from different perspectives and relying on different methodological approaches. In stratificational sociolinguistics, the quantitative paradigm in the study of linguistic variation in relation to social systems, viewing the social largely as a fixed and external structure that is only reflected in linguistic variability, has held centrestage. Major lines of research here include quantitative analysis of linguistic features in correlation to social class (e.g. Labov 1972) or domain-specific contexts of use, i.e. registers (e.g. Biber 1988). In linguistic anthropology, relying on qualitative ethnographic methodologies, the focus of attention has been on meaning-making processes that are at the core of understanding language as social practice. Here linguistic forms and processes, with other semiotic means, provide a window to the interpretation of socio-cultural


processes, including socialization, ideologies and identities (e.g. Silverstein 1985; Ochs 1988; Kulick 1992). Meaning-making processes have also been focal in the linguistic orientations of pragmatics and discourse analysis, examining languagein-use and language-in-action in its various social contexts, spoken and written (e.g. de Beaugrande and Dressler 1981; Brown and Yule 1983; Levinson 1983). These different orientations towards the relationship of language and society have given rise to several interesting “mergers”, also providing a perspective on social roles. These include interactional sociolinguistics, grounded in the work of Gumperz, concerned with how speakers signal and interpret meaning in social interaction (e.g. de Fina, Schiffrin and Bamberg 2006; Auer 2007), social network analysis (e.g. Milroy 1980), and research on communities of practice (e.g. Eckert 2000). While much of the research into language and the social paradigm has focused on spoken language, the role of literacy, a resource which is generally unequally distributed in any society and has effects on the way in which people construct roles and identities, has also been examined in some work in New Literacy Studies, shedding light on the complex relationship between literacy as a practice and identity work (e.g. Collins and Blot 2003; Blommaert 2008). In this body of research, the notion of social role has rarely been the centre of attention, largely because of its “passive” connotations, deriving from structuralfunctionalist conceptions, where roles are seen as fixed, objectified attributes. According to Agha (2007: 242), the term “role”, like the related term “status”, once so fashionable in anthropological and sociological studies, is now considered questionable, and this is also reflected in socially-oriented linguistics. Instead, the focus of attention in research on social personae has been on identity, and during the last ten years, the relationship of language and identity has become one of the most intensely studied topics in linguistics (see e.g. Joseph 2004; de Fina et al. 2006). This has happened simultaneously with an increased interest in identity as a subject of inquiry across the humanities and social and behavioural sciences. In research on institutional language use, for example, in studies on doctor-patient interaction, the notion of roles is relevant, although not always explicitly thematized in terms of roles but related concepts, such as voices (e.g. Cordella 2004). In some of the research that does explicitly deal with roles, they have in fact often been portrayed in a rather negative light, as something forced upon individuals, as in, for example, gender studies (see Holmes and Meyerhoff 2003). From a historical perspective, research that explicitly thematizes or theorizes the notion of social roles and their relationship with language use is practically non-existent. We think that social roles, however, are worthy of attention also in historical linguistics. No one would deny, we believe, that roles are part of the various interactional social structures, systems, relationships or scenarios in which individuals of past periods also participated, presenting themselves to others and


negotiating and constructing their places and positions in interaction. The studies in this volume, focusing on language-in-use in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain, demonstrate the ways in which the notion can be applied in studying language of the past in social interaction. Making use of the concepts of social networks, discourse communities and communities of practice, hierarchies and power relations, intimacy and social distance, the studies show that the concept of roles can be useful for our understanding of the linguistic meaning-making processes by which individuals participating in various social relationships in late modern Britain built, indexed and maintained these relationships and influenced each other in various ways in their writings.

2.

Studying historical language-in-use

In this volume, the texts studied from the perspective of role construction range from journals and personal correspondence to business correspondence, from the Spectator essays and book reviews to children’s books. These genres include both private manuscript texts written by one individual to another, or even to herself, as well as published writings intended for a wider circulation. Thus, the production circumstances, the audience and the purpose of writing vary, but the texts entail the interpersonal dimension, “enacting our personal and social relationships with the other people around us” and are studied as interaction between writers and readers (Halliday and Matthiessen 2004: 29). A letter writer just like a journal writer, a book reviewer, a periodical editor or a novelist position themselves or the characters they create in relation to the expected audience, the intended effect of the text and the conventions of a genre at a particular moment in history. In this section we focus on methodological issues in the study of interpersonal meanings in language use in past periods, including the type of materials, recent developments in corpus methodology and the nature of available contextual information.

2.1 Characteristics of historical linguistic data Since the bulk of research on role construction focuses on present-day communities, mainstream analytic models are not always directly applicable to the historical context, even though research methods in historical sociolinguistics and pragmatics in general are adopted from current theories of language (cf. Taavitsainen and Fitzmaurice 2007: 15–16). Present-day studies on role and identity construction, for instance, deal overwhelmingly with talk-in-interaction using conversation or


discourse analytic methods. Alternatively or in addition to such analyses, ethnographic methods including interviews, questionnaires and participant observation are frequently used. Moreover, studies concerning present-day languages and speech communities typically pay attention not only to the linguistic repertoires used in interaction but also to auditory features like prosody, or extralinguistic features like posture and gesture (see e.g. studies in de Fina et al. 2006; Auer 2007; Spencer-Oatey and Ruhi 2007). For a historical linguist, face-to-face interactions are available only in written transcriptions, but some of the methods employed for the analysis of talk-ininteraction may be used to explore historical genres like drama or trial records. Dialogues in plays are fictional representations of spoken interactions, while trial records are written transcriptions of oral legal procedures. Both types of texts have been used to study patterns of interaction in the past. Articles in Jucker, Fritz and Lebsanft (1999) provide examples of historical dialogue analysis in different text genres in the Romance languages, German and English. Culpeper (2002; also Culpeper and Kytö 2010) focuses on the analysis of character description in plays drawing on a rich theoretical background of literary criticism, linguistic description and pragmatics. Archer (2005) employs socio-pragmatic methods to study question-answer sequences in courtroom interaction from 1640 to 1760 and establishes changes in the institutional roles of judges, defence lawyers, defendants and witnesses during the period as a result. Among the genres studied in this volume, letters are apparently the most dialogic and interactional in the sense that the writer-addressee dyad can be located in specific individuals. Ideally, letters sent between the correspondents could even be observed as “turns” in interaction, but unfortunately this is seldom possible, as all the letters sent between the correspondents have not necessarily been preserved and/or edited (for the preservation of letters, see Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2005). As the vast majority of extant historical texts are anything but recordings of talk-in-interaction, new methodologies and a different toolkit from presentday analyses have to be developed. Most clearly this toolkit includes a means of tackling written data that have been haphazardly preserved and are consequently patchy in many ways (for advantages and disadvantages of historical data, see e.g. Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg 2003: 26–28). Additionally, historical people are available for observation only in their texts and possibly through notes and interpretations of contemporaries and/or historians, and researchers do not have first-hand experience of the communities they work with (for examples of the methodology of historical network reconstruction, see Bax 2000 and Sairio 2009). Reliable and systematic methods of linguistic analysis and contextualization are thus essential, but the historical linguist is not severely hampered by the temporal distance of the data as pointed out by Archer (2005: 8): “although the distance in


(historical) time may exacerbate the [analyst’s] potential to ‘err’, it is nevertheless possible to reconstruct ‘plausible’ intentions, given adequate evidence”. The analyst’s closeness and involvement with the analysed community also introduces biases. Blommaert (2005: 50–56) observes that critical discourse analytical studies of present-day communities often contain a priori statements on power relations that are used as perspectives on discourse. The same power relations are then confirmed in a circular manner by the analysis. Since sociolinguists and pragmaticians dealing with present-day languages prioritize spoken data, historical sociolinguists and pragmaticians used to feel apologetic about their “bad data”, but attitudes have now changed. Jucker (2008: 896) identifies three aspects contributing to a “new appreciation of the communicative complexity of historical data”. First, spoken language and written language are no longer regarded as dichotomous opposites, as both exhibit linguistic variation and may be more or less (in)formal or interactive (Biber 1988). Thus, more fluid conceptualizations, such as a scale between the language of immediacy and the language of distance, are felt to be more appropriate (Koch and Österreicher 1985). Linguistic variation within the letter genre, for example, is evident as business correspondence in general tends to be more formal than private correspondence, but private correspondence may also be formal particularly if the correspondents are socially distant and/or unequal in status. Second, the communicative nature of written language is now widely recognized. Consequently, written language can be analysed as a communicative act for its own sake, not just as a poor substitute for spoken interaction. Nurmi and Palander-Collin (2008), for example, discuss letters as written interaction and conclude that although personal letters are highly interactive in general, interactive involvement features surface most prominently in correspondence between socially equal and/or intimate writers. Third, linguists have moved away from describing language in general to describing specific varieties and genres, as illustrated by all the articles in this volume that are highly contextualized in particular settings and/or located at certain individuals. Finally, issues concerning literacy, relevant for language practices in any period, have a profound impact on the nature of historical linguistic data in many ways. Literacy practices, access to literacy and varying levels of literacy in the community as such have important implications for individual identities and possible situated roles, as various roles and identities may or may not be available depending on the nature of the individual’s reading and writing skills (Blommaert 2008; see also p. 11 below). In historical studies, the language practices observed are usually those of highly literate elites, although there is also a distinct language history from below paradigm focusing particularly on the language of the majority (e.g. Elspass, Langer, Scharloth and Vandenbussche 2007; Vandenbussche and Elspass 2007).


2.2 Corpus methods Corpora and corpus methodology are identified as the key feature of current research in historical sociolinguistics and pragmatics (Jucker 1999, 2008; Taavitsainen and Fitzmaurice 2007). Electronic corpora and corpus tools facilitate data searches and analyses of linguistic features, and, ideally, corpora provide plentiful evidence. With corpus methodology, it is possible to draw conclusions about typical linguistic patterns in a given data set without reliance on intuitions only. It is also possible to observe differences in usage between data sets, as well as to reveal lexical and grammatical characteristics of the text that are not immediately observable to the reader but still form an important part of the style of the text (for ideas on using corpus tools for discourse analysis, see Conrad 2002). This is a good heuristic tool, as linguistic features indexing identity and social roles may encompass a variety of linguistic phenomena including labels, implicatures and presuppositions, stances, styles and linguistic structures and systems, but it is difficult to know beforehand which will be relevant in a given situation (Le Page and Tabouret-Keller 1985; Rampton 1999: 501; Bucholtz and Hall 2005: 593–598). Many of the contributions in this volume are based on electronic corpora of varying sizes, compiled from original manuscripts, original printed sources or modern editions. Authors also make use of analytic tools easily available in corpus software such as WordSmith Tools (Scott 2004–2007). As a case in point, Susan Fitzmaurice as well as Arja Nurmi and Minna Nevala employ a relatively new corpus tool for identifying positive and negative keywords in a given text. These are words that occur significantly more or less frequently in the corpus investigated than in a reference corpus (for a detailed methodological presentation of a keyword analysis applied to character description in plays, see Culpeper 2009). This statistical tool of analysis helps them identify linguistic patterns and then interpret the significance of these patterns in role construction through qualitative readings of the texts and by means of situating the texts in their socio-cultural and discursive contexts. Using frequency lists of words occurring in the corpus as a starting point may also help us identify typical semantic domains in the text. In the case of nineteenth-century children’s literature, family roles are important in the children’s world and such social roles are often labelled, as words referring to people occur particularly frequently among the 500 most common words. Thus, Hanna A. Sveen divides these words into gender roles, adult and child roles and family roles and explores which recurring adjectival patterns are used to describe them in order to understand what the typical contents of the roles are. However, corpora and corpus tools do not always facilitate searches. Minna Palander-Collin and Minna Nevala investigate reporting constructions and their functions in terms of social role construction. As reporting constructions and

10


reporting frames vary to quite an extent, it would be difficult to identify reporting events comprehensively by automatic means using corpus tools based on specific words or characters, or even POS tags or grammatical annotation, but the corpus would have to be manually coded for the array of reporting constructions. It is similarly difficult to use corpus programs to search for thematic issues in texts, like Carol Percy does, or particular linguistic functions. Relevant linguistic constructions would have to be identified from the texts first. This is what Marina Dossena does when dealing with trust-building in business letters. She shows that building trust is a complex function in linguistic terms including various lexical, syntactic and politeness features. At the next stage, corpus tools could perhaps be used to search for these items.

2.3 Contexts of language use Social role construction in this volume is discussed as a situated linguistic phenomenon, but to make interpretations as plausible as possible the context has to be approached in a systematic way. How can this be accomplished, and what kind of contextual information is there? First, the notion of context is not unproblematic, and the relevance and definition of context varies in different linguistic paradigms, as shown by Archer and Culpeper (2003) in their discussion of research traditions in corpus linguistics, historical linguistics, sociolinguistics and pragmatics. Even though each of these disciplines regards language and context as inseparable, they often emphasize different aspects of context. In variationist, correlational sociolinguistics, such social categories as gender, class and ethnicity tend to be regarded as discrete, stable and primary contextual factors affecting linguistic variation, whereas some strands of conversation analysis do not allow any prior categorization, requiring interpretations to be based on insiders’ understanding of what makes talk comprehensible for them at that moment (for a discussion, see e.g. Coupland 2001). In order to make sense of historical interactions, it soon becomes evident that context has to be treated as multilayered, where the layers are simultaneously important and incorporate the “here and now” of the interaction as well as wider expectations and possibilities stemming from various societal constellations. One such multilayered notion of context is provided by Schiffrin (1994: Ch. 10), who identifies “context as knowledge” and “context as situation”. When defined as knowledge, context is viewed essentially in terms of knowledge that the interactants can be assumed to have, such as awareness of social institutions and of the general wants and needs of others. Context as situation, meanwhile, signifies knowledge of the “here and now”. Context as knowledge of cultural norms and conventions and context as situation are intertwined in


historical socio-pragmatic research, as language use is analysed and interpreted in relation to who the interactants are, what kind of an interaction they are involved in, and why they are communicating. The definition of appropriate and expected participant roles and linguistic behaviour is based on the interactants’ cultural and situational understandings. Blommaert’s (2005: 58–62) notion of “resources as context” captures the essence of the interactional dynamics as we understand them, linking macro-societal contexts with micro-interactional contexts: Speakers can/cannot speak varieties of languages, they can/cannot write and read, they can/cannot mobilise specific resources for performing specific actions in society. And all these differences – different degrees of proficiency ranging from ‘not at all’ to ‘full mastery’ of codes, language varieties, and styles – are socially consequential. (Blommaert 2005: 58)

This understanding of context highlights the significance of literacy skills, ranging from “can” to “cannot”, as a component in identity formation. Mastery in the art of letter writing or the ability to compose a piece of criticism or a scholarly dissertation are prerequisites for the adoption of certain roles performed through these genres. Fairclough’s three-dimensional framework of discourse analysis provides a tool for contextualizing language practices. The framework has been applied in historical socio-pragmatics to the analysis of Margaret Paston’s letters by Johanna L. Wood, most recently in Wood (2009). Although the three dimensions – text, discursive practice and social practice – are not necessarily referred to as such in the articles, the context for language practices/texts discussed in this volume can be understood in terms of discursive and social practices (cf. Fairclough 1992: 62– 100). Discursive practice concerns the production, distribution and consumption of texts, such as who wrote the text, what kind of conventions pertained to the genre, how it was distributed, why it was written and who read the text. Social practice, on the other hand, concerns the macro-frame of ideologies and hegemonies that have a material existence in the practices of institutions and the constitution of subjects (Fairclough 1992: 78–96). Discursive practices and social practices are intertwined aspects of the context, as for instance letter writers followed the discursive conventions of the genre in recognizing the intended recipient with conventional address formulae at the beginning of the letter, and by doing so they recognized and recreated social patterns and societal hierarchies. Similarly, the availability of education was biased in favour of upper ranks and men on the societal level, and consequently the level of literacy varied extensively in the population. Therefore, the discursive practices of text production and consumption in many cases primarily concerned the educated ranks of men.

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The articles highlight different discursive and social aspects of the texts. S usan Fitzmaurice places her discussion in the context of eighteenth-century periodical publishing, comparing the general periodical discourse community with the Spectator community of practice. Hanna A. Sveen discusses social roles as they emerge in the discourse of nineteenth-century children’s literature. Carol Percy reflects on the role of book reviewers as language guardians as part of the eighteenth-century normative ideology. Anni Sairio also discusses the role of normativity in the private sphere of personal correspondence. Marina Dossena deals with the institutional setting of nineteenth-century business, the language practices of institutional roles, and the values dominating the business scene. In studies concerning personal letters by Anni Sairio, Arja Nurmi and Päivi Pahta, Arja Nurmi and Minna Nevala and Minna Palander-Collin and Minna Nevala the networks of writers, their social milieus, personal life histories and immediate family contexts are also important. Thus, in the analyses of language practices, social roles emerge (1) as an individual’s roles vis-à-vis other people, (2) in relation to the practices of a discourse community and (3) within the framework of broader ideologies. In each case, taking on a social role is an activity that makes sense only in relation to other language users and the context of use. Thus, exploring the language of social roles in historical texts essentially means making situated interpretations of language practices. Finally, to provide a sociologically-inspired practical example of possibilities of contextualization in historical research, we shall again refer to letters, as they are written interaction between individuals who can often be identified and contextualized on several levels. In Section 3, we shall further identify various major socio-cultural tendencies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as these tendencies are particularly relevant in understanding the macro-level context and conditions of social life at the time. The levels of contextualization available through letters range a full scale from the very personal and individual level to the most macro-societal level and can be summarized as follows: 1. Psychobiography – the letter writer’s individual background (e.g. family and educational background, social and geographical mobility, personal attitudes and dispositions) can be accessed through historical research and from the letters up to a point and is most easily available in the case of (male) members of high society through sources like the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; 2. Situated activity – the current letter written to a certain recipient in a specific context for certain purposes can be localized through dates in the letter, the knowledge we have from other sources about the events at the time of writing and the persons involved;


3. Social settings – norms governing the letter writing activity, the institutional contexts and social roles available for the writers are accessible through contemporary sources like letter writing manuals and current socio-historical research; 4. Contextual resources – society-wide distribution and ownership of resources such as goods, money, status, occupation and quality of life can be gleaned from socio-historical research. These four levels are proposed by Layder (2003/1997: 2–5, 78) as domains of social life that are related to each other over time and space and bound together by social relations and positions, power, discourses and practices. Layder’s domain theory provides a sociological perspective to mechanisms of face-to-face transactions, incorporating both the notion of systematic and objective knowledge and the analysis of subjectivity to understand social life in general and face-to-face encounters in particular. According to this model, the individual is an active agent who does things which affect social relationships, but within the confines of what the structure, i.e. the objective features of social life, makes possible for the individual to do. The domains certainly affect the production of any kind of text – including also periodical essays and reviews, novels, diaries, sermons and scientific texts discussed in this volume – but depending on the text they may be articulated in various ways and reconstructed to a different degree. In public printed texts, for instance, the author’s psychobiography may remain rather vague if the identity of the author is not known, the author creates a fictional authorial character or the publishing house interferes with the text. Similarly, public texts as a situated activity are usually meant for a wide circulation and the intended audience therefore remains abstract. It may be an extremely complicated task to incorporate all the four domains within the same empirical study of language use, but domain theory might offer tools of contextualization for linguists, historical and otherwise, interested in language in society, and help us incorporate various linguistic aspects and levels of use within the same model of language use, variation and change.

3.

The Late Modern English period

For the writers in this book there have been many reasons for concentrating on the late modern period in general and Late Modern English in particular. The articles portray a variety of linguistic, social, societal and ideological changes which have helped to raise awareness on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century material in English historical linguistics during the past few years. In this section, we will discuss some of the central factors concerning culture and language

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development in late modern Britain, each of which has given rise to the studies presented in this book.

3.1

Society

Burke (1992: 10–11) notes that in order to reconstruct social identities in a given society we need to study the “social vocabulary” of it, i.e. those model(s) by which the people themselves perceive their society. By the second half of the seventeenth century, there were at least two current modes of social description, the hierarchical and archaic one, and the new, more informal model. This allowed “the plasticity of social identity” and the terminology of social simplification into sorts of people. The term “sort” was introduced in the later seventeenth century, and by the early eighteenth century it was firmly established in the vocabulary. The use of different models was indeed flexible, and, eventually, the term “class” became to be used alongside “sort” by the latter half of the eighteenth century. Among eighteenth-century contemporaries, there were, of course, those who wished to make finer distinctions between people. As the following sevenfold categorization by Daniel Defoe shows, the social hierarchy could still be described in terms of a fine-grained structure (cited in Porter 1990: 53): 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

The great, who live profusely The rich, who live plentifully The middle sort, who live well The working trades, who labour hard, but feel no want The country people, farmers etc., who fare indifferently The poor, who fare hard The miserable, that really pinch and suffer want

The predominant division between the working people and those who do not have to do manual labour seems to be a decisive factor for Defoe as well. However, while in the eighteenth century land ownership remained the predominant criterion for distinguishing the wealthy from the less well-to-do, there was a differentiation in the form of property as well as a growing separation of urban and rural strata (Neale 1981: 75). Increasingly, it was not only wealth, but also education, that defined one’s social position, and the definition of what the gentry consisted of changed radically since it no longer rested on status hierarchy alone (French 2000: 94). In general, social relationships between strangers and distant people could be characterized in terms of formality. Munck (2000: 65–66) argues that as late as the eighteenth century, informal social contacts across barriers of wealth and status


were not encouraged, and that people spent time within their own social groups – the middle and lower sort had their coffee houses and taverns, and the wealthy their salons and societies. Then, as in the earlier periods, people who were distant to each other went by the rules of the social order, so that deference and respect were shown to one’s superiors, and benevolence, sometimes also contempt, could be shown to one’s inferiors. Social equals recognized each other as such, but maintained formal conduct until they were better acquainted, if that ever happened. The line between, for example, employers and employees was largely a matter of tacit knowledge, and no matter how close an employee felt to his or her employer, the social barrier should not be crossed. This is one of the issues introduced by Arja Nurmi and Minna Nevala’s article in this book, which deals with the dual social role of a governess as “superior” to the children she taught and as “inferior” to her employers, and the implications the situation had on her use of language. The Victorian period (1837–1901) exacerbated class conflicts between the aristocracy holding political power and the industrial middle class on the one hand, and between men of power and labourers on the other. Despite the public opinion of the press, effective social communication was limited, and the upper and lower classes were said to live “side by side but wide apart as if they lived in separate quarters of the world” (Briggs 1999: 254–255). In the middle Victorian period, both social stability and cultural diversity grew, although the aristocracy managed to retain its social and much of its political influence. Recent scientific progress had reduced geographical distance in the form of the railroad and steamboats, which thus facilitated intercourse as well as the flow of personal and public correspondence. Aspects concerning the role and form of business correspondence became increasingly important in the nineteenth century, and language was developed as a tool for improved interaction between prospective and established business partners, as is shown in the article by Marina Dossena. Thus, new social ties were created between areas previously not in contact, which also had its effect in the rise of organized unskilled labour. Duty took precedence over inclination, and the moral law over the pursuit of pleasure. As Hanna A. Sveen discusses in her article, the morals of the social roles imposed on the different sexes were part of the way in which even popular children’s literature was structured and composed: girls were supposed to take on a more passive role than boys. Individualism, which had been characteristic of early nineteenthcentury social thought, turned towards collectivism whereby the state assumed a more positive role by intervening in the affairs of its citizens for their own good and for the good of the common welfare (May 1987: 115). As Webb (1980: 127) notes, the ordered world of the earlier culture was lost: external criteria gave way to internal, and the forms used came not from tradition but from the act of creation itself. This had an effect on unity as well, because the world became more

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complex and interdependent with industry, and science was gradually becoming more culturally divided.

3.2 Polite society – private and public As we have already seen, eighteenth-century English society gave rise to a new way of describing social hierarchy: the middling sort spread among the upper and the lower sort. As before, society continued to be “a matter of status, of hierarchy, of ranks and orders” (Webb 1980: 29). Proper behaviour, and politeness in the social sense of the word, was to be learnt, and this enlightened society was further divided into the common and the élite – a cultural differentiation of “the informed” and “the ignorant” already introduced in the previous century. Social mobility was considerable, but although people talented enough to rise from the lower ranks were welcomed into polite society, it was done condescendingly (Porter 1990: 49, 2000: 365). Nevertheless, progress, whether social or individual, was considered a great hope among the lower ranks. As, for example, Porter puts it, “today’s vulgar might be tomorrow’s polite” (2000: 370). Burke (2000: 39–40) also notes that in eighteenth-century England the middle ranks used polite speech as a way of showing their closeness to the upper ranks, alongside other means, such as accent or vocabulary. Polite language could, of course, also be used by members of the upper ranks to distinguish themselves from their social inferiors, which Burke suggests may have been “a reaction to the decline of ‘external evidence of rank’” (2000: 47). The old dissenting social groups drew a sharp distinction between “candour”, which they valued, and “cant”, which they condemned. Such possession of civility and education could be shown by the mastery of, for example, code-switching practices between English and foreign languages, as Arja Nurmi and Päivi Pahta show in their article for this book. It has been suggested that the key concept in both eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England was the formal code imposed for the rich and the poor alike (Briggs 1959: 66–67). Royle (1987: 238) writes about the moral reform central to the period: religious and humanitarian reformers believed that the lower classes had to be rescued from indulging in morally debasing sports, the evils of the public house and the sins of drink and debauchery. This was not, of course, a new concept, since the Society for the Reformation of Manners, whose main aim was the suppression of immorality and other lewd activities, had been set up as early as in 1691. The Society for the Suppression of Vice founded in 1802 was merely a direct descendant along the path towards a more civil society in which there would be no room for the immoral, and sometimes even riotous, behaviour of the poor.


Throughout the late modern period, different kinds of clubs and societies attracted a growing number of people, and science was popularized by public lectures. Literary and Philosophical Societies founded in the late eighteenth century brought together leading scientists, men of letters, medical men, manufacturers and merchants, but were beyond the means of ordinary working people. In general, the notions of “public” and “private” were not necessarily opposed concepts. Munck (2000: 198–199), for example, notes that in the eighteenth century domestic privacy did not mean the same thing as today: private space was exposed to public control. Following the ideology of Rousseau, “private” was considered secretive and factional. “Public”, on the other hand, was most often connected with the notion of “public good”. However, concerning personal communication like letters, “public” and “private” were more likely to be distinct rather than overlapping notions. Fitzmaurice notes this to be true, particularly when there is a “move from talk in public places to writing in private” (2002: 208). Public reputation was still crucially important, to women in particular, and it must be placed before any intimate aspirations. It is rather questionable how far, for example, personal letters in fact were “private” in the strictest sense of the word, since at least in the early eighteenth century letters were still frequently read among the entire family and among closest friends and neighbours. Yet another aspect concerning the two concepts was introduced by the new genre of travel letters, which were typically circulated among a wide audience. The art of introducing private matters into the public domain, and vice versa, was a thing to be mastered by different means. Minna Palander-Collin and Minna Nevala show in this book, for example, how reporting in eighteenthcentury personal letters concerns public matters, or how by quoting direct speech “private” emotions are made “public” to the reader(s) of the letter. The influence of social class even had its effect on the topics and stylistic presentations of books: the educated upper classes read journals like the Gentlemen’s Magazine, whereas the middle and lower classes read chapbooks sold at fairs. This big wave of popular literature, which was held to “imperil the soul as well as degrade the mind”, was countered by publishers who turned their attention to improving literature by printing, for example, religious tracts. Other means were also attempted. With the growth of newsheets and coffee-house discussion societies, an informed public outside the Parliament began to emerge. By 1760 there were around 40 provincial newspapers in existence, and with the spread of information came the formation of public opinion, and politics became less exclusive and more inclusive. But as Susan Fitzmaurice shows in her article, commercial periodicals like the Spectator and its broader periodical discourse community still differed greatly in terms of the social agenda from the party political periodicals of the time.

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In the late modern period in general, new circumstances rose affecting the public, such as the rise of publishing (as distinct from printing and bookselling), the spread of circulating libraries and the growth of female readership. Different societies, such as the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, published inexpensive texts intended to adapt scientific material for the expanding reading public (Royle 1987: 248–249). Although the newspaper tax was abolished in 1855, the real breakthrough in wider readership did not happen until newspapers were produced in a form which demanded little concentration on the part of the reader with their “tit-bits” of information and news (May 1987: 255). The nineteenth century also saw further development in other genres in addition to the language of newspapers, for example, private letters, the novel and scientific discourse (Kytö, Rydén and Smitterberg 2006: 4). Formal and informal registers increasingly diverged, which offers a modern reader and researcher an interesting insight into the process of language standardization and the overall awareness of multi-purpose language use.

3.3 Standardization and language Late Modern English has been characterized by the concept of standardization. During the first decades of the eighteenth century, a large number of grammars and dictionaries of English and writing manuals were published, and by the midcentury plain and functional English was preferred (Görlach 2001: 4). This development was brought on by the grammars of the likes of Joseph Priestley (1761), Robert Lowth (1762), and Lindley Murray (1795). The contemporary view supported a divergence from Latin, and educated speech was seen as a cause of decay in the language, as was the use of non-standard varieties like slang, cant and dialect. Attempts to refine English were supported by growing British self-confidence, mainly owing to the increasing political and commercial power of England and the spread of English to other continents. The Late Modern English era was also greatly characterized by the so-called complaint tradition (Milroy and Milroy 1991: 4). The need to reform the language was motivated, for one thing, by the “deplorable state” of the language, and writers such as Jonathan Swift described English as “extremely imperfect” (cited in Milroy and Milroy 1991: 34). In a similar vein, Samuel Johnson called for a “struggle” to keep the English language from degenerating (cited in Leith and Graddol 2002: 158). As late as in 1873, Walter Skeat wrote how “eyes should be opened to the Unity of English” (Milroy 2001: 549). Access to improving the mothertongue was, however, out of reach for the members of the lower social classes, and the general


negative attitude towards the vernacular is shown by the fact that dialect and slang lexis was gathered in glossaries instead of proper grammars and dictionaries. Few lexicographers and grammarians were in fact language professionals, which added to the sometimes negative preconceptions held against their work (Görlach 2001: 25; also Chapman 2008). Priestley, for example, was a scientist and a politician, Murray started as a lawyer, and Lowth practised as a churchman. As Tieken-Boon van Ostade (2006: 541) notes, the unpopularity of eighteenthcentury grammars among later structural linguists also allowed prejudice about the grammars and their authors to grow. Another factor possibly working against them concerned the alleged fact that the grammarians focused on the language of gentlemen in order to decide what was grammatically correct and what was not. The grammarians could also take the language use of the “best” writers as a model for correctness, as was the case with Swift, Pope and Johnson. They listed as their authorities such Elizabethan and Restoration writers, even poets, as Bacon, Hobbes, Dryden and Locke. By the end of the eighteenth century, the lists included not only works from celebrated authors but also essays in periodicals like the Spectator. Thus we cannot claim that prescriptivism and models for correct language use would only have been brought forward in Late Modern English grammar books and dictionaries. As for example Carol Percy finds in her article, the ideology of standardization could also be appropriated by book critics, many of them anonymous, in the new review periodicals of the age. She shows that although book reviewers often seemingly used language as an objective index of quality, such criticism could in fact reveal their own, subjective, preconceptions of the writer’s education and linguistic competence. As Milroy (2001: 535) notes, one important effect of standardization has been the development of consciousness among speakers of a “correct”, or canonical, form of language, one aspect of this being a firm belief in correctness. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it was common to correct the “mistakes” of the original scribes and to make their language uniform and acceptable to the contemporary sense of propriety. “Correct English” was supported by moral reform in the latter part of the late modern period, and grammarians were affected by the dominant ideologies of the time, such as the elitist theory of social class or the nationalist theory. Grammatical correctness became even more crucial, as it affected a larger proportion of the population than before (see Stein 1994: 8–10). The imposed ideology had not, however, succeeded in the abolition of alternative forms of English usage in earlier practice, as Anni Sairio shows in this volume. Her focus is on the so-called dual spelling system of the eighteenth century, as well as on the differences between the familiar epistolary style and the correct usage encouraged by the language authorities of the time (see Osselton 1984).

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By the end of the nineteenth century the printed word had reached everyone, as had general education, which introduced the three R’s to all sections of society. The situation continued to improve throughout the nineteenth century, and around the 1850s, the rise of new books intended for literary education rapidly increased. The number of different grammars also increased from about 270 (at around 1800) to more than 850 in the course of the century (Görlach 1999: 15). In linguistics, the invention of the historical-comparative method had a huge impact on the overall concept of grammar during the final decades of the century.

4.

The studies in this volume

The studies in this volume deal with social roles from many different points of view. In the first, Susan Fitzmaurice discusses a constructed role in a specific community of practice. She studies the periodical discourse community in eighteenth-century London, focusing particularly on the Spectator and the constructed persona, or eidolon, of Mr Spectator. This role construction takes place in the public sphere, and the men behind the role, Addison and Steele, create the character in many ways quite deliberately, differentiating the construct from their own personal roles and identities. Fitzmaurice discusses the questions of the externally determined identity of Mr Spectator and his identity seen in linguistic choices using qualitative and quantitative corpus-linguistic methods, particularly keyword analysis. Her comparison data come from the Network of Early Eighteenth-century Texts (NEET), of essays, letters and fiction. Carol Percy analyses a community overlapping that of Fitzmaurice’s study, focusing on the public roles anonymous authors perform as educators and entertainers in eighteenth-century review periodicals. The review authors enforce prescriptive rules of language, both judging and improving contemporary literature. The ostensible purpose is to educate authors and readers alike, and the process is carried out through reasoning, but also through aggression, condescension and mockery. Closely tied to the process was the social prestige and commercial value of education. In the texts, good grammar appears as something elusive, possessed only by educated and privileged social groups. The seeming objectivity of the reviews is belied by their actual subjectivity which is evident, for example, in the sarcasm applied to texts, and much of the criticism functions as a tool for the reviewers to differentiate and elevate themselves with regard to the authors criticized. Anni Sairio looks at a social network of highly literate people, the Bluestocking circle, during the course of the eighteenth century. Her focus is on social roles as perceptions of self, connections with others and membership of social circles


and networks. The roles attested are both static (family relationships) and negotiable (connections in social circles). The material consists of personal correspondence edited from the manuscripts by Sairio herself, which provides a solid basis for her research on the spelling and contracted forms appearing in the data. The study compares the linguistic practices of two sisters, Elizabeth Montagu and Sarah Scott, who had a similar background and schooling. Both were also published authors, but moved in somewhat different social circles. Sairio’s study employs quantitative corpus-linguistic methods, and shows that in the style of spelling typical of the epistolary genre (which was different from spelling in print) of the two informants, contractions and abbreviations were linked to intimacy between correspondents. Factors influencing spelling choices were membership of differing social networks, the association with polite society for Montagu and the relative exclusion from it in the case of Scott. The spelling forms also function as self representation on three levels, the individual, relational and collective. Both sisters used relatively informal spellings when writing to each other, but Montagu’s spelling was closer to the standard than Scott’s, which may reflect her more prestigious social status. Minna Palander-Collin and Minna Nevala study the differing roles of Charles Burney in his personal letters. Burney appears in varying roles according to the recipient: a family man, a member of a literary network, a friend. The linguistic variable observed in connection with Burney’s role-building is reporting. The questions of who and what to report, the complex relationships between reporter, reportee and addressee, and the varying combinations of direct and indirect preferences are all taken into account. The theoretical framework of the study comes from audience design and accommodation theory. The results show that reporting is commonly framed by evaluative remarks. There are clear gender differences: women’s words are reported more rarely than men’s. Reporting is also closely connected to ego-related topics, as a means of professional role enhancement. Arja Nurmi and Päivi Pahta provide a case study of an individual’s multilingual practices in his writings representing different genres and registers. The focus is on Thomas Twining, an eighteenth-century clergyman and classical scholar, who also appears in his private roles as brother, uncle and friend. The data comprises a sample from Twining’s correspondence, published sermons and other religious writings, as well as two scholarly dissertations and notes on his translation of Aristotle. Twining’s code-switching practices are evidence of his functional multilingualism in several languages. Various genre-specific patterns can be attested. In correspondence code-switching seems to be a marker of intimacy. The choice of languages and frequency of switching depend on the recipient, his or her multilingual abilities and the nature of the relationship between the interlocutors. Shared professional interests, such as classical scholarship and an interest in music, seem

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to influence switching patterns in corresponding with friends. The influence of audience can also be seen with the two other genres studied. In Twining’s sermons, contrary to expectations based on previous studies, there is little or no switching, most likely due to the wide expected readership. In Twining’s scholarly writings, on the other hand, typical practices of scientific language can be attested: Greek and Latin are the most frequent languages used, and switches appear as quotations, terminology or references, taking also text-organizing functions, and performing thus the role of membership of the scholarly community. Arja Nurmi and Minna Nevala also study the writings of one individual, the eighteenth-century governess Agnes Porter. The data consists of her surviving letters, journal and a book of tales she published anonymously. The study combines qualitative and quantitative methods. A keyword analysis, carried out comparing Porter’s correspondence with contemporary female writers of somewhat similar social status, showed that Porter lived in more female surroundings than the comparison group, and used fewer first-person pronouns. The other linguistic variables studied include third-person reference and modality, and the results support the findings of the keyword analysis. Porter’s language use seems to reflect her difficult social role as a governess, living on fairly intimate terms with her wards and their family, and yet clearly their social inferior. There is evidence of variation in power and distance in how she refers to members of her own family, acquaintances and her employer’s family in both her correspondence and her journal. Both epistemic and deontic modality seem to be a means of constructing a suitable professional role, and contribute to Porter’s constant strategy of selfeffacement. All these different linguistic strategies combine to illustrate the narrowness of Porter’s social space, with the constant necessity of not only keeping her place but negotiating its constraints. Marina Dossena continues with a study of how professional roles are negotiated in nineteenth-century business correspondence. She discusses the uses of lexis, the passive and modality as well as pragmatic moves like reciprocal expressions of politeness on the levels of both individual and group identity. The study is carried out with qualitative corpus-linguistic methods. The different social roles in the data are performed by the writers of the letters, who were often writing not on their own behalf, but as representatives of a company or other party. The focus is on performing the different social roles with complex and adaptable social profiles in the context of negotiating business relationships. One of the main elements of such relationships is trust, which needs to be reciprocal. Trust in itself is an abstraction, but it is realized in language through a variety of means. The study concentrates on identifying patterns expressing stance and the interdependent means in negotiating trust between partners. Face is here seen as at least a dyadic concept, related to both sender and receiver, with a plurality of identities


c oexisting in the correspondence. The different means of expressing trust in the data are collected under the theoretical framework of the Appraisal system, discussing authority, power and solidarity between correspondents. In the final article of the volume, Hanna A. Sveen studies gender roles, both overall in nineteenth-century society and in a family context. The study is based on Sveen’s corpus of nineteenth-century children’s literature. Using qualitative and quantitative corpus-linguistic methods she follows patterns in the adjectival descriptions of fictional characters. In the study, language practices are seen as both reflecting and constructing social roles, and children’s literature is particularly rife with generally approved social roles and the practices of enforcing them. Roles are often manifestations of ideologies, as authors construct desirable gender models for child readers through linguistic means. The study identifies different social roles through the nouns that label them, and shows how co-occurring adjectives reveal the attributes associated with them. Kinship terms define the central roles in a child’s life, but more general trends are also visible. The results show that age and appearance are mostly mentioned in connection with female characters, while mental properties and situations are more typically descriptive of males. Male characters have more positive attributes, expressing subjecthood, while female characters are typically represented as passive victims of circumstances. To conclude, it is apparent from the studies included in this volume that the concept of social role can be succesfully approached from multiple points of view through various methodological approaches in several theoretical frameworks. While related to the ways in which a speaker’s identity is linguistically constructed, the examination of social roles provides insights into the social and linguistic behaviour of people that is not otherwise evident. The ways in which roles are performed, assigned, taken and maintained are numerous, and the interrelated speaker/writer internal and external constraints reveal the ways in which sociocultural reality and language practices of any historical period exist entwined and mutually dependent.

References Agha, Asif. 2007. Language and Social Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Archer, Dawn. 2005. Questions and Answers in the English Courtroom (1640–1760): A Sociopragmatic Analysis. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Archer, Dawn and Culpeper, Jonathan. 2003. “Sociopragmatic annotation: New directions and possibilities in historical corpus linguistics.” In Corpus Linguistics by the Lune: A Festschrift for Geoffrey Leech, Andrew Wilson, Paul Rayson and Anthony McEnery (eds), 37–58. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.

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Mr Spectator, identity and social roles in an early eighteenth-century community of practice and the periodical discourse community Susan M. Fitzmaurice University of Sheffield

This paper explores questions of identity and social roles in the Spectator community of practice and its broader periodical discourse community in commercial publishing in early eighteenth-century London. A keyword analysis of the Spectator essays reveals the lexical underpinnings of the periodical’s social niche in the form of its eidolon, Mr Spectator. A study comparing the periodicals published in the first two decades of the eighteenth century with the Spectator highlights the different social agendas of the Spectator and contemporary party political periodical papers. The paper concludes that the Spectator’s identity and social roles are distinct from those of its principal authors, Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, thereby casting new light on the significance of authorship in the period.

1.

Introduction I have observed, that a Reader seldom peruses a Book with Pleasure ’till he knows whether the Writer of it be a black or a fair Man, of a mild or cholerick Disposition, Married or a Batchelor, with other Particulars of the like nature, that conduce very much to the right Understanding of an Author. To gratify this Curiosity, which is so natural to a Reader, I design this Paper, and my next, as Prefatory Discourses to my following Writings, and shall give some Account of them of the several Persons that are engaged in this Work. As the chief Trouble of Compiling, Digesting and Correcting will fall to my Share, I must do my self the Justice to open the Work with my own History. (Spectator No. 1, Thursday, March 1, 1711)

It is with these words that Mr Spectator introduces himself as the eidolon of a brand-new periodical publication, as the official voice that offers instructive

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s peculations to its readers. Mr Spectator reasonably anticipates his readers’ curiosity about the identity of the writer and sketches his own character, taking pains to impress upon them his disinterested stance as a “Spectator of Mankind” not as “one of the Species”, thus making himself a “Speculative Statesman, Soldier, Merchant and Artizan, without ever medling with any Practical Part in Life”. While the public expression of the Spectator was declared to issue from this taciturn observer, the people behind the periodical were neither disinterested nor taciturn. Joseph Addison and Richard Steele were established political periodical essayists. They were responsible for producing the Tatler and for creating the paper’s highly popular persona, Isaac Bickerstaff. They also participated in Whig politics and were members of the Whiggish Kit Cat Club. In this paper I explore questions of identity and the nature of social roles as they relate to two particular social constructions in the early eighteenth century. These are the Spectator community of practice and its broader discourse community in the commercial publishing enterprise that is the periodical press in early eighteenth-century London. On the one hand, periodical production, as exemplified by the Spectator and the Tatler, involves a small tightly knit social network of like-minded colleagues with similar literary ambitions and shared politics. This context promotes the development of practices that mark the joint activities of participants in a common domain of interest. On the other hand, the grittier newspaper world of Defoe’s Review and the Tory papers edited by Swift and others represent the institution of discourse practices that are determined by the culture of the genre – an explicitly partisan political and commercial enterprise – in which difference is reflected in the diversity of papers. Participation in this enterprise is marked by a broader and less cohesive group of writers, working more from self-interest than common political or social cause. Indeed, the later enterprises of Addison (The Freeholder) and Steele (The Guardian, The Englishman) belong fairly clearly to this community. In exploring the interstices in the world of the periodical essay in early eighteenth-century London, we consider the social roles of key individuals like Addison and Steele who appear to identify with different political communities and agendas that find expression in very different ways and media, and the nature of the social and political identity of the Spectator as distinct from the broader periodical discourse community. The idea of identity that would have been most familiar to the readers of the Spectator is that of constancy of conviction, manners or habits. In Spectator No. 162 (Wednesday, September 5, 1711), Mr Spectator discusses the contempt with which the world regards the man who changes his religion or his politics, and speculates on the inevitability of inconstancy in life:

Identity and social roles in an 18C community of practice

There is scarce a State of Life, or Stage in it, which does not produce Changes and Revolutions in the Mind of Man. Our Schemes of Thought in Infancy are lost in those of Youth; these too take a different Turn in Manhood, till old Age often leads us back into our former Infancy. A new Title or an unexpected Success throws us out of ourselves, and in a Manner destroys our Identity. (Spectator No. 162, Wednesday, September 5, 1711)

This interpretation of identity as constancy of character and outlook is challenged in the period by the notion of personal identity as individuality or selfhood. It concerns the notion of personal identity – a notion explained by John Locke in his (1690) Essay concerning Human Understanding in the context of the concept of identity as referring to the sameness of a substance or thing over time regardless of its different phases of life or states. The key to Locke’s challenge to the Cartesian cogito was continuity of consciousness. Eustace Budgell, author of Spectator No. 578 (Monday, August 9, 1714), paraphrases Locke’s notion of personal identity as follows: Mr Lock, after having premised that the Word Person properly signifies a thinking intelligent Being that has Reason and Reflection, and can consider it self as it self; concludes, That it is Consciousness alone, and not an Identity of Substance, which makes this personal Identity or Sameness. Had I the same Consciousness (says that Author) that I saw the Ark and Noah’s Flood, as that I saw an Overflowing of the Thames last Winter, or that as I now write; I could no more doubt that I who write this now, that saw the Thames overflowed last Winter, and that view’d the Flood at the general Deluge, was the same Self, place that Self in what Substance you please, than that I who write this am the same My self now whilst I write, (whether I consist of all the same Substance material or immaterial or no) that I was Yesterday: For as to this Point of being the same Self, it matters not whether this present Self be made up of the same or other Substances. (Spectator No. 578, Monday, August 9, 1714)

So whereas Addison in 1711 regards identity as an individual’s social sense of self that can change with circumstances and alterations in the environment across time, Locke argues that human consciousness ensures that one’s self is constant throughout the inevitable changes that shape and mark the life of an individual over time. As Porter (2003: 76) notes, “Identity – the ‘I’ – was thus continuity of experienced consciousness or memory”. In this essay, I consider both aspects. On the one hand, I am interested in the identity – the social image and roles – ascribed to the Spectator as a major social force in early eighteenth-century English periodical culture. On the other, I am interested in the extent to which this externally determined identity is matched by the internal linguistic stuff of the Spectator. This will require an exercise in testing the claim that the identity of the Spectator

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was different and separate from the identities of its key components, Joseph Addison and Richard Steele on the one hand, and different from its broader literary context on the other. I approach these questions by conducting two corpus linguistic studies. In study 1, I conduct a keyword analysis of the Spectator essays with reference to the literary context as represented by the texts collected in the Network of Eighteenthcentury English Texts (NEET) in order to examine the extent to which there is a clear lexical basis for concluding that Addison and Steele carve out a deliberate social niche for the periodical in the form of its eidolon, Mr Spectator. In study 2, I conduct a keyword analysis of the periodicals published in the first two decades of the eighteenth century with reference to the Spectator in order to investigate the linguistic basis for the cultural historical impression of how different the social agenda of the Spectator is from the party political periodical papers of the time. In the sections that follow, we examine the early eighteenth-century historical and cultural context for these studies in the form of the periodical discourse community. Then as preparation for the keyword studies, we examine the historical evidence for the argument that the Spectator forms a distinct community of practice in early eighteenth-century London by virtue of its common goals and domain of interest. The focus of both studies is thus the language of the Spectator.

2.

The periodical discourse community

The discourse community according to Watts (1999: 43) is “a set of individuals who constitute a community on the basis of their common interests, goals, beliefs, and enterprise as revealed in their oral or written practices”. This statement could reasonably be used to characterize the group of individuals participating in the production and distribution of periodical literature in the first two decades of the eighteenth century. Table 1 lists some of the most prominent and well-known periodicals of the period together with the key people involved in their production. A little historical background is necessary to contextualize the periodical press. William Speck (1986) notes that the final lapse of the 1662 Licensing Act in 1695 brought an end to formal pre-publication censorship of the press, and paved the way for publication to play a more vital role in politics than ever before. He notes that the absence of formal government control meant that politicians could develop more protracted propaganda campaigns through newspapers and periodicals that could appear regularly and reliably without fear of prosecution. The consequence was the vigorous proliferation of privately owned newspapers allied with political parties, starting with the Whig Daily Courant (1702) and Flying Post jousting with their Tory counterparts, the PostBoy and Heraclitus Ridens.


Table 1. Major periodical publications in early eighteenth-century London The Review Tatler

Defoe, 1704–1713 Steele, Addison, Swift, 1709–1711

Spectator

Addison, Steele, Swift, Pope, Hughes, 1710–1712, 1714

The Examiner

King, Swift, Freind, Prior, Manley, Atterbury, 1710–1711

Guardian

Steele, Addison, Pope, Budgell, Philips, Tickell, Garth, 1713–1715

Freeholder

Addison, Dec 1715–June 1716

The Medley

Oldmixon, Maynwaring, 1710–1711

The government also had an official news mouthpiece, the London Gazette, but ministers like Robert Harley also exploited unofficial organs such as Defoe’s Review and Swift’s Examiner for government use (Speck 2004/2007). Whereas the newspapers tended to carry news items gleaned from the Gazette, the periodicals offered opinions about the news in essays and editorial features. Accordingly, the periodicals can be identified with partisan interests – the prominent and durable Review was chief among the Whig periodicals. The lesser periodicals conducted a vigorous running commentary on one another (Downie 2004). John Tutchin’s Observator was published in dialogue form in which “Observator” kept a “Countryman” Roger “on the Whig straight and narrow”, and vilified the Tories. Charles Leslie’s Rehearsal (of Observator) responded in kind, “showing [Observator] to be a villainous Whig hack” (Speck 1986: 48). At the same time as the Spectator was being published, the Whig Medley was produced to challenge the Tory Examiner (Snyder 2004/2005). In short, the periodical scene was dominated by explicitly political journalism immersed in current affairs. The periodical discourse community is characterized by conventions and practices surrounding the production and distribution of the periodical in the historical milieu of early eighteenth-century London. The roles of the bookseller and printer were key in establishing these practices. The printers were crucial in the production and distribution of periodicals that had multiple contributors and particular patterns of production. Many printers had diverse interests and projects running simultaneously. Major printer-booksellers published a range of products by diverse authors; John Morphew published Steele’s works, including the Tatler, as well as the pamphlets and histories of his political opposite, Mary Delariviere Manley. Booksellers discovered that periodical publication could be highly lucrative if . Harley first got Defoe to write in support of the ministry in the Review in 1704. Speck notes that he re-established his professional relationship with Defoe in 1710 when he was Prime Minister, but that he also engaged Swift to support his administration in the Examiner. So, Harley was a highly professional politician who understood how to use the press in politics (Speck 2004/2007).

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they could keep the copy coming. For example, Samuel Buckley, who published the Spectator, assumed the printing of the Daily Courant just ten issues after it appeared in the imprint of Elizabeth Mallet. Mallet mainly printed sensational tracts and several serial publications including The New State of Europe, the first number of which was dated 20 September 1701 (Maxted 2004). Another woman printer, Abigail Baldwin, ran a business in Warwick Lane, publishing and distributing a wide range of pamphlets and periodicals under her imprint A. Baldwin. She published pamphlets by Whigs and periodicals that ranged from the economic journal British Merchant of Commerce Preserved to the Female Tatler. Political sponsorship also affected and shaped the conditions in which the political press operated. Hyland (1986: 865) notes that although the government could promote its policies and interests highly effectively, it could also undermine those interests. Because the most vigorous economic competition was among newspapers and periodicals that held complementary views, strong ministerial support for one could jeopardize the future of another in a number of respects. Hyland argues that as papers depended increasingly on their sponsors for financial and political support, so they tended to become increasingly detached from their readers’ interests. Accordingly, serial propaganda publications ceased production rapidly when governmental assistance was withdrawn. Hyland (1986: 865) cites as an example the withdrawal of the government sponsorship and hence the demise of the publication of the Examiner and Monitor with the fall of the Tories in 1714. The periodical press in the first two decades of the eighteenth century is therefore an institution with its own historicity, reflecting contemporary preoccupations and inclinations as regards the politics, culture and life of the time. The context in which the periodical is produced and consumed shapes the periodical discourse community. It is in this environment marked by an obsession with party politics and news that the avowedly nonpolitical and nonpartisan Spectator project is launched.

3.

The Spectator project and the coffee house community

Joseph Addison and Richard Steele were the two men at the centre of the Spectator coalition. It is important to stress that the Spectator was a very special project; as a daily paper that explicitly eschewed party political comment or support, it stood outside the cut and thrust of the Tory and Whig periodical antagonists of the time. However, this is not to say that the Spectator was not interested in topical events, interests and preoccupations. If anything, it was firmly embedded in the social fabric of London in the last years of Queen Anne and had the potential to function as an agent of reform of public discourse. The locus par excellence of


public discourse was the coffee house, where people of all sorts would meet to talk politics, get the news, conduct business and socialize. It was also the place to read broadsides, pamphlets, and periodicals. It is no accident that the dateline of many of Steele’s Tatler essays included the name of a coffee house such as Will’s or St. James’s, or Grecian Coffee House. The identity of the coffee house by the beginning of the eighteenth century was complex; it was a place that promoted sociability and civility, on the one hand, but the quality of that civility was dubious. According to Cowan (2004b), Swift thought that ‘the worst conversation I ever remember to have heard in my life’, was to be found there; self-important playwrights ‘entertained one another with their trifling composures’ before ‘an humble audience of young students from the inns of court, or the universities’, who, having ‘listened to these oracles, … returned home with great contempt for law and philosophy, their heads filled with trash, under the name of politeness, criticism, and belles lettres’ (Prose Writings, 4.90)

The coffee house and its associated social structure, the club, were targeted by writers of serial publications like news-sheets. For instance, Novak (2001: 214) suggests that Daniel Defoe’s use of a mythical society (the Scandalous Club) to discuss various ethical and social issues of the period placed the Review in the public sphere of the coffee house where ideas about politics, economics and foreign affairs that would ultimately transform the politics of a nation may be debated. As a place that was intimately bound up with the public consumption of news as well as with public debate and discourse, the coffee house could be satirized as the hub of newsmongers, gossips and idlers, as the Tatler comments of Will’s Coffee-house: Where you us’d to see Songs, Epigrams, and Satyrs, in the Hands of every Man you met, you have now only a Pack of Cards; and instead of the Cavils about the Turn of the Expression, the Elegance of the Style, and the like, the Learned now dispute only about the Truth of the Game. (Tatler No. 1, Tuesday, April 12, 1709)

By the beginning of the eighteenth century, the coffee house had become a disreputable place, associated with the degradation of discourse rather than an exemplary level of debate and discourse. Cowan (2004a) argues that Addison and Steele were concerned to reform coffee house activities such as newspaper reading, political discussion and club socialization in constructing a different social world. He suggests that their goal was to ensure the survival of Whig values and politics in the face of the resurgence of Tory values as expressed in high church . Quoted by Backscheider (2004/2008).

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politics (Cowan 2004a: 348). Of course, this goal of refocusing and changing the content and tenor of public discourse was not expressed overtly. However, as early as No. 10 (March 12, 1711), Addison identifies the target readership of the Spectator’s instruction as “well-regulated Families”, “the Fraternity of Spectators who live in the World without having any thing to do in it”, “the Blanks of Society”, and “the female World” (Bond 1965: vol. 1, 44–46). He also sets out the agenda of the Spectator thus: I shall endeavour to enliven Morality with Wit, and to temper Wit with Morality, that my Readers may, if possible, both Ways find their Account in the Speculation of the Day. And to the End that their Virtue and Discretion may not be short transient intermitting Starts of Thought, I have resolved to refresh their Memories from Day to Day, till I have recovered them out of that desperate State of Vice and Folly into which the Age is fallen. ... I shall be ambitious to have it said of me, that I have brought Philosophy out of Closets and Assemblies, at Tea-Tables, and in Coffee-Houses. (Spectator No. 10, March 12, 1711)

Steele had reacted to the deep suspicion with which the authors of serial publications were regarded by adopting the eidolon of Isaac Bickerstaff for the Tatler, and Addison and Steele followed suit by adopting that of Mr Spectator for the Spectator. This name allowed the writers to adopt a persona for the periodical that could conveniently be argued to be independent of the personal histories and habits of his creators. At the same time, this eidolon allowed the Spectator to reflect the interests and attitudes of a community rather than those of a pair of individuals. The Spectator sense of community was expressed in different forms. For example, one of the ways in which readers responded to Mr Spectator’s speculations was the formation of clubs and societies, often congregating in public places such as coffee houses, to read and discuss the latest Spectator. So, the Spectator effectively rehabilitated the coffee house as a potentially polite place; as a site for “a conversable sociability conducive to the improvement of society as a whole” (Klein 1996: 33). Maurice Johnson, a barrister who practised in London but who lived in Spalding, Lincolnshire, formed the Gentleman’s Society on November 3, 1711, with the approval of Addison and Steele, “for the supporting of a mutual benevolence, and their improvement in the liberal science and in polite learning” (Haycock 2004/2008). When Johnson was in London, he associated with the literary circle that met at Button’s Coffee-house, Covent Garden, from 1712. This circle attracted people who wanted to be associated with Addison and Steele and who sought their patronage and help. These included minor Whig writers like Eustace Budgell, Ambrose Philips, Thomas Tickell, and John Ozell, as well as the much better known figures, Alexander Pope and John Gay.


There is another sense of community that the Spectator embodies. This is the notion of the community of practice, a notion that has gained considerable currency in present-day sociolinguistics to capture the juncture of group identity and its expression in linguistic behaviour (e.g. Eckert and McConnell-Ginet 2003). Key indices of a community of practice include a domain of interest shared by its members, activities engaged in as joint enterprises, and most importantly, shared practices. The shared domain of interest that engages the Spectator community is the vision of a public sphere as a forum for urbane (rather than risqué) conversation, moral reflection rather than obsession with the news of the day or the latest fashions, and above all, temperate agreement on affairs of state instead of heated political debate. This domain of interest was maintained by the pursuit of joint activities conducted over time through sustained interaction. In practice, these activities consist of the regular publication of essays for sociable consumption in coffee houses like Button’s as a reformed social sphere. Members of the community develop a shared set of practices or repertoire of resources to advance their engagement with the domain of interest. The shared practice that differentiates this community from others is the active championing through serial publication of the Whig social ethic of politeness to replace newsmongering (quidnunc) and irresponsible coffee house gossip with discursive decorum. Of course, this moral and social work is also political in intention as its ultimate end is to ensure that the public sphere is oriented to Whig rather than Tory politics.

4.

Keyness, the Spectator and the periodical press

The challenge posed by the cultural historical examination of the Spectator community in the context of the early eighteenth-century press is to demonstrate that its social distinctiveness is matched by linguistic distinctiveness. In the two studies reported in this paper, two keyword studies will reveal the extent to which the linguistic texture of the Spectator periodical confirms the impressions gained by a close analysis of the historical and cultural context of the periodical. Keyword analysis is an empirical and systematic methodology increasingly used in corpus linguistic studies to explore the distinctiveness or unique characteristics of a body of texts compared with its textual context. A keyword list for a given corpus reflects the unusually frequent (or infrequent) occurrence of words in that corpus compared with another corpus for reference. For our purposes, a keyword analysis can be used to explore the lexical and structural linguistic distinctiveness . For a detailed theoretical account of communities of practice, see Etienne Wenger’s discussion (http://www.ewenger.com/theory, accessed 28 February 2008).

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of the Spectator essays in two contexts: first, in the broad social, historical and literary context; and second, in comparison with the periodical press in the period. The methodology has been applied to the study of characterization in drama (Culpeper 2002), the stuff of political and cultural movements as reflected in newspaper coverage (e.g. Johnson, Culpeper and Suhr 2003; McEnery 2006), as well as register specificity (Xiao and McEnery 2005). Culpeper (2009) comments that the term “keyword” is “simply another term for statistically-based style markers”, and is not to be confused with the identification of lexical items that might be considered “key” in terms of their social, political or cultural salience. Culpeper and McEnery have used Scott’s WordSmith package in their keyword studies; I adopt Laurence Antony’s concordancer, AntConc 3.1 for the same purpose. Keywords are derived in the following way. First, a target corpus is selected. AntConc can compare the words that appear in the target files with the words that appear in a reference corpus to generate a list of keywords, words that are unusually frequent (or infrequent) in the target files. To derive keyness, the program compares word frequency in the target corpus, the number of running words in the target corpus, word frequency in the reference corpus and the number of running words in the reference corpus. The program then cross-tabulates these results and applies Ted Dunning’s Log Likelihood test as a statistical measure (Antony 2006: Readme). As Scott (1999: Help Menu) notes, “a word will get into the listing if it is unusually frequent (or unusually infrequent) in comparison with what one would expect on the basis of the larger wordlist”, that is, the wordlist generated for the reference corpus. So “keyness” is a matter of unusual frequency (relative to the reference corpus). The keyword list provides the basis for the exploration of the lexical and grammatical patterns that mark the texts in the target corpus. Cluster analysis then reveals the typical grammatical contexts in which a keyword occurs as well as the most common lexical collocates that a keyword selects.

5.

Study 1: The Spectator in early eighteenth-century literary London

The target corpus for study 1 is a text file of 212 issues of the Spectator between October 24, 1711 and Thursday, June 26, 1712, which amounts to 293,269 words. The reference corpus for this purpose is a sample taken from the Network of Eighteenth-century English Texts (NEET), consisting of essays, letters, and fiction, 1,069 text files totalling just over 1 million words (exactly 1,072,126 words; see Fitzmaurice (2007) for details of the corpus). In this section, I discuss the topranked keywords in the Spectator in the broader literary context as represented by NEET, and explore the linguistic texture that a cluster analysis of selected keywords reveals. Table 2 lists the top thirty keywords in the Spectator. For each item,


Table 2. Keywords of the Spectator Rank

Frequency

Keyness value

Item

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

262 6830 150 77 6838 927 1396 194 65 377 435 12278 787 1495 3671 131 15634 150 140 41 129 179 74 1258 115 59 69 130 2599 333

649.916 336.427 320.970 227.146 205.507 189.716 183.512 182.205 177.227 170.106 169.687 168.824 167.905 155.057 151.005 139.581 139.095 137.257 135.934 126.389 125.214 117.698 115.631 115.141 114.433 109.275 107.633 107.569 105.659 103.776

spectator in Milton* Hor. a man an reader Roger several self of d who is eye the poem following Virg behaviour virtue et upon imagination fable paradise beautiful which mind

*See Fitzmaurice (2010) for a detailed discussion of the occurrence of Milton, the abbreviations Hor. (Horace) and Virg. (Virgil), Roger (Sir Roger de Coverley).

column 1 indicates its rank as a keyword, column 2 gives its raw frequency in the target corpus, column 3 indicates its keyness value (as described above), and column 4 contains the item. I will discuss the keyness values of selected lexical and then structural keywords, and discuss their collocational and cluster characteristics in order to try to ascertain the salience of these expressions in indicating the agenda of the Spectator. Because the features that distinguish the Spectator from the essay genre in the

39

40 Susan M. Fitzmaurice

early eighteenth century are examined in Fitzmaurice (2010), I will not discuss positive keywords shared by the two sub-corpora. For the purposes of this study, I am particularly interested in the extent to which the analysis aids an examination of the social roles ascribed both to the Spectator as a community of practice and to its key individual exponents – Addison and Steele – operating at a critical historical and political juncture.

5.1

Identity and Mr Spectator

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the most unusually frequently occurring word in the Spectator target corpus is the name of both the key persona and of the periodical itself, namely, spectator. The examples in (1) illustrate how the eidolon of the periodical provides a means of giving the values and agenda of the periodical a material substance that pervades the text. The most frequent realization of the term is as part of the name, Mr Spectator. Mr Spectator is the addressee of the letters that are an integral part of the periodical (1a), but the Spectator is also the paper’s speaking persona (1b): (1) a. b.

Now, Mr. SPECTATOR, you that are a professed Friend to Love, will, I hope, observe upon those who abuse that noble Passion, and raise it in innocent Minds by a deceitful Affectation of it, after which they desert the Enamoured. (Spectator No. 288, Wednesday, January 30, 1712) This is to give Notice, that the SPECTATOR has taken upon him to be Visitant of all Boarding-Schools, where young Women are educated; and designs to proceed in the said Office after the same Manner that the Visitants of Colleges do in the two famous Universities of this Land. All Lovers who write to the SPECTATOR, are desired to forbear one Expression which is in most of the Letters to him, either out of Laziness, or want of Invention, and is true of not above two thousand Women in the whole World; viz. She has in her all that is valuable in Woman. (Spectator No. 314, Friday, February 29, 1712)

These two excerpts are taken from papers produced by Richard Steele. The prominence of self-reference in the periodical seems to be aligned with the impression of gravity accorded to individuality or self-hood. The frequency with which the Spectator persona refers to the purposes and interests of the Spectator as a person contributes to the impression that the reputations and identities of its primary contributors, Addison and Steele, are subordinated to the identity for the paper itself. The example in (2) is an apt illustration of the way in which the authority of Mr Spectator appears to be reinforced within the periodical itself.


(2) The SPECTATOR writes often in an Elegant, often in an Argumentative, and often in a Sublime Style, with equal Success; but how would it hurt the reputed Author of that Paper to own, that of the most beautiful Pieces under his Title, he is barely the Publisher? There is nothing but what a Man really performs, can be an Honour to him; what he takes more than he ought in the Eye of the World, he loses in the Conviction of his own Heart; and a Man must lose his Consciousness, that is, his very Self, before he can rejoice in any Falshood without inward Mortification. (Spectator No. 382, Monday, May 19, 1712)

This excerpt appears in a paper devoted to the topics of candour and honesty. Curiously, by referring to the Spectator in the third person in a particularly approbatory fashion, the author of this particular issue separates this act from the more general identity of the paper. More specifically, by this time, it was reasonably well-known that Steele and particularly Addison were behind the Spectator, and the effect of referring to the Spectator in the third person is to extricate aspects of the periodical’s authorship from its publication. Although Steele does not explicitly sign his name to this issue, there is sufficient evidence to support the supposition that Steele is acknowledging Addison’s massive contribution to the project. He refers to himself as “the reputed Author” who ought to be able to admit that some of the best work issued under “his Title”, namely the Spectator, cannot be attributed to him. Together with this attempt to pay tribute to his partner by citing the Spectator rather than its persona, Mr Spectator, Steele illustrates the extent to which the word self is intimately associated with selfhood and identity on the one hand and the association of these concepts with humankind, in the form of Man on the other. In addition, the excerpt illustrates nicely the extent to which the keywords in the top 30 cluster together in particular passages (see the underlined instances of eye, man, self, Spectator, and beautiful). The co-occurrence of the keywords in the same contexts contributes to the salience of the keywords, and underlines the integrity of the concerns that we can ascribe to the Spectator community. Excerpts (3) and (4) below illustrate further how connected these terms and concepts are in the world of the Spectator. (3) There is a Call upon Mankind to value and esteem those who set a moderate Price upon their own Merit; and Self-denial is frequently attended with unexpected Blessings, which in the End abundantly recompense such Losses as the Modest seem to suffer in the ordinary Occurrences of Life. The Curious tell us, a Determination in our Favour or to our Disadvantage is made upon our first Appearance, even before they know any thing of our Characters, but from the Intimations Men gather from our Aspect. A Man, they say, wears the Picture of his Mind in his Countenance; and one Man’s Eyes are Spectacles to his who looks at him to read his Heart. (Spectator No. 206, Friday, October 26, 1711)

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(4) One may see now and then this Humour accompanied with an insatiable Desire of knowing what passes, without turning it to any Use in the world but merely their own Entertainment. A Mind which is gratified this Way is adapted to Humour and Pleasantry, and formed for an unconcerned Character in the World; and, like my self, to be a mere Spectator. This Curiosity, without Malice or Self-interest, lays up in the Imagination a Magazine of Circumstances which cannot but entertain when they are produced in Conversation. If one were to know, from the Man of the first Quality to the meanest Servant, the different Intrigues, Sentiments, Pleasures, and Interests of Mankind, would it not be the most pleasing Entertainment imaginable to enjoy so constant a Farce, as the observing Mankind much more different from themselves in their secret Thoughts and publick Actions, than in their Night-caps and long Periwigs? (Spectator No. 228, Wednesday, November 21, 1711)

These excerpts also illustrate the prevalence of the present tense frame for the speculations in the construction of papers that offer advice, moralizing lectures, and generally seek to instruct the reader. In (3) above, Steele opens his piece on the virtues of self-denial with a set of sententious statements that set the agenda of the paper. He then offers several examples by way of anecdotal evidence for the truth of the opening statements. It is typically in the opening set of statements that the gnomic present frame accommodates the presentation of the type or the generalization signposted by the indefinite article a, as well as the restrictive relative marked by the wh-pronouns who and which. In (4), Steele uses a study of inquisitiveness as an opportunity to explore the relationship of chatter, rumourmongering and speculation in the news on the one hand and (tongue in cheek) the harmlessness of the spectator who keeps the gossip for his own entertainment rather than passing it on. This excerpt, like (3), illustrates how the keywords congregate together to provide a sense of the consistency with which the Spectator is concerned with the sententious. The lexical coherence illustrated by these excerpts encourages the impression of a single ideological and intellectual framework for the speculations offered by the Spectator. The opacity with which one contributor refers to the other through the medium of the Mr Spectator persona does not confuse the experience of reading issues of a single periodical with that of browsing through the contributions making up a miscellany. So, despite the fact that Steele rather than Addison is the author of these issues, the linguistic integrity of the speculations does not privilege authorship above the periodical’s generic identity as developed in the community of practice.


5.2 The Spectator instructs the Reader Let us examine the ways in which the reader figures in the Spectator’s intention of instructing its target audience. In contrast with the excerpts quoted in the section above on identity, selfhood and the Spectator, the following ones (5), (6), (7) are taken from papers by Addison. They happen to entertain altogether more serious topics; (5) is taken from an introduction to Sappho’s “Hymn to Venus” by way of a translation by Addison’s protégé, Ambrose Philips. Addison directs the reader’s reading of the translation, seeking to instill in him/her the appropriate response to the poem (as well as to the translation). (5) After having given this short Account of Sappho so far as it regards the following Ode, I shall subjoin the Translation of it as it was sent me by a Friend, whose admirable Pastorals and Winter-Piece have been already so well received. The Reader will find in it that Pathetick Simplicity which is so peculiar to him, and so suitable to the Ode he has here Translated. This Ode in the Greek (besides those Beauties observed by Madam Dacier) has several harmonious Turns in the Words, which are not lost in the English. (Spectator No. 223, Thursday, Nov. 15, 1711)

Excerpt (6) is taken from the second treatment of Sappho. Addison here presents three versions (Latin, French, English) of the same fragment of the “Hymn to Venus” in order to instruct the reader about translation and imitation. The third version is another Philips translation. Addison avoids seeming to prefer this to the other versions by delicately directing the reader to Longinus’ criticism of Sappho. However, by telling the reader what he should find upon consulting the criticism, he attributes to Philips’ translation “the very Spirit of Sappho”, and so implicitly recommends it: (6) My learned Reader will know very well the Reason why one of these Verses is printed in Roman Letter; and if he compares this Translation with the Original, will find that the three first Stanzas are rendred almost Word for Word, and not only with the same Elegance, but with the same short Turn of Expression which is so remarkable in the Greek, and so peculiar to the Sapphick Ode. (Spectator No. 229, Thursday, Nov. 22, 1711)

Example (7) is taken from one of Addison’s Saturday papers, which discusses divine providence, prosperity and adversity. In it, he quotes Paradise Lost as well as invoking Plato and Seneca and offering an anecdote of Moses, derived from the Talmud. It is striking that when referring to the reader, the Spectator issues indirect instruction through the use of the predictive modal will together with the perception verb, observe. Addison uses a variation of this formula with the

43


verbs find and know in excerpts (5) and (6) respectively. The use of this formulation adds to a rhetoric of instruction that adds intellectual weight to the moral authority of Mr Spectator. (7) Plato expresses his Abhorrence of some Fables of the Poets, which seem to reflect on the Gods as the Authors of Injustice; and lays it down as a Principle, That whatever is permitted to befal a just Man, whether Poverty, Sickness, or any of those Things which seem to be Evils, shall either in Life or Death conduce to his Good. My Reader will observe how agreeable this Maxim is to what we find delivered by a greater Authority. Seneca has written a Discourse purposely on this Subject, in which he takes Pains, after the Doctrine of the Stoicks, to shew that Adversity is not in itself an Evil; and mentions a noble Saying of Demetrius, That nothing would be more unhappy than a Man who had never known Affliction. (Spectator No. 237, Saturday, December 1, 1711)

By adopting the role of instructor, the Spectator assumes the stance of the intellectual that is above the fray. This is consistent with the disinterested and detached position that Mr Spectator declares he occupies when contemplating or observing the world. However, Mr Spectator is careful not to appear to be out of the ordinary by situating his comments with those of what he calls “greater Authority”. We must distinguish between the community of practice associated with the Spectator intellectual and moral project and the material history of the Spectator. The nature of the community’s domain of interest is strongly evident in the speculations. However, once the Spectator had ceased to be published as a daily paper and after its issue by Jacob Tonson as eight volumes of essays, the separate identities of Steele and Addison became apparent once more.

5.3 Structural keywords In addition to the keyness of lexical expressions as illustrated above, the topranked 30 keywords include structural items or what Biber, Johansson, Leech, Conrad and Finegan (1999: 55) call function words. These are typically members of closed word classes, they tend to be short and lack internal structure, and they are frequent and tend to occur in any text. In contrast, the individual members of lexical open classes such as nouns and verbs occur with variable frequency and tend to be bound to the topic of the text. It is worth reiterating that keyness is a statistical expression of unusual frequency or scarcity of an item in a target corpus relative to a broader context represented by a reference corpus. Accordingly, we are invited to infer that the indefinite and definite articles occur with much more intensity in the Spectator than the broader literary context would lead


Table 3. Structural keywords Objectification Situatedness Here and now Collectivity Definition

Indefinite articles (a, an); definite article (the) Prepositions (in, of, upon) is as key verb Quantifier several (several passages, several parts, several years, free several sentences) Relative pronouns (which and who rather than that)

us to expect. A close reading of the excerpts quoted in the sections above invites the conclusion that the following rhetorical and discourse features pervade the Spectator. Table 3 summarises the types of structural items that command high keyness values for the Spectator. The unusual frequency of the indefinite articles a and an together with the definite article the suggests a preoccupation with objects and their definition. We should probably treat this feature together with the feature I have labelled “definition”, as realized in the predominance of the wh-relative pronouns who and which because the definition specifies the nature of the subject identified as newly introduced by the article. These structural items appear in each of the excerpts in the examples (1) through (7). For example in (1b), repeated below as (8), the relative markers figure prominently as a device for defining and specifying the nature of the general, introduced as definite or indefinite phrases: (8) This is to give Notice, that the SPECTATOR has taken upon him to be Visitant of all Boarding-Schools, [where young Women are educated]; and designs to proceed in the said Office after the same Manner [that the Visitants of Colleges do in the two famous Universities of this Land]. All Lovers [who write to the SPECTATOR], are desired to forbear one Expression [which is in most of the Letters to him, either out of Laziness, or want of Invention, and is true of not above two thousand Women in the whole World]; viz. She has in her all that is valuable in Woman. (Spectator No. 314, Friday, February 29, 1712)

In this excerpt, the two wh-pronouns who and which mark relative clauses (as underlined); however, the function of definition is underpinned by the prominence of the relative clause which is marked by other means. For example, in (8), the first two relative clauses are marked by the wh-forms where and that respectively. Note that the definite article is given the task of anaphoric reference together with said for an effect that matches the formality of the frame taken by Mr Spectator’s announcement that he will visit girls’ boarding schools. Finally, this excerpt also illustrates effectively the use of the present tense frame adopted for the speculations, particularly in the use of the third-person present tense singular form of be

45


(italicized). This verb, which appears in the relative clauses, also contributes to the impression that the topics treated are both singular and generic. The excerpt also happens to illustrate the ways in which the preposition in functions in the Spectator. As the relative clauses serve to define topics of discussion, prepositional phrases with in are deployed as modifiers. In order to ascertain the extent to which the structural items that appear as highly ranked keywords might be taken to characterize the rhetorical and grammatical tenor of the Spectator by contrast with the texts in the more general literary context, we also examine those items that are distinctive as negative keywords.

5.4 Negative keywords: What the Spectator is not The unusual lack of frequency with which words occur in a corpus in comparison with a reference corpus provides an additional basis for exploring how distinctive the Spectator is in the literary world of early eighteenth-century England. Table 4 lists the negative keywords of the Spectator. These give us a good idea of what is common in the literary context as a whole. Table 4 indicates the top twenty negative keywords in the Spectator relative to the reference corpus of NEET. For each item, column 1 indicates its negative keyness rank, column 2 indicates its raw frequency in the Spectator, column 3 indicates its negative keyness value (the higher the number, the more negative the keyword value), and column 4 indicates the item. As the list of top-ranked positive keywords includes a number of structural items, so does the list of top-ranked negative keywords. The top-ranked item is the first-person singular subject I, followed by the second-person subject pronoun you, with the possessive second-person pronoun your in the sixth place, and the first-person singular object pronoun me in the ninth place. Three more pronouns appear in the negative top twenty. Two of them are quite marked in form – the old fashioned second-person plural subject form ye at 14, and the contracted third-person plural object form em at 16. The third one is myself, reflexive first-person singular pronoun, at 19. These pronouns are typical of interactive genres such as letters and drama; the part of the NEET corpus used as a reference corpus includes fiction, essays and a large sub-corpus of letters. Accordingly, we can infer that although the first- and second-person pronouns are not exactly infrequent in the Spectator – note the raw frequencies in the second column of Table 4 – they are much more typical of the Spectator’s broader literary context. Two related items are lord (3) and Lordship (7), a title and address form respectively that are common in the essays but markedly infrequent in the Spectator. It is worth noting that these occur as part of the third-person reference my lord (for


Table 4. Negative keywords Rank

Frequency

NEG keyness

Item

1

4329

852.233

I

2

1508

532.050

you

3

36

346.354

lord

4

62

312.889

written

5

842

271.677

had

6

824

256.330

your

7

7

201.830

lordship

8

8491

195.386

to

9

978

177.493

me

10

1426

164.140

was

11

81

152.089

god

12

2128

151.877

for

13

197

124.081

yet

14

38

123.586

ye

15

2052

123.101

be

16

28

118.423

em

17

59

116.436

king

18

73

110.033

tis

19

45

109.565

myself

20

4

106.109

shore

example, as in my lord Somerset) and the address formula your lordship. Accordingly, it seems that the Spectator does not participate in the kind of interactivity that is apparently common in the more general corpus. There are some verb forms among the top-ranked negative keywords for the Spectator, including the past participle written, the past tense forms had and was, the infinitive copula be and the contracted form tis (it is). In addition to these structural items, prepositions to and for and adverb yet also occur relatively infrequently in the Spectator compared with the literary context. The only other salient lexical items are god, king, and the extremely infrequent shore. In light of the discussion of the positive keywords, which revealed the extent to which the Spectator project is concerned with social and literary matters, the appearance of terms that have to do with the highly charged domains of church and state like god and king should not be surprising. What seems slightly odder is the appearance of the extremely rare shore. The context in which this item does occur in the

47


Spectator is, however, consistent with its agenda. The term occurs just four times, in discussions of poetry, for example: (9) If our Poet has imitated that Verse in which Ovid tells us that there was nothing but Sea, and that this Sea had no Shore to it, he has not set the Thought in such a Light as to incur the Censure which Criticks have passed upon it. The latter part of that Verse in Ovid is idle and superfluous, but just and beautiful in Milton. ‘Jamque mare et tellus nullum discrimen habebant, Nil nisi pontus erat, deerant quoque littora ponto.’ (Ovid.)

‘– Sea cover’d Sea, Sea without Shore –’ (Milton.) (Spectator No. 363, Saturday, April 26, 1712)

So, the Spectator keyword lists, both positive and negative, present no surprises; indeed, they demonstrate the topical coherence and linguistic integrity of the stated aims of the project. This consistency allows us to review the question of the extent to which the Spectator reveals the performance of community practices. If we acknowledge the key roles of Addison and Steele in both setting and carrying out the agenda of the Spectator against the general trend of the periodical press, we must now consider the question of whether these two men shape the Spectator naturally, by virtue of their personalities as it were, rather than as a consciously conceived plan. It seems that if we were able to demonstrate that the Spectator represents a project that is different from others in which they were involved, we would be able to support the claim that they, with other key people, formed a community of practice that pursued joint activities with a clear goal. Further, we would be able to determine the social role accorded to Mr Spectator. The results of Study 2 should enable us to examine how far the Spectator project diverges from the interests and concerns of the periodical press of the time.

6.

Study 2: The periodical press and the Spectator project

Study 2 is designed to allow the exploration of the relation of the periodicals of the day to the Spectator. Thus, we consider the nature of the Spectator’s natural discourse community in order to understand how distinctive the Spectator project is, and consequently, how distinct its identity is in the periodical press. Accordingly, the target corpus consists of all of the periodical essays collected in NEET (165,000 words). The reference corpus is composed of the Spectator essays (293,269 words). This analysis yields a list of keywords that typify the periodical


press. A quick glance indicates that the list suggests a preoccupation with current affairs and politics. In contrast with the Spectator’s concern with the individual, the reader, and the agenda of diverting or instructing its readership, the periodical press is concerned with secular national matters (people, nation, kingdom, Table 5. Keywords of periodicals relative to the Spectator Rank

Frequency

Keyness

Item

1

345

146.703

people

2

205

145.432

king

3

1397

137.120

their

4

167

133.483

nation

5

1349

131.685

they

6

128

131.442

government

7

77

120.077

ministry

8

146

109.183

majesty

9

66

100.606

rebellion

10

93

94.709

trade

11

66

79.633

parliament

12

90

71.507

hath

13

74

71.474

kingdom

14

6763

67.679

to

15

101

65.596

party

16

108

64.535

queen

17

167

63.028

power

18

1824

62.198

be

19

46

61.369

clergy

20

111

59.269

England

21

436

54.147

men

22

29

53.721

ants

23

29

53.721

Helim

24

231

52.773

against

25

47

52.471

treaty

26

94

51.099

interest

27

89

51.086

subjects

28

223

50.320

country

29

916

50.310

them

30

109

49.337

church

31

107

48.443

religion

49

50


ngland, country) as well as religious ones (clergy, church, religion), monarchy E (king, majesty, kingdom, queen, subjects), government (ministry, parliament, power) and politics (rebellion, trade, party, treaty). The key structural items also point to the difference between the Spectator and the periodical press. Whereas the Spectator shares with its literary context a focus on the first and second persons, the periodical press is defined by the predominance of the third-person plural pronouns: their (3), they (5) and them (29). There are also only two verbs in the top-ranked keywords for the periodical press, namely the old fashioned third-person singular present form of have, i.e. hath, and the infinitive copula be. Another structural item that is in the top 30 keywords is the preposition to (14), an item that also appears in the top-ranked negative keywords of the Spectator. The rest of the items are lexical expressions. A few items appear both in the negative keywords list of the Spectator and in the positive keywords list of the periodicals. These include the lexical item king, and the structural items, to and be.

7.

The Spectator and questions of identity and social roles

The two studies presented reveal the special place of the Spectator in the broader contexts of early eighteenth-century London and in the periodical discourse community. The fact that the keyword studies result in rather different lists of positive keywords suggests that the Spectator is as distinct from the other periodicals that populate London print culture as it is from the broader multi-genre literary context. In lexical terms, the keyword analysis seems to support the analysis yielded by a cultural and literary historical interrogation. In particular, the

. There are two lexical items included in the keyword list presented here that seem to be inconsistent with the semantic coherence of the others. These are ants and the name Helim. It is worth reiterating that keyness of an item is the statistical expression of the unusual or unexpected frequency of an item relative to a larger context. In these cases, the peculiar salience of the items can be accounted for by a concentration of frequency in two text files. In truth, the keyness value of each is not very high, certainly not by comparison with the top ten keywords. However, ant occurs 29 times in the periodicals target corpus, by comparison with just once in the entire Spectator reference corpus. It occurs in a paper by Addison (No. 343, Thursday, April 3, 1712) in which he treats the topic of transmigration through a letter written ostensibly by Jack Freelove, narrating the several lives of an “Indian Brachman”. The frequency of the item in the periodical target corpus can be accounted for by Richard Steele’s narrative of the ants in a single issue of the Guardian, Number 157 [rsess027]. Steele is also responsible for the surprising keyness status of the name Helim; it occurs in another issue of the Guardian, Number 167 [rsess030].


Spectator is concerned with matters that it designs to appeal to key readerships, from moral and social topics to literary and intellectual ones. From the selected excerpts presented as illustration, it would appear that while Steele is responsible for the more mundane social trivia, Addison produces the weightier, more serious papers. However, both make use of the distinctive style as indicated in the keyness of the structural items, both use the eidolon of Mr Spectator, and both draw upon the contributions of correspondents as a basis for many of the speculations. In contrast to the Spectator, the periodical press of the time appears concerned with highly topical, political domains of interest. The predominance of lexical items associated with state and church, monarchy and party politics, indicates that their focus is on current affairs and the political ramifications of daily news. As such the subject matter of periodicals like the Review, the Examiner, and the Freeholder is grist to the social historian’s mill and ephemeral to anybody other than the most committed newshound. The fact that the negative keywords list of the Spectator study shares some items with the positive keyword list of the periodicals study provides additional evidence that the Spectator is distinctive for its time. The Spectator carves out a distinctive identity through its persona Mr Spectator, and within the project assumes a variety of social roles that might be only obliquely connected to its major contributors, Addison and Steele. Indeed, it would oversimplify the case to suggest that while Steele performed the role of Mr Spectator as entertainer, Addison performed his role as instructor. The Spectator amounts to a major project with a clear agenda which ended when Addison and Steele turned their attention to different projects. Indeed, although both men continued to work on periodicals independently after the end of the Spectator – Addison on the Freeholder and Steele on the Guardian and then the Englishman – their new projects shared more with the Medley and the Examiner than the Spectator. In consequence, the identity of the Spectator is more than the sum of the identities of the individuals that make up the community of practice that had as its principal aim to rehabilitate public discourse.

References Antony, Laurence. 2006. AntConc 3.1. http://www.antlab.sci.waseda.ac.jp/software.html, accessed 28 March 2008. Backscheider, Paula R. 2004/2008. “Defoe, Daniel (1660?–1731).” In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/ article/7421, accessed 31 March 2008. Biber, Douglas, Johansson, Stig, Leech, Geoffrey, Conrad, Susan and Finegan, Edward. 1999. Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. Harlow: Pearson Education Ltd. Bond, Donald (ed.). 1965. The Spectator, 5 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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Cowan, Brian. 2004a. “Mr Spectator and the coffeehouse public sphere.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 37 (3): 345–366. Cowan, Brian. 2004b. “Urwin, William (d. 1695).” In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/74228, accessed 29 March 2008. Culpeper, Jonathan. 2002. “Computers, language and characterisation: An analysis of six characters in Romeo and Juliet.” In Conversation in Life and in Literature: Papers from the ASLA Symposium [Association Suedoise de Linguistique Appliquée 15], Ulla Melander-Marttala, Carin Östman and Merja Kytö (eds), 11–30. Uppsala: Universitetstryckeriet. Culpeper, Jonathan. 2009. “Keyness: Words, parts-of-speech and semantic categories in the character-talk of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.” International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 14 (1): 29–59. Downie, J. A. 2004. “Tutchin, John (1660x64–1707).” In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/27899, accessed 28 March 2008. Eckert, Penelope and McConnell-Ginet, Sally. 2003. Language and Gender. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Eighteenth Century Collections Online. Gale Group. http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/ ECCO, accessed 27 March 2008. Fitzmaurice, Susan. 2007. “Questions of standardization and representativeness in the development of social networks-based corpora: The story of the Network of Eighteenth-century English Texts.” In Creating and Digitizing Language Corpora, vol. 2, Diachronic Databases, Joan C. Beal, Karen P. Corrigan and Hermann L. Moisl (eds), 49–81. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Fitzmaurice, Susan. 2010. “Coalitions, networks, and discourse communities in Augustan England: The Spectator and the early eighteenth-century essay.” In Eighteenth Century English: Ideology and Change, Raymond Hickey (ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Haycock, David Boyd. 2004/2008. “Johnson, Maurice (1688–1755).” In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/ article/14908, accessed 31 March 2008. Hyland, P. B. J. 1986. “Liberty and libel: Government and the press during the succession crisis in Britain, 1712–1716.” The English Historical Review 101 (401): 863–888. Johnson, Sally, Culpeper, Jonathan and Suhr, Stephanie. 2003. “From ‘politically correct councillors’ to ‘Blairite nonsense’: Discourses of ‘political correctness’ in three British newspapers.” Discourse and Society 14 (1): 29–47. Klein, Lawrence. 1996. “Coffeehouse civility, 1660–1714: An aspect of post-courtly culture in England.” The Huntington Library Quarterly 59 (1): 30–51. McEnery, Tony. 2006. “Keywords and moral panics: Mary Whitehouse and media censorship.” Paper presented at Word Frequency and Keyword Extraction: AHRC ICT Methods Network Expert Seminar on Linguistics, 8 September 2006. Lancaster University. Maxted, Ian. 2004. “Mallet, Elizabeth (fl. 1672–1706).” In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/66880, accessed 29 March 2008. Network of Eighteenth-century English Texts (NEET). Novak, Maximillian E. 2001. Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Porter, Roy. 2003. Flesh in the Age of Reason. New York/London: W. W. Norton.


Scott, Mike. 1999. WordSmith Tools. http://www.lexically.net/wordsmith, accessed 27 March 2008. Snyder, Henry L. 2004/2005. “Maynwaring, Arthur (1668–1712).” In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/17809, accessed 29 March 2008. Speck, William A. 1986. “Politics and the Press.” In The Press in English Society from the Seventeenth to the Nineteenth Century, Michael Harris and Alan Lee (eds), 47–63. London: Associated University Presses. Speck, William A. 2004/2007. ”Harley, Robert, first earl of Oxford and Mortimer (1661–1724).” In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. http://www. oxforddnb.com/view/article/12344, accessed 28 March 2008. Watts, Richard. 1999. “The social construction of Standard English: Grammar writers as a ‘discourse community’.” In Standard English: The Widening Debate, Tony Bex and Richard Watts (eds), 40–68. London: Routledge. Wenger, Etienne. 2006. “Introduction to communities of practice.” http://www.ewenger.com/ theory, accessed 25 February 2008. Xiao, Zhongua and McEnery, Tony. 2005. “Two approaches to genre analysis: Three genres in modern American English.” Journal of English Linguistics 33 (1): 62–82.

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How eighteenth-century book reviewers became language guardians Carol Percy

University of Toronto

Contributing to studies of standardization in mid eighteenth-century Britain, this paper draws on a corpus of criticism in the new review periodicals in order to explain reviewers’ enthusiastic enforcement of linguistically prescriptive rules. Reflecting consumers’ need for guidance in an expanding market, reviewers often used authors’ language as a seemingly objective index of a book’s quality. However, reviewers’ judgments were sometimes relayed in subjective tones. Reviewers’ satiric perspective in part reflected their dual roles as entertainers and educators, publicly punishing individuals in order to improve standards of writing and reading in a market that was perceived as increasingly socially heterogeneous. Drawing on Bogel’s theory of satire, I also argue that reviewers mocked authors in order to differentiate and elevate themselves.

1.

Introduction The writing runs as foul as the disease it treats of, and is no better than, to use the author’s words, a gonorrhaea fluor, a gonorrhaea gleet, a fluor gleet, or a fluor mucus. A p-x on such writing! And yet, though this author writes without knowledge, judgment, common sense, decency, or language, he may turn out a thriving practitioner in this merit-distinguishing metropolis. But that our readers may judge whether this censure is too severe or not, we shall lay before them a few specimens of Mr. Neale’s erudition, beginning with the title leaf, in which is considered the mischievous consequences of an improper and injudicious manage(Armstrong 1756b) ment.

This quotation, taken from a large database corpus of excerpts from eighteenthcentury book reviews (Percy 1997), exemplifies the roles played by both linguistic

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criticism and critical invective in eighteenth-century print culture. Contextualizing representative book reviews in a synthesis of interdisciplinary scholarship, this paper will describe and interpret how the ideology of linguistic standardization was appropriated by reviewers and received by some authors. I am particularly interested in the tone of reviews: sometimes aggression, condescension, and mockery supplemented a more reasoned critique. Indeed, it has often been observed that such labels as the “age of reason” erase the conflicts and contradictions inherent in any culture (e.g. Redwood 1976; Brewer 1995). In response to social difference, for instance, both satire and politeness seem stereotypical of the period. Moreover, linguistic criticism in eighteenth-century periodicals had its own paradoxes. Writing about the period’s periodical criticism, Eagleton (1984: 12) identifies its “irony”: “while its appeal to standards of universal reason signifies a resistance to absolutism, the critical gesture itself is typically conservative and corrective” (see also Fitzmaurice 1998: 327). Interpreting the promotion in mid-century grammars of “an absolute standard of prescriptivism and correctness”, Fitzmaurice (1998: 327) reminds us that the idea of a standard language can stratify as well as unify a society. In this paper I will account for both the content and tone of mid-century reviewers’ invocation of an ideology of standardization by considering how both helped them establish their own new roles in the print culture of the mid-century. Well before this time, print culture had been criticized for its dependence on the market and for what were perceived to be declining cultural standards (e.g. Ingrassia 1998). Drawing on Marxism, Eagleton (1984: 33) has argued that social alienation accompanied the commercialization of print culture by contrasting two well-known periodical writers: Joseph Addison, creator of the gentlemanly and sociable everyman Mr Spectator and his club of friends and reader-correspondents, was succeeded only decades later by the vituperative and pontificating pedant Samuel Johnson, who famously asserted that only a fool would not write for money (see also Patey 1997: 11–13). Pope’s portrayals of poets laureate, pedants, and Grub Street hacks in The Dunciad represent his anxieties about both cultural authority and popular writing. However, Pope himself is a useful reminder of the importance of the market. Despite publicly disseminated criticism of his translation (e.g. Ault 1941: 430), Pope profited from the public’s desire to buy his adaptation of high culture. Moreover, by publishing his translation of Homer as a subscription and keeping control of the copyright, he is famous for having made a fortune by his writing and becoming “the first English man of . For research support, I gratefully acknowledge SSHRC grant 410-97-0981 and the many talented assistants whose names appear here: http://chass.utoronto.ca/reviews/students.htm. Special thanks to Aidan Goodwin for editorial assistance.

How book reviewers became language guardians

letters to become financially independent by means of his own work” (Williams 1990). From Bogel’s study of eighteenth-century satire, we might infer Pope’s satire of Grub Street writers was inspired by his awareness that they were “not alien enough” (Bogel 2001: 41). It might be added that the viciousness of eighteenthcentury satire arises in part from the importance of public opinion. The reviewers themselves were a symbol of the power of a socially heterogeneous market for printed material (e.g. Donoghue 1995: 67; 1996: 41). The first periodical review had been founded by a bookseller on the grounds that potential purchasers required a disinterested guide to vernacular publications, often described as numerous and mostly substandard. Yet, as hired specialists, reviewers differed from authors only in their anonymity. In this context, it is in some ways unsurprising that linguistic criticism became an apparently objective criterion of quality for reviewers. External sources confirm the social capital of good grammar and its association with high culture. In this paper I will argue that criticizing authors’ grammar allowed reviewers both to differentiate themselves from and elevate themselves above authors while simultaneously entertaining purchasers of the periodical and supplying them with the same cultural capital. Identifying bad English in the writings of titled authors, promoting “worth” over “birth”, contributed to the social prestige and commercial value of education generally and of good English specifically. In his ongoing analyses of the ideology of standardization in the period, Watts (2002) has characterized the change as from “polite” to “educated” English. In this paper, I argue that reviewers exploited and furthered the standardization of English in their own quest for professionalization. However, the public display of learning and of verbal criticism was highly problematic (Patey 1997: 11–13). In a society that prized sociability, the display of expertise was impolite: the pedant and the gentleman were often opposed (Klein 1993: 38; Patey 1997: 13–15; Fitzmaurice 1998: 313–314). Pervading contemporary polemic as well as scholarship, verbal criticism was certainly not polite. Often quoted by disgruntled authors, Pope’s “Epistle to Arbuthnot” (1735) linked verbal criticism with ignorance. “Of Verbal Criticism”, a poem addressed to Pope in the wake of his feud with Shakespeare’s other editor Lewis Theobald, reminds us that editing and criticism were often seen as opposed to and destructive of literary creation: Pope was praised for being able to both critique and create (Mallet 1733). Finally, in such other fields as agriculture and medicine, the practical value of “learning” was sometimes questioned. In debates about medical professionalization, for instance (Hamilton 1951; Harley 1990), the mid-century reviews participate in debates about the professional value not only of an Oxbridge education but even of polished English. Even professionalization was problematic, since the process involved both paid labour and a narrowness of perspective seen by some as ungentlemanly or even pedantic (Klein 1993: 38). Given the cultural

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importance of education generally and English grammar specifically in the earlier eighteenth century, mid-century reviewers’ roles as language guardians may seem inevitable to modern scholars. In this paper I hope to demonstrate that the process was neither inevitable nor uncontested.

2.

Grammatical variation in public writing: Salience and significance

Eighteenth-century book reviewers’ roles as language guardians reflected the state of the English language at that time. Both the ideology and effects of standardization were disseminated and entrenched gradually; during this period grammatical variants that appeared saliently non-standard to some people could also appear in print. The slow spread of standardization might be illustrated by the fact that throughout the “long” eighteenth century commentators claimed that attention to correctness was new. In 1672 John Dryden characterized his age as the first to attend to issues of correctness: For all writers have their imperfections and failings but I may safely conclude in the general [sic], that our improprieties are less frequent, and less gross than theirs. One Testimony of this is undeniable, that we are the first who have observ’d them. and, certainly, to observe errours is a great step to the correcting of them. (Dryden 1672: 163)

Almost ninety years later, in 1759, a reviewer of Samuel Butler’s works also asserted that his attention to accuracy was a relatively recent trend: In a word, with all his faults, [Butler] was a true genius: and had he lived and wrote [sic] in these more polished times, in which accuracy of composition, and neatness of expression are more attended to than they were in Butler’s days, his droll humour, his extensive reading, and his uncommon spirit, would doubtless have rendered him the delight and ornament of the age. (Anon. 1759b)

Standards of grammatical accuracy were established gradually. Although this reviewer was attentive to error, he used a verb form that was among those removed from editions of Richardson’s Pamela (1740) (Eaves and Kimpel 1967: 64). However, past participial wrote was not yet widely or explicitly proscribed and still appeared in the prose of educated writers (Gustafsson 2002: 268–273; Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2002: 462–463, 465–467). Like eighteenth-century reviewers, modern critics of published texts can also identify and interpret the presence of typos, unconventional lexis, and of grammatical variants that are felt to be more colloquial than incorrect. However, other non-standard grammatical variants rarely appear in published print because


English has been standardized and because publishers hire editors to ensure that authors meet those standards. With the rise of the internet and associated modes of publication, modern critics do face issues similar to those of eighteenth-century print culture. Publication unmediated by editors means that non-standard language is more likely to become public. It is obviously beyond the scope of this essay to consider whether correspondingly postmodern modes of criticism have arisen and to what extent they are attentive to grammar. But it is useful to keep the internet in mind as a rough analogy for early print culture. Both mediums are vehicles for publication by authors perceived to represent groups previously un(der)represented in public, and for language that is perceived to differ from and thus violate previously established conventions. The language itself can be regarded as a conveniently concrete symbol of the unfitness of a private writer to assume the authority and legitimacy of a published author. Good examples of publications with debatable legitimacy and authority are those hosted on noninstitutional websites. In this paper I am particularly interested in the process by which reviewers came to point out non-standard grammar and to infer from it (or pretend to) an author’s lack of education and professional incompetence. The following extracts epitomize some trends that were typical by the mid-century. The first extract below exemplifies the kinds of conclusions reviewers drew from an author’s nonstandard grammar as they performed their roles as judges for and entertainers to the public. But it would be an insult upon our readers to give farther specimens of a work, every page of which betrays the writer’s deficiency in grammar, stile, judgment, method, spirit, character, composition, and every necessary quality of an historian. It is sufficient, we may venture to pronounce, that whoever has treasured up any of the public news-papers, since the commencement of the rupture with France, possesses a more entertaining and instructive narrative, than what we have here presented, under the pompous title of A Complete History. (Anon. 1761b)

Demonstrating one author’s self-consciousness about his language, the next extract attests to the influence of reviewers on print culture. Quoting the author, the reviewer italicized such non-standard forms as infalliable and Grammer. With the same means and ends as satire, this implicit criticism works to elevate and ally the reviewer and the reader, who (unlike the author) ostensibly did not need to be told that the forms are non-standard: … Mr Relly … freely owns his defects as a Writer, – which are, indeed, so many and so great, that he does not even ‘pretend to the abilities of falliable Authors.’ – However, if, notwithstanding this plain confession of his weakness – ‘some busy

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Critic, whose genius leads him ever in search of offal,’ – or – ‘the pidling Pedant who feeds on garbage,’ – should pretend to detect in his book, not only bad Grammer, (of which there is plenty) with inaccuracies in phrase, but even errors in judgment also; yet, he says, he has ‘an infalliable remedy in silence:’ to which we shall leave him, with our advice, never to break that, and Priscian’s head, at the (P. 1761) same time again.

I will consider elsewhere the grounds on which an author’s language was deemed – implicitly or explicitly – to be non-standard. Here I would like to emphasize that Mr Relly’s preemptive attack on linguistic critics not only confirms reviewers’ cultural influence but also reminds us that their roles were not unchallenged (Forster 1994). The first extract also hints at the cultural vulnerability of the periodical reviews. With the reference to newspapers, the reviewer quite typically distinguished and elevated the new reviews above other kinds of periodicals. That such qualities as permanence and elegance were at stake in contemporary print culture can be illustrated by the denigration in other reviews of the “temporary subjects” and linguistic “vulgarisms” characteristic of newspapers (Griffiths 1763; Anon. 1767a). Relly had preemptively attacked linguistic critics as “pidling Pedants”, and, as I will demonstrate below, he was not alone. Published authors’ anxiety about public criticism is utterly unsurprising. But his criticism of linguistic critics crystallizes some issues about the status of the book reviewer in the early 1750s, and why what we might think of as the full-blown linguistic criticism exemplified above did not develop immediately. Although the bookseller Griffiths’ Monthly Review appeared in 1749, in its early years most of its reviewers said relatively little about authors’ grammar. Indeed, scholars have argued that it was the Scot Tobias Smollett, the first editor of the Critical Review (1756), who introduced particularly detailed and lengthy grammatical criticism into the review genre (Spector 1966: 324–326; Basker 1988: 76–84; Donoghue 1996: 25). That there was indeed a market for what we might charitably call the public dissemination of linguistic standards can be confirmed by the speed with which the Monthly Review followed suit (Donoghue 1996: 26). Some scholars attribute what Spector describes as the Monthly’s initially more liberal stance to religious and political differences between the reviews: Spector contrasts the Monthly’s more “commercial” concerns with the Critical’s conservatism; Donoghue argues that the nonconformist Monthly initially promoted an ideology of reading based on information-gathering as opposed to clarifying social hierarchies (Spector 1966: 324; Donoghue 1995: 59–60; but cf. Forster 1994: 179–180). In this paper I would like to contextualize and synthesize scholarly explanations for the relatively muted linguistic criticism in the first volumes of the pioneering Monthly Review. By doing this, I will not only enrich the


description of the linguistic critic but also explain some relationships between the quintessentially eighteenth-century phenomena of satire and prescriptivism.

3.

Linguistic criticism in book reviews

3.1

The status of vernacular publications in English review periodicals

The fact that mid-century reviewers found a great deal of English to criticize reflects one of their self-professed roles: in the words of Griffiths, the first editor of the innovative Monthly Review (1749–1844), to provide for readers “a compendious account of those productions of the press, as they come out, that are worth notice” (Forster 2001: 173). In these mid-century review periodicals, reviews of books written in English outnumbered those in foreign or classical languages. According to Bloom (1957: 547), the public demand for contemporary literature explains the immediate popularity of the Monthly Review and its successful imitation by the Critical (1756–1817). That there was already a market for mediating modern literature is evident from some key features of the earlier Gentleman’s Magazine (1731–1907): new books had been listed since its inception (McIntosh 1998: 183), and reviews of some of them were reprinted from such other sources as newspapers. For instance, in the Gentleman’s Magazine for 1749, Albrecht von Haller’s review of Richardson’s Clarissa (1747–1748), published in French in the Bibliothèque raisonée was printed in English (von Haller 1749; Dussinger 2004/2008). Indeed, Richardson’s Pamela (1740) had been reviewed in the earlier Works of the Learned (1737–1743), where in an otherwise descriptive summary of its plot, its language was described as “not altogether unexceptionable, but in several Place sinks below the Idea we are constrained to form of the Heroine who is supposed to write it” (Keymer and Sabor 2005: 29). However, as an object of critical interest both Pamela and her language were atypical: in these periodicals that preceded the Monthly and the Critical, relatively few vernacular texts of a popular kind had been considered (Donoghue 1996: 126–127). For instance, the review of the popular Pamela in the Works of the Learned was according to Keymer and Sabor “remarkable”, likely reflecting Richardson’s connections with its publisher. As its title indicates, that periodical generally “showed relatively little interest in contemporary literature, and largely ignored prose fiction. Its stock in trade was the approving summary of new works by (as the editors liked to put it) ‘the most eminent Writers’ of philosophy, science, divinity, history, and the like” (Keymer and Sabor 2005: 28). The low status of English relative to both Latin and French might be inferred both from the title of The Works of the Learned and by the fact

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that its title was a translation of Journal des sçavans. The great popularity of English might be inferred from the relatively short life of The Works of the Learned. In the mid-century, the content and tone of reviewers’ linguistic criticism indirectly reflected what the reviews confirm was intense anxiety about the influence of the market on contemporary English publication. We can infer that there was a market both for “low” books and for guides to them from Griffiths’ rephrasing of his mission statement a few months after the first number of the Monthly Review: the reviewers would “register all the new Things in general, without exception to any, on account of their lowness of rank, or price” (Forster 2001: 173). However, literature that was too “low” overtly offended the reviewers’ sense of professionalism: the fictional History of Betty Barnes (1753) was dismissed as “written for the kitchen”, while reviews of both Ann Shackleford’s Modern Art of Cookery Improved (1767) and John Smith’s The Printer’s Grammar (1755) were delegated to the “printer” by the reviewer (Anon. 1752; Anon. 1767c; Anon. 1755). The reviewers were particularly dismissive of newspapers and their “temporary subjects” and linguistic “vulgarisms”, perhaps reflecting the tenuous claim of periodicals to permanence in print culture (Anon. 1767b; Griffiths 1763). Reviewers were also keen to identify and expose “catch-penny scribblers” hired by booksellers and to distinguish them from “authors”. Doubly epitomizing this obsession is a pamphlet called The Case of Authors by Profession or Trade, Stated with Regard to Booksellers, The Stage, and The Public and its assessment by a Critical Reviewer: “this piece is not the production of a hackney’d writer” (Anon. 1758a).

3.2 The status of reviewers in the new reviews Reviewers’ scorn of scribblers was self-defensive, as Donoghue (1995: 64–65) has argued. Already a stigma in the literary republic, the association of money with criticism specifically undermined its claim to neutrality. Moreover, the review was a new genre, and especially given the regional and social marginality of many of the reviewers their position did not automatically come with cultural authority. While the Critical Reviewers were attacked as a “Cabal of refugee Scotchmen” (Forster 1994: 39) in a period of intense anti-Scotticism (Colley 1992: 117–132), the reviewers in the Monthly were dangerously close to Grub Street, being pieceworkers hired by the bookseller and former watchmaker Griffiths. One exchange that provides a snapshot of the period illustrates both the rivalry between the two periodicals and the role played in that rivalry by linguistic criticism, which could be interpreted as both superiority and pedantry. Perhaps questioning the ability of the British to write good English, an attack on the Critical Review denigrated the linguistic errors in its first number’s “lead article”, a review of Sheridan’s


British Education (1756) (Murdoch 1756a; Basker 1988: 53). A rebuttal by its editor Smollett attributed the attack to a pedantic Monthly Reviewer, a “low-bred, pedantic Syntax-monger, retained as servant or associate by any bookseller, or bookseller’s wife, who may have an interest in decrying their performance” (Smollett 1756d). Because reviewers’ linguistic criticism sometimes reflects contemporary debates about literature as a “trade” and “profession”, in this paper I will sometimes epitomize the broad array of print culture with reviews of medical and agricultural works. As well as subtly thematizing the idea of improvement, both medical and agricultural works contrast the professional value of classical and practical learning. Did an apothecary’s practical training give him more authority than a physician in assessing the properties of spa waters? Was a learned physician’s gentlemanly air of more value in securing wealthy clients? The concurrent dispute over the restrictions on fellowship in the Royal College of Physicians raised issues about professionalism that resonate with the new “profession” of book reviewer (Hamilton 1951; Harley 1990; Corfield 1995; Burnham 1996).

3.3 The new reviews: (Re)forming the public taste? As Donoghue and others have argued, some reviewers attributed the popularity of vulgar authors to the influence of uneducated consumers: the figure of the chambermaid could epitomize bad readers and bad writers alike (Donoghue 1996: 42). Reviewers’ linguistic criticism must thus be contextualized within their self-professed roles not only of judging contemporary literature but also of improving contemporary literature by educating authors and readers alike. In suggestively defensive rhetoric, the reviewers define their roles as directed by the need for an improvement in public taste. In the Monthly Review, Goldsmith was to define “the true Critic’s province” as “To direct our taste and conduct the poet up to perfection” (Forster 2001: 181). The Critical Review claimed to “contribute towards the Formation of a public Taste, which is the best Patron of Genius (Donoghue 1996: 143)”, to “reform the taste of mankind”, expose the fraud of “every author who writes without talent”, and “heal the wounds they have made should his improvement entitle him to their favour” (Smollett 1756e).

3.4 Ascertaining linguistic and literary standards in the new reviews Reviewers used verbal criticism in their self-proclaimed mission to improve public taste. I will not relay the debates about (to use Hume’s phrasing in 1757) “the Standard of Taste” (Marshall 1997: 633–657; Patey 1997: 14–15): whether there were rules for good literature and (if there were) whether readers could or should

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be taught those rules so that good literature would be more popular. More relevant to this paper are other issues – whether there was a standard of language and (if there were) whether a text’s language could be used as a direct index of its content. Both the standard and its ideology were under development: “bad grammar” generally or poor language generally did not have the same significance for every reviewer or in every context. Moreover, as Meyers has observed, the perceived connections between language and content had been complicated by Locke’s assertion of the arbitrary connection between words and their referents (Meyers 1997). In some reviews there is little correlation between the quality of a text’s language and its content. Indeed, in less learned genres, poor grammar is potentially a sign of authenticity: as quoted by Corfield, “one Admiral in 1773 excused his errors in grammar with blunt pride: ‘A Man of War was my University’” (Corfield 1995: 189). As we will see below, reviewers often held lower class authors to lower standards: for instance, in both the Critical and Monthly Review the valuable content of Thomas Hitt’s agricultural writings is described as separable from its style. Moreover, even in the case of a more learned author, one reviewer claims to distinguish his “solid and deep thoughts” from his language: although his thoughts seem to be solid and deep, his expression is so embarrassed and confused, that we are at a loss, whether we have catched [sic] his real meaning. … In short, were this work cleared of some rubbish, were its excrescences reduced, its luxuriancies lopt off, and the whole brought into a neater and more commodious form, we needed not scruple to recommend it as the best system of the anatomy and physiology of the eye, that we have seen. (Anon. 1759a)

However, despite these assertions of the relative independence of linguistic and literary merit, another review insists on the “inseparable connection betwixt truth and beauty, betwixt deformity and falsehood in writing, as well as every other art”, and “that as good sense will always express itself in good language, so inaccurate tautology or false grammar are the constant literary vehicles of nonsense” (Griffiths 1751). Other reviewers, quoted below, also used syntax that linked bad grammar with mediocre content. Of course, all of these comments must be contextualized within the dynamics of the individual review – a reviewer determined to denigrate a book could justify the bad review by finding some questionable language. Nevertheless, the fact that bad grammar could justify a negative review is one sign of its significance. Moreover, the fact that these contrasting opinions were articulated publicly and forcefully reflects both the topicality and the intensity of the subject of bad grammar.


3.5 Verbal criticism in the early Monthly Review: Descriptive or prescriptive? Verbal criticism was relatively sporadic and muted in the first volumes of the Monthly Review. Nevertheless, its presence and its features confirm the observations of Forster and others – that from the beginning the Monthly Reviewers saw themselves as judges and educators, despite Griffiths’ claim in the periodical’s first issue that “we shall not, in the language of critics, pretend to describe, in terms of the art, the beauties or imperfections … of the production before us” but “extract from the work itself a few of such passages as we shall judge proper to give a tolerably adequate idea of the whole” (Forster 2001: 174). From Griffiths’ motivation to make a proclamation at all and from its quick inconsistency with practice, we might infer that the reviewers’ roles were both new and contested. The inconsistency also highlights the conflicting roles for readers: capable producers or anxious consumers of criticism? With respect to both language and content, select elements of the early Monthly Review appeared more descriptive than prescriptive. In the long reviews that began each month’s number, extracts typically comprised about 70–80% of the review (Basker 1988: 66–67) and were often framed by a sentence like “‘a few passages from the work will give the reader the best idea of it’ (MR 1, 1749: 461) or ‘we leave the reader to form his own judgment of it on others’” (MR 2, 1749– 1750: 331; Forster 2001: 180). When there is a linguistic judgment to be made, occasionally readers were left to make it themselves. For instance, in the first volume of the Monthly, a great number of words and phrases were italicized in an extract from William Duff ’s self-published serial history of Scotland: the reader might infer these to include concord errors, a contraction, nonemphatic do, not ... nor and no ... nor (Griffiths 1749a). The reader must also infer the error in what the reviewer describes as the “uncouth, ungrammatical title” of an agricultural essay: The Preparation of water for sprinkling the trees and the plants in which the seeds may be settled before they are sown and planted, until they swell (P. 1754). These reviews to some extent implicate the reader as a philological critic: it is the reader who must interpret the significance of the italics and identify the bad grammar of the title. In both cases, the reader’s involvement diffuses what might well be construed as the reviewer’s undue attention to detail. However, because it was the reviewer who added the italics to the first review and described as “uncouth” and “ungrammatical” the title of the second, even these reviews reveal the reviewers in what must have been their contested role of verbal critics. Betraying an immediate discrepancy between the journal’s precept and practice, the review of Duff was “almost certainly” written by Griffiths (McIntosh 1998: 182–183). Editors’

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annotations have disclosed the identities of otherwise anonymous reviewers in both the Monthly (Nangle 1934) and the Critical (e.g. Roper 1959; Basker 1988). More typically, even in the early years of the Monthly, its reviewers articulate their judgments quite explicitly. For instance, by introducing a long excerpt with obviously ironic phrasing the reviewer might simultaneously entertain, flatter, and educate readers by subtly directing their judgment. In spite of describing A Dialogue between the Gallows and a Free-thinker as “this excellent” and “learned work” and a slang word in it as “Another of this writer’s elegancies”, the further definition of elegancies as “the language of Jonathan Wilde” (a criminal) clearly confirms the reviewer’s negative opinion (Griffiths 1749b). Similarly, after being presented with a heavily-italicized extract from a controversial religious pamphlet, the reader is invited to judge the writer’s “genteel manner of writing, and some of those elegant and polite phrases made use of by this worthy presbyter of the church of England”. Among the examples are such terms of abuse as “insolent schismatic, skeptical trifler, paultry sneerer” and “impertinent caviller”, making it very clear that the author is not to be thought of as polite or genteel (Rose 1752a). It should be pointed out that invective pervaded the reviews despite reviewers’ ostensible disapproval of it. The functions of insults are discussed further below, when I explain why reviewers and satirists had much in common. Reviewers and authors were aware of the bad reputation of verbal criticism (see Section 1 above). One early review refers to Pope’s “Word catchers” (Griffiths 1749c), another author quotes his friend Lord Bolingbroke’s contempt for “antiquaries, chronologers, critics, grammarians, compilers of dictionaries, and reviewers and publishers of manuscripts” (Rose 1753). Indeed, Pope was frequently quoted – by hostile authors as well as by reviewers keen to portray themselves as opposed to Grub Street (Donoghue 1996: 37). Particularly popular were the lines from Arbuthnot describing verbal critics: “Each Wight who reads not, and but scans and spells, / Each Word-catcher that lives on syllables” (Forster 1989: 85). Indeed, reviewers criticized authors who criticized each other’s language: following a dispute between rival editors of Buchanan’s history of Scotland, the reviewer describes one book as “a long and tedious detail of particulars, many of them very minute and trifling” and another as “a number of criticisms, many of them very trifling ones, on nouns, pronouns, verbs, prepositions, &c.” (Rose 1755). In his response to the Critical Review’s verbal criticism of his own work (Smollett 1758), the angry author (and Monthly Reviewer) William Kenrick directly and publicly correlates linguistic criticism and critical incompetence: reviewers are accused of “pick[ing] out a few inaccuracies of stile; to make a parade of philological learning with” in order to disguise their lack of “time”, “inclination”, or “comprehen[sion]” of the work at hand (Forster 1994: 40). Indeed, as McIntosh has observed, the


very extensive italicization in the review of Duff ’s (anti-Buchananite) history was atypical of the early years of review criticism (McIntosh 1998: 183).

3.6 Critics’ social inferences from linguistic criticism: Education and region Nevertheless, despite the cultural stigma of pedantry we find many kinds of linguistic criticism in the early Monthly Review. In some of the very brief reviews necessary for the broad coverage of contemporary publications, reviewers used parallel syntax to correlate bad language with unsatisfactory content: a “layman” is dismissed by Flexman as ignorant equally of “the idioms of the language he writes in”, “the common rudiments of grammar” and “the subjects on which he professes to treat” in his Moral Discourse on the Attributes of God (Flexman 1754a), while the author of a political pamphlet is dismissed by Tourneyser (1755) “as ignorant of the historical facts which he pretends to quote, as he is defective in argument, and illiterate in respect to grammar”. The fact that all of the reviews were printed anonymously undoubtedly incited the critics to candour. According to Forster (1989: 66; 2001: 18) and Donoghue (1996: 37), the anonymity of individual reviewers contributed to the sense of the reviews as (in Forster’s words) “giant personified figures” or institutions. As verbal critics, reviewers often marked boundaries in the “literary republic” by implying that there were standards for works published in England. Their rhetoric made the knowledge and mastery of “good English” an index of professionalism for themselves. As exemplified in a review of a medical treatise, in a variation of a frequently-used formula Kirkpatrick (1758a) both denigrates Stevens’ language and thematizes professionalism: “We recommend it to him, to prescribe rather than to publish”. The formula was flexible: some posthumous letters are described as “more worthy of being circulated among private friends than being published (Anon. 1757a)”, while a clergyman’s sermons are described as “written rather for the Pulpit than the Press, with an Air of Familiarity that is very excuseable between old Acquaintance (as we may suppose a Rector and his Parish to be) but which must be disagreeable to a stranger” (Francklin 1756). The structure implicitly associates the reviewers, as judges, with language that is fit for publication. Reviewers implied that standards were violated very often from beyond or from below – by writers born outside England or lacking a proper education. Bad grammar might be found in texts by authors who were Irish or Scottish or, in the case of the medical writer Diederick Wessel Linden, German. While Linden’s reviewer acknowledges the foreigner’s apology for “any blemishes in style” and pardons his want of “elegant, or very apt expression”, the “many ungrammatical

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abuses” are beyond the pale and “in decency to his readers, should have been corrected by some friend before publication” (Kirkpatrick 1751). Reviewers also represented the English of some Scottish and Irish authors as non-standard. As we have seen, William Duff ’s self-published history of Scotland attracted the most prominent verbal criticism in the early years of the Monthly. Many Irish and Scottish medical writers were also among the targets of reviewers’ verbal criticism. According to the review, in his Dublin-printed New Treatise of the Glaucoma [1750], the Irish Catholic surgeon Sylvester O’Halloran “often wants English idiom and grammar, whence his sentences are sometimes irrelative and scarcely intelligible” (Kirkpatrick 1753). William Scott’s Dissertation on the Scrofula (1759) contains or rather than nor and would rather than should: the reviewer adds that “These, with several other expressions that might be referred to, are not English idioms; neither are we certain that all of them are Scotch” (Kirkpatrick 1759b). The Critical Reviewer of the work assumes that Scott is “a young practitioner from the college of Edinburgh, brim-full with reading and theory” (Anon. 1759c). Indeed, while reviewers could correlate lexical variation with regional variation, they more often correlated grammatical variation with education. Better language is expected of well-educated authors. Reviewing The Secret Expedition [1757?] by an author describing himself as both “a commissioned officer” and “graduate of the university”, the reviewer claims that “though slips in language will be pardoned in a military man, the reader will expect good grammar and orthography in the productions of a graduate of the university” (Anon. 1757b). In a 1770 review of a supposedly verbatim transcript of the Grosvenor divorce case [1770], the presence of contractions and confused forms of lay and lie allows the reviewer to insult hairdressers, newspaper writers, and Lord Mansfield simultaneously (Anon. 1770). Reviews which draw attention to a well-born writer’s bad grammar underline reviewers’ investment in education and in “worth” over “birth”. Lord Mansfield illustrates the social importance of education: though the son of a viscount, his earldom was the consequence of his legal brilliance (Oldham 2004/2008). The career of the Monthly’s Owen Ruffhead attests to the cultural importance of education: his father, a royal baker, invested his lottery winnings in his son’s legal education (Jones 2004/2008). In a 1759 review of an edited memoir, Ruffhead claimed to judge leisured authors by higher standards than professional authors: They, who are born to ease and affluence, who enjoy otium cum dignitate have time to be accurate. They may correct at their leisure and publish when they . Dates of publication have been taken from the English Short Title Catalogue.


please; but writers whose talents, perhaps constitute all their fortune, cannot always command such correctness. They may be obliged to publish to the world what they have not sufficiently revised in their closets. Errors in them are more venial, and their writings should be viewed with a more indulgent eye. (Ruffhead 1759)

Although the well-born editor had recently started to draw a government pension, his previous and longstanding financial distress reminds us that there is often not a connection between birth, education, wealth, and status (Smith 2004/2008). By prioritizing education and displaying their own, reviewers enhanced their standing in the literary republic. Typically, reviewers claimed that language is an index of an author’s education and a work’s quality. A Letter from a Physician in the Highlands [1752?] “does not appear to have been wrote [sic] by a physician; the style and expression being too mean and inaccurate to render it digestible by readers who have any tolerable acquaintance with medicine” (Kirkpatrick 1752). Its language was deemed unacceptable to readers not because the author was “in the Highlands” but because it was “mean”, unbefitting a physician. Indeed, in his review of the Irish O’Halloran, it is possible that the anonymous reviewer was amusing himself by representing the author’s language as “scarcely intelligible”: “if the English is not his vernacular language, great allowance must be made for it” (Kirkpatrick 1753). This particular reviewer knew that a Celtic medic could write good English: the author of all of the reviews I have quoted in the preceding paragraphs was the Irish medical writer James Kirkpatrick, who as a reviewer in the early years of the Monthly was more attentive to grammar than many of his colleagues. Quoting Leonard’s (1962: 174) assertion that linguistic battles were “fought most hotly by persons who had had to earn and prove their gentility”, Sorensen (2000: 106, 111) has argued that regionally-marginal reviewers secured cultural authority by emphasizing class and education, “rewriting spatial dichotomy in social terms”. While the Critical Review had been co-founded and was largely staffed by Scots, Smollett made a particular point of trying to hire educated Scots (Basker 1988: 55–56). The increased attention to language by the Critical Review (e.g. Smollett 1756b, 1756d, 1756f; Armstrong 1756a) had an immediate impact on the Monthly: more reviewers attended to grammar and long lists of errors become another prominent form of verbal criticism.

3.7 Verbal criticism of professional writing: Medical authors and reviewers Although reviewers certainly correlated bad English with a lack of a “learned” education, in tension with the ideology of a “standard” is the fact that good

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g rammar was not necessarily expected in more “practical” contexts. As noted above in Section 3.3, some anxious authors pre-empted linguistic criticism by prioritizing their practical expertise: for instance, one military writer claims that he was unable to study “polite literature” and acquire “correctness of stile” because of the demands of his early “military genius” (P. 1755). In contrast to the higher linguistic standards expected of the better-born Robert Maxwell’s treatise on husbandry (P. 1759; Smollett 1759), both the Monthly and the Critical Review have similar responses to Thomas Hitt’s Treatise of Husbandry (1760): Mr Hitt, though no Scholar, is a very sensible man, and seems to understand the nature and proper culture of different sorts of land perfectly well. It is a pity, indeed, that he has not a more agreeable method of communicating his knowledge; for his stile is frequently inaccurate, and too often ungrammatical. But as it seldom happens that your learned Clerks know much of husbandry, we ought to think ourselves obliged to Mr Hitt for giving us the result of many years experience on a subject of no small importance, even in a national view. We could wish, however, that if this piece should happen to arrive at a second edition, (as his former, upon Fruit-trees, has done) he would be so just to himself and the public, as to get it revised by some person better acquainted with the rules of writing, than a mere practical Gardener or Husbandman can be supposed to be. (P. 1760; see also Anon. 1760)

Like the special treatment of women authors, which I have discussed elsewhere (Percy 2000), these lower expectations of certain classes of writers mark particularly prominent boundaries. I would argue that the implication that not everyone can write well enhances the social capital of good grammar for reviewers in their quest for professional legitimacy. As critics of an author’s grammar, reviewers were often making a point about the author’s education and thus about the content more generally of his or her writing. Very occasionally a specific grammatical variant is criticized because it obscured a work’s content. From Linden’s Treatise on … Medicinal Medical Waters (1756), Kirkpatrick enumerated examples whereby “some of his medical notions are either essentially wrong, or so expressed as to seem such”: the only grammatical example, “an obstruction in the nervous fluid” to “of the nervous fluid”, is perhaps more an issue of lexis (Kirkpatrick 1755b). In works of religious controversy, a phrase like “that God” might confuse the argument of The Divinity of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ Asserted and Defended [1755] (Flexman 1754b); the subjunctive verb in the phrase “Cursed be Canaan” would be better rendered in the indicative, as a prediction (Rose 1752b). Historians are criticized for using inappropriate or inconsistent verb tenses (e.g. shifting from is to was…) (P. 1755; see also Griffiths 1749a).


However, any connection between good grammar and professional writing is usually more general. From my reading, the issues are brought into fine focus with respect to medical writing. According to some reviewers, medicine’s connections with Latin and Latin’s with grammar implied that good physicians should write good English. For instance, reviewing Reflections on Slow and Painful Labours [1755] by the “young” medical writer Giles Watts, the reviewer claimed to have found some errors in his Latin and some “ungrammatical escapes in his [English]” then redefined as “a few peculiarities of idiom, which may be right elsewhere, tho’ they rarely occur in good English books”, “which surprize us the more from a gentleman who deals in Greek and Latin” (Kirkpatrick 1755a). Elsewhere we find even more explicit connections between good English and good medicine. After criticizing the grammar of Stevens’ Treatise on the Medicinal Qualities of Bath-Waters (1758), Kirkpatrick spelled out why “a physician in print” should attend to his English: “Very seriously, people of the best reflection will find it difficult to conceive, that any person who, in a learned profession, manifests an ignorance of his mother-tongue, in which he daily converses, should attain an essential knowlege of diseases, and a certain method of curing or mitigating them, in their utmost complexity and extent”. Perhaps justifying his pedantry, Kirkpatrick then quoted from “a modern writer”: Though it is not really necessary for a physician to have all the flowers of an orator, nor the critical correctness of a philologist; yet, to appear with the least suitable dignity, he should be qualified with sufficient reason and erudition to write (if he must needs write) with perspicuity at least; and should have such an intimacy with his own language, especially where he affects to meddle with Latin, as to make him grammatical and above contempt. (Kirkpatrick, Barrowby and Schomberg 1746; Kirkpatrick 1758b)

That Kirkpatrick provides textual support for his pedantry suggests that at some level he was defensive. That the source was one contribution to a pamphlet war spells out the similarities between periodical criticism and aggressive polemic. That Kirkpatrick had to draw on a source of which he was likely a co-author (Brunton 2004) suggests that standardizing medical language was a relatively new issue. Certainly it was a vexed one.

3.8 Authors’ responses to linguistic criticism From responses to the reviews and from the reviews themselves, it would seem that some authors did not expect their English to be held to high standards (Forster 1994). Like the military writer Thomas More Molyneux (quoted by Berkenhout 1759), one medical writer argued that the genre’s practical

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importance demanded more speed than elegance in publication. As quoted in the Monthly Review of his Treatise of Midwifery [1754], Benjamin Pugh argued in his preface “that every new discovery, how small soever, ought to be made public without fear of censure or criticism, if tending to the general good of mankind” – in other words, that saving newborn babies with large heads was more important than polishing one’s style (Kirkpatrick 1754). That another scientific author published a letter in the General Evening Post and that Smollett responded to it in the Critical Review is a good indicator that the existence and importance of a “standard” was contested. Pretending that the letter signed by J. Parsons was so ridiculous that it must have been submitted maliciously, Smollett reported one of its elements of “strange doctrine”: The next strange doctrine which this disguised enemy of Dr. Parsons advances, is, that a man, who writes of matters of importance, ought not to trouble his head about diction: that is to say, if your intention is to communicate knowledge, no matter whether you be, or be not, understood: for, we apprehend, that diction is the vehicle in which an author’s meaning is conveyed; and if no regard is to be paid to this vehicle, it may be conveyed in Arabic as well as in English. (Smollett 1756g)

Smollett’s two references to the Irish in the course of his response continue his digs at “the Doctor’s own extensive knowledge”; though English-born, James Parsons had been brought up in Ireland (Hudson 2004).

4.

Reviewers’ use of satire

4.1

Introduction

Periodical reviewers are and were journalists as well as critics. The sustained mockery of Parsons by the novelist Smollett is a good example of how eighteenthcentury reviewers used satiric techniques to entertain as well as to instruct. Like the formula that directed physicians to prescribe rather than to publish, extended metaphors often linked an author’s bad writing to his or her identity or professed profession. For instance, in a notably but by no means uniquely nasty review of a novel called Memoirs of a Young Lady of Family [1758], the reviewer undermined the novel’s pretensions to gentility and conflates what he figures as the “chamber-maid” reader and author, the not-so-genteel “young lady who tells the story”, and a hen: P. 165, ‘I laid in the same room with my benefactress.’ – by which it might possibly be understood, that the young lady who tells the story, had gracelessly laid


an egg in the chamber of her benefactress. Nor is this an accident or error of the press; but the common language of the narrative; for we find the same impropriety in other parts of the book, for instance, page 189, ‘I laid in her apartment:’ – Page 155. ‘She ordered a tent-bed to be put up in her room, for me to lay (Anon. 1758b) upon.’ – A hen might have said so with propriety.

The reviewer’s extended metaphor connected bad grammar with artless reproduction, and perhaps thus implicitly with the popular print culture that their role was to control. These extended metaphors were not confined to reviews of books by uneducated authors. Medical writing furnished reviewers with colourful analogies. Reviewing Stevens’ Treatise on the Medicinal Qualities of the Bath-Waters (1758), Kirkpatrick compared his writing to some of the illnesses he describes and his own reviewerly advice as like a physician’s prescription: But should he fail to amend by this [friendly] prescription [against publishing], we can only advise him to apply himself to the discovery of some mineral water, that may prove as prevalent against a particular cacoethes, as he supposes Bathwaters in a cachexy … (Kirkpatrick 1758b)

Similarly, reviewing Thomas Neale’s Practical Treatise on the Venereal Disease (1756), Armstrong compared the writing to a discharge: The writing runs as foul as the disease it treats of, and is no better than, to use the author’s words, a gonorrhaea fluor, a gonorrhaea gleet, a fluor gleet, or a fluor mucus. A p-x on such writing! And yet, though this author writes without knowledge, judgment, common sense, decency, or language, he may turn out a thriving practitioner in this merit-distinguishing metropolis. But that our readers may judge whether this censure is too severe or not, we shall lay before them a few specimens of Mr. Neale’s erudition, beginning with the title leaf, in which is considered the mischievous consequences of an improper and injudicious manage(Armstrong 1756b) ment.

This is a typical review both in its savage assault on an author and its conflicting representation of readers. Armstrong accused common consumers of culpability in the rise of low writing with his ironic description of the “merit-distinguishing metropolis”, but flatters “our readers” by inferring their ability to spot the concord error. Conflicting representations of readers were common, as Forster observes: “[i]n the earliest days the reviewers … liked at least to pretend that the public … would form appropriate judgements, although there are many indications that they believed nothing of the sort” (Forster 2001: 185). This tension arises from the fact that readers were purchasers of the periodicals as well as students of the reviewers. As Sommerville (1996: 14) has observed of the periodical forms, “[t]he dynamics of periodicity comes from the need to flatter readers” and to portray

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them as having “intelligence, knowledge, and] good judgment”. Readers needed to be flattered and entertained as well as informed and educated. The prevalence of invective in eighteenth-century print culture did not mean that it was endurable to its victims. Both its impact and its potential influence can be gauged by the number and intensity of responses (Basker 1988: 175–178; Forster 1994). Outraged authors responded to the reviews: in her survey of the earliest responses, Forster quotes their numerous accusations of reviewers’ “Malice” and “Malevolence”, attributed often to “envy” and inability to make judgments of more substance (Forster 1994: 40–42). It is important to remember that these new reviews did not automatically secure cultural authority.

4.2 Reviewers as journalists and entertainers These extended metaphors and extensive invective demonstrate how satiric techniques furthered the mid-century reviewers’ simultaneous roles of entertainer, educator, and cultural upstarts. Their sheer nastiness had several functions. One was entertainment. In his anatomy of The News Revolution in England, Sommerville (1996: 9) argues that periodical literature necessarily “highlight[s] conflicts” in order to “insure further reports” and greater sales. As quoted by Forster (1994: 42–43), the author Thomas Marriott accused reviewers of “printing scurrilous Abuses” to “promote the Sale” of the journal by “gratif[ying] some malevolent Readers”. Certainly the need to please the broad audience for the new reviews must have been a factor, as Basker observers. Documenting some of Tobias Smollett’s more entertaining reviews, Basker also reminds us that he had first been a novelist, and speculates that he sometimes used satire as “an entertaining alternative to tedious fault finding or plain condemnation” (Basker 1988: 71–75).

4.3 Reviewers as educators Yet satire also had serious functions in society, at least according to its practitioners. To paraphrase Bogel’s paraphrase of one common theory of satire, if satirists publicly exposed and condemned unworthy objects, perhaps readers would learn to recognize and reject them and the satirized figures would have to improve (Bogel 2001: 3). Reviewers’ invective reflected their self-professed mandate to improve public taste by educating authors and readers. Surveying their writings, Forster reports reviewers’ self-descriptions as therefore duty-bound to treat bad authors harshly (Forster 2001: 186). Some reviewers describe it as their professional “duty” to enumerate “inelegancies” or “errors”, despite a “reluctance” undoubtedly related to the reputation of verbal critics as pedants (Berkenhout 1759;


Ruffhead 1760). Their prose was often composed with a seriousness of tone: one Critical Reviewer, for instance, claims that reviewers “look on themselves to be in some measure responsible for the morals as well as the taste of their readers” (Forster 2001: 181–187). Smollett’s attitude to language helps to illuminate the perceived connections between morals and literature. Explaining Smollett’s linguistic “fastidiousness”, Basker (1988: 80) argues that he had a “special view of the role of language in transmitting knowledge and preserving civilization” and thus “acted more out of principle than pettiness”. Such connections between language, publication, and civilization also explain the apocalyptic tone of Pope’s jeremiad against modern print culture, the Dunciad (1728–1743). In their self-professed roles as educators, some reviewers entrenched hierarchies within the literary republic by representing some categories of authors as unable to improve themselves. The foreign physician Linden, the author of a work on mineral water, is redirected from “authorism” to “mines and metallurgy” and reproved for not having had the “ungrammatical abuses” in his work on mineral water “corrected by some friend before publication” (Kirkpatrick 1751; see also Aikin and Bewley 1777). As we have seen, the agricultural writer Hitt is advised by both the Monthly and the Critical Review to “some person better acquainted with the rules of writing, than a mere practical Gardener or Husbandman can be supposed to be” (P. 1760; Anon. 1760; see also N. 1778, N. 1785). Women writers were the object of conflicting rhetoric: their cultural status as bodies conflicted with and undermined their status as symbols of educability. On one hand, when reviewers compared their writing to reproduction (see Section 4.1 above) and their linguistic infelicities to such physical features as freckles, they implied that women’s writing was more the product of nature than of nurture. On the other hand, in an age that celebrated cultural progress and epitomized it with the “taste” of some women “for every branch of polite literature” and ability to “write correctly and elegantly”, some women writers were at least sometimes treated as being capable of improvement. While Anne Penny’s double negation and other infelicities are compared by the Critical Review to “freckles in a fine face”, it is Penny’s “little performance” they use to epitomize women’s abilities (Anon. 1761a); moreover, a Monthly Review of a later publication of Penny’s advises her to “finish her future productions with greater care; as we really believe her capable of more correctness and elegance than she has manifested on the present occasion” (Anon. 1762). In short, the social categories of class and gender were highlighted by reviewers’ predictions of future improvement; these representations in turn often reinforced reviewers’ elevated status as educated males. Reviewers sometimes “schooled” authors whose profiles were very similar to their own. One obvious reason for this is their own expertise in the author’s field: as we have seen, in his reviews of medical books the medical writer Kirkpatrick

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was attentive to their authors’ grammar. However, it is worth emphasizing the particular vigour with which Smollett and the Critical Review criticized the language of Scottish authors. Because of widespread anxiety about the influence of Scots on English culture, Scottish authors found themselves the object of vigorous criticism (Basker 1988: 83; Beal 2004: 96–97). But it is well documented that the most vitriolic attackers of Scotticisms were Scots themselves. For instance, David Hume published a list of Scotticisms in 1752 and included it in what Moody notes was “only some copies” of his Political Discourses (1752), in editions of his oft-revised Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects (1753), and (reprinted with additions) in the Scots Magazine (1760) and the Aberdeen Magazine (1761) (Basker 1988: 82–83, 297; Moody 1974: 68 n. 4). According to Basker, Smollett’s “unflagging attentiveness to language” “verg[ed] on obsession” and “the use of Scotticisms” was “[t]he real bugbear of Smollett’s campaign to purify and preserve the English language” (Basker 1988: 76, 82). From the first volume, he and the other Critical Reviewers provided long lists of linguistic details (e.g. Smollett 1756b, 1756d, 1756f; Armstrong 1756a) and correlated many with Scottish authorship. For instance, Smollett argues that an English reader will be at a loss to understand the Scottish words and technical terms in Francis Home’s Experiments on Bleaching [1756] (Smollett 1756a). These correlations were not always correct: despite such tell-tale signs as the verb adduce, the anonymous author of Essay on the Writings and Genius of Pope [1756] was not a Scot but Joseph Warton (Smollett 1756c; Basker 1988: 82–83). Reviewers proclaimed themselves as educators of their peers for several reasons. As McIntosh has observed, many guides to the English language were written both for and from the “margins” (McIntosh 1998: 178). Given the evidence that we have already seen of the difficulties that writers of all nations faced in writing correct English, it is not surprising to find a Scot like Smollett keen to publicize linguistic standards to fellow Scots. Indeed, what Basker describes as the “lead review” in the first number of this new periodical, of British Education (1756) by the Irishman Thomas Sheridan, features a text whose title thematizes the desirability and possibility of the English language to be standardized and mastered by British citizens (Basker 1988: 53, 76). The misclassification of Warton is proof that the boundary between Scottish and English writing was certainly permeable. So too was the ability of some Scottish authors to write good English, proved by the employment of Scots as proofreaders (e.g. Sher 2006: 124–125, 617) and by favourable reviews in both the Critical and the Monthly. Such other Critical Reviewers as Murdoch and Derrick find the language of other Scots needing “very little indulgence” and “in general sterling” (Murdoch 1756b; Derrick 1756). A Monthly Reviewer, suggesting some corrections for the next edition of Maxwell’s Practical Husbandman (1757), argues that Scotsmen can write English:


“how difficult soever it may be for a North-Briton to speak good English, we have lately had the pleasure of being thoroughly convinced, that many of them can write it with great ease, as well as elegance” (P. 1759). Of course, these positive statements of potential often appeared in negative reviews.

4.4 Reviewers as self-defensive satirists Satiric theory supports a final reason for some reviewers’ particular criticism of their peers – Kirkpatrick of medical men, Smollett of Scots. Because reviewers were hired to assess books in their areas of expertise, they had much in common with authors. Whatever authority they possessed derived more from their anonymity and from their journals’ consequent status as “institutions”. However, although the review genre was popular, it was relatively new and potentially low in its links with the market. In order to secure authority, reviewers needed to differentiate and elevate themselves from their subjects (Donoghue 1996: 34–37). With the Monthly accused of being tainted by the market and the Critical of being staffed by and biased towards Scots, it is not surprising that reviewers attacked “hireling” and “North British” authors for deviating from perceived standards. Their attacks on authors can be interpreted as acts of self-definition, a scenario supported by Bogel’s “revised scenario” of Augustan satire. Satire “does not merely register a difference and proceed to attack in light of that difference. Rather, it must establish or produce difference:” The crucial fact is not that satirists find folly or wickedness in the world and then wish to expose that alien something. Instead, satirists identify in the world something or someone that is both unattractive and curiously or dangerously like them, or like the culture or subculture that they identify with or speak for … (Bogel 2001: 41) something, then, that is not alien enough.

“Good grammar” is among the ostensible standards from which certain authors are represented as deviating. Thus, reviewers’ potentially pedantic verbal criticism had a positive function in the context of their self-presentation as educators and as reformers of print culture. Some reviewers tempered the negative connotations of their verbal criticism by presenting it as a suggestion for the author’s next publication. Some tutelage was abusive: for instance, in the context of the very negative review that compared Stevens’ medical publications to diarrhea, Kirkpatrick mockingly enumerated the author’s errors: We hope too, as a proof of his future progress in the rudiments of literature, that in his next public exercise … he will shew himself a master of the first concord, or

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agreement in the nominative case and the verb in number and person, which he has failed to do in some of his present pages: in expectation of which amendment, we suppress several hundred instances of this great fault, or discord. … He is not altogether so happy in a proper application of relatives to their antecedents, which generally referring to brutes and inanimate things, who to persons; but we find ‘persons which bathe,’ p. 74, ‘hysterical women which labour,’ p. 114. There occur besides several other faults in the regimen of our language: we have hinted at one in the dedication: and we are told, p. 97. ‘We should not lay all the blame for this (Kirkpatrick 1758b) (i.e. sterility) to the females.

However, in other reviews, corrections are sometimes suggested in a somewhat less patronizing tone: Hence, as we may possibly see some other publications from this gentleman, in his profession, we would take the friendly liberty of advising him to a little more accuracy in his expression, which though not often improper, as our citations may evidence, will here and there admit of some improvement. For instance, we should rather have wrote [sic] nor, after neither, p. 11. l. 13 than or, l. 17, as the last member of that period manifestly contains a negative assertion. … We have also been obliged sometimes in reading this little tract, to supply a few words, that seemed necessary to preserve the sense and the Syntax, as at p. 47–55–101. And as none of these ellipses are [sic] mentioned among the errata of the press, we suppose they were little escapes in the copy, which may be very easily avoided upon another occasion, as they can be owing solely to inadvertency on this. (Kirkpatrick 1761)

Other reviews supply similar instruction in the light of the likelihood of “a second edition of [the author’s] valuable work” (Kirkpatrick 1759a), or “a future edition” (Langhorne 1761). According to Trolander and Tenger (2007: 15, 19), private criticism from a friend was acceptable as it pre-empted humiliation in public. “Even satiric modes of censure sought to justify themselves as though they were sanctioned by some personal connection to the author in question[.]” By presenting public verbal criticism as a “friendly” suggestion for later revision, perhaps reviewers might have preemptively deflected charges of pedantry and impoliteness. By illustrating and taking credit for authors’ subsequent improvement, reviewers ‘proved’ their own worth. Reviewing yet another treatise by Stevens, Kirkpatrick (1760) pronounced rather grudgingly that “his orthography, and his Grammar, in general, tho’ not yet fully correct, are less reprehensible in this than in his former performances: to which, we think, our strictures on them must have contributed”.

5.


Conclusion: Summary and implications

Many scholars have observed that when “pedantic” criticism became a key feature of mid-century English grammars, the production of grammar books became important to educators (Fitzmaurice 1998; Watts 1999, 2002). This paper, acknowledging the previously dubious status of verbal criticism in English print culture, has described how the ideology of standardization was appropriated by anonymous critics in the new periodical reviews. Although reviewers often used language as a seemingly objective index of a book’s quality and its writer’s education, such criticism was sometimes relayed in subjective, satirical tones. The satiric perspective in part reflected reviewers’ self-proclaimed roles as educators, publicly punishing individuals in order to raise the general standards of both writing and reading in a market that has been described as increasingly socially heterogeneous. Reviewers’ public humiliation of authors also reflected their status as periodical journalists, expected to entertain their readers and purchasers. Indeed, reviewers may also have mocked authors in order to differentiate and elevate themselves; according to Bogel (2001: 21), satire creates difference as much as registers it. That the criticism of language in the Monthly and the Critical Review was anonymous may have helped to transform verbal critics from petty pedants into more influential institutions. It is beyond the scope of this paper to explore the extent to which the reviews might have influenced the proliferation of prescriptive grammars in the next decades. Elsewhere (Percy 2009) I have argued that reviewers’ use of quotations as negative examples predated those in Lowth’s very influential grammar of 1762. Moreover, although the reviewers hold up good grammar as an ideal they often imply that it is an elusive one. Reflecting the role of education as a determiner of social position, some reviews construct good English as attainable. However, certain socially-defined groups of authors are described as unable to write good English without help. In part the elusiveness of good English might reflect what has been described as the “permanent mode” of “longing” that is supposed to characterize consumer culture generally and periodical literature specifically (quoted by Donoghue 1995: 71). Perhaps more relevantly, the rarity of good grammar added to its value and thus to the social capital of those people who had it – such as the periodical reviewers.

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Anon. 1752. “Review of The History of Betty Barnes.” Monthly Review 7: 470. Anon. 1753. “Review of Canning’s Magazine.” Monthly Review 9: 146. Anon. 1755. “Review of The Printer’s Grammar, by John Smith.” Monthly Review 13: 80. Anon. 1757a. “Review of Letters on Several Occasions, by the Late Sir William Freeman.” Critical Review 4: 311–318. Anon. 1757b. “Review of The Secret Expedition Impartially Disclos’d ... By a Commissioned Officer on Board the Fleet, and Graduate of the University.” Critical Review 4: 551–552. Anon. 1758a. “Review of The Case of Authors by Profession or Trade, Stated with Regard to Booksellers, the Stage, and the Public.” Critical Review 5: 175. Anon. 1758b. “Review of Memoirs of a Young Lady of Family.” Monthly Review 18: 182–183. Anon. 1759a. “Review of Treatise on the Eye, the Manner, and Phenomena of Vision, by William Porterfield.” Critical Review 7: 206–216. Anon. 1759b. “Review of The Genuine Remains in Verse and Prose, of Mr. Samuel Butler, Author of Hudibras, ed. R. Thyer.” Monthly Review 21: 171–172. Anon. 1759c. “Review of A Dissertation on the Scrofula, by William Scott.” Critical Review 8: 303–304. Anon. 1760. “Review of A Treatise of Husbandry and the Improvement of Dry and Barren Lands, by Thomas Hitt.” Critical Review 9: 373–378. Anon. 1761a. “Review of Anningait and Ajutt: A Greenland Tale, by Anne Penny.” Critical Review 11: 291–293. Anon. 1761b. “Review of A Complete History of the Present War, From Its Commencement in 1756, to the End of the Campaign, 1760.” Critical Review 12: 108–113. Anon. 1762. “Review of Select Poems From M. Gessner’s Pastorals, by Anne Penny.” Monthly Review 27: 393. Anon. 1767a. “Review of An Address to the Public, Concerning the Business Between the Government and the East-India Company.” Critical Review 23: 157. Anon. 1767b. “Review of The Happy Life: Or, the Contented Man, by Mme. de Vernage.” Critical Review 23: 316–318. Anon. 1767c. “Review of Modern Art of Cookery Improved, by Ann Shackleford.” Monthly Review 37: 147. Anon. 1770. “Review of The Whole Proceedings at Large, in a Cause on an Action Brought by the Right Hon. Richard Lord Grosvenor Against his Royal Highness Henry Frederick Duke of Cumberland; for Criminal Conversation with Lady Grosvenor.” Monthly Review 43: 321– 322. Armstrong, John. 1756a. “Review of The Natural History of Aleppo, and Parts Adjacent, by Alexander Russell.” Critical Review 1: 360–364. Armstrong, John. 1756b. “Review of A Practical Treatise on the Venereal Disease, and the Art of Bleeding, by Thomas Neale.” Critical Review 1: 303–309. Ault, Norman. 1941. “Pope and Addison.” Review of English Studies 68: 428–451. Basker, James. 1988. Tobias Smollett: Critic and Journalist. Cranbury, NJ/London, UK/Mississauga, Canada: Associated University Presses, Inc. Beal, Joan C. 2004. English in Modern Times 1700–1945. London: Arnold. Berkenhout, John. 1759. “Review of Conjunct Expeditions, by Thomas More Molyneux.” Monthly Review 21: 185–192. Bloom, Edward A. 1957. “‘Labors of the learned’: Neoclassic book reviewing aims and techniques.” Studies in Philology 54: 537–563.


Bogel, Fredric V. 2001. The Difference Satire Makes: Rhetoric and Reading From Jonson to Byron. Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press. Brewer, John. 1995. “‘The most polite age and the most vicious’: Attitudes towards culture as a commodity, 1660–1800.” In The Consumption of Culture 1600–1800: Image, Object, Text, Ann Bermingham and John Brewer (eds), 341–361. London/New York: Routledge. Brunton, Deborah. 2004. “Kirkpatrick, James (1696–1770).” In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/55901, accessed 1 September 2008. Burnham, John C. 1996. “Garrison lecture: How the concept of profession evolved in the work of historians of medicine.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 70 (1): 1–24. Colley, Linda. 1992. Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837. New Haven/London: Yale University Press. Corfield, Penelope J. 1995. Power and the Professions in Britain, 1700–1850. London/New York: Routledge. Derrick, Samuel. 1756. “Review of The History of Croesus King of Lydia, by Walter Anderson.” Critical Review 1: 138–141. Donoghue, Frank. 1995. “Colonizing readers: Review criticism and the formation of a reading public.” In The Consumption of Culture 1600–1800: Image, Object, Text, Ann Bermingham and John Brewer (eds), 54–74. London/New York: Routledge. Donoghue, Frank. 1996. The Fame Machine: Book Reviewing and Eighteenth-Century Literary Careers. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Dryden, John. 1672. “Defence of the epilogue: Or, an essay on the dramatique poetry of the last age.” In The Conquest of Granada by the Spaniards in Two Parts: Acted At the Theatre Royall Written by John Dryden, 160–175. London: In the SAVOY, Printed by T. N. for Henry Herringman. http://eebo.chadwyck.com, accessed 1 September 2008. Dussinger, John A. 2004/2008. “Richardson, Samuel (bap. 1689, d. 1761).” In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/ article/23582, accessed 1 September 2008. Eagleton, Terry. 1984. The Function of Criticism: From The Spectator to Post-Structuralism. London: Verso. Eaves, T. C. Duncan and Kimpel, Ben D. 1967. “Richardson’s revisions of Pamela.” Studies in Bibliography 20: 61–88. English Short Title Catalogue. 2008. http://estc.bl.uk, accessed 1 September 2008. [ESTC] Fitzmaurice, Susan. 1998. “The commerce of language in the pursuit of politeness in eighteenthcentury England.” English Studies 79 (4): 309–328. Flexman, Roger. 1754a. “Review of A Moral Discourse on the Attributes of God, by J. B.” Monthly Review 10: 315–316. Flexman, Roger. 1754b. “Review of The Divinity of Our Lord Saviour Jesus Christ Asserted and Defended.” Monthly Review 11: 477–478. Forster, Antonia. 1989. “Mr. Pope’s maxims.” In The Age of Johnson, Paul Korshin (ed.), 2: 65– 89. Forster, Antonia. 1994. “‘The self-impannelled Jury’: The reception of review journals, 1749– 1760.” In Studies in Newspaper and Periodical History 1993 Annual, Michael Harris (ed.), 27–51. Westport, CT/London: Greenwood Press. Forster, Antonia. 2001. “Review journals and the reading public.” In Books and Their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England: New Essays, Isabel Rivers (ed.), 171–190. London/New York: Leicester University Press.

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Francklin, Thomas. 1756. “Review of Several Sermons Preached in Newcastle Upon Tyne, by Anthony Munton.” Critical Review 2: 379–380. Griffiths, Ralph. 1749a. “Review of Number I. Of a New and Full, Critical, Biographical, and Geographical History of Scotland; Containing the History of the Succession of Their Kings, From Robert Bruce to the Present Time ... By an Impartial Hand, by William Duff.” Monthly Review 1: 270–276. Griffiths, Ralph. 1749b. “Review of A Dialogue between the Gallows and a Free-Thinker, by Simon Berington.” Monthly Review 2: 9–11. Griffiths, Ralph. 1749c. “Review of An Examen of the History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, by ‘Orbilius’.” Monthly Review 2: 93–94. Griffiths, Ralph. 1751. “Review of Cursory Remarks on Mr. Warburton’s New Edition of Mr. Pope’s Works, by John Gilbert Cooper.” Monthly Review 5: 466–475. Griffiths, Ralph. 1763. “Review of History of the Military Transactions of the British Nation In Indostan, From the Year MDCCXLV, by Robert Orme.” Monthly Review 29: 299–305. Gustafsson, Larisa O. 2002. Preterite and Past Participle Forms in English 1680–1790: Standardisation Processes in Public and Private Writing. Uppsala: Uppsala Universitet. Hamilton, Bernice. 1951. “The medical professions in the eighteenth century.” Economic History Review, New Series 4 (2): 141–169. Harley, David. 1990. “Honour and property: The structure of professional disputes in eighteenth-century English medicine.” In The Medical Enlightenment of the Eighteenth Century, Andrew Cunningham and Roger French (eds), 138–164. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hudson, Giles. 2004. “Parsons, James (1705–1770).” In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/21461, accessed 1 September 2008. Ingrassia, Catherine. 1998. Authorship, Commerce, and Gender in Early Eighteenth-Century England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jones, N. G. 2004/2008. “Ruffhead, Owen (c. 1723–1769).” In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/24258, accessed 1 September 2008. Keymer, Thomas and Sabor, Peter. 2005. Pamela in the Marketplace: Literary Controversy and Print Culture in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kirkpatrick, James. 1751. “Review of An Experimental Dissertation on the Nature, Contents, and Virtues of the Hyde Spaw-Water, by Diederick Wessel Linden.” Monthly Review 5: 525–527. Kirkpatrick, James. 1752. “Review of A Letter From a Physician in the Highlands, to His Friend in London, on the Subject of a Consumptive Habit.” Monthly Review 7: 399–400. Kirkpatrick, James. 1753. “Review of A New Treatise of the Glaucoma, or Cataract, by Silvester O’Halloran.” Monthly Review 8: 120–124. Kirkpatrick, James. 1754. “Review of A Treatise of Midwifery, by Benjamin Pugh.” Monthly Review 10: 241–243. Kirkpatrick, James. 1755a. “Review of Reflections on Slow and Painful Labours, and Other Subjects in Midwifery, by Giles Watts.” Monthly Review 13: 244–246. Kirkpatrick, James. 1755b. “Review of A Treatise on the Three Medicinal Mineral Waters At Llandrindod, by Diederick Wessel Linden.” Monthly Review 13: 382–388.


Kirkpatrick, James. 1758a. “Review of An Essay on the Diseases of the Head and Neck, by J. N. Stevens.” Monthly Review 19: 145–150. Kirkpatrick, James. 1758b. “Review of A Treatise on the Medicinal Qualities of the Bath-Waters, in Three Parts, by J. N. Stevens.” Monthly Review 19: 371–379. Kirkpatrick, James. 1759a. “Review of A Treatise on the Three Different Digestions, by Edward Barry.” Monthly Review 21: 403–417. Kirkpatrick, James. 1759b. “Review of A Dissertation on the Scrofula, or the King’s Evil, by William Scott.” Monthly Review 21: 427–429. Kirkpatrick, James. 1760. “Review of A Practical Treatise on Fevers, by J. N. Stevens.” Monthly Review 22: 441–454. Kirkpatrick, James. 1761. “Review of Essays Physiological and Practical, by Hugh Smith.” Monthly Review 25: 220–224. Kirkpatrick, James, Barrowby, William and Schomberg, Isaac. 1746. A Letter to the Real and Genuine Pierce Dod, M.D. Actual Physician of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital. London. http:// galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/ECCO, accessed 1 September 2008. Klein, Lawrence. 1993. “‘Politeness’ as linguistic ideology in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England.” In Towards a Standard English, 1600–1800, Dieter Stein and Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade (eds), 31–50. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Langhorne, John. 1761. “Review of Purity of Heart: A Moral Epistle, by James Scott.” Monthly Review 25: 465–466. Leonard, Sterling A. 1962. The Doctrine of Correctness in English Usage, 1700–1800. Madison: University of Wisconsin Studies in Language and Literature, 1929. Reprint. New York: Russell & Russell. Mallet, David. 1733. Of Verbal Criticism: An Epistle to Mr. Pope. Occasioned by Theobald’s Shakespear, and Bentley’s Milton. London: for Lawton Gilliver. http://galenet.galegroup. com/servlet/ECCO, accessed 1 September 2008. Marshall, David. 1997. “Taste and aesthetics: (I) Shaftesbury and Addison: Criticism and the public taste.” In The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. 4, The Eighteenth Century, H. B. Nisbet and Claude Rawson (eds), 633–657. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McIntosh, Carey. 1998. The Evolution of English Prose, 1700–1800: Style, Politeness, and Print Culture. New York: Cambridge University Press. Meyers, Carole. 1997. Language is the Dress of Thought: Stylistic Literacies and Social Categories in Eighteenth-century Great Britain. Ph.D. dissertation. Emory University. http: //prometheus.cc.emory.edu/cfm/academic/Intro.html, accessed 1 September 2008. Moody, Patricia A. 1974. “Shall and will: The grammatical tradition and dialectology.” American Speech 49 (1/2): 67–78. Murdoch, Patrick. 1756a. “Review of British Education, by Thomas Sheridan.” Critical Review 1: 1–9. Murdoch, Patrick. 1756b. “Review of A Harmony of the Four Gospels, by James Macknight.” Critical Review 1: 23–41. N. 1778. “Review of A Treatise on Practical Seamanship, by William Hutchinson.” Monthly Review 58: 427–432. N. 1785. “Review of Discursory Thoughts on the Late Acts of Parliament, by Francis Spilsbury.” Monthly Review 73: 62–63. Nangle, Benjamin C. 1934. The Monthly Review. First Series, 1749–1789. Indexes of Contributors and Articles. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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“if You think me obstinate I can’t help it” Exploring the epistolary styles and social roles of Elizabeth Montagu and Sarah Scott Anni Sairio

University of Helsinki

This paper discusses the formality of epistolary spellings in the correspondence of Elizabeth Montagu and Sarah Scott, eighteenth-century sisters of similar backgrounds yet different social positions. I examine their use of full vs contracted auxiliary verb forms, preterite and past participle spelling variants, and other epistolary contractions and abbreviations in four decades of correspondence. Contractions and abbreviations indicate the level of informality and intimacy in eighteenth-century epistolary spelling. Montagu’s social prominence appears to show even in intimate and familiar communication, whereas Scott’s less significant social standing might have provided more linguistic flexibility. Scott’s style was significantly more informal and leaning towards oral mode than Montagu’s, which suggests that her relative exclusion from the fashionable polite society in London influenced the level of formality in her spelling.

1.

Introduction

The Robinson sisters, Elizabeth Montagu (1718–1800) and Sarah Scott (1720– 1795), were born into a moderately distinguished Kentish lower gentry family. Their relationship was close, they were of very similar age, and they were educated to a fairly similar extent, even if Elizabeth’s schooling may have been more extensive. Both women eventually became published authors and “irrepressible builders of community” (Rizzo 2003: 194), but otherwise their lives took somewhat different routes (see Myers 1990; Pohl and Schellenberg 2003; Tavor Bannet 2005). Elizabeth Montagu became a wealthy and influential woman of letters, one . The research reported here has been funded by the graduate school “Meaning, Language and Changing Cultures” and the project “Socio-cultural Reality and Language Practices in Late Modern England” (University of Helsinki).

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of the eminent social hostesses and patrons of London, and a notable business woman. She is known particularly for her role in the literary Bluestocking circle of accomplished men and women, dedicated to intellectual conversation. Sarah Scott published both original and translated works, but unlike her sister and distinguished ladies in general, she wrote for money. Financially she also had to depend on her sister’s generosity, and after Mr Montagu’s death in 1775, Elizabeth Montagu granted Scott an annuity. Furthermore, Scott had separated from her husband in 1752 after only ten months of marriage, which added to the social distance between her and Montagu. Their letters nevertheless suggest that their private relationship was equal and intimate despite these economic and social discrepancies. In this paper I examine the spelling variation in Elizabeth Montagu’s and Sarah Scott’s correspondence as a possible indicator of their respective social roles. The implications of the suggested dual spelling system of the eighteenth century (Osselton 1984) are considered, and the focus is on possible indicators of the so-called epistolary style of spelling. This refers to spellings that in the course of the eighteenth century were no longer fully accepted in print but continued to be used in private spelling, including contractions, abbreviations, and other than standard use of capitals and verb inflections. Auxiliary verb forms (could, should, and would and cannot, shall not, will not, and do not and their contractions), preterite and past participle spellings (-ed, -’d, -d, -’t, -t), and other epistolary contractions and abbreviations are investigated in Montagu’s and Scott’s correspondence during a time span of four decades. Previous research (Sairio 2008) indicates that unlike Montagu and her Bluestocking friends, Montagu and Scott did not seem to share similar linguistic patterns in the use of, for example, preposition stranding. Montagu’s letters display language use that suggests awareness of what contemporary language authorities considered to be correct usage, whereas for Scott, who had distanced herself from the demands of polite society, such implications are less clear (see e.g. Mendoza-Denton 2002 on language variation and identity). First I will present my analysis of Elizabeth Montagu’s and Sarah Scott’s social roles, then give a brief account of the developments in eighteenth-century spelling and the language variables under investigation, and finally present my results.

1.1

Material

The research is based on a selection of letters in the Bluestocking Corpus of my own compilation (Table 1), discussed in more detail in Sairio (2009a and 2009b). The Bluestocking Corpus currently consists of 203 transcribed letters from the

Epistolary styles and social roles

Table 1. The Bluestocking Corpus: word counts in Montagu’s and Scott’s letters Writers

1738–43

1757–62

1766–71

1775–78

Total

Elizabeth Montagu Montagu to Scott Sarah Scott*

23,285 2,618 728

34,917 6,690 4,729

37,440 5,067 3,471

22,282 3,360 4,173

117,924 17,735 13,101

*The time periods in the corpus are based on the dates of the entire material: the actual dates of Scott’s letters are 1740, 1758–1761, 1768–1769, and 1777.

Montagu Collection (MO) in the Huntington Library and Add. 40663 in the British ibrary, and 24 letters from Eger’s (1999) edition, which draws from the Montagu L Collection and is in terms of modern editorial standards by far the best edition of this material. All the letters in the corpus are autograph, and they amount to c. 154,000 words. The selection of Montagu’s and Scott’s correspondence consists of c. 30,800 words, and all of it is transcribed from manuscript sources. The method of transcription has been to reproduce the original text as closely as possible, which enables studies in spelling variation. The letters in Eger (1999) have been edited according to good editorial principles: ampersands, apostrophes, and underlinings have been retained, apostrophised variants of preterites and past participles have been retained, detailed notes indicate (among other things) when the letter has not been preserved intact, and address and subscription formulae are included. Superscripts seem nevertheless to have been lowered; they do not appear at all in the edited material, whereas the autograph letters generally abound in them. The material is categorised into four time periods from the late 1730s to the late 1770s.

2.

Social roles of Elizabeth Montagu and Sarah Scott

Brewer and Gardner (1996: 84) distinguish between three levels of self-representation: individual, relational, and collective. The individual level refers to one’s own concept of self, the relational self represents the self-concept derived from interpersonal connections and role relationships with significant others, and the collective self is derived from significant group memberships. This entails that Montagu’s and Scott’s social roles can be examined in terms of their own perceptions of themselves, their connections with other people, and their membership in social circles and networks. In this paper my focus is on social connections and group memberships in a broader sense; a larger-scale study could be carried out as a thorough analysis of self-expressions and other signals of identity. Meyerhoff (2002: 539) points out that the notion of, for example, “being a woman” is constructed differently across a person’s life span through participation

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in different practices. In Vickery’s (1998: 8–11) discussion of the functional roles of eighteenth-century genteel women, women’s lives are described as a “stately progress through recognized stations [...] with different duties and liberties attached to each role”, which could range from being a maid to being a wife, mother, widow, dowager or grandmother (1998: 8). The genteel women’s own perceptions of their social and emotional roles might mean being a “kinswoman, wife, mother, housekeeper, consumer, hostess and member of polite society” (1998: 10). Marriage was a particularly critical turning-point in a woman’s life, as it introduced the active new role of wife and the subsequent responsibilities which entailed the administration of a household (1998: 8). Many of these roles are relatively permanent, static, and imposed from above, and they carry particular expectations as to the behaviour of the individual. For eighteenth-century women, kinship appears to be the primary category of functional roles. According to Rizzo (2003: 195), Sarah Scott’s salon in Bath was more inclined toward discussion on social reform than Elizabeth Montagu’s resplendent Bluestocking assemblies in London; “[i]t focused on the disadvantaged rather than the advantaged, on giving rather than receiving, on selflessness rather than egocentrism” (2003: 198). Montagu appears to have attempted to include Scott into her society, but Scott was not inclined to do so, although they did have several friends in common. Scott was very well connected in the high society (Tavor Bannet 2005: 26), but apparently she was determined not to be more involved in the activities of Montagu’s Bluestocking circle, the elitism, competitiveness, and affluence of which she disapproved (Rizzo 2003: 195). In the 1760s Scott was involved in an eventually failed utopian project to set up a women’s community, which Montagu helped fund. Rizzo (2003: 196) contrasts the two in a way that does not flatter the older sister: “In succeeding years Montagu was [...] indicted by everyone for her vanity, if not her selfishness, while Scott applied herself to serious, selfless matters”. From a functionalist point of view, Elizabeth Montagu and Sarah Scott occupied the primary social positions of sisters, daughters, and wives (in practice, Scott the last of these only for a short period of time). These ascribed, relatively static and non-negotiable roles were extremely family-oriented. Montagu was nevertheless a more powerful figure in her family than Scott was. In addition to the functionalist approaches, social roles can also be considered as hybrid and changing, constantly negotiated events of role-taking. The various aspects of Montagu’s and Scott’s lives over the years introduce other, more fluid and negotiable social roles. Montagu’s marriage in 1742 to the wealthy MP and landowner Edward Montagu made her status considerably more important in terms of wealth and social opportunities, whereas Scott’s ten-month union and its swift conclusion,


even though the marriage and its outcome did provide her with a certain i ndependence from her parents and her sister (whose companion she had been), was an embarrassing affair. Montagu undertook the role of a business woman, and her personal responsibility in supervising the Montagu family’s coal mines and other properties increased considerably over the years. Her prominence as a social hostess and a published author, which strengthened her reputation as a learned woman, increased her social influence and the expectations imposed upon her. Scott, on the other hand, was actively involved in philanthropy, but her salons (or “anti-salons”, as Rizzo (2003: 195) characterises them) were focused on social reform and charity. She published anonymously, but her circle knew of her authorship. These activities were more private and smaller-scale than Montagu’s respective pursuits. Simmel (1950; quoted in Wasserman and Faust 1994: 292) argues that an individual’s multiple group affiliations (with, for example, family, voluntary organizations, or occupational groups) have a fundamental significance in defining social identity. Memberships in and friendships with groups and networks such as the extended Robinson and Montagu families, Bath philanthropists, upperclass business venturers, and learned women writers added additional elements to Montagu’s and Scott’s social roles and identities. To compare the respective roles and positions of Montagu and Scott, some basic juxtapositions would be benefactor/beneficiary, upper-class author/professional writer, member of Bluestocking elite/Bath philanthropy, and member of London polite society/Bath polite society. There seems to be an element of greater privacy and perhaps a pursuit of independence in Sarah Scott’s life, reflected in her determination to live outside London and the immediate sphere of influence of Montagu. In terms of hierarchy and power relations, Montagu was Scott’s superior, and therewith perhaps more bound by the norms of polite society.

3.

The dual spelling system in the eighteenth century

The eighteenth century saw the rise of a new attitude towards language: one that attempted to purify it, to define accurately the meaning of each word, to fix the grammatical rules, and correct and preserve the language from further decay (Vorlat 1975: 23–24). Spelling had been codified in print by the mid-seventeenth century, and printers’ norms were subsequently imposed on published texts . Scott’s main circle of friends included Lady Barbara Montagu (no relation), Elizabeth Cutts, Miss M. Arnold (probably an illegitimate daughter of her brother Morris), and Sarah Fielding (Rizzo 2003: 202–204).

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(Nevalainen 2003: 138). Private writing, however, continued to display spelling variations which were on their way out of printed texts. These included a number of contractions (&, wch), final double consonants in monosyllabic words with a short vowel (cutt, fitt), the old -all spellings as opposed to the new -al (generall vs general), and apostrophised and contracted preterite and past participle inflections of weak verbs (sav’d, savd) (Osselton 1984: 132–136; Görlach 2001: 79). Abbreviations such as ye and yt were no longer used even in the first manual of printing, Moxon (1683–1684), although particularly ye was very common in epistolary spelling (Haugland 1995: 167). That eighteenth-century spelling did not consist of a homogeneous set of rules was first tentatively suggested by Osselton (1984) on the basis of the differences between Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary (1755) and his personal correspondence, and subsequently by Tieken-Boon van Ostade (1998, 2005) based on the different public and private styles of several other authors. Osselton (1984: 123–125) compares Johnson’s accounts of spelling in the Dictionary and the spelling variations in his private writing and shows that Johnson’s letters contain a much larger scale of variant spellings than which he admitted to the Dictionary, and that many of his epistolary spellings are not included in the Dictionary at all. It would seem, therefore, that the Dictionary presented a public standard, which was largely based on printers’ conventions, whereas a private standard might be observed in Johnson’s epistolary spelling. According to Osselton (1984: 125), [A]t least at this stage in the development of English, epistolary spelling is a graphic system which leads its own linguistic life: it has its own rules and tendencies; it is independent of, though it stands in a clear relationship to, the system used by the printers. Furthermore, this graphic system is a part of the educated English of its day.

The dual standard appears to have been widespread and acknowledged by eighteenth-century writers, and it has also been observed in the differences between the private and public writings of Sarah Fielding, Robert Lowth, and Laurence Sterne (Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2005: 255). Tieken-Boon van Ostade (1998: 460) notes that the more intimate Sarah Fielding’s friendship with the recipient, the less her epistolary use of extra capital initials resembled the printers’ practice of capitalization. There were also fewer epistolary spellings in Robert Lowth’s letters when the style was more formal and the relationship between writer and recipient more distant (Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2003: 256, 259). Tieken-Boon van Ostade’s (2006: 238–240) analysis of Lowth’s correspondence shows that almost . -’d, -t, and -y’- (carry’d) as weak verb and past participle forms, spelling of plural nouns in -y (copys), single or doubled final consonants (gott, admitt), adjectives ending in -ful (successfull),


everything could be abbreviated in epistolary spelling. Abbreviations were used most frequently in letters in which “appearance is subordinate to contents”, such as drafts and formal notes (2006: 244). The revisions in Sterne’s Memoirs (written in 1767, published eight years later) indicate the extent to which Sterne’s private spelling differed from printer practices (Tieken-Boon van Ostade 1998: 458, 463–464). The manuscript could be assumed to represent fairly unpolished and informal written language.

4.

Contractions and abbreviations: Attitudes and practices in the eighteenth century

4.1

General observations

The main types of contraction that concern the eighteenth century are (1) phonetic transcripts of speech variants (gee’t’um – give it him), (2) synchronic variants of an alternative full form both in pronunciation and in print (I will – I’ll), and (3) contractions that represent a later stage of pronunciation where the full orthographic variant is no longer phonetically available (would – wou’d) (Haugland 1995: 166). Many contracted forms had been accepted as “non-literary, formal prose forms” in the late seventeenth century, particularly verbal inflections -’d and -t, tho’, the proclitic it (’tis), and the enclitic is (there’s) and will (I’le) (Haugland 1995: 171–172). The use of contractions in letter-writing seems to have been at its highest in the early eighteenth century: this frequent usage probably resulted from the need to write quickly and the physical circumstances of letter-writing, but may also have eventually become an epistolary fashion or custom (Osselton 1984: 130).

nouns ending in -ic (politicks), his spelling of ‘immediately’ (immediatly), and contractions (won’t, can’t, don’t, I’ll, tother) (Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2003: 254). . Abbreviations were used in eighteenth-century letters for names of months, titles and forms of address, personal names and placenames, general nouns, verbs, pronouns, prepositions, words typical of letters (Compts.), words typical of the written medium (ibid., i.e.), words referring to scholarly matters (MS), titles of books, and money units (Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2006). . In the printing process, all the extra initial capitals in the manuscript were removed; contractions (tho’, wch, Sept, OS, thro) were expanded; the use of genitive -s (Wifes) was normalised; preterite and past participle endings in weak verbs were normalised to -ed; compounds, place-names, and “unacceptable” spellings were standardised and corrected; and the long -s was normalised.

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The growing acceptance of contractions took a turn when Swift and Addison, who were bothered by the inelegant consonant clusters brought by deletion, attacked contractions in the 1710 and 1711 issues of the Tatler and the Spectator (Haugland 1995: 172). Addison complained that the common omission of e in drown’d, walk’d, and arriv’d “has very much disfigured the Tongue, and turned a tenth part of our smoothest Words into so many Clusters of Consonants” (1711; quoted in Haugland 1995: 172). Haugland (1995: 173, 174) notes, however, that given the continued use of contractions in early prose and even in grammatical works, Swift’s and Addison’s writings were not immediately effective. The appearance of a variety of contracted forms in the grammars and spelling books of this period is an indication that these forms were not considered entirely colloquial, epistolary or poetic, but were being established as legitimate variants even in scholarly prose. (Haugland 1995: 179)

A decade or so later, grammatical writers also began to voice criticism. The eventually notable influence of Addison and Swift can be detected in the numerous arguments presented in grammatical writing (Haugland 1995: 174). Some writers advised against using abbreviations and contractions for reasons of politeness and clarity (Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2006: 230–231). Anne Fisher proscribed against apostrophes used elsewhere than with genitives, for contractions and abbreviations (where they would otherwise be employed) are “very destructive to Language” and “unnecessary” (1753: 117n). Schoolteacher John Carter recommended in Practical English Grammar (1773: 140) that “Contractions, except for private Use, should be as much as possible avoided. They argue Disrespect to Superiors, and are puzzling to others” (also in Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2006: 230). Campbell (1776) condemned wasn’t, didn’t, shouldn’t, and couldn’t as “intolerably bad” contractions, but allowed the use of I’m, ’em and the preterite -’d as “elision whereby the sound is improved” and states that contractions should be allowed in the familiar style, because they are “natural” in conversation (quoted in Haugland 1995: 176). Perceptions of politeness with regard to contracted spellings were witnessed also in book reviews (Percy 2002). Reviews of the 1770s suggest that enclitic contractions such as don’t and won’t had negative connotations: for some writers, they spoke of impoliteness, vulgarity, and a lack of education, and their usage were attributed to “such hyperbolically stereotypical social climbers as the ‘hair dresser’, the ‘valet’, and especially the ‘milliner’” (Percy 2002). Despite the criticism, contractions became considerably more frequent in published material during the Late Modern English period and particularly the nineteenth century (López-Couso 2007: 302), and for example Robert Lowth’s usage of contractions indicates that these forms were common in the private


ritings of educated people (Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2003: 253–254). And when w particularly Carter’s and Campbell’s views are considered, it also seems that the proscription was not targeted towards private, familiar correspondence as much as more formal types of writing.

4.2 Preterite and past participle endings Apostrophised contractions were a common feature of printing styles in the early years of the century, and the most common types of contraction at that time were the contracted verb inflections (Haugland 1995: 179). Preterites and past participles had five variant spellings: the emerging standard -ed, the -’d variant commonly used by early printers, -d of more private spelling styles, and the more uncommon -’t and -t variants. Between 1680 and 1710, published authors like Addison and Defoe frequently used -’d forms in their private writing (Oldireva Gustafsson 2002: 54–58), even though Addison himself prominently advised against contractions. Oldireva Gustafsson’s (2002: 56–57) comparisons of published texts of 1680– 1710 and 1760–1790 demonstrate the standardization process of the -ed variant as it increased from 56% to 93%, and the near disappearance of -’d from 43% to 6.5% in the course of the eighteenth century. The -d variant was practically nonexistent in both periods, and -t decreased from 1.5% to less than one percent. Early eighteenth-century printers and authors appear to have used the apostrophised variant nearly as often as the full variant, but towards the end of the century they began to switch entirely to -ed. According to Oldireva Gustafsson (2002: 228, 260), the increasing disapproval of abbreviations greatly influenced the suppression of -’d, which had been the most frequent contraction in public writing of the early eighteenth century, and eventually triggered the levelling of spelling variation and led to the dominance of -ed towards the end of the eighteenth century. Table 2 presents Oldireva Gustafsson’s results for private letters and diaries of 1680–1710 and 1760–1790. Evidently the variables were still in the process . The percentages are counted from the total sums of preterite and past participle forms in Oldireva Gustafsson (2002: 56–57). . Oldireva Gustafsson’s research on late eighteenth-century private writing is based on letters of Laurence Sterne, Edmund Burke, David Hume, Richard Sheridan, Betsy Sheridan, Lady Sarah Lennox, Samuel Crisp, and Fanny Burney, extracts of the diaries of James Beattie and Thomas Campbell, travelogues by George Robertson, Hester Thrale Piozzi, and Thomas Pasley, and poetry (according to Oldireva Gustafsson, applicable to private texts) by Christopher Smart (2002: 23).

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Table 2. -ED forms in private letters and diaries in Oldireva Gustafsson (2002: 94, after Table 3.2) 1680–1710 1760–1790

-ed

-’d

-d

-t

-’t

60% (1,778) 76% (2,598)

22% (669) 18% (626)

11% (330) 5% (187)

4% (113) 0 (13)

3% (75) 0

of being fixed: there was a clear increase of the -ed variant, a moderate decrease of -’d, a marked decline of -d, and the -’t and -t variants disappeared from use. During the late eighteenth century, the absence of -’d and the consistent use of -ed indicated awareness of the current trend towards uniform printing styles and thus good education, and for example Fanny Burney’s carefully spelled letters contain practically only -ed forms (Oldireva Gustafsson 2002: 117–118). Oldireva Gustafsson (2002: 260) considers this consistent absence of -’d to be the “hallmark of the new spelling style”. The -d variant on the other hand seems to have been characteristic of private writing and to have carried a specific informal message. Edmund Burke’s letters contained only -ed and -d variants, and Oldireva Gustafsson (2002: 172) interprets the presence of -d as an exclusive signal of his informal spelling. The -d variant appeared hardly at all in public texts (0–2%), whereas in private letters and journals it made up a total of 8% of the -ED forms (Oldireva Gustafsson 2002: 56–57, 94). It was nevertheless infrequent even in private writing and continued to decrease. Tieken-Boon van Ostade (1998: 461) discusses apostrophised spellings in Sarah Fielding’s letters of 1751–1767 and notes that approximately 10% of the spellings are apostrophised, which is considerably less than in Oldireva Gustafsson’s material of the 1760–1790 period. In Samuel Richardson’s letters written in 1741, 27% of verb forms are spelled with -’d, whereas Samuel Johnson did not use the apostrophised form after 1738. Tieken-Boon van Ostade hypothesises that these authors might have been, in fact, ahead of printers’ practice in their private spelling (1998: 466).

5.

Features of the private spelling system in Montagu’s and Scott’s letters

Contractions and abbreviations in Montagu’s and Scott’s correspondence from the late 1730s to the late 1770s are next examined as features of private and informal language use, or as markers of the proposed private spelling system of the eighteenth century. The more contractions these letters contain, the more informal the style can perhaps be claimed to be, and the less attention the writer perhaps


paid to contemporary prescriptivist notions. Clearest evidence of private spelling could be a high frequency of contractions (both in itself and with regard to the corresponding full spellings) and the continuing use of -d in preterite and past participle forms. Examples (1) and (2) illustrate the use of contractions and abbreviations in Montagu’s and Scott’s letters, suggesting that their epistolary style seems to have been rich in these features. (1) [...] those Virgin dancings sure cou’d not offend the most scrupulous, tho’ a modest woman might be exceedingly asham’d at the indecorum of giving her hand to a Man & not be able to conquer her modesty so far as to look him in the face all night (Sarah Robinson (Scott) to Elizabeth Montagu, c. 1740) (2) Mrs Boscawen tells me she saw our Bror Charles ride by her gate as he was returning from Guilford, she call’d him, made him eat some peaches, wd fain have perswaded him to have stayd all night, but he wd not so much as go into her House. (Elizabeth Montagu to Sarah Scott, c. 1768)

In Section 5.2, contractions are examined in the use of the (tentative) central modals could, should, and would and their contractions, which are formed independently within the lexeme, and the negative auxiliaries cannot, shall not, will not, and do not and their respective enclitic contractions. Do not is not a modal, but it is contracted following the same rule of encliticisation as the negative modal auxiliaries and is therefore included. The ratio of could/should/would not and cd/ shd/wd not and the enclitic negatives is also considered. Shall and will as such are excluded: unlike the other auxiliaries, which can be contracted regardless of word order, shall and will are contracted depending on the position of the subject, and their contracted forms (’ll) are also indistinguishable from each other, as is shown in examples (3a)–(4b). (3) a. I will do it. > I’ll do it. b. Shall I do it? > *’ll I do it? (4) a. I could do it. > I cou’d/coud/cd do it. b. Should I do it? > Shou’d/shoud/shd I do it?

. Some eighteenth-century printers’ guides suggest that the apostrophised contractions of could, should, and would may have been acceptable in mid-century public texts, at least if the master-printer and the author approved. The printer could thus omit the letter l from could, should, and would: “the absence of the mute l can no-ways lessen the credit of an elaborate Essay; but may help a Printer to lengthen his Letter”, there often being a shortage of the l font (Smith 1755: 107; in Haugland 1995: 167).

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Other common contractions and abbreviations (bror, ’tho, yr), simple clitics (’m, ’ll, ’re, ’s, ’ve), the contracted negator n’t, and the connectors and and its abbreviation & were also retrieved from the corpus. In Section 5.2 I discuss the use of -ED variants. Examples (1)–(2) and (5)–(6) include Montagu’s and Scott’s use of different variants. All the preterites, past participle verbs forms, and past-participial adjectives (see Huddleston and Pullum 2002: 77–79) were retrieved from the corpus.

5.1

Modal auxiliaries and epistolary contractions in Montagu’s and Scott’s correspondence

In this section I consider the ratio of full and contracted spellings of a selection of modal auxiliaries and the negative auxiliary do not. In Present-day English, negative contractions are considered to be characteristic features of spoken language (Mazzon 2004: 105). In Huber’s (2007) study of the proceedings of London’s Central Criminal Court between 1674 and 1834, compiled into the Old Bailey Corpus (OBC), negative contractions were shown to be a speech-based feature of also Late Modern English. All the negative contractions in the speech passages of the OBC from 1732 to the 1830s amount altogether to 6.4% (20,473), whereas in the prose passages of the same period the figure is 0.1% (5). In her study of the 1750–1799 section of ARCHER, López-Couso (2007: 305) shows that the uncontracted negative forms of be and have seem to have been the unmarked variants in the written language of the LModE period. These full spellings cover over 90% of the cliticised–uncliticised words in all the data.10 The difference in Elizabeth Montagu’s and Sarah Scott’s spellings of modal auxiliary verbs is statistically significant (p 10) per 1,000 words.

the stigma which the not-contractions carried and used them sparingly, regardless that they were used also by educated upper-class writers as shown in Tieken-Boon van Ostade (2003: 253). The clitics ’m, ’ll, ’re, ’s, ’ve, and n’t did not yield particular results. A search through all of Montagu’s letters brought one instance of n’t (couldn’t) in addition to the negative contractions covered in Tables 6 and 7, and one instance of ’s (that’s), neither of these in the letters to her sister. Nothing was found in Scott’s letters. Montagu and Scott did not seem particularly prone to use contractions of this category, and comparisons with López-Couso’s (2007) results of auxiliary (he is > he’s) and negative (is not > isn’t) cliticisation in ARCHER could not be made. The figures for other contractions and abbreviations are given in Table 8. These cases were retrieved from the corpus by searching for apostrophes and superscripts, private spellings charted in Sterne’s and Lowth’s writing (Tieken-Boon van Ostade 1998, 2003), and by a cursory reading of the letters. These spellings in Montagu’s letters to other recipients (em to others) are included in Table 8 as a means to further distinguish between her recipient-based epistolary styles. Overall, Montagu and Scott used these spellings in very similar frequencies when they wrote to each other (4.7 vs 4.2 per 1,000 words), whereas in Montagu’s general style they were significantly less common (3.2, p

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Style Shifting in Japanese (Pragmatics and Beyond New Series)

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