The Evolution of English Prose, 1700-1800: Style, Politeness, and Print Culture

cover

title: author: publisher: isbn10 | asin: print isbn13: ebook isbn13: language: subject

publication date: lcc: ddc: subject:

next page >

The Evolution of English Prose, 1700-1800 : Style, Politeness, and Print Culture McIntosh, Carey. Cambridge University Press 0521624320 9780521624329 9780511005954 English English prose literature--History and criticism, Women-Books and reading--Great Britain--History, Literature publishing--Great Britain--History, Written communication-Great Britain--History , Great Britain--Intellectual life, Literacy--Great Britain--Hi 1998 PR769.M38 1998eb 828/.50809 English prose literature--History and criticism, Women-Books and reading--Great Britain--History, Literature publishing--Great Britain--History, Written communication-Great Britain--History , Great Britain--Intellectual life, Literacy--Great Britain--Hi

cover

next page >

< previous page

page_i

next page > Page i

The Evolution of English Prose, 17001800: Style, Politeness, and Print Culture Between 1700 and 1800 English prose became more polite and less closely tied to speech. A large-scale "feminization" of literary and other values coincided with the development of a mature print culture; these two historical trends make themselves felt in the evolution of prose. In this book Carey McIntosh explores oral dimensions of written texts not only in writers such as Swift, Defoe, and Astell, who have a strong colloquial base, but also in more bookish writers such as Shaftesbury, Johnson, and Burke. After about 1760, McIntosh argues, prose became more dignified and more self-consciously rhetorical. He examines the new correctness, sponsored by prescriptive grammars and by Scottish rhetorics; the new politeness, sponsored by women writers; and standardization, which by definition encouraged precision and abstractness in language. The book offers support for a hypothesis that these are not only stylistic changes but also major events in the history of the language. Carey McIntosh is Professor of English at Hofstra University. He is author of The Choice of Life: Samuel Johnson's Prose Fiction (1973) and Common and Courtly, Language: The Stylistics of Social Class in Eighteenth-Century British Literature (1986), and a variety of articles on Johnson, Boswell, Reynolds, Pope, dictionaries, and eighteenth-century prose.

< previous page

page_i

next page >

< previous page

page_xi

next page > Page xi

infelicities, and filling gaps in my knowledge: Frederick Keener and Carol Percy. The book has I think gained a great deal from their sensitivity and learning; weaknesses that remain are my responsibility not theirs. I owe only slightly less to other scholars who read or listened to chapters at different stages and offered valuable suggestions for change: James Basker, Thomas Couser, Robert DeMaria, William Dowling, Kathy Eden, Scott Harshbarger, Lawrence Klein, Irma Lustig, Thomas MacCary, Walter Rex, Richard Sher, Dieter Stein, and Susan Wright. I have benefited from two expert readings (anonymous) for Cambridge University Press. Paul Korshin and Howard Weinbrot have given assistance at crucial points. My debt to Joan Ferrante is of a different order and goes beyond ordinary thanks; this book is (hereby) dedicated to her, with love and admiration.

< previous page

page_xi

next page >

< previous page

page_iii

next page > Page iii

The Evolution of English Prose, 17001800: Style, Politeness, and Print Culture Carey McIntosh

< previous page

page_iii

next page >

< previous page

page_iv

next page > Page iv

PUBLISHED BY THE PRESS SYNDICATE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK http://www.cup.cam.ac.uk 40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011-4211, USA http://www.cup.org 10 Stamford Road, Oakleigh, Melbourne 3166, Australia Ruiz de Alarcón 13, 28014 Madrid, Spain © Carey McIntosh 1998 This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 1998 Reprinted 2000 Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge Typeset in Baskerville 11/12.5pt [CE] A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data McIntosh, Carey. The evolution of English prose, 17001800 : style, politeness, and print culture / by Carey McIntosh. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0 521 62432 0 (hardback) 1. English prose literature 18th century History and criticism. 2. Women Great Britain Books and reading History 18th century. 3. Literature publishing Great Britain History 18th century. 4. Written communication Great Britain History 18th century. 5. Great Britain Intellectual life 18th century. 6. Literacy Great Britain History 18th century. 7. English language 18th century Rhetoric. 8. English language 18th century Style. 9. Courtesy in literature. I. Title PR769.M38 1998 628'.50809dc21 97-40963 CIP ISBN 0 521 62432 0 hardback

< previous page

page_iv

next page >

< previous page

next page >

page_v

Page v Contents Preface 1 The Ordering of English

page vii 1 1

Hypotheses, Contexts 13 Approaches 15 Cultural Insecurity in the Early Eighteenth Century 19 Cultural Complacency in the Later Eighteenth Century 2 Literacy and Politeness: The Gentrification of English Prose

22 23

Early Eighteenth-Century Prose 31 Late Eighteenth-Century Prose 34 Orality and Writtenness 38 Microscope and Telescope 3 Testing the Model

42 43

Defoe and Paine 45 Pope and Wordsworth 50 Astell and Wollstonecraft 53 Jonathan Swift 58 Edmund Burke 67 Shaftesbury 4 Loose and Periodic Sentences

76 78

What Makes a Sentence Periodic? 84 The Domains of Periodicity 88 Defoe and the Syntax of Accumulation

94 Joseph Addison 5 Lofty Language and Low

98 99

James Boswell 106 Decorum and Genre and Boswell's Life 110 A Map of High and Low: Arbuthnot and Others 6 Nominal and Oral Styles: Johnson and Richardson

117 117

More and Less in Orality and Writtenness

< previous page

page_v

next page >

< previous page

next page >

page_vi

Page vi 126 Writtenness and Orality in Johnson's Prose 137 Samuel Richardson: The Uses of Indirection 7 The New Rhetoric of 1748 to 1793

142 143

What is rhetoric? 146 What was rhetoric in the eighteenth century? 156 The New Rhetoric of 1748 to 1793 160 Civilization as a Cultural Value 8 The Instruments of Literacy

169 171

Grammars 181 Review Magazines 184 Dictionaries (and Encyclopedias) 9 Politeness; Feminization

195 196

The Feminization of Culture 207 "My Fair Lady": Pamela and ladies of the Stage 214 Politeness in the Dictionaries 216 Politeness as a Universal in Language 10 Style and Rhetoric

221 221

Style as a Mode of Understanding 224 A Rhetorical Frame 233 Style-Studies and Cultural History Epilogue: Language Change

235

References

239

Index

268

< previous page

page_vi

next page >

< previous page

page_vii

next page > Page vii

Preface In the years from about 1710 to 1790, I shall argue, English prose and prose style changed in important ways. Small wonder, in a century that experienced major political and social upheavals, including the American, French, and (the beginnings of the) industrial revolutions. The development of a mature print culture in Great Britain took place in those eighty or one hundred years, and coincided with a "feminization" of literary and other values; these two large historical trends make themselves felt in the evolution of prose. By and large English prose in the last quarter of the eighteenth century is more polite, more gentrified, and more written than early eighteenth-century prose. Prose published around 1710 is characteristically more oral, more informal and colloquial, whereas late eighteenth-century prose became more bookish, more elegant, more precise, and more consciously rhetorical. Chapter 1 presents these hypotheses concisely and orients them within standard histories of prose, of prose style, and of the English language. Scholars trained in linguistics approach such issues very differently from literary critics, but I suggest that the two approaches are not incompatible. Here also I summarize what eighteenth-century writers themselves thought about the evolution of English. Chapter 2 presents a sharp contrast between early and late eighteenth-century prose, based on word-by-word analyses of selected short texts, their grammar, vocabulary, rhetoric, style. Here is my thesis in its simplest and most extreme form. In chapter 3, I test the model, applying it to writings by major authors from each end of the century, especially authors whose writings seem to be counterevidence to the general argument of this book. I conclude that although characteristic publications by Edmund Burke, Alexander Pope, and the third Earl of Shaftesbury don't fit the model very well, they don't destroy it either; they complicate it.

< previous page

page_vii

next page >

< previous page

page_viii

next page > Page viii

Chapters 4, 5, and 6 explore contrasts that figure in the argument of the two previous chapters: between periodic and loose sentences; between "high," formal, dignified language and "low," vulgar, vernacular language; and between nominal and oral styles. Neither ''looseness" nor periodicity has had as much attention as it deserves; and in chapter 4 I go back to the sixteenth century and forward to the twentieth, to show that these two dimensions contribute significantly to the expressivity of English prose and poetry. Chapter 5 focuses on Boswell's Life of Johnson, the artistry of which depends in part on disparities between splendidly dignified sentences in Boswell's narrative and low, vernacular, barnyard language in Johnson's conversation. It is (in part) a special combination of high and low language that enables this biography to paint Johnson in the round. In chapter 6, I attempt to demonstrate the ubiquity of different kinds of "writtenness" and "spokenness" in prose, plus the very many ways these two dimensions of English can affect readers and empower writers. I am also trying to complicate the model again. Private letters from Samuel Johnson to Mrs. Thrale, for example, are spectacularly oral, even though Johnson's other writings exemplify the new writtenness. Nominal styles are associated with politeness, for example in the letters of Richardson's most elegant heroine, Clarissa Harlowe. Chapter 7 introduces a third literary-historical explanation for the evolution of English prose in the eighteenth century, the "new," largely Scottish rhetoric of Adam Smith, Hugh Blair, Lord Kames, George Campbell, James Beattie, and others. A "Chronological Checklist" of rhetorics published in England between 1654 and 1790, Greek, Latin, English, and French, helps to put these writers in context. The New Rhetoric was much more interested in politeness and writtenness than earlier rhetorics had been. It valued correctness in language; and so its teachings reinforced the teachings of prescriptive grammarians. There were many more publications in grammar and rhetoric in the second half of the eighteenth century than in the first, and most of them exhibit a new form of language-consciousness, one that directly promotes the causes of politeness and literacy. Chapter 8 reviews four of the major "instruments of literacy": grammars; magazines, especially those that pioneered book reviews; dictionaries; and (briefly) encyclopedias. I defend prescriptivism, and suggest that the change in attitudes underlying all those new rules

< previous page

page_viii

next page >

< previous page

page_ix

next page > Page ix

was a major development in the history of ideas about English. The gentrification of English shows up clearly in dictionaries. Such later dictionaries as Ash (1775) and Johnson (1755) are far more correct, polite, and written, far less oral, physical, feudal, and rural, than earlier dictionaries by Kersey (1708) and Bailey (1721). Chapter 9 resumes the study of politeness, the value most widely identified with "high" culture in the eighteenth century; and I associate it directly with the new cultural vitality of women in the second half of that century. The "feminization" of British culture had consequences not only for the novel and other genres but also for language and style. Historians have located the emergence of politeness as a powerful cultural ideal in the years from about 1700 to 1720, but my reading suggests that this ideal did not change the way English was actually written until the 1750s and 1760s. Styles of speaking in two of the most popular heroines of the period (Pamela Andrews and Kate Hardcastle) undergo changes exactly like those I propose for the evolution of English prose in general. Chapter 10 begins by looking for common threads in what we call "style" in anthropology, music, painting, linguistics, and literature: style as a mode of understanding. Scholars have taken a bewildering variety of different approaches to literary style, but all these can be organized within a rhetorical frame. Every style-study I know can be analysed as one or more of seven relationships between verbal surface and author, audience, or outside world. That includes studies by Leo Spitzer, Samuel Johnson, Stanley Fish, Longinus, C. S. Lewis, Strunk and White, J. Hillis Miller, Matthew Arnold, and (of course) the style-studies in this book. I conclude with an Epilogue summarizing the implications of the "ordering of English" for theories of language change. This book is intended as a contribution to cultural and literary history, perhaps to the history of English (depending how that field is defined), and to style-studies. The study of verbal style in this book is embedded in a discussion of history: that is, in evidence (of several kinds) for the growing importance of politeness in a developing print culture. Since I deal with polite language, for example, I needed to know something about the social and linguistic history of politeness. It turns out that information about dirt floors, what got spilled on them, and when they began to be replaced on a large scale with wood or stone or tile, has something to do with the "gentrification" of English in the eighteenth century. And politeness as a linguistic

< previous page

page_ix

next page >

< previous page

page_x

next page > Page x

universal, as a syntactic/semantic/pragmatic variable in almost all the world's languages, has something to do with the increasing formality and rhetoricity of eighteenth-century prose. My argument is cumulative, and depends as much on the cultural history of chapters 8 and 9 as on the style-studies of chapters 3 through 6, and as on the literary history of chapters 5 and 7. This book makes no attempt to follow the ebb and flow of innovation and revival in all the varieties of eighteenthcentury prose. No one has written such a book, and it would not be an easy task. There are roomfuls of books on individual authors of the period, Burke and Burney, Johnson and Hume, Swift and Smith (and many others), but surprisingly little has been written on eighteenth-century prose as a medium. I shall be dealing here with two or three aspects of one facet of that medium. One of the implications of my argument is that the study of language and style is not confined to narrow formalisms, that it can open doors to culture, to history, and to the expressive power of literary and other texts. Style and substance are (to borrow words from Cardinal Newman) "the convex and the concave of a single curve." Chapters 2 and 3 start with nit-picky details of grammar but soon find themselves addressing cultural values. Chapter 5 follows stylistic clues to generalizations on major comic modes. In chapter 7, style-studies are presented as a key to the Scottish Enlightenment. Anyone who attempts to make such connections must depend on the ideas of professional linguists, and I wish to acknowledge a large general debt to scholars in this exciting and enormously diverse field. Although much of my argument is historical, I am confident that people who are interested in language for its own sake will enjoy this book. Such readers might want to start with chapter 4. Earlier versions of portions of several chapters have appeared in print, and I thank the following for permission to reprint: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc. for parts of chapters 2 and 3; parts of chapter 5 copyright © 1995, from BOSWELL, CITIZEN OF THE WORLD, MAN OF LETTERS, by Irma Lustig, editor, reprinted with permission of The University Press of Kentucky; AMS Press, Inc., for parts of chapter 6; Mouton de Gruyter for parts of chapter 9. A great many people have helped in one way or another with the writing of this book. I am deeply indebted to the two who took time to read the whole manuscript, clarifying my ideas, correcting

< previous page

page_x

next page >

< previous page

page_xi

next page > Page xi

infelicities, and filling gaps in my knowledge: Frederick Keener and Carol Percy. The book has I think gained a great deal from their sensitivity and learning; weaknesses that remain are my responsibility not theirs. I owe only slightly less to other scholars who read or listened to chapters at different stages and offered valuable suggestions for change: James Basker, Thomas Couser, Robert DeMaria, William Dowling, Kathy Eden, Scott Harshbarger, Lawrence Klein, Irma Lustig, Thomas MacCary, Walter Rex, Richard Sher, Dieter Stein, and Susan Wright. I have benefited from two expert readings (anonymous) for Cambridge University Press. Paul Korshin and Howard Weinbrot have given assistance at crucial points. My debt to Joan Ferrante is of a different order and goes beyond ordinary thanks; this book is (hereby) dedicated to her, with love and admiration.

< previous page

page_xi

next page >

< previous page

page_1

next page > Page 1

Chapter 1 The Ordering of English O, voman! voman! if thou hadst but the least consumption of what pleasure we scullers have, when we can cunster the crabbidst buck off hand, and spell the ethnitch vords without lucking at the primmer. (Tobias Smollett, Humphry Clinker: 1771) Hypotheses, Contexts My subject is the evolution of English prose in the eighteenth century. I shall argue that the language of ordinary written discourse changed markedly during those hundred years, that the habitual or primary textures of prose became more polite and more "written" (less oral). For better or worse, it was not possible in 1790 to write as Defoe and Swift had written in 1710 the age demanded greater formality and precision; the age applauded a more flowery style. And standards, preferences, tastes that dominated the literate world of 1790 did not entirely lose their grip for many decades. Accordingly, although this book deals with the ordering of eighteenth-century English it also describes the stylistic origins of some varieties of Romantic and Victorian prose (Wordsworth and Walter Scott, for example). "Changes in language and style from 1700 to 1800," and "the evolution of English prose in the eighteenth century": I may have to begin by convincing the reader that there were any such changes, and that English prose really did evolve during those hundred years. Until recently, histories of the English language have paid little attention to the eighteenth century, assuming either that all eighteenth-century prose is "modern" (as opposed to Shakespeare's prose or Hooker's, which is "early modern"), or that the only thing worth talking about for the period is prescriptivism.

< previous page

page_1

next page >

< previous page

page_2

next page > Page 2

When members of the Philological Society published their Proposal for what later became the Oxford English Dictionary, in 1858, they divided the life-span of the English language into three parts: 12501526 (from the beginnings of Middle English to the date of the first printed translation of the Bible); 15261674 (to the death of Milton); and 1674 to the present. We may still be feeling the effects of this periodization. That is, historians of the language frequently assume that since the 1660s, when Dryden perfected his version of "the other harmony of prose," the essential structures of English have not changed. Newcomers to the field who were trying to find out what happened to English during the eighteenth century would probably learn about Dryden's fastidious repudiations of out-of-date language in Shakespeare; and they would certainly read about Johnson's Dictionary and about grammarians' attempts to fix and correct the language. But with the possible exceptions of Barbara Strang (1970) and Dick Leith (1983), no book-length history of English admits my thesis, that English in 1790 was a different animal from English in 1710. Similarly, histories of prose style have tended to assume that after the triumph of "plain prose" in The Spectator and Swift, very little happened in the eighteenth century. Johnson is the exception that "proves" this rule. Our inquiring student might be reminded that the late seventeenth century revolted against "Baroque glories" in Taylor and Donne and Browne, preferring, with Sprat, "so many things almost in an equal number of words," and that this movement gathered strength in the late seventeenth century, eventuating in "the rise of modern prose style'' in Addison, Defoe, and Swift. From this perspective Paine, Burke, Godwin, and Boswell are writing in the tradition of Addison.1 The three-part division of English announced in the Proposal of 1858 may cause readers to make two mistaken assumptions: first, that English is at any given time a single language, one set of words 1 Alternately, Celia Millward proposes two traditions of prose, one "characterized by long, heavily subordinated, periodic sentences and by such devices as parallelism, couplets, balanced clauses, and use of absolute participles," the other an "older, native tradition of cumulative, paratactic sentences" (1988: 241). Ian Gordon's excellent book (1966) proposes "a unified period" of "speech-based" prose from 1660 to 1760, followed by a period devoted both to a "new classical prose" and to the beginnings of Romantic prose. There are brief, perceptive comments on changes in the prevailing prose styles of the eighteenth century in Monk and Lipking, Brady and Price, Sherburn and Bond. Adolph's book, The Rise of Modern Prose Style (1968), seems to me an admirable and discerning work of scholarship, even though its title is misleading.

< previous page

page_2

next page >

< previous page

page_3

next page > Page 3

organized under one set of rules, the single product of a single system. But language can be either a mass noun or a count noun (Lyons 1995: 18); it is almost as misleading to refer to language in Britain as one thing at any one time, as it is to refer to weather in Britain as one thing at any one time. "In reality there are only linguistic continua: different varieties of English shade off into each other" (Leith 1983: 1). We should think of "English" in 1710 (spoken and written) as a bundle of varieties of language, not as a single collection of words and usages. A collier from Northumberland must have hectored and harangued in words and idioms that never sullied the lips or page of Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury, and, of course, vice versa; to each, whole volumes of the other's English would have seemed a foreign language. Less obviously, many words and idioms used routinely by Shaftesbury in Characteristics (1711) have no existence for John Arbuthnot writing The History of John Bull in 1712, and vice versa, because these two texts belong to different strands in the bundle of locutions called "English." My thesis, then, restated, is that by 1790 many of the low, colloquial, informal strands in written English had disappeared, and the middle-class strands had multiplied and been gentrified. The bundle as a whole was more polite, precise, correct, and less vernacular than it had been.2 Surely it would also be a mistake for readers of the Proposal of 1858 to assume that English had stopped changing after 1674. Rather, it seems true that all languages are always changing, unless the society they serve is exceptionally isolated and static (as was perhaps for centuries the case with Icelandic). We cannot point to large structural changes in English as it evolved from 1700 to 1800, though small structural changes continued to occur (for example, the pleonastic do was on its way out, and the passive progressive was being born). It is hard to decide in many cases whether the changes I shall be describing belong to the history of prose style or to the history of the language; they fall at or near the edge of territories commonly defined in either linguistic or stylistic terms. They are not a revolution but a general trend, the result of thousands of minute shifts in characteristic vocabulary, diction, grammar, sentence structure, word order, idiom, and over-all organization in many kinds of 2 This thesis does not apply in exactly these terms to poetry. But the language that mainstream poets put into their poems had grown politer and more "written" by the end of the century which is one reason why the use of dialectal, rural, and vernacular language in poetry seemed in the 1790s both urgent and revolutionary.

< previous page

page_3

next page >

< previous page

page_4

next page > Page 4

texts over the course of the years. And although "general trends" are what histories of the language are about, we discover these trends only in particular texts written by individual authors, each of whom has his or her own special ways of constructing sentences and paragraphs and discourses. To study the choices a writer might make among different ways of constructing texts is to study style. So pervasive was change in other aspects of the eighteenth century that it would be astonishing if English prose had not changed also. The years between Dryden's death and Wordsworth's 1800 Preface were not only the great age of English prose but also a period of sweeping cultural transformation: in clothes, music, manners, politics, aesthetics, demography, in modes of production and consumption, in social organization, in prevailing assumptions about truth and knowledge themselves. It was during these years that English-speaking people moved from the mind-sets of John Bunyan and Sir William Temple to the mind-sets of Adam Smith and Jane Austen. Chambers's Cyclopedia of 1728 still recognizes a scholastic ontology, informing us (for example) that "Action may be consider'd two ways, Entitatively and Connotatively." Forty years later, the first Encyclopaedia Britannica seems to belong to a different world: about one third of the 150 books it lists as authorities are in the natural (mainly biological) sciences, and only three are on religion. During this period London was turning into a city, almost in the modern sense, with street lights and police and slums. New institutions were born: museums, post offices, banks, stock exchanges, insurance companies, discount stores. It is in this century that we first encounter the serious commercialization of leisure; casino, spa, ball-room, racetrack, boxing, cricket, art, and music all went public and charged admission (Plumb 1973: 1419). The "consumer revolution" of eighteenth-century Britain, dramatic changes in the quantity and nature of buying and selling, has been claimed as "one of the great turning points in the history of human experience" (McKendrick et al. 1982: 9). Such changes, and the social contexts they imply, are important for this book, because although it focuses sharply on language it is equally a book on cultural history, or on the contexts for language change. Let me sketch here five sociocultural dimensions of these broader contexts, first three that contributed to literacy and helped make language more "written," and then two that pushed refinement and politeness into prominence as cultural ideals.

< previous page

page_4

next page >

< previous page

page_5

next page > Page 5

(1) During the eighteenth century, Great Britain took giant strides towards a mature print culture. This is the period when English prose was first brought to market in something like the modern way. In the average seventeenth-century town there were no printed posters, theatre bills or programs, handbills, labels, tickets, printed forms, marriage certificates, indentures, or receipts; but all these products of the press could be found almost anywhere in Britain in 1790. In 1700, London had no daily newspaper; in 1811, it had fifty-two, and by the end of the eighteenth century they included such modern features as full and regular sports reporting on horse races, boxing, and cricket. At the beginning of the century, there was no adequate copyright, only four towns could boast of printing presses (London, Oxford, Cambridge, York), and only a few score people were making a living in the world of publishing, journalism, and advertising. By the end of the century there were words for sale in every village in the nation, and virtually every branch of a modern print culture was flourishing. Children's books, magazines, the book review as we know it, popular novels, lending libraries, high-volume printings (e.g., 500,000 copies of The Rights of Man in 1791) these are all new events in the life of English prose. They did not go unobserved by contemporary authors: Martinus Scriblerus denounced the 1720s as a time "when (after Providence had permitted the invention of Printing as a scourge for the sins of the learned) Paper also became so cheap, and Printers so numerous, that a deluge of Authors cover'd the land."3 The citizen of a mature print culture thinks of language differently from the citizen of scribal or oral cultures. According to Michael Dobson (for example), this period put "a new emphasis on the textuality of drama" (1992: 113). Shakespeare's creations became during the eighteenth century as much texts to read as drama to perform. The early eighteenth century saw the first collection of the "beauties of Shakespeare," a printed anthology almost totally unconnected with the stage, plus more or less scholarly printed editions by Rowe and Pope. In the 1750s, Charlotte Lennox rewrote Shakespeare's plays as novels, for perusal in study and parlor. Similarly, these plays are now being filmed and digitalized. (2) Another context for changes in language and style in the eighteenth century starts with the concept of "standardization." In 3 See Belanger 1978 and 1982; Kernan 1987; Black 1987: 14, 27; Pope 1729: 304.

< previous page

page_5

next page >

< previous page

page_6

next page > Page 6

chemistry, commerce, farming, and cooking, standardization means the gradual merging of local weights and measures into more widely agreed-on units and scales. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, thirty carks equalled one sarplar, and two sarplars was one sack, which in weight was either 364 pounds (of wool) or 350 pounds, unless it was a measure of volume: three and a half bushels of apples in Kent, but four in Worcestershire (Zupko 1968: 14951). In language, standardization is something that happens when one dialect has been identified with and attached to the central authorities of a developing nation-state: it puts strong pressures on the language used in commerce and administration, to be more orderly, more precise, and in general more written. Although the "correcting" and "fixing" promoted by standardization may be a historical process, one that continues to happen to languages that have been standardized, the years from 1700 to 1800 saw momentous advances in this historical process as it affects English, including codification, diffusion, and maintenance, three of the major stages. Some of the hoopla over eighteenthcentury dictionaries and grammars has therefore a political motivation, which is amusing to remember when one encounters a particularly eccentric, grammatical rule in one of the hundreds of prescriptive grammars of the second half of the century. English-speaking peoples are still in the 1990s wrestling with the consequences of standardization in many arenas, educational, cultural, and political; but it was during the eighteenth century that several of the most decisive steps in this process were taken.4 Some (but not all) of the changes we refer to as standardization can be considered as "language planning," a very widespread form of language change resulting from deliberate efforts by one set of people to influence the linguistic codes of others (Cooper 1989). Among other memorable examples of language planning are the revival of Hebrew as a vernacular language in Israel, the recent selection of a "national language" in dozens or scores of developing nations, and mass literacy programs of almost any kind, both inside and outside the institutional frames of public education. Not coincidentally, standardization may be forwarded by the ordinary routines of putting something in print. It was a printer who 4 On standardization in language, see Milroy and Milroy 1985; Joseph 1987; Stem and Tieken-Boon van Ostade (eds.) 1994.

< previous page

page_6

next page >

< previous page

page_7

next page > Page 7

changed the manuscript spellings swoord to sword, greef to grief, and thease to these in Harrington's Ariosto (Febvre 1958: 32128). It was a consortium of booksellers, not of philologists, who brought Johnson's Dictionary to birth. A burgeoning print culture and the standardization of English both were directly connected to the "growing sense of Britishness" that spread over the island during the eighteenth century (Colley 1992: 6). A kingdom of distant towns and isolated villages can more plausibly think of itself as a single nation when it is reading the same newspapers and magazines and when local dialects and languages are being educated out of existence to clear the ground for Standard English. The assault on Scots Gaelic began in the early seventeenth century, but was taken up in earnest in the early eighteenth by the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge and by the British government as part of postCulloden efforts to "sanitise the glens" (Colley 1992: 119). On the Isle of Man, English was the language of school and church, but not farmyard and kitchen.5 (3) "Prescriptivism," in the grammars and dictionaries that proliferated after 1750, as part of standardization, probably contributed to the evolution of English prose by codifying explicit standards for correct formal English. Many linguistics scholars disparage prescriptivism, since it assumes that some variants of a language are better than other variants. "The only useful generalizations about language are inductive generalizations," said Leonard Bloomfield in 1933 (20). As early as the 1790s, some readers felt that the prescriptivists had gone too far, and wrote contemptuously about the "immoderate embellishment" of current prose. Dick Leith (1983), Olivia Smith (1984), Tony Crowley (1989), and, with interesting qualifications, John Barrell (1983) attack prescriptivism as elitist and anti-democratic; they fault it for excluding working-class people and provincials not only from the corridors of literary/intellectual power but also from full, active participation in the political life of the time. Such criticisms of the prescriptivists have a basis in fact. It does not take a trained linguist to discover that many of the rules in the grammar-books were unrealistic, that is, out of touch with the way languages really work. We can watch the elitism of the grammarians as it develops in book reviews in The Monthly Review (1749) and The 5 See Price 1984: 5354, 7475; see also Newman 1987; Weinbrot 1993.

< previous page

page_7

next page >

< previous page

page_8

next page > Page 8

Critical Review (1756); Carol Percy's research (forthcoming) shows how much trouble these rules stirred up for women, Scots, and nonclassically educated writers between 1750 and 1780. But there is another side to the coin of prescriptivism: by formulating and explaining and exemplifying rules for correct and elegant English, the grammarians enabled their readers to obey those rules. Normative grammars and rhetorics gave women, provincials, and working-class people access to intellectual and political power by showing them how to qualify themselves for it. Canons of taste that may seem elitist in Blair or Campbell were pounced on and put to work as ladders to literacy by thousands of ambitious working-class people (including women and Scots and Americans) who, in the last half of the century, wanted to read and write like the gentry. From the fact that most prescriptive grammars were written as school textbooks, plus the closely related fact that about half these grammars were written by and for women, Scots, and "provincials," I infer that the form of language consciousness dealt with in this book could be as powerful an instrument for liberation as for exclusion. No one seems confident that the prescriptive grammars made a substantial impact on the way people actually spoke and wrote. This book presents evidence that, in alliance with many other factors promoting writtenness and politeness, they probably did; but my argument is by no means conclusive. Perhaps we should look on these grammars more as symptoms of language consciousness than as causes of language change.6 These three movements print culture, standardization, and prescriptivism all may be said to have contributed to a general "commodification" of literature and language in the eighteenth century. If, as Mark Rose implies, this was the century during which writing became the production of intellectual property, and reading the consumption of same, then it seems reasonable that in the middle of that century the substance of which that property was made quite suddenly became the object of ardent scrutiny. The ordering of English required quality control, and ensured a more uniform product. Prescriptive grammar and lexicography played the role of industrial design, purging that product of blemishes, local variations, anomaly, Handarbeit. 6 It is not quite true that "no one" has claimed that the prescriptive grammars, changed language use. The very fact that historians of the language dwell on prescriptivism implies that its consequences were not merely theoretical. See also Percy 1996.

< previous page

page_8

next page >

< previous page

page_9

next page > Page 9

(4) It is not unreasonable to speak of the "feminization" of English prose during the eighteenth century. I take the word, from Ann Douglas and Terry Eagleton, as a summary of many kinds of changes in the life of the language. If the midcentury flood of prescriptive grammars eventually left a mark, the over-all direction of the changes they recommended was as much towards refinement as towards correctness. In language, the age demanded elegance and politeness, not merely a school-masterly freedom from "errors." Adam Potkay makes a case that "an emerging ideology of polite style" dominated mid-century discourse (1994: 1). And a major consequence of the cult of sensibility was an openness to feeling and a new repertory of ways of expressing feeling that correspond in many ways to what Ann Douglas describes in her book on the evolution of American cultural norms in the nineteenth century. Women writers, either notorious or marginalized in the late seventeenth century, had by 1800 become dominant forces in certain regions of the world of letters, and by 1800 women had notably expanded the domain of such genres as the novel, diaries, journals, letters, and non-heroic plays. "Feminization" is perhaps a misleading term, both because women have never not played essential roles in the construction of social values (however cramped and constrained their roles as human beings may have been), and because use of the word may seem to legitimize the very stereotypes about women-in-general that any thinking person is reluctant to endorse. I use it because it summarizes, it applies to many different eighteenth-century events: to changes in values and in behavior; to the re-articulation of gender roles, both male and female; to what Terry Eagleton calls "a pervasive aestheticizing of social practices" (1990: 41) accompanying the new respect for manners and sentiment; and to language and style. If we accept "the gendered nature of class formation" (Davidoff and Hall 1987: 30), and if we assume an evolving interdependency of eighteenth-century notions of masculinity and womanliness, then feminization supplements gentrification. (5) Contemporary rhetoric. Histories of the language and of style both ignore the New Rhetoric of 1748 to 1793, a body of writings and lectures that played a critical role in early modern attempts to adapt rhetoric to writing (as opposed to speech) and to prose (as opposed to poetry). Significantly, those who composed the new rhetorics, like those who wrote the prescriptive grammars, were outsiders; its

< previous page

page_9

next page >

< previous page

page_10

next page > Page 10

foremost proponents include six or seven Scots, a Dissenter, and one or two Irishmen (depending how you define the New Rhetoric). Chapter 7 will argue that this New Rhetoric was uniquely poised to speak to the needs of the emerging middle class. The Scottish rhetoricians tried to teach civilizedness in language, defining this new value in terms of politeness, sensibility, and linguistic correctness. Unlike their colleagues at Oxford and Cambridge, they opened their lectures to all comers (for a fee), and they published books. One thing that all five of these sociocultural contexts have in common is that they contributed to language consciousness. Writers of the eighteenth century were much more interested in prose style than we are in the 1990s. Our grammars tend to be either cognitive, hypothesizing mental structures and constraints that might generate grammatical sentences in English, or sociological, exploring language use in various cultures and sub-cultures. Eighteenth-century grammars were interested in how language can contribute to (cultural) excellence in discourse. And grammars were reinforced by rhetorics (such as John Ward or Blair) and treatises on aesthetics (Kames) and essays (The World, nos. 100102; The Connoisseur, nos. 27, 42) and even dictionaries (Johnson 1755 or Ash 1775) and philosophies-of-language (Campbell or Monboddo) all have something to say about how to write clear, elegant English. Most people writing about writing during the eighteenth century mention the project of a politer and more precise prose style.7 The historical perspective of this book is oriented to change. As a result, I probably slight issues and texts that support continuities in the eighteenth century, and I linger over those that support a transformation of culture between 1700 and 1800. Here are two changes related to language that do not crop up in standard literary histories. Proverbs have been defined as "strategies for situations" (Obelkevich 1987: 44). They are a repository of oral wisdom and of cliché. Almost every culture in every period of history for which we have records has set a high value on proverbs. King Alfred and Queen Elizabeth were fond of them, as were Solomon and Mao, Scottish peasants and Israeli literati. Among the Anang in Nigeria, judicial 7 This way of describing national attitudes toward language probably understates what Frederick Keener has (in personal communications) called "the value of style as a basis of determinate sense"; nevertheless, it makes sense within a rhetorical view of style.

< previous page

page_10

next page >

< previous page

page_11

next page > Page 11

courts decided cases on the basis not of precedent but of proverbs. Most proverbs are prudential and conservative, but some are subversive, sexist, or obscene. If there is a distinct mentality or attitude associated with proverbs, it is realistic and fatalistic; it warns against counting unhatched chickens and crying over spilt milk. Even during periods (such as the eighteenth century and the twentieth) which look to other sources for "wisdom," proverbs continue to appear, and each age coins new ones. "Waste not, want not" is first recorded in the eighteenth century, and it was the Victorians who decided that "every cloud has a silver lining." Late twentieth-century proverbs: "no pain, no gain," and "garbage in, garbage out.'' In a chronicle of the fortunes and misfortunes of proverbs in Britain, the eighteenth century was unique; it was the only time when literati stopped collecting them and publishers almost stopped printing them. Elizabethan culture had been soaked in proverbs. Erasmus's Adagia was a required text in every grammar school. The titles for three of Shakespeare's plays are proverbs, and 4,600 different proverbs may be found in his oeuvre as a whole. Twenty thousand proverbs were printed in each of two seventeenth-century German collections. But the last major collection in English before our period was John Ray's of 1670; after that, no big, new collection of proverbs in English was printed until the nineteenth century. Swift made fun of proverbs, weaving them into the loathsome and ludicrous tapestry of slang and platitudes in his Polite Conversation (1738): "scornful dogs will eat dirty puddens"; "don't throw water on a drownded rat"; "I won't keep a dog, and bark myself." In 1741, Lord Chesterfield advised his son that "there is, likewise, an awkwardness of expression and words, most carefully to be avoided; such as false English, bad pronunciation, old sayings, and common proverbs; which are so many proofs of having kept bad and low company" (II 461). The aristocrat Lord Morden in Clarissa, whose conversation is studded with proverbs, is obviously, even ostentatiously, a fool. James Obelkevich regards these events as a sign of "both the transformation of elite culture and the breaking of its links with the culture of the people" (55). The point is not that proverbs were eradicated between 1700 and 1800 but that they were "dropped" by the learned and the polite. Whereas Elizabethans had enjoyed using locutions that were oral, communal, popular, and folk-ish, well-bred

< previous page

page_11

next page >

< previous page

page_12

next page > Page 12

Georgians preferred the formulas of politeness or quotations from the classics. What happened to proverbs may be only one aspect of a larger change that came to a climax of sorts in the eighteenth century, the "reform," "abandonment," and "discovery" (in that order) of popular culture. In 1700, the music, dance, theatre, poetry, art, and sculpture of the people was still largely hand-made and home-made: ballads, harvest festivals, songs by and for the miners or the weavers or the shepherds, puppet theatre, painted signs and carved bowls. Peter Burke's history of popular culture in early modern Europe locates a movement to reform the "paganisms" and "licentiousness'' of popular festivals and recreations in the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, but it was the growth of cities, of communications, and of commerce in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that gradually stifled popular culture of this older kind (not commercialized popular culture, like TV or rock music, but what Burke calls "do-it-yourself" culture). The waning of popular culture was gradual and continuous. In 1777, John Brand published a book on the history and survival of "popular Notions and vulgar Ceremonies," demonstrating that any number of pre-Christian "superstitions" were still vigorous in rural areas and in the north. But one can safely assume that as roads and turnpikes and canals brought the smaller towns and farming villages more nearly in touch with London, as postal services and coaches spread news and newspapers over the countryside, as bi-annual or weekly country fairs were replaced by shops and stores, the old do-it-yourself songs and clothes and furniture fell out of favor. Many of the most colorful of the folk arts had vanished long before 1700. Charles I, who ruled 162549, was the last British monarch to keep a court fool (Burke 1978: 278). The popular religious drama, out of which had emerged for example the Second Shepherd's Play and Everyman, was frowned upon by Elizabeth's Archbishop of York, Edmund Grindal, and had ceased to exist by 1600. But in 1700 Shrove Tuesday was still celebrated with cock-fights all over the north, and Midsummer Eve with bonfires, with "Running, Wrestling, Dancing" that the oldsters watch while they "enjoy themselves and their Bottle" (Brand 1777: 271). In the 1750s and I760s Wesley and Whitefield scoured the Welsh hills and the rural north for converts, denouncing folk-healers, fiddlers, football, and the straw images and effigies on parade at harvest festivals.

< previous page

page_12

next page >

< previous page

page_13

next page > Page 13

It was the eighteenth century that brought to a head the abandonment and, paradoxically, the discovery of popular culture by the educated classes. In 1500 "popular culture was everyone's culture; a second culture for the educated, and the only culture for everyone else." By 1800 all over western Europe "the clergy, the nobility, the merchants, the professional men and their wives had abandoned popular culture to the lower classes."8 Neoclassical aesthetics drew a clear line between high culture and low. Private theatres replaced public. Education itself helped to squeeze out the folk-healers, the cunning women, the chap-books, the prophets, and the harpers. But this was exactly the period when the educated classes discovered popular culture: Addison (1711) and Ramsay (1718) supplied kindling for the enthusiasms that burst into flame with "Ossian" (1760), Percy (1765), Chatterton (1777), Herder (1778), Burns (1786), and many more. Here again, the eighteenth century is a hinge between the olden times and our own. Approaches Certain formal aspects of prose word order, grammar, rhetorical schemes take center stage in this book. At the same time, substance often counts as style, for example in the traditional distinction between high styles and low. What major authors are saying and how the substance of their writings reflects cultural values are crucial to our understanding of what all these formal features mean. I take, in general, a rhetorical (or pragmaticist) approach to stylistics and language change, assuming that we cannot understand language-in-use without examining not only texts but also audiences, authors, and the world within which language subsists, in historical context. Rhetoric can afford to be as technical as anyone could wish, without divorcing itself from those subjective and intersubjective realms that the study of history and authors and audiences requires. In certain respects the study of language change is based on such different premises from the study of style, and pursues such different goals, that the two approaches may seem incompatible. Historical linguistics bore its first fruits in the nineteenth century, during an era of naive scientism, when the very best thinkers were happily 8 See P. Burke 1978: 270 "Authors came to appreciate the powers of speech and the virtues of oral Culture at the very time that writing was beginning to dominate their world" (Hudson 1995: 6)

< previous page

page_13

next page >

< previous page

page_14

next page > Page 14

codifying inductive procedures for (in John Stuart Mill's phrase) "discovering and proving laws of nature" (1843: 390). Perhaps "naive" is the wrong word for the early theorists of science, since a great deal of today's science and much of our everyday experience is based on the same inductive procedures and "laws" that they were codifying. Some of the most telling results that historical linguistics has come up with are quantitative and statistical. And so I welcome the reasonableness, the common sense, the validity of scientific approaches to language change, within their own domain, just as many linguists welcome the comprehensiveness and subtlety of good literary history as a way of clarifying the history of the language (Stein 1990). Therefore a working premise of this book is that, despite inevitable tensions (Catano 1988), linguistics and literary history may complement each other in the diachronic study of texts. We can learn something from scholars such as Geoffrey Leech and Janel Mueller, who approach the evolution of English prose within the context of the history of the language. We can learn a great deal about the nuts and bolts of language, as well as about its social dimensions, from contemporary linguistics and sociolinguistics. Perhaps in reaction against the scientism of modern linguistics and certain schools of stylistics, most literary scholars do not study modern grammar, discourse studies, semantics, or sociolinguistics. I have not hesitated to consult books in these fields, and to base analyses on them, recognizing that a trained linguist or semanticist could supply all kinds of detail and depth missing here. Nor have I hesitated to express personal tastes in evaluating and analyzing eighteenth-century texts. For example, I do not think either Addison or Steele is much of a stylist in prose. Though I can appreciate that some of Johnson's essays may seem flatfooted or pedantic to some readers, I continue to be as astonished now as I first was thirty-five years ago by the power and precision of his language. Such preferences are in some measure personal; I am responding to eighteenth-century prose as Wayne Booth tells us we all respond to "the company we keep" in fiction, which means of course that aesthetics and politics and individual taste all come into play. On the whole, I don't feel it was a bad thing for English to be "gentrified," but when combed and groomed and corrected, our language lost some of the colloquial vitality it had in Arbuthnot and Swift and Defoe. Although the tendency of my argument is to

< previous page

page_14

next page >

< previous page

page_15

next page > Page 15

foreground the positive and reasonable sides of the prescriptive grammars, I argue also that correctness and incorrectness are not good or bad respectively but neutral terms: instances of both appear in almost any text; the issue becomes not whether but how much. Cultural Insecurity in the Early Eighteenth Century I suspect that one could find texts for any year or period blaming the state of the language or praising it. In every decade someone writes either to disparage or to support recent developments in the world of letters. But there are differences between the optimists in 1710 and the optimists in 1790; ditto for the pessimists. In general, the first quarter of the century was not so confident in its claims to politeness as the last; it worried about British "barbarity" (versus French elegance) and about its inheritances, linguistic and literary, from the previous age. By 1780, British writers could lay strong claims to elegance but worried that refinement had gone too far. Although the earlier writers routinely referred to their nation and their period as "polite" (see Lawrence Klein), such references are often meant simply to claim membership in the contemporary world of letters, and they do not outweigh a larger number of references in the first two decades of the century to a need for the reformation of manners and speech, to a paucity of English grammars, to the ignorance of men and women of fashion, and to the profligacy, false taste, and factiousness of the recent past. Some of these references may be political, intending a slur on previous reigns and regimes. Addison, as is well known, devoted much of his best talent to "civilizing" the readership of The Tatler, The Spectator, and The Guardian (170913). Think of the consciousness of an age any age as moving along at one hour per hour, one month per month, trailing its recent past behind it. Thus, what "the age" thought of itself in 1710 probably extended back to 1680 or so, and the reign of the merry monarch Charles II was just fading out of "present" memory and awareness when George I came to the throne in 1715. John Gay in 1711 seems slightly surprised that it is no longer "a jest" for someone to assert, ''that any thing Witty could be said in praise of a Marry'd State, or that Devotion and Virtue [are] any way necessary to the Character of a fine Gentleman" (3). So Richard Steele, in Tatler, no. 12 (1709), regrets disparities between "the present Grandeur of the British

< previous page

page_15

next page >

< previous page

page_16

next page > Page 16

Nation" and the frivolity of British gentlepersons, who were in his opinion mostly "Rakes and Debauchees," atheists, drunks, free-thinkers, and "Banterers." In Spectator, no. 6, two years later, Steele expressed his fears "that the most polite Age is in danger of being the most vicious." So far as language goes, the national consciousness was divided. English was generally considered a copious language, but many writers were concerned about irregularity and lawlessness in their native tongue. In 1707 Nahum Tate commended the spelling-book of his friend Thomas Dyche as well design'd, to take away The Scandal that upon our Nation lay; Where Elegance a Stranger was, and few The Beauties of their Mother-Language knew. John Brightland claimed in 1711 that English had been left so helpless, that to write it Purely and Correctly; it was necessary to study other Languages, in which the Art of Grammar was fixt. But this was incumber'd with so many Difficulties, that few Natives know how to write their own Mother Tongue.9 Swift's burlesque of fashionable slang in Tatler, no. 230, sparked a long anonymous letter in Tatler, no. 234, on the study of English (not Latin) grammar, and was followed quite soon by the publication of four new grammars of English in English (Brightland 1711, Greenwood 1711, Mattaire 1712, Bellum Grammaticale 1712). Proposals tor an English academy that would correct and fix the language came fairly thick and fast between 1697 and 1712 (Monroe 1911), and this was the year when Swift assured Harley "that our Language is extremely imperfect; that its daily Improvements are by no means in proportion to its daily Corruptions; that the Pretenders to polish and refine it, have chiefly multiplied Abuses and Absurdities" (Swift 1712: 8). Addison seconded Swift on the harshness of monosyllables and contractions in English, adding a syntactic item that Swift failed to mention: early eighteenth-century English was replacing -eth inflections in third singular present-tense verbs with -s, a change that lops off one syllable and so in his judgment reduces musicality (Spectator, no. 135). Shaftesbury accused writers of failing to avoid "the shocking consonants and jarring sounds to which our language is so 9 The Tate poem and the Brightland remark each occur in unpagmated (prefatory) sections of these two books.

< previous page

page_16

next page >

< previous page

page_17

next page > Page 17

unfortunately subject," and mocked "the gouty joints and darning-work of whereunto's, whereby's, thereof's, therewith's, and the rest of this kind, by which complicated periods are so curiously strung or hooked-on one to another."10 In the 1720s we encounter two positive evaluations of the state of the language. Should we credit Alexander Pope for what looks like a new growth of confidence in English? He could be said to have improved the language both by precept and by example. Tamworth Reresby declared that "our Language [is] more copious and expressive than the so much admir'd French, Italian, and Spanish." Leonard Welsted believed that "the English language is not capable of a much greater perfection than it has already attained. . . . We have laid aside all our harsh antique words and retained only those of good sound and energy; the most beautiful polish is at length given to our tongue, and its Teutonic rust quite worn away." An anonymous pamphlet of 1724, however, was written "to represent the Disadvantages which we of this Nation are under for want of" grammars and dictionaries: "That there is need of [improvements in the English language] we think there is no Question. Its very Alphabet is only what Chance hath made it, and is much out of Order. We have no Grammar of it that is taught in any School that we ever heard of: We have no good Dictionary to bring it into Method."11 It seems to me that (in a modern idiom) the literary self-esteem of the first two decades of the eighteenth century was low. John Dennis put it forthrightly in 1702: "The English were never sunk so miserably low in their taste, as they are at present" (I 289). Edward Niles Hooker's note to this sentence lists complaints about the triviality, vice, and absurdity of the taste of the time, citing Brown, Trotter, Steele (I 491). Addison devoted Spectators, nos. 58, 61, 62, and 63 to a history and taxonomy of false wit, and no. 35 to false humor. In Spectator, no. 409 he made a broader case: "Our general Taste in England is for Epigram, turns of Wit, and forced Conceits, which have no manner of Influence, either for the bettering or enlarging the Mind of him who reads them." Pope's Essay on Criticism (1711) was intended to establish sound principles for judging literature, which 10 Shaftesbury 1711: 11 322 (subsequent references to Characteristics are by volume and page in the text.) 11 Reresby as cited by Erskine-Hill 1983: 241; Welstead in Elledge 1961. 1322; [Wilson] 1724: 32, 6.

< previous page

page_17

next page >

< previous page

page_18

next page > Page 18

principles were explicitly listed as ways to reform the "taste" of the age in his 1736 Table of Contents. Two larger arguments support the idea that the more self-conscious writers of the first quarter of the eighteenth century lacked confidence in their language, in prevailing standards of taste, and in the quality (style) of English being written. This was the period of the "battle of the books," ancients against moderns. The moderns could point to contemporary achievements in natural philosophy to justify their optimism. But not even the cockiest of them could argue that the language and literature of early eighteenth-century England outshone the language and literature of Homer and Virgil. William Wotton hoped that English-speaking poets might rival Homer someday, but he was not sure (Levine 1991: 132). Similarly for the English language: according to the optimistic view, "Were we as industrious in improving and cultivating our Language, as the Greeks and Romans were, we might equal, if not exceed them, having many Advantages not known in their time" (Lane 1700: xix). Everyone assumed that Greek and Latin were more expressive, more musical, and more durable linguistic instruments than English. The ancients "writ in languages that became universal and everlasting, while ours are extremely limited both in extent, and in duration" (Pope 1717: 7). I am arguing that writers of the first quarter of the century suffered more from cultural insecurity than did writers of the last. May we list "the myth of duncehood" both as an expression and as a cause of that insecurity? Everyone remembers the contempt that Swift and Pope expressed for second-rate writers, for "those heavy, illiterate Scriblers, prostitute in their Reputations, vicious in their Lives, and ruin'd in their Fortunes" (Swift 1710: 5) who (allegedly) almost choked the streets of London with rubbishy books and pamphlets. So compelling was the poetry of duncehood, so convincing the rhetoric of the Scriblerians (see MacDermott 1982), that generations of readers have thought of Lewis Theobald and Colley Cibber as slow-wits and incompetents one, the greatest Shakespearian editor of his time (Jones 1919: ix), the other "the most talented and powerful personality of the London stage" (Battestin and Battestin 59). Twentieth-century equivalents might be E. K. Chambers and Oscar Hammerstein, more or less. But there is evidence that the unreasonably negative image of lesser writers held by Swift and Pope and their circle was shared by

< previous page

page_18

next page >

< previous page

page_19

next page > Page 19

some of the lesser writers themselves. Abel Boyer in 1702 extemporizes on the "Scandal" and vileness, the vanity and "Assurance," the impertinence and pride of aspiring poets. "Many a pert Coxcomb might have past for a Wit" (5), he remarks, by way of introduction to the portrait of a coffee-house critic "without a grain" of ''Breeding and Good Manners" (10). Henry Felton in 1715 asks "how many Scriblers are there who observe the Rule, and neglect the Meaning, and what Number of Pedants do we meet with, that keep to the Letter, and lose the Spirit?" (ix). On the face of it, there is little reason to believe that the second-rank authors of the age of Swift and Pope were much less competent than the second-rank authors of any other age. If "dunces" such as Cibber, Defoe, Mandeville, Susanna Centlivre, and Ambrose Philips were in fact writers of genuine merit, then perhaps "duncehood" à la Swift and Pope was more neoclassical myth than literary-historical reality; but it was certainly pervasive and probably demoralizing. Cultural Complacency in the Later Eighteenth Century "Nobody will deny," wrote Henry Mackenzie, "the superiority of the modern over the ancient world in almost all the arts and sciences" (1785: II 99). Thomas Warton described this last quarter of the eighteenth century as "an age advanced to the highest degree of refinement" (1774: I i). In 1791, Isaac D'Israeli paid tribute to what seemed to him an extraordinary growth of literacy during the eighteenth century: "a taste for literature spread through the body of the people. . . . Multifarious writings produced multifarious strictures, and public criticism reached to such perfection that taste was generally diffused, enlightening those whose occupations had otherwise never permitted them to judge of literary compositions." More particularly; "the invention of Reviews, in the form which they have at length gradually assumed, could not have existed but in the most polished ages of Literature" (I 17). These opinions suggest that by 1775, more or less, English writers and readers had lost much of the cultural insecurity expressed between 1700 and 1720. Hugh Blair in 1783 was willing to extend these affirmations to English prose in general: "The public ear is now so much accustomed to a correct and ornamented Style, that no writer can, with safety, neglect the study of it" (I 407). "Refinement in Language has,

< previous page

page_19

next page >

< previous page

page_20

next page > Page 20

of late years, begun to be much attended to" (I 495). And a sizable number of the writers who puffed current prose did so at the expense of early eighteenth-century prose. According to Nathan Drake, the language of that time was "in general, unharmonious, and inaccurate, clogged with barbarisms, provincial vulgarisms, and cant phraseology." With only one possible exception (Swift), "we possessed scarcely a specimen of good style, from the death of Tillotson in 1694 to the appearance of the Tatlers [in 1709]" (1805: I 38). William Godwin contrasted the "purity and perfection" of English ''in the present reign of king George the third" with "bad taste" in seventeenth-century writers, intolerable prolixity, and a "disjointed style, more resembling the illiterate effusions of the nurse or the rustic, than those of a man of delicate perceptions and classical cultivation" (1797: 37073). As early as 1778 Johnson deplored the quality of the writings of his predecessors: "It is sad stuff, Sir, miserably written, as books generally then were. There is now an elegance of style generally diffused" (Life III 243). Edmund Malone shortly before 1786 alluded to "the incorrect and nerveless style which generally prevailed for a century before Dr. Johnson's energetick writings were known" (Life v 399 n.4). Add to these all the "examples of bad writing" collected from famous early eighteenth-century writers by prescriptive grammars of the 1760s and after.12 A good many critics, however, had reservations about certain tendencies in the prose style of the late eighteenth century. According to Anna Laetitia Barbauld in 1804, Addison's prose may possibly be contaminated by "colloquial phrases" and "the remains of barbarism," but late eighteenth-century prose has "an elaborate pomp, which sets written composition at too great a distance from speech" (III 94). Vicesimus Knox's essay "On Simplicity of Style in Prosaic Compositions" (1782) accuses contemporary English writers of "ill-placed pomp and magnificence." "The greater part seem to have mistaken unwieldy corpulence for robust vigour" (I 75). Robert Alves lists Shaftesbury, Johnson, Hervey's Meditations, and Mrs. Rowe's Letters as exemplars of "pompous" style (278). Mary Wollstonecraft spoke out vigorously against another "tendency" of the times, which she called "flowery diction," and accused authors of having "slided from essays into novels, and from novels into 12 Subsequent references to Boswell's Life of Johnson (1791) will be in the text, abbreviated as here (Life III 243). On the late eighteenth-century preoccupation with finding faults in the best early eighteenth-century writers, see McIntosh 1986 and chapter 8 below.

< previous page

page_20

next page >

< previous page

page_21

next page > Page 21

familiar letters and conversation. These pretty superlatives, dropping glibly from the tongue, vitiate the taste, and create a kind of sickly delicacy that turns away from unadorned truth" (1792: 10). The texts I have quoted in the last few pages, first from the early years of the century and then from the late, suggest that writers were unhappy about the condition of English prose in the first part of the century and believed that it had recovered a measure of correctness and health by 1770 or 1780. I interpret these remarks as prima facie evidence that changes of some kind, whether of syntax, usage, style, preferred vocabulary, or diction, did take place during those eighty or a hundred years.

< previous page

page_21

next page >

< previous page

page_22

next page > Page 22

Chapter 2 Literacy and Politeness: The Gentrification of English Prose Even if there is such a thing as meaning (whatever 'thing' means in this context), its ontological and psychological status is surely more questionable than that of form. (John Lyons, Linguistic Semantics: 1995) What does "the evolution of prose during the eighteenth century" consist of? Can minor alterations in syntax, or in characteristic ways of ending sentences, or in preferred vocabulary, add up to a substantial change in habitual modes of discourse? In the language itself? The changes I shall be describing belong both to historical linguistics and to the history of English prose: some are grammatical, some semantic, some a matter of style. Having described these changes, how can I convince the reader that they were "habitual"? Which modes of discourse were central or typical at which times? In any single decade of the eighteenth century, a great many different varieties of texts were published; and it is sometimes difficult to decide that a given kind is really and truly characteristic or uncharacteristic. In 1710 appeared an essay of which "the language differ[s] only slightly from present-day English," according to Charles Barber, but one can also find texts from the 1770s which sound to other judges positively Elizabethan: "That of ch, as in such; and its like, but stronger expressed by g before e or i generally, and by j before any vowel always"; "A redundant after e, when it serveth not to make e long"; ''This is the next open sound; which as it is narrower, so is it shorter."1 Most histories of English do not see the language as changing much between 1700 and 1800. (An exception: those historians of English who have looked at the eighteenth century as a separate span of time, such as Mats Rydén and Ingrid Tieken.) Many scholars 1 Barber 1993: 199; Bayly 1772. Accedence 6, 10; Grammar 8.

< previous page

page_22

next page >

< previous page

page_23

next page > Page 23

think of the eighteenth century as a waystation to present-day English. One of the best modern histories of the English language, by Barbara Strang (1970), takes the years from 1570 to 1770 as a unit, and this strategy blurs the years from 1700 to 1800, though her book is sensitive to the differences between seventeenth-century and late eighteenth-century English. This chapter will discuss some of the "minor alterations" in syntax, style, idiom, and expression that contribute to the evolution of English prose from 1700 to 1800. First, I derive a model for these alterations from a careful reading of eight texts. By calling these changes "gentrification," I imply that they are determined in many respects by politeness; they make sense as responses to that cultural ideal. Subsequently, I show that literacy could also be a motivation for these changes: they make sense as part of the evolution of a full-dress print culture. Early Eighteenth-Century Prose The word "gentrification" draws an analogy between trendy alterations of buildings or neighborhoods, in the real-estate world of the 1990s, and the cleaning-up or modernization of early eighteenth-century English. Both processes are classconscious. Lindley Murray, author of what was probably the most popular English grammar of all time (1795; c. 200 editions before 1850), gives directions for avoiding pronunciations characteristic of "the lowest of the people" and for imitating "the best speakers" (14). George Campbell's influential Philosophy of Rhetoric (1776) branded such words as bamboozle as "vile" and unfit ''for the company of gentlemen" (169). It is no accident that "propriety" was a key term in prescriptive grammars of the time; like other key terms in eighteenth-century writings on language and literature ("decorum," "correctness," "ease," "wit," "refinement"), it applies both to language and to deportment; the presumption of a system of social rank is deeply implicated in the language itself. On the other hand, most of these minor alterations in syntax, style, idiom, and expression change a text in the direction of writtenness and make it less oral. That is, most of the same features that give late eighteenth-century prose its gentrified character can be reanalysed as ingredients in the new print culture. "Standardization," which seems by definition to encourage formality, precision, and abstractness in

< previous page

page_23

next page >

< previous page

page_24

next page > Page 24

language, is equally a trend towards writtenness and away from the redundancy, sloppiness, and concreteness of speech. And so in the following pages, as in chapter 1, I shall try to acknowledge both the elitist and the egalitarian aspects of the evolution of eighteenth-century prose. Whatever it was that promoted politeness and precision in language may sometimes have served to exclude unschooled writers from the circles of influence and power. Exactly the same forces may sometimes have helped the unschooled to gain access to circles of influence and power by enabling them to write standard English. A more dramatic example of the same forms of empowerment has taken place during the twentieth century in Italy. As recently as four generations ago, dialect speakers were virtually imprisoned in their local communities; but now that schools in every town and village teach Standard Italian, a bright child can climb ladders of prestige no matter what is spoken at home. I start with a detailed analysis of 1,000-word passages from eight English grammars. The first four were published in 1700, 1711, 1711, 1712 (by A. Lane, J. Brightland, J. Greenwood, and M. Mattaire, respectively); the second four in 1784, 1785, 1795, and 1796 (by J. Fell, G. Ussher, L. Murray, and P. Fogg). Every historical study of language runs into problems in locating comparable texts from different eras. Natural languages of any kind are so sensitive to context that no two texts written eighty or ninety years apart are perfectly comparable. In making cross-century comparisons, one tries to hold as many variables constant as possible. These eight English grammars were written for approximately the same sorts of audiences and purposes, handle the same subjects, and voice many of the same sentiments. All eight grammarians had had some classical education and were addressing an audience of school-teachers. I draw my samples first from introductions or prefaces, and subsequently from those dissertations and articles in the text which are free from example-sentences and quotations. Greenwood begins his preface to A Practical English Grammar with all opinion that we encounter again and again in such texts: I Need not, I hope, make any Apology for publishing a Grammar of our Mother Tongue, since it is too plain and evident, how necessary a Performance of this Nature is, and especially for those Persons, who talk for the most part just as they have heard their Parents, Nurses, or Teachers, (who likewise may happen to be none of the best Speakers) talk . . .

< previous page

page_24

next page >

< previous page

page_25

next page > Page 25

The word order or arrangement of that last predicate is unusual: simplified, it reads as follows: 'just as they have heard X (who likewise may happen to be Y) talk.' An eleven-word parenthetical clause has been inserted between the subject of a reduced clause, "Parents, Nurses, or Teachers," and its verb, "talk," giving the sentence a feeling of severe interruptedness. In fact, however, the sentence has just begun; it goes on for another ninety-four words, adding a gerund phrase to what has been quoted above, two more independent clauses, two noun clauses, two adverb clauses, and a relative clause.2 Although it is interrupted, this sentence is loose, the opposite of a periodic sentence. In Aristotle's words, a loose sentence "has no end in itself and only stops when the sense is complete. It is unpleasant because it is endless" (Rhetoric III ix). (A periodic sentence, by contrast, "has a beginning and end in itself, and a magnitude that can be easily grasped.") The word "endless" (apeiron) here seems to refer to the fact that loose sentences keep going past one or more places where they have reached syntactic closure, unpredictably. There are nine or ten points at which Greenwood's 158-word sentence could have ended, having reached syntactic closure after the sixteenth word, after the thirty-first and the sixty-fourth words in the passage quoted above, then again after the seventy-third, ninety-third, 104th, 119th, 126th, 130th, 151st. Loose sentences are more common in colloquial than in formal discourse. They are particularly adapted to expressing thoughts and feelings in the very act or process of coming to mind. They handle apparently unplanned narrative especially well.3 This is also a very long sentence, even for my sample of early eighteenth-century texts, which average about fifty words in length. In Mattaire (1712) the longest sentences are 107, 101, and ninety-four 2 The sentence in Greenwood continues as follows: "without ever taking the Matter into any farther Consideration. It is indeed possible that a Young Gentleman or Lady may be enabled to speak pretty well upon some Subjects, and entertain a Visiter with Discourse that may be agreeable enough: Yet I do not well see how they should write any thing with a tolerable Correctness, unless they have some tast of Grammar, or express themselves clearly, and deliver their Thoughts by Letter or otherwise, so as not to lay themselves open to the Censure of their Friends, for their blameable Spelling or false Syntax" (A3). 3 Starr 1974: 241 Ian Watt's classic study of The Rise of the Novel discusses relations between loose, rambling sentences and formal realism. For "naive empiricism" and the validation of a plain, homely artless prose, see McKeon 1985: 16364; for relations between "the length and disorder of [Defoe's] sentences" and social class, Boulton 1965: 19. For the stylistic virtues of loose sentences, see Christiansen 1978: 2530.

< previous page

page_25

next page >

< previous page

page_26

next page > Page 26

words long. The average length of Lane's sentences is sixty-three words. Two-thousand-word passages from Johnson (Ramblers, nos. 87 and 89) and Burke (Reflections) average 37.5 and 37.8 respectively. Compare the average sentencelength of some well-known modern writers: Joseph Conrad, 57, Henry James, 35, D. H. Lawrence, 20 (Leech and Short 1981: 113); Ernest Hemingway, 28 (Gibson 1966: 35). Edmund Burke sustains what I would call an artful mix of very long and very short sentences: in that same 2,000-word passage he has three sentences with more than ninety words and ten sentences with fewer than fifteen words; whereas Johnson has zero sentences longer than ninety words and only five sentences shorter than fifteen words. Certain features of the four early texts in my sample are more likely to be found in informal prose: homely, idiomatic diction, physical metaphors. Thus A. Lane laments: And generally all Children are utterly averse to go to the Schools, where they find nothing for several years together, but a constant Series of insuperable Difficulties, like one Wave upon the back of another, ready to overwhelm their weak Understandings: and the reason is, because they are forc'd to cleave the Block with the blunt end of the Wedg. (viii) Lane's Preface is the work of a conscientious schoolmaster, and there is no evidence that he was not respectable and learned; but he is perfectly happy to illustrate his argument with the menial and rural task of splitting wood. Lane refers to himself as one who had "been long chain'd" to the "Gallies" of pedagogy and "tugg'd at the Oar for many years" (ix). Similarly, Mattaire tells us that "It is now a-days the miserable Fate of Grammar to be more Whip't than Taught" (iiiiv); Brightland mentions ''the Crutches of any Foreign Ornaments" (Preface, par. 6). One of the doctrines bequeathed to the Renaissance and eighteenth century by classical rhetorics was the "separation of styles," according to which all literate discourse is couched in a "high," "middle," or "low" style (as in Cicero's Orator, see Hendrickson 1905). A reference to "wedges" or to the whipping of schoolboys would ordinarily consign a sentence to the lower end of the spectrum. A syntactic mannerism that we find rather commonly in all four early texts, a construction that automatically makes a sentence "loose," is the trailing which-clause:

< previous page

page_26

next page >

< previous page

page_27

next page > Page 27

The Greeks and Romans writ all their Learned Books in their Mother-Tongue, and always had their Grammars in their own Language, and for that only, and for no other; which made their Application to Learning so easy and successful, that . . . (Lane x) A non-restrictive relative clause tacked onto the end of a sentence cannot follow inevitably or derive necessarily from anything preceding it. Because of what it means to be "non-restrictive," this clause is an extra, a supplement to the rest of the sentence. Trailing clauses are not very noticeable unless they are repeated frequently, as happens in the first, second, fourth, sixth, and seventh sentences in Brightland or the eighth, ninth, tenth, eleventh, twelfth, and fourteenth sentences of Lane. The absence of multiple trailing clauses in our late eighteenth-century prefaces suggests that such constructions are one of the "blemishes" that gentrification aimed to wipe away; but I do not find an explicit rule on them in the prescriptive grammars. I do find remonstrations against extra words at the ends of sentences in at least four of the rhetorics: Lawson (1758: 238), Ward (1759: II 182), Adam Smith (1762: 18), and Blair (1783: I 206, 22324, 233, 239, 259). Almost any conjunction can be used to add an extra clause to what is already a complete sentence; and a series of unanticipated, unprepared-for add-on clauses may result in "overconcatenation." Greenwood's 158-word sentence quoted above may be schematized as follows, with the capital letters filling in between conjunctions and other connectors: 'I need not, I hope, A, since it B how C, and especially D, who E as they F (who G); without H: It is possible that J, and K that may L: Yet I do not M how N, unless O, or P, and Q, so as not R.' Notably absent from this sentence is regular, visible structure, the feel of having been planned out in advance. Credit it with improvised structure, a colloquial on-goingness, traits that prescriptive grammarians had little sympathy with. Older conventions for punctuation may contribute to the sprawling informality of this sentence: it would be three sentences, one seventy-three words, another thirty-one words, another fifty-four words long, if periods had been used in place of those two colons. But contemporary grammarians knew definitely what they wanted a colon to mean: a pause longer than the pause at a semicolon but shorter than the pause at a period. The use of a colon instead of a period where the words that follow belong in some sense with the words that precede is specifically recommended in at least

< previous page

page_27

next page >

< previous page

page_28

next page > Page 28

two mid-century grammars (Kirkby and Fenning). Sometimes compositors decided on the punctuation without regard to the author's wishes or principles. Nevertheless, I do not see how we can treat a text like this as punctuated differently than it is. James Thorpe associates a colon followed by a capital letter with the stately, ruminative "performances" of texts that were typical of reading in a more oral culture (1987: 2032). Loose, informal, and colloquial prose came under heavy fire in the prescriptive grammars, which after 1762 often included small anthologies of errors, solecisms, and infelicities as a warning. The assumption was that "a proper selection of faulty composition is more instructive to the young grammarian, than any rules and examples of propriety that can be given" (Murray 1795: iv). Most of these examples of "bad" English are drawn from the writings of wellknown authors of the first half of the eighteenth century, including Addison, Steele, Pope, Swift, and Bolingbroke. In other words, the gentrification of early eighteenth-century English was actively pursued by such later eighteenthcentury scholars as Lowth, Campbell, Kames, and Blair. The full significance of this fact has not, I think, been appreciated: how often in the history of any of the Western languages have school texts been filled with quotations from the major authors of fifty or seventy-five years earlier as examples of bad writing? It was not only colloquialisms and solecisms that were censured; archaisms also came under fire. ("Irregularities" in language may be the fossilized remnants of regularities from the past.) All three were associated with lower-class usage, because the rising middle class in this period aspired fervently to correctness and politeness. Colloquialisms are linguistic forms and constructions that belong more to spoken than to written English. Solecisms are not "mistakes" or "errors" in any absolute sense; they should in most cases be defined historically, as what contemporary grammarians censure. Archaisms may show up in one of the historical corpora, such as the Helsinki corpus, which sometimes furnish a large enough number of tokens to support strong generalizations about that type (see for example Kytö and Rissanen 1993). As a consequence, certain lively forms of expression in early eighteenth-century prose simply don't appear in our 4,000-word sample from 178496. Here are a dozen or so examples of colloquial or "incorrect" or old-fashioned language from the 1700 to 1712 texts.

< previous page

page_28

next page >

< previous page

page_29

next page > Page 29

Homely, Middle- or Lower-Class Expressions "To write an English Grammar for English Youth, may seem to many . . . a very superfluous and ridiculous thing; but if the Reader have a little patience, I hope to make it appear to all the World, that it is so far from being superfluous, that on the contrary it is the most necessary, and best Expedient . . . that ever was thought of" (Lane 1700: vii). The emphasis, the asseveration of this sentence is heavyfooted and colloquial; these are expressions proper for shopkeepers and servants not for courtly or literary folk: 'so far from X that it is Y . . . the best Expedient that ever was thought of.' Also the three that's in a row are awkward. We find the same kind of lower-middle-class expressions in Greenwood when he writes of "Discourse that may be agreeable enough" (1711: A3). The "blunt end of the Wedg" quoted above from Lane falls in this category, as does Mattaire's lament that ''It is now a-days the miserable Fate of Grammar to be more Whip't than Taught" (1712: iiiiv) I can't imagine that Murray or Fell would allow themselves to use a metaphor as "creatural" as these (Auerbach 1946: 257). "Incorrect" and Awkward Expressions "The Encrease of our Polysyllables . . . are the good effect of this Licentiousness of our Modern Writers" (Brightland 1711: n.p.): the subject and the verb don't agree. "The Ignorance of English can never be a good foundation or ingredient towards disposing of Youth for the Learned Languages. The knowledge of it must serve as an Introduction to them; else 'twill be in vain to expect they'l ever be an Improvement to that" (Mattaire 1712: v): pronominal reference in the second sentence is a mess. Awkward and Archaic Expressions "For which reason after several others" (Greenwood 1711: A3): we would say, "among several others." "This their wrong and hard Notion" (Greenwood 1711: A3v): archaic: Shakespeare habitually used the demonstrative before the possessive, but both Lowth and Murray proscribe it (and see Kytö and Rissanen 1993: 255). "My third Aim that I had in the Writing this Treatise" (Greenwood 1711: A3v): awkward double possessive (my aim that I had); archaic gerund Lowth prescribed omission of the definite article. "But He Writing for Foreigners and in Latin, I have not pursu'd his Method; as not being every way answerable to my Design" (Greenwood 1711: A4): the absolute construction seems more Latin than English; the "as not being answerable" construction is rusty, antique, pedantic. "No such

< previous page

page_29

next page >

< previous page

page_30

next page > Page 30

Thing being to be expected" (Greenwood 1711: A4): an absolute construction rendered more unidiomatic by its complement. "For tho' . . . the Danes had possess'd the Empire of this Nation, yet was there not made any considerable Alteration in the Language, for their Speech was either exactly the same, or at least very near akin to it" (Brightland 1711: A3): the doubly marked antithesis ("For tho' . . . yet was there'') is an old-fashioned locution, as is the inversion of subject and verb after "yet"; awkward disjunction ("either exactly the same, or at least very near akin"); uncertain pronoun reference. "They took up what of the Country they Conquer'd" (Brightland 1711: n.p.): I wonder whether "what of the" (for 'whatever of the') has ever been standard. "Which none ever neglected, but who sometime or other paid very dear for't" (Mattaire 1712: iii): the omission of an antecedent for the relative pronoun is normal in Elizabethan English but archaic by 1770. "But yet i am not able to find any tolerable reason, why even any station or sex should be excluded" (Mattaire 1712: v): it is still possible in 1712 to take an independent line in the matter of capitalization of the first-person pronoun. "Even any" is colloquial. "If children did learn nothing" (Mattaire 1712: vi): pleonastic do, common in the sixteenth century but gradually eliminated in the eighteenth (Tieken 1987). I have quoted extensively from these four texts not only to call attention to particular features of grammar and usage but also to convey some sense of the rhythm and character of early eighteenth-century English. Late eighteenth-century prose is less interrupted than early: subject, auxiliary, verb, and complement are more likely to follow close on each other's heels. Late eighteenth-century prose is more periodic and less loose than early eighteenth-century prose; and the trailing non-restrictive relative clause that is so frequently spliced onto the end of a sentence by Greenwood or Lane, making the sentence even looser than it was, scarcely exists in Fogg, Fell, and Murray: 30% of the sentences in our 4,000 words of early eighteenth-century prose end with a non-restrictive relative clause, versus only 7% of sentences from late in the century. Colloquial expressions are commoner in early than in late eighteenth-century prose, and so are explicit connectives of the kind that a listening audience could discern easily, coordinating conjunctions used to start a new sentence (not merely a new clause). Louis Milic's quantitative study of Swift (1967a) picked up the frequency with which his sentences begin with coordinating conjunctions as a

< previous page

page_30

next page >

< previous page

page_31

next page > Page 31

distinctive trait; surely it is related to the spokenness of Swift's prose. Late Eighteenth-Century Prose Colloquialisms and archaisms are almost entirely absent in our four samples of late eighteenth-century prose, and a new fussiness makes itself felt, a more abstract vocabulary, more passive-voice verbs. To some readers these texts seem over-precise; their authors dot every syntactic i and cross every syntactic t. Late eighteenth-century sentences don't ramble on and on in the same aimless manner as some early eighteenth-century sentences. Four notable traits: Periodic Sentences Paragraph 4 of Fell's Preface (1784) opens with a tribute to "many valuable compositions" published in English during "the last thirty or forty years," in ''all the important branches of science and art" (vi). "All kinds of subjects have been skilfully treated," and "many works of taste and genius have been written"; yet perhaps it will appear, upon a careful view of these compositions, that whatsoever credit their authors are entitled to, for acuteness of understanding, strength of imagination, delicacy of taste, or energy of passion; there are but few of them that deserve the praise of having expressed themselves in a pure and genuine strain of English. (vi) This is a periodic sentence: it saves key semantic and syntactic components for last. We know, moreover, that it was planned ahead because the two sentences just before it build towards the climactic message of its last dozen words, and so does the orderly series of abstractions ("delicacy of taste" etc.) that sounds to me like a diluted imitation of Johnson. Periodicity is also promoted by use of "there" to invert normal subject-verb word order. The early eighteenth-century writers we sampled did not attempt symmetrical and orderly series or extended periodic sentences. I shall argue (as in Kernan 1987: 173) that these devices were comparatively rare in 1710 and comparatively common by 1790. Balanced Antitheses "The works of our ablest grammarians are allowed to be too voluminous and abstruse for the capacities of children, and more adapted to finish the scholar than to initiate and instruct the young beginner" (Ussher 1785: v): a self-conscious verbal arrangement (again, perhaps in imitation of Johnson), an antithesis the two sides of which are grammatically as well as conceptually

< previous page

page_31

next page >

< previous page

page_32

next page > Page 32

balanced. Two paragraphs further on Ussher gives us a Johnsonian triplet: "who have investigated its nature, remarked its peculiar idioms, and reduced it to grammatical precision" (vi). Polysyllables, Gentility, Purple Prose Some late eighteenth-century texts use polysyllabic "hard" words where ordinary words would do perfectly well (see Sutherland 1957: 81): "voluminous and abstruse" (Ussher 1785: v); ''prosecuting such additional improvements in language, as may be judged useful and proper" (Murray 1795: v); "so rich, so appropriated a diversity of expression" (Fell 1784: x); "according to the venerable relation of the Hebrews" (Fogg 1792: 135: = 'according to the Old Testament'); "extirpate," "ratiocination," "intermixture" (Fogg 1792: 13637), and many more. Some of the fancy words in these late eighteenth-century texts seem intended to be not just polysyllabic but also genteel. There are traces of "courtly" diction in these prefaces, as when Fell "begs leave" to declare that he never intended his grammar to compete with "ingenious tracts" that "the Public has been favoured with of late years" and confesses his "obligations" to Lowth (v). Contrast the ceremonious modesty of these late prefaces with the vehemence of Lane and Mattaire. Murray says that "It may be proper to remark" (14) and that a "judicious" quotation "may, perhaps, be properly introduced on the present occasion" (15). There are dozens of "perhaps's" in the 1790s, hardly any in the 1710s. The point at which polysyllabic and genteel-pedantic prose turns into "purple" prose (over-written, excessively rich, hyper-adjectival, melodramatic, over-rhetorical) is not always easy to identify. Murray makes "a point of no small importance," which, "if scrupulously regarded," would "advance the best interests of society, by cherishing the innocence and virtue of the rising generation" (v). The diction here is orotund. George Kennedy cautions against applying the word "rhetorical" to literary texts, except perhaps to those that abound in the "most obvious" tropes such as rhetorical question and paralepsis (1972: 391); there is plenty of "obvious" artifice in late eighteenth-century prose. Nominalizations, Abstractions The first paragraph of Murray's Introduction illustrates some relations between verbs and nouns (and more generally between verbals and nominals) that seem significant: When the number* and variety of English Grammars already published, and the ability* with which some of them are written, are considered, little

< previous page

page_32

next page >

< previous page

page_33

next page > Page 33

can be expected from a new compilation, besides a careful selection of the most useful matter*, and some degree* of improvement in the mode* of adapting it to the understanding, and the gradual progress of learners. In these respects something, perhaps, may yet be done, for the ease* and advantage of young persons. (iii) Note first that all four finite verbs in this seventy-six-word paragraph are in the passive voice. Then look at the nouns: only three of seventeen could be considered concrete ("Grammars," "learners," "persons"); all the rest are abstractions, either of the ordinary untouchable, untaste-able, inaudible sort or of a sort we may call "deverbals.'' I have starred six ordinary non-sensible abstractions in the two sentences quoted above; the other eight abstractions are deverbal, i.e., derived from a root verb. Although we may know a good deal about the derivation of a deverbal, it is not clear just what makes some of them quite abstract ("variety," "improvement," "understanding," "progress," "respects," "advantage"), and some of them less so ("compilation," "selection").4 Noun and verb in English may be taken as polar opposites, with finite action verbs at one end of the spectrum and abstract nouns at the other. A text that depends heavily on nouns, that seems to shy away from action verbs, may be called "nominal." A graded continuum running from the most verbal to the most nominal constructions might take approximately the following shape: first action verbs; then a cluster of more nominal verbs (passive voice, or stative verbs), then the verbs to have and be; then a group of half-verb-half-noun constructions, such as infinitives and dummy-verb-plus-deverbal locutions (to "make a decision" rather than "to decide"); then nominals and nouns of increasing abstractness. The gentrification of English prose, according to the hypothesis argued here, includes in part a shift towards the nominal end of the spectrum, in part a rearrangement of nominal features. A comparison of Murray's opening paragraph with Greenwood's opening sentence (both quoted above) suggests that the work of predication is not distributed in the same way in late eighteenth-century texts as it is in earlier prose. Deverbals bear a heavier 4 "Compilation" and "selection" may denote, at their most concrete, a physical object which is the result of the action or event denoted by their parent (or daughter) verb; at their most abstract they may refer to a mental event. Deverbals referring to "physical" events that are available to sense perception may be considered concrete: a "dance," a "fall," a "smell." See also Marchand 1969: 303.

< previous page

page_33

next page >

< previous page

page_34

next page > Page 34

burden of the central meaning in 1785 than they do in 1711. In the first seventy-three words of the 1711 preface there are seven finite verbs, vs. Murray's four, all in the passive voice. Greenwood has seven prepositional phrases in seven clauses; Murray fourteen prepositional phrases in four clauses. Another way of making a similar comparison between that long sentence in Greenwood (p. 24 above) and these two of Murray is in terms of "lexical density": the average number of lexical words (as opposed to function words) per clause (Halliday 1989: 67). Murray's sentences are shorter than Greenwood's, but his clauses are longer, and their lexical density is about twice as high (ten per clause versus five). I have been speaking of low- or middle-class diction in early eighteenth-century prose, and of polite, high-falutin words in late, as if the social and linguistic hierarchies were isomorphic, which of course they are not. But the elevated, "closed, homogeneous, monumental" qualities that Bakhtin ascribed to "high official culture" were just what late eighteenth-century writers most frequently aspired to; and the open, heterogeneous subversiveness of carnival lurks behind some of Swift's and Arbuthnot's and Defoe's best prose (Stallybrass and White 1986: 2122). Orality and Writtenness Since writing consists entirely of shapes, and speech entirely of noises, the two may be said to "bear no resemblance to each other whatever" (Abercrombie 1967: 1). A visitor from Saturn might have difficulty finding anything in common between that stream of grunts, hisses, and clicks, on the one hand, and this set of lines and dots. There is no doubt, however, that when writing becomes part of the socio-economic apparatus of a community, institutional practices change (Goody 1987: 25560; Goody 1986: 4748). It is possible that what we have been referring to as gentrification came about because during the years from 1700 to 1800 the literate community was gradually feeling more and more at home in the world of print more and more writers chose to express themselves in styles appropriate to writing not speech. If so, if English as it appears in printed books became less oral between 1700 and 1800, that change would seem to be an exception to a historical trend. According to computer-based studies by

< previous page

page_34

next page >

< previous page

page_35

next page > Page 35

Douglas Biber and Edward Finegan (1988, 1989, 1995), the general "drift" of English since 1600 has been towards orality except for the eighteenth century. "Relatively oral, direct styles arose in the 17th and 18th centuries to meet the functional demands" of an expanding readership and a (presumably) more democratic society (1989: 516), but there was enough resistance to this general trend to register unmistakably in a factor analysis of 120,000 words of texts. Biber's research recognizes that patterns of co-occurrence of features are more significant, in the long run, than any single feature or set of features. His premise is that "co-occurrence reflects shared function" (1989: 488); and most of the clusters of co-occurring features the computer came up with are related to orality/literacy. Biber's 1995 book refines these generalizations and extends them to non-European languages. "Apart from dialogue, most [written] registers [i.e., prose genres] evolve to become even more distinct from speech over the first 100200 years of their history" (297; see also Atkinson 1992): that is, an emerging print culture takes pains to make its written genres more obviously written and less like speech. That seems to be what happened in eighteenth-century Britain. However, since 1800 all registers except the most specialized (medical, scientific, and legal prose) have responded to the need for accessibility and evolved towards speech (297300). We can certainly make an argument that European print culture came of age in the eighteenth century. London by 1780 provided a comfortable home to most of the institutions of literacy: magazines and daily newspapers, bibliographies and anthologies, a functioning (but not monopolistic) copyright law, professional writers and publishers and editors all of which were in their infancy in 1700. Perhaps more important for the English language as a whole, by the end of the century these institutions could be found throughout Great Britain, in towns and even villages and country homes up and down the island, thanks to improvements in transportation and communication. The rise of the familiar letter as a genre coincided precisely with the development of postal service. The rage for turnpikes and canals 415 turnpike acts were passed between 1750 and 1780; by 1790 England could boast of 2,223 miles of canals! (Langford 1989: 391414) broke down the isolation of partially literate communities all over England. Quite possibly, then, we must reckon with increased literacy as a factor in the evolution of English prose in the eighteenth century.

< previous page

page_35

next page >

< previous page

page_36

next page > Page 36

Ivan Kalmar (1985) has made a case for literacy in contemporary language change: Inuktitut, an Eskimo language, as it acquires literacy, seems to be changing from a "pragmatic" mode to a "syntactic" mode; it is beginning to use subordination in new ways. We know more about new literacy in the nineteenth century than in the eighteenth (see Thompson 1963; Graft 1987), but it does not seem unreasonable to assume that as printed texts infiltrated daily life and ordinary occupations, ordinary English usage changed in response. What effects could increasing literacy in Great Britain have on the styles and strategies of individual writers? In the words of Walter Ong, "new media" do not "annihilate their antecedents. When men [and women] learned to write, they continued to talk." "Habits of thought and expression tracing back to preliterate situations or practice, or deriving from the dominance of the oral as a medium in a given culture, or indicating a reluctance or inability to dissociate the written medium from the spoken" linger on, in seventeenth- and in eighteenth-century Britain (1971: 2526). David Cressy reminds us that there was little need for literacy in rural life of the time. 73%91% of farmers in four English regions, 15601730, made marks not signatures on depositions. ''Much of the cultural life of the seventeenth century [and, by extension, the eighteenth] was not strictly oral or literate, but a combination of both," in the form of reading aloud and listening to sermons (1983: 27, 34). Since I have painted my picture of gentrification in terms of "features," one way to decide whether gentrification relates to literacy is to review those features in the light of what we know about written as opposed to spoken English. Wallace Chafe, comparing speech with writing, discusses more than forty grammatical elements that seem to differentiate between these two media, Douglas Biber more than sixty. One can analyse most of the differences between the 1710 texts and the 1790 texts in terms of differences between the two media themselves (speech and writing) or their functions. Since the medium of speech is physical, interactive, and comparatively spontaneous (that is, made up as we go along), it is perfectly reasonable that a more oral style will be more interrupted than a more "written" style. And the solecisms, awkwardnesses, and incorrectness of the 1710 texts may also be considered oral, since most of us can't say exactly what we mean the first time we try. Talk is loose, according to Erving Goffman; truly appropriate utterances are the

< previous page

page_36

next page >

< previous page

page_37

next page > Page 37

exception not the rule. The structural looseness that Aristotle considered unpleasing may be inevitable in speech to the extent that speech allows for second thoughts and changes of opinion in mid-sentence. In fact, of course, sentenceboundaries themselves are fluid and imprecise in ordinary talk (because, among other reasons, turn-taking is signaled by silence and "adjacency pairs" not by syntactic closure; so the issue of periodicity and looseness may not arise.5 When I re-read our four 1700-11 texts with orality in mind, I find two speech-specific traits that I did not find before. Consider the redundancies of the following: and for that only, and for no other . . . (Lane x) for several years together . . . (Lane viii) so far from being superfluous, that on the contrary . . . (Lane vii) Doublets, pairs of almost synonymous words where one would do, also qualify as a form of redundancy: "strictly and properly" (Brightland 1711: A3); "barren and deficient" (Brightland 1711: A4); "plain and evident" (Greenwood 1711: xx). From one point of view, beginning a sentence with the coordinating conjunction "and" is also tautological, since the fact that the text has continued is in itself evidence that this new sentence is being added to the previous sentence. Both correlative conjunctions and initial coordinating conjunctions may answer to communicative needs of speech, in that they give an early and unmistakable signal that this sentence is connected to the previous one. Perhaps the pleonastic do is also a form of redundancy. In Chafe's samples of real-life conversation, about four times as many sentences open with coordinating conjunctions as in his written texts. In Lane, I found traces of another orality: proverbs and proverbial expressions, a major depository of tradition and experience in oral cultures. "But yet he would not be mistaken, as if he thought himself any taller than those who went before him," says Lane (ix), and later he talks of "unconnected and loose Words, or Terminations, which like Ropes of Sand, are no sooner done but undone" (xiii). Since proverbs are an oral distillation of popular wisdom, writers who were trying to be more gentrified or more literate would have avoided them. Sentences in the written medium can be and often are more 5 Samuels 1972: 9; Goffman 1974: 501; Schegloff and Sacks 1973; Schegloff 1990.

< previous page

page_37

next page >

< previous page

page_38

next page > Page 38

carefully planned and revised than sentences or other groups of words in speech, and so we may more reasonably expect special effects of balance, antithesis, and periodicity. The normal, central functions of speech are social, emotional, agonistic, and pragmatic. One can see that this fact might foster informal language, homely idioms, and physical metaphors. The normal, central functions of writing are to inform, analyse, record, and argue. Logic enters into at least two of these; abstractions and categories play a role in all four. Polysyllables are very often abstractions, learned or Latinate or specialized words, more suitable to analysis than to the rough and tumble of ordinary talk. According to Wallace Chafe, deverbal nouns and other nominalizations are far more common in writing than in speech (55.5 per thousand words, versus 4.8 per thousand). In Biber's lists, long words, abstractions, and a high proportion of prepositional phrases are all more common in writing than in speech. In most respects the changes associated with gentrification seem to run closely parallel to those associated with the development of literacy. This is not surprising, given the amount of overlap between literacy and social class. We should not expect any single factor to dominate socio-historical events as complex as language change. Microscope and Telescope Historical style-studies do not easily escape from uncertainties inherent in the facts that it is difficult to do justice to the individual character of the language of any text, even a brief one, and that at the same time no sampling however extensive can do justice to the complexity and variety of the language in a given period or decade or year. Even a long lifetime would probably not be long enough to perform a minute and nuanced analysis on a "full" sampling of all texts published in the first and last quarters of the eighteenth century. But disproving hypotheses like those I offer here is not easy because any counterevidence can be classified as an exception to them. In this sense the hypotheses of this chapter are both unprovable and unfalsifiable. Each of the eight writers examined here has an idiolect, traits that differentiate him from the rest and from the norm I have posited for the early or the late eighteenth century. Mattaire, for example, at several points makes skillful use of antithesis:

< previous page

page_38

next page >

< previous page

page_39

next page > Page 39

. . . the Youths are forced to learn, what they can't understand; being hurried into Latin, before they are well able to read English: as if this last were so despicable, that it needed not, or so barbarous, that it could not be digested into a Grammatical Method. (iv) Never mind that "needed not" doesn't quite fit with "be digested" as "could not" does (though this is the kind of minor irregularity that would have been picked out for correction by the prescriptive grammarians); Mattaire packs a good deal of energy into the neatly arranged contrast in this sentence. But none of the other three early eighteenth-century writers analysed here seems interested in antithesis. Brightland supplies another example of idiosyncratic style; he exemplifies the very copiousness (of vocabulary) he praises. "Conquestor" is the word he applies to William the First, and one reason he gives for linguistic change since the Anglo-Saxon era is "the Longuinquity of Time.'' The English lexicon, he writes, enjoys "a numerous Medley of Exotic" terms, plus "innumerable Shoals of stranger Words" (1711: A3v and facing). Studies of language depend almost inevitably on sampling of one kind or another, and the strengths or limitations of any particular study derive in part from sampling strategies. A large sample, such as the two million words in the Helsinki Corpus, offers major advantages. The Early Modern British English section of the Helsinki Corpus (for the years 15001710) chose its texts in order to be "representative" of "the language"; so it includes law statutes, sermons, travel books, correspondence, jest books, handbooks (e.g., Turner, A New Boke of the Natures and Properties of All Wines, 1568), and diaries; and it excludes most fiction, poetry, and translations (Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg 1989). My approach to the evolution of English takes into account certain qualities and traits that cannot readily be tagged into a corpus, hence cannot be searched for or analysed by computer. I assume that some of the features that come to light only through inch-by-inch examination will turn out to be as important as or more important than the features that a computer can handle, because an inch-by-inch analysis can be sensitive to nuances, to unique traits, and to context. So I test every sentence on my verbal palate for distinctive flavors. That is, I recognize qualities like Brightland's copiousness or Mattaire's fondness for antithesis, or (in chapter 3) Burke's rhetoricity, Shaftesbury's cloudiness, Astell's sense of humor.

< previous page

page_39

next page >

< previous page

page_40

next page > Page 40

Elizabeth Traugott and Mary Louise Pratt point out that we can write "a grammar of a text," that is, gain general insights into its syntax and semantics and pragmatics by looking at "the most detailed facts of [its] language" (1980: 24). The Traugott/Pratt approach works best when the grammar of the text is in some interesting way ''deviant" from the grammar of the language (33). Some of the best literary criticism, including literary history and style-studies (e.g., Auerbach 1946), employs strategies of analysis similar to what I pursue here basing, that is, large generalizations on small samples. This form of style-studies has something in common with periodization as a way of thinking about the past. "Period styles" are expected to apply to most people writing during the span of years they cover. An experienced reader feels intuitively that texts, sometimes very brief texts, by many different writers at certain periods have features in common. We are convinced that if we were confronted with, say, ten short pieces of prose we had never seen before, and asked to date them, we could place eight out of ten within fifty years and give what seem to us convincing reasons for our judgments. Quite often, however, the period style that one critic has described fails to be recognized by another critic; and the idea that any one style can be truly characteristic of any one age has come under fire (Milic 1967b). Finally, this form of style-studies overlaps intriguingly with some of the most elegant recent historical semantics in English. Elizabeth Traugott's research (1982, 1989, 1990, 1991) is limited to a relatively small number of sentences, distributed over the centuries, each sentence using one of a relatively small number of single words. Her results raise the possibility that semantic change in English undergoes something like "gentrification." That is, some of the differences between early and late eighteenth-century prose correspond to differences between Middle English and Early Modern meanings of words; gentrification looks like a concentrated, stylistic version of more general trends in the lexicon. As part of the evolution of modern (or, in some cases, early modern) English, a great many words add to their "propositional" or externally descriptive meanings, additional meanings that are subjective, expressive, and "textual." For example, the word just when borrowed from Middle French meant "righteous; fitting; precise," and only gradually acquired its metalinguistic meanings as a downtoner: "It's just a

< previous page

page_40

next page >

< previous page

page_41

next page > Page 41

letter from my sister [not a love-letter from my fiancée]." Late eighteenth-century prose tends to be more selfconscious than early, more open to metalinguistic readings. A closely related change is towards abstractness: the verb assume at first meant "to put on" (e.g., clothing) and only later (the date of the citation is 1714) came to mean "to claim that something is the case" (1990: 5089). The trend towards purple prose in the eighteenth century may correspond to a more general semantic trend which Langacker (1986) and Traugott call ''subjectification": to go originally meant "to walk"; its subjective meaning came later, "to be about to," as in "he was going to answer but decided not to." Why no statistical tables in this chapter? If late eighteenth-century prose has "more" nominalizations and polysyllables, if in early eighteenth-century prose "more" sentences begin with coordinating conjunctions and end with non-restrictive relative clauses, why not count these features and the others that are countable? An earlier version of parts of this chapter (1992) includes a table with the numbers of sentences, of words, of clauses, of passive-voice verbs, and other variables, for each of these eight texts plus those of Paine and Defoe discussed in chapter 3. And I spent a good deal of time trying to extend that table to the texts surveyed in chapter 3. But the more numbers I accumulated, the more misleading and unreliable they began to seem. Nominalizations come in so many different forms that without a complicated and hair-splitting apparatus for classifying them no statistic would be meaningful. Most of the features I could count vary by author and genre (register) as much as they vary for historical period; and my samples are too small to support real statistics.

< previous page

page_41

next page >

< previous page

page_42

next page > Page 42

Chapter 3 Testing the Model The more we know about how intelligence is communicated from one head to another, the less inclined we are to dismiss any part of it as secondary. (Dwight Bolinger, Intonation and its Parts: 1986) How representative are the teaspoonfuls of prose analysed in chapter 2, 8,000 words drawn from the great rivers of English published between 1700 and 1725, or between 1775 and 1800? Those who write grammars for schools are probably more sensitive to the orderliness of their prose than most people, and more conscious of correctness and formality. If gentrification was a linguistic as well as a stylistic phenomenon, if it affected most of the prose of the time, it would show up in proletarian as well as in academic texts, in novels and in stage plays, in philosophers and poets. Changes that look like gentrification may be detected by relatively cursory examination of major authors from the two ends of the century: Sheridan's dialogue is cleaner and more elegant than Steele's; Jane Austen's sentences are more periodic and her paragraphs more coherent than Defoe's; Godwin's critical essays are fussier and more prolix and more precise than John Dennis's. But what about the most careful and sophisticated writers of the first two decades of the eighteenth century, such as the third Earl of Shaftesbury or Alexander Pope? What about less-educated writers of the last two decades of the century? The texts I have chosen to test the "gentrification and literacy" model are intended to be both representative and diverse; they speak for their age, but with more than one voice. I treat them, a total of nine authors, more or less in pairs, one each from the beginning of the century and the end. This means that each pair must be as compare-able as possible: similar in genre, subject matter, occasion, purpose, audience. In practice, however, perfect comparability

< previous page

page_42

next page >

< previous page

page_43

next page > Page 43

simply does not exist. I begin with 1,000-word excerpts from Defoe and Paine, Pope and Wordsworth, Astell and Wollstonecraft. As I worked on my 1,000-word passages, however, I became aware of the limitations of this approach; parsing every sentence picks up details, and may enable us to identify trends, especially in minor authors such as the eight grammarians of chapter 2, but it cannot handle a major oeuvre. The need for breadth became obvious when I tried to assess Jonathan Swift and Edmund Burke, whose writings are fully realized in many directions, for many different purposes. I could not do justice to the quality of literacy or orality (or gentrification) in these two authors without examining much larger samples. At the beginning of this chapter I am walking slowly from one sentence in Defoe and Paine to the next; at the end, I am cruising through many pages of Shaftesbury and Burke, taking into account biographical and cultural constraints on what they wrote and why. Defoe and Paine Analysis of political tracts by Daniel Defoe (16601731) and Thomas Paine (17371809) suggests that gentrification did indeed extend beyond the ranks of the well-educated elite, though not precisely in the ways we might expect. Paine and Defoe were not from the lowest ranks of society, by any means. The very lowest classes were busy fighting for food and shelter day by day, and most of them had never had an opportunity to learn to read or write in the first place. But both Paine and Defoe are considered men of the people who addressed themselves to a popular audience. Neither went to a university; neither had a classical education. So as to display these two men writing on the same or similar issues, I settled on a January 1706 number of The Review in which Defoe discusses petitions to Parliament, and on the first 1,000 words of Rights of Man (1791); both texts deal with the rights of common citizens in relation to parliamentary authority. Defoe's prose is not interrupted in the way Lane's and Greenwood's is, but it is irregular, sometimes disorderly, and loose. Five of Defoe's eighteen sentences meander along for 85, 98, 108, 112, and 138 words before reaching a full stop, adding an adverb clause here, an independent clause there, quite un-inevitably. Paine's sentences are shorter, smoother, and mostly periodic (either in whole or in

< previous page

page_43

next page >

< previous page

page_44

next page > Page 44

part). Both writers commit solecisms. One of Paine's contemporaries, Sir Brooke Boothby, accused him of writing "in defiance of grammar." Horace Walpole labeled him as "coarse." The Monthly Review (1791) found his language "ungrammatical, and often debased by vulgar phraseology" (Boulton 1963: 147, 13738). But homely asseverations and archaisms are a good deal more evident in Defoe than in Paine. "All our Civil Rights are not subjected, no not to Parliament," says Defoe. Though Paine's tone is more formal, he does use colloquial expressions every so often: "one of the best-hearted men that lives''. The similarities between these two may count as common denominators for the best proletarian prose of the eighteenth century. Both Paine and Defoe violate the rules of prescriptive grammar (if not quite in the same way). Neither man ends sentences habitually with a non-restrictive relative clause, or depends on passive voice; the commonest finite verbs in both are to be and to have. Both show considerable rhetorical skill: Defoe in the subordination of his ideas within a logical argument ("though X, yet Y, because Z") and in effective and orderly series ("to lead, direct, command, much less threaten or speak roughly to them, is an Insolence destructive of the very Nature of Government"); Paine by a kind of relentless iteration ("There never did, there never will, and there never can exist a parliament, or any description of men, or any generation of men, in any country, possessed of the right or the power of binding and controlling posterity to the 'end of time' "). Both marry pathos and logos, conveying to every reader the strength of their feelings on difficult political issues. The major differences between these two, differences of context and argument aside, can, I think, be described as well in terms of gentrification as in other terms. Paine's prose is smoother, more neatly articulated, more periodic, more formal, somewhat more puffed up, and, in places, slightly tinged with purple. Four of his twenty-eight full sentences are periodic, and another six either begin or end with extensive periodic structures. Boulton feels that self-consciously "literary" and "inflated" passages in Rights of Man are "not normal" (1963: 148). I'm not sure I agree, though I wholly concur with Boulton's high estimate of the value of Paine's simpler sentences. It seems to me that Paine was writing at a time when English prose could hardly avoid certain kinds of "inflation," though his prose also benefited from the increased clarity and orderliness

< previous page

page_44

next page >

< previous page

page_45

next page > Page 45

that gentrification aimed at. Consider the opening sentence of Rights of Man: Among the incivilities by which nations or individuals provoke and irritate each other, Mr Burke's pamphlet on the French Revolution is an extraordinary instance. This is a periodic sentence, and it got that way by a deliberate change in the ordinary word order of English, which would have placed the opening prepositional phrase after the word it modifies ("Mr. Burke's pamphlet on the French Revolution is an extraordinary instance of the incivilities by which nations or individuals provoke and irritate each other"). Incivilities is quite a fancy word. The next sentence ends with Johnsonian balance ("a conduct that cannot be pardoned on the score of manners, nor justified on that of policy"). Two sentences further on, a lovely series of abstractions become agents ("everything which rancour, prejudice, ignorance, or knowledge could suggest, are poured forth in the copious fury of near four hundred pages"). "Near" for ''nearly" is colloquial or archaic, and had been declared a solecism thirty years or so before; "are" should be "is"; but these "errors" do not spoil the general effect of well-organized rhetoric. To my ear, the rhetoric in Paine can sometimes seem overdone, overwritten, even purple. The sentence just quoted is an example. Consider also the alliteration in "of the same marvellous and monstrous kind," and the hyperbole in the charge that Burke "applies the poison drawn from his horrid principles." Pope and Wordsworth A pair of introductory essays by young poets, both anxious to make the right impression on the reading public: Pope's Preface to the Works of 1717, and Wordsworth's Preface to the 1800 edition of the Lyrical Ballads. Both bear the signs of scrupulous revision: that is, highly-wrought diction and style in the 1717 preface; and a cloud of pre-publication variants and emendations recorded by Wordsworth's editors. Pope was twenty-nine when his preface was published, Wordsworth thirty. Pope's sentences are not particularly long, or loose, or periodic. There are other traditions of elegance and craft in prose than the periodic one, and Pope is pursuing balance, antithesis, and wit. Paragraph one reads as follows:

< previous page

page_45

next page >

< previous page

page_46

next page > Page 46

I am inclined to think that both the writers of books, and the readers of them, are generally not a little unreasonable in their expectations. The first seem to fancy that the world must approve whatever they produce, and the latter to imagine that authors are obliged to please them at any rate. Methinks as on the one hand, no single man is born with a right of controuling the opinions of all the rest; so on the other, the world has no title to demand, that the whole care and time of any particular person should be sacrificed to its entertainment. Therefore I cannot but believe that writers and readers are under equal obligations, for as much fame, or pleasure, as each affords the other. (3) Every sentence in this paragraph depends on an opposition between writers/authors/poets on the one hand, and readers/critics/the world on the other. In the final sentence of the paragraph, the balance is adjusted to an equilibrium by a perfect match between the syntax of correlative subordinators, as . . . as, and correlative determiners, each . . . the other.1 Balance and antithesis of this sort is a staple of Restoration wit. Here is Congreve's Fainall in Act 1 of The Way of the World, resorting to the same correlative subordinators (for paradox) as Pope: "Be half as well acquainted with her charms as you are with her defects, and my life on't, you are your own man again." And for a fairly heavy-footed antithesis a few speeches later Fainall uses correlative determiners: "One will melt in your mouth, and t'other set your teeth on edge; one is all pulp, and the other all core." Pope's Preface in paragraphs two to four continues to ring changes on the polarity between writers and readers. The affairs of both poet and critic are described as those "of idle men who write in their closets, and of idle men who read there." Antitheses of this kind are framed as paradox, or apparent contradiction, so as to express disdain or disparagement or amusement. Their home territories were the same "court circles of the Renaissance'' that bequeathed to Pope the hauteur with which he dismisses, in this paragraph, the world's expectations and authors' hopes (Mack 1985: 335). One of the most interesting aspects of the syntax of these first paragraphs of Pope's Preface is their predilection for noun clauses used as the objects of verbs of thinking, believing, acknowledging, wondering, demanding, fancying, supposing: "I am inclined to think that"; "seem to fancy that"; "the latter to imagine that"; "Methinks . . . [that] the world"; "I cannot but believe that," and so on for a 1 For the grammar of these two correlative constructions, see Quirk et al. 1985: 450, 999.

< previous page

page_46

next page >

< previous page

page_47

next page > Page 47

total of eleven such constructions in eight sentences. That-clauses of this type are propositions. They offer a truth about something. The verbs of thinking, believing, hoping, etc., allow Pope to entertain these propositions as someone's thought, belief, or hope, not as received truths. Pope, or his persona for this text, is offering to the reader, tentatively, a series of descriptions of what life is like, each ticketed with its sponsor's name and graded for probability. The intention is to lay out premises for agreement between Pope and his readers, an agreement that will justify his appearance in print even if readers may not like everything they read. And so the functions of style and syntax in these opening paragraphs are rhetorical they serve ethos; they are designed "to render [the speaker] worthy of confidence" (Aristotle I ii 4). They express the extreme self-consciousness of this writer. He knows, indeed he tells us in paragraph seven, that "The life of a Wit is a warfare upon earth"; surviving this warfare depends on reconciliation, on balancing violently opposed opinions; this is not the time for loose sentences no matter how charmingly spontaneous. Abstractions play a special role here. Like the potentially negative opinions of readers, they must be allowed for, controlled; and the strategy Pope pursues is measurement, allocation, a judicious adjustment of quantities of qualities: "as much fame or pleasure as"; "[enough] humanity to reflect"; "too well bred to shock them with a truth''; "so much diffidence, as not to reap any great satisfaction." The last thing we can expect from a style like this is anything vulgar or low. It wholly eschews physical metaphors and homely diction. However, even though the tradition of wit within which Pope writes is aristocratic, it is not grand or pompous; and Pope's diction has enough colloquial elements to support the mild facetiousness of his appeal to an ingenuous readership. This is something like the "raillery" that we shall find in Shaftesbury, an upper-class mode imitated by Boswell in his Dedication to the second edition of the Life of Johnson. Hence the large number of firstperson pronouns; hence the informal "amplifiers" and "downtoners": "I am pretty certain"; "if [his genius] be never so great" (my italics).2 Additional colloquialisms: 2 See Life I xx. First-person pronouns appear on both Biber's and Chafe's lists of the grammatical features of oral prose. For amplifiers and downtowners as wordclasses, see Quirk et al. 1985: 445. By mid-century such colloquialisms may have seemed objectionable; Warburton emended "never so" to "ever so" in his 1751 edition of Pope.

< previous page

page_47

next page >

< previous page

page_48

next page > Page 48

please them at any rate. Yet sure upon the whole . . . now if he happens to write ill . . . ["now" at the beginning of a sentence takes the reader into confidence] which generally their Booksellers are the first that inform them of [ending with a preposition]; and additional informalities: what is the hardest case imaginable . . . the poor man is all the while trembling with the fear of . . . [even this mild attempt at facetiousness departs slightly from high formality] living thus in a course of flattery . . . [the medical metaphor is a joke] it is ten to one but he must give up all . . . [the central context for giving odds at this time was gambling, an aristocratic amusement.] In one sentence Pope's anxiety about what people think of him clouds his meaning: I could wish people would believe what I am pretty certain they will not, that I have been less concern'd about Fame than I durst declare till this occasion, when methinks I should find more credit than I could heretofore. (6) There are twenty-five first-person pronouns in this paragraph. The tense smile with which Pope tries to appease his critics fades a little in paragraph eight, an appeal to the example of "the Ancients," but re-appears in paragraph eleven: "For what I have publish'd, I can only hope to be pardon'd; but for what I have burn'd, I deserve to be prais'd." The antiquated character of Pope's wit can be detected in the jest with which he begins paragraph 14, the last: "But if this publication be only a more solemn Funeral of my Remains, I desire it may be known that I die in charity" which echoes the opening of Donne's Satyre IV, or anticipates Pope's version of it: ''Well, if it be my time to quit the Stage, . . . I die in Charity with Fool and Knave." Wordsworth's 1800 Preface is not more homely (or less) than Pope's, but it is much more "written." It has every ounce of the prissiness and wordiness we found in gentrified, late eighteenth-century grammar prefaces. Wordsworth takes pains to dot every i and cross every t; his aversion to the ellipsis and "gapping" of

< previous page

page_48

next page >

< previous page

page_49

next page > Page 49

informal language makes his writing at certain points positively prolix: . . . to ascertain, how far, . . . that sort of pleasure and that quantity of pleasure may be imparted, which a Poet may rationally endeavour to impart. . . . in this only, that I have pleased a greater number, than I ventured to hope I should please. The usual (informal) way of saying this is, 'I have pleased a greater number than I hoped to.' Sundby and Bjorge list ellipsis as one of the "grammatical figures" that were "a characteristic feature of the elementary English grammar book" (1991: 10) of the eighteenth century, including Stirling (1733) and Fisher (1750). Avoiding ellipsis is a sure sign of self-conscious accuracy; but it multiplies words. A polysyllabic or even an academic vocabulary reinforces this impression of wordiness: "perusal," "ascertain," "impart,'' "multiplicity," "approbation," "disproportionate." Wordsworth's double negatives can also seem verbose, though what they chiefly express to me is his selfconsciousness: "no very inaccurate estimate," "no discordance," "not unimportant," "I cannot be insensible of." Gentrification and literacy taken together account for many of the differences between these two prefaces. Though Pope is more elegant than the grammarians we looked at in chapter 2, he is more colloquial and less verbose than Wordsworth. And there is another big difference between them, unrelated to our model. Wordsworth's is an "adversarial stance." He is making a major affirmation about the value of poetry, in a public statement against tendencies in contemporary culture (Gill 1989: 190). Pope's is a conciliatory stance. The Alexander Pope of 1717 was not trying to cure an illness in society or justify a new kind of poetry; it was his artistry that was on the auction block, and so he hopes his book will "please"; he does not mention "the quality of its moral relations" as Wordsworth does. Pope may be anxious because he knows that although he really has "written well," readers are often not sensitive enough to true excellence in poetry to appreciate this fact. Accordingly, while Wordsworth's sentences swell and burgeon with "no fewer than fifteen reasons" (Gill 1989: 188) for believing in "the real language of men" as the proper language for poetry, Pope's sentences are a succession of courtly apologies and compliments.

< previous page

page_49

next page >

< previous page

page_50

next page > Page 50

Astell and Wollstonecraft What is striking about Mary Astell's preface to the third edition of Some Reflections upon Marriage (1706) is the way the energy, sense of humor, and intelligence of the author translate themselves into vehemence and rhetorical power on the one hand, and playfulness on the other. Like Pope's, her prose does not perfectly fit the model of 1710 prose, but it gives clear signs of not having been gentrified; and it is more oral, less written than prose of the 1790 model. Astell makes fun of the hypocrisy of men. She refers to them as "our Masters," and pays hyperbolical obeisance to "that superior genius which men, as men, lay claim to." To think well of men's "folly" and "brutality" would require ''a flight of wit and sense much above her poor ability, and proper only to masculine understandings." Casting herself as ironist, one whose "ignorance" is "pitiable," she nevertheless "hopes it is no presumption to insist on this natural right of judging for her self," and allows herself parenthetical digs at the expense of her male readership. Astell's rhetorical power can best be seen in selective quotations: she hits hard, but usually muffles the blow with extra phrases and add-on clauses: a sentence will build up high expectations, and then it will interpolate an additional consideration, letting the are of suspension sag a bit: For if by the natural superiority of their sex, they mean, that every man is by nature superior to every woman, which is the obvious meaning, and that which must be stuck to if they would speak sense, it would be a sin in any woman, to have dominion over any man, and the greatest queen ought not to command but to obey, her footman: because no municipal law can supersede or change the law of nature: So that if the dominion of the men be such, the Salique Law, as unjust as English men have ever thought it, ought to take place over all the earth, and the most glorious reigns in the English, Danish, Castilian, and other annals, were wicked violations of the law of nature! (3435) A writer who was aiming at periodicity would have ended this sentence at the close of the first independent clause: ". . . dominion over any man." On the other hand, this is not truly a loose sentence; it ends in a climactic rush of indignation and an exclamation point a form of punctuation that does not appear very often in formal eighteenthcentury expository prose. Ruth Perry describes Astell's "rhetorical style" as "half lively and

< previous page

page_50

next page >

< previous page

page_51

next page > Page 51

persuasive conversation" (1986: 5354), punctuated as if for speech not writing (101). The oral and ungentrified qualities of Astell's writing in my sample show up in her vocabulary, her diction, and her syntax. She uses words that would be considered undignified or low by strict judges of the last two or three decades of the century, and she seems to use them for conscious effect (my italics): "it may be any man's business and duty to keep hogs" (36); "not to dispute whether those women were blabs or no'' (46); "even all the swords and blunderbusses are theirs" (47). There is an engaging informality to her diction: "If they mean that some Men are superior to some women, this is no great discovery" (35). Recall also "that which must be stuck to" in the long sentence quoted above. This kind of informality is colloquial or speech-like, and effectively complements Astell's willingness to be (or seem) relatively personal, as when she describes her hope ("to retrieve, if possible, the native liberty" of women) as "forlorn" (34). What counts here as oral syntax is the number of doublets ("love and worship," "wit and sense") and the number of sentence-initial, coordinating conjunctions: four out of eight consecutive sentences on page 36 of our text begin nor, but, for, or, and six out of ten on page 37 begin and, and, for, and, but, and. Like those of Astell's preface, the first paragraphs of Mary Wollstonecraft's Introduction to A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) appeal to the humanity and justice of a hostile readership. To announce her feminism without preamble would have alienated anyone who did not already share it, so Wollstonecraft's first sentence alludes first to her own "melancholy emotions," then to Rousseau's ideas on inequality (for her liberal readers), and finally to the history of civilization (for her conservative readers): After considering the historic page, and viewing the living world with anxious solicitude, the most melancholy emotions of sorrowful indignation have depressed my spirits, and I have sighed when obliged to confess, that either nature has made a great difference, between man and man, or that the civilization which has hitherto taken place in the world has been very partial. (7) For style-studies what is striking here is the combination of formality and passion. "The historic page" contrasts symmetrically with "the living world," and both are generic, as in Johnson's "animals that bite the grass, or brouse the shrub" (Rasselas, ch. 1): one who has considered "the historic page" has a good deal more formal dignity

< previous page

page_51

next page >

< previous page

page_52

next page > Page 52

than one who has merely read history books (my italics). Starting with the twelfth word of this sentence, seven of seventeen words denote or are associated with powerful feelings: anxiety, solicitude, melancholy, sorrow, indignation, depression, sighing. At certain points Wollstonecraft's passionate indignation produces poetic prose; at others, we could call it rhetorical or overwritten or purple. Women are "like the flowers which are planted in too rich a soil," and so their "flaunting leaves, after having pleased a fastidious eye, fade, disregarded on the stalk." "One cause of this barren blooming,'' says Wollstonecraft, extending the metaphor, is a false system of education. "Barren blooming": an alliterated paradox, almost an oxymoron, a skillfully turned phrase. In the next paragraph, "improveable reason is allowed to be the dignified distinction which . . . puts a natural sceptre in a feeble hand." This is personification of a special kind. It draws on a pictorial tradition of the grand style, as in Pope's and Johnson's most splendid writings, a tradition that poses allegorical abstractions in throne-room scenes to express majesty and power. The alliteration in "dignified distinction" will not be to everyone's taste. On the following page what seems to me a highly effective rhetorical figure loses some of its punch because of an interpolated phrase: "They [women] only live to amuse themselves, and by the same law which in nature invariably produces certain effects, they soon only afford barren amusement." That middle clause is unspecific: "the same law which . . . produces certain effects"? what effects? what law? But the interplay between "amuse" in the first clause and "amusement" in the last is arresting. And it is a named figure in classical rhetoric, polyptoton, "repetition of the same word or root in different grammatical functions or forms." Compare Romeo and Juliet, "Upon his brow shame is asham'd to sit."3 Wollstonecraft's prose is certainly more periodic than Astell's. She prefers compound sentences, but often the second half, the second independent clause in the sentence, is periodic (see sentences one, four, six, seven, twelve, and nineteen of the first twenty sentences of this Introduction). Is this not a qualified confirmation of the model? Astell's prose is more colloquial than Wollstonecrafi's, and the Vindication has many 3 For personified abstractions and throne-room scenes in the grand style, see McIntosh 1973, 1988; for the definition and example of polyptoton, see Quinn 1982: 103.

< previous page

page_52

next page >

< previous page

page_53

next page > Page 53

of the features we found in the four late eighteenth-century grammarians, formality, rhetoricity, and a tinge of purple. Both writers have strong individual personalities, however, and while their texts conform to the model in general, they have their own distinct characters. Jonathan Swift Though Swift and Burke were as different as tiger and lion, they have enough in common to make them worth comparing as representative and exemplary writers of persuasive prose. They were among the half-dozen most effective political apologists of the eighteenth century, writing to influence public opinion. Both produced literary as well as political works and lived among the literary elite of their times. Both drew on an Irish heritage. But both men published so much, over so many years, of such various natures, that one simply cannot make blanket generalizations about either man's style on the basis of one or two works. Swift's prose is (in Irvin Ehrenpreis's words) "thoroughly embodied in spoken language." Swift excelled at exploiting "human speech as the most precise register of personality" (1967:655). The Journal to Stella exhibits his most speechlike writing. It flaunts catch-phrases and colloquialisms almost as brazenly as Polite Conversation, but in a far more playful mode: As for your letter, it makes me mad: slidikins, I have been the best boy in Christendom, and you come with your two eggs a penny . . . (58) The Oxford English Dictionary defines "slidikins" as a "minced oath" and compares it to "'sbodikins," so perhaps it is a diminutive of "God's eyelid"; and I cannot believe that Swift did not enjoy its silliness as well as its sound. Oaths are speech acts, by definition, and have always been associated more closely with speech than with writing. To "come with two eggs a penny'' is proverbial for "to intrude with a foolish, irrelevant story" (1711: 58 n. 30); proverbs belong to oral culture. A few days later in the Journal Swift openly admits that he is keying to the sound of what he writes: I dined today with Patty Rolt at my cousin Leach's, with a pox, in the city: he is a printer, and prints the Postman, oh, ho, and is my cousin, God knows how, and he married . . . I wish you could hear me repeating all I have said

< previous page

page_53

next page >

< previous page

page_54

next page > Page 54

of this in its proper tone, just as I am writing it. 'Tis all with the same cadence with oh hoo, or as when little girls say, I have got an apple, miss, and I won't give you one. (7273) Deborah Tannen tells us that ordinary conversation is full of reported dialogue: not only "he said" and "she said," but also created speeches, mimicry, and indirect discourse (1989: 98133). Here Swift highlights first the words and then (this is quite unusual) the intonation of the talk he is imitating. One surmises that Swift chose an oral style for this letter-journal to the people he most trusted and loved because it felt right to him, intimate, expressive. "Lord, I dreamt of Stella, &c. so confusedly last night, and that we saw [A and B] and she bid, and they proved [C and D]; and I walked without till she was shifting, and such stuff, mixt with much melancholy and uneasiness, and things not as they should be, and I know not how; and it is now an ugly gloomy morning" (56). The incoherences and add-on clauses and phrases, the questioning, the semi-pronominal, all-purpose nominal "stuff,'' discourse signals ("Well," "Lookee"), and clichés ("other fish to fry") such traits put this at the oral end of any continuum that runs between the most written and the most speech-like prose. If Swift's prose is oriented to speech, we should test the model of gentrification-and-literacy by reference to those of his writings that cluster at the written end of this continuum not the Journal to Stella or the letters, and not the "manic style" of the Tale (Hawes 1996), but documents meant for posterity. We should look at his formal, public, and official writings: The Conduct of the Allies (1711), A Discourse of the Contests and Dissentions in Athens and Rome (1701), and The History of the Four Last Years of the Queen (1758), the most official and least mischievous of Swift's writings. These three do not play Swift's usual "game of identities, mimicries, and pseudonyms" (Ehrenpreis 1967: 496). They aim to persuade through the appearance of impartiality, and none of them is a satire. Swift wrote The Conduct of the Allies under pressure to publish before Parliament began its discussion of the preliminaries to what was eventually signed as the Peace of Utrecht. "It was absolutely essential for the ministry's friends to be primed with the right arguments and the right answers" (Ehrenpreis 1967: 483), which meant revisions and re-writes under the exacting eyes of Henry St. John and Robert Harley and their cohorts.

< previous page

page_54

next page >

< previous page

page_55

next page > Page 55

In the fourth paragraph of The Conduct Swift presents the reader with an argument for letting the Netherlands bear the brunt of the cost of peace: If a House be on fire, it behoves all in the Neighbourhood to run with Buckets to quench it; but the Owner is sure to be undone first; and it is not impossible that those at next Door may escape, by a Shower from Heaven, or the stillness of the Weather, or some other favourable Accident. (89) Surely this is as homely an allusion, for townsfolk, as "the blunt edge of the wedge" in Lane's 1700 Preface. Although his audience is country gentlemen (Ehrenpreis 1967: 487), Swift's language is ungentrified; it prefers common AngloSaxon words to Latinate polysyllables, a house on fire with buckets for quenching it, to the refined analogies and poetic allusions favored later in the century. In 1797 William Godwin castigated the prose of almost "every English writer before the present age" as "resembling the illiterate effusions of the nurse or the rustic" (373); what would he have thought of these buckets and this "undone" owner? Those who are unhappy with the hypothesis that archaisms, solecisms, and colloquialisms in concert are signs of middle- or low-class language may be more comfortable with its sister hypothesis almost a tautology that these three are signs of orality. The Conduct, while not as old-fashioned, incorrect, and speech-like as the Journal to Stella, has nevertheless far more of these features than we will find in characteristic late eighteenth-century prose. Here one encounters the pleonastic do: no Monarch or Commonwealth did ever engage . . . (7); old-fashioned correlative conjunctions: For though each may have . . . , yet one . . . will (8) but, as They must . . . , so . . . they ought to . . . (8); indexical which at the beginning of a sentence: All which Considerations are of much greater Force (8); doublets: Dignity and Respect (9) employed and circulated (9) Undertakers and Projectors (10); and which used to refer to an idea or a proposition not a particular noun (four examples on the first two pages). Here are any number of trailing which-clauses tacked onto the ends of sentences, as after-thoughts, contributing not a little to the looseness of the prose (e.g.,

< previous page

page_55

next page >

< previous page

page_56

next page > Page 56

pp. 22, 23, 25, 26, 27, 28). The prevailing character of Swift's sentences here is loose. The list of archaic or colloquial locutions in The Conduct also includes ellipsis, or gapping: The Northern War hath been on Foot, almost ever since our Breach with France: The Success of it various; but . . . (62); the historical present: But immediately after he breaks through all he had done, marches into Poland, and reassumes the Crown (63); "low" or slang phrases like "come with two eggs a penny" quoted on page 53 above: about which the Warlike Politicians of the Coffe-House make such a Clutter (61) This discourse oil the political ambition of kings and dukes uses middle-class, bourgeois, shopkeepers' idioms: where the Beseigers have not the worse of the Bargain . . . (61) since we have done their Business . . . (57) we ought, in pity, to . . . have leave to shift for our selves. (57) if they be such as no way find their private Account by the War . . . (53); Mildly archaic expressions: neither of the two last Emperors had ever Twenty thousand Men (33) in any Demand, however so unreasonable (24). All three of these political pamphlets (the History, of the Four Last Years is just as partisan as the other two) have a general readership in mind because they were meant to influence political events, in the public sphere. A Discourse of the Contests and Dissentions In Athens and Rome (1701) purports to come from the pen of a member of Parliament, and it was certainly designed to shape the opinions of members of Parliament, but selective quotation can suggest that it has no more gentrification or writtenness than The Conduct.4 I think, however, that A Discourse should be located a couple of notches 4 Ending a sentence with a non-restrictive relative clause: pp. 196 (3 examples), 195, 197 (3 examples), 198207 (i.e., every page, so far as I kept track); pleonastic do: 196 (2 examples), 198, 202, 213; ellipsis or gapping: 196, 197, 199 (2 examples), 200, 203, 204, 206 (2 examples); archaisms ("becomes to have great Influence" 196; "Depravations to which every of these was . . . " 200; "at what time" = "when" 205; "the Nobles, spighted at this Indignity'' 213); solecisms (pronoun reference 205; agreement 196, 201; misplaced modifier 203; sequence of tenses 204, 207, 230); homely or lower-middle-class words: 197, 199, 200, 201 ("upon the Scramble for"), 205 ("a small truckling State").

< previous page

page_56

next page >

< previous page

page_57

next page > Page 57

farther along the scale towards writtenness than The Conduct. (Perhaps the reason is its human subjects, Greek and Roman heroes, who are hard to imagine as running with buckets.) When Swift is writing for posterity, as he was in the History, most of the low- and middle-class features of his prose disappear. Most, but not all: here are the homely expressions I found in Books I and IV: those Brangles that for a time obstructed the Peace (159); this unusual Proceeding, which made a mighty Noise (125); lay upon a watch for a good Bargain (109); a sort of Smattering (such as it is) which qualifies them for reading a Pamphlet (2); he could sometimes scratch out a Song (9). The scarcity of such locutions does not however mean that the language of the History is gentrified, in our extended meaning of that term. It is almost entirely free from what the normative grammarians were to call solecisms (with the possible exception of nonparallel series5), but it is not free from the awkwardnesses of a very loose syntax piling clause upon clause: It was then the States first began to view their Affairs in another light; to consider how little the vast Promises of Count Zinzendorf were to be relyed on; to be convinced that France was not disposed to break with Her Majesty only to gratify their ill Humour, or unreasonable Demands; to discover that their factious Correspondents on this side the Water, had shamefully misled them; that some of their own principal Towns grew heartily weary of the War, and backward in their Loans; and lastly that Prince Eugene their new General, whether his Genius or Fortune had left him, was not for their Turn. (15253) ("Heartily weary" and "was not for their Turn" are neither of them elegant upper-crust expressions.) The History contains page after page of long sentences like this. By contrast, periodic sentences figure almost not at all in Swift's rhetoricfi.6 One of the most distinctive features of the History provides 5 Typical of many: "The Emperour expected to keep all He already possessed in Italy; That, Port-longue on the Tuscan Coast should be delivered to him by France, and lastly That He should . . . " (164). 6 Inversions ("On the Seventh Day of December 1711 began the Second Session of this Parliament": 2; see also 124, 12930); indexical which ("the whole Proceedings of which previous Negociation between [X and Y], I shall . . . relate": 3, this is quite frequent); reflexive pronouns in subject position ("as themselves had more than hinted to him": 138; also p. 6), pleonastic do (121, 122, 129, etc.), "middle'' verbs ("a great Opportunity offering" 126; "something of Consequence now transacting" 126); and other odd expressions ("but (footnote continued on next page)

< previous page

page_57

next page >

< previous page

page_58

next page > Page 58

evidence not only that Swift's prose was "oral" but also that Swift in some sense knew this and tried to change it. I found instances of ellipsis on almost every page of this tract. One form of ellipsis is the omission of the subject when it is identical to the subject of the preceding verb in a series: "But the Queen . . . thought that His Imperial Majesty ought to restore those other Territories in Italy which He had taken from the rightful Proprietors, And was grown dangerous to the Italian Princes" (164). Years later, Swift revised that last predicate: ''and by the Possession of which he was grown dangerous to the Italian Princes" (246; Wright 1994: 263). In other words, Swift revised his prose to give it more writtenness and less orality. An article by Barbara Strang (1967) argues convincingly that Swift "devoted a substantial part of the second half of his life" to remodelling his own spontaneous usage so that it would be more durable, "fuller, and less speech-like." Strang points out that Swift's urgent desire to "fix" the language was not as silly as it may seem from our perspective, given the facts that during his lifetime "the English-speaking community was about the size of that of modern Danish, only with a markedly lower literacy rate," and that English had been changing rapidly in the preceding sixty years. Swift's "concern with an audience yet unborn" led him to approach language more as writing than as speech. He revised the spelling of his own works to reflect etymology not sound: "dropt" and "pickt" became "dropped" and "picked." Elsewhere his changes support "amplitude, explicitness, and regular choice": "'tis" became "it is"; "'tother" became "the other; "though" is changed to "although" and "till" to "until." Edmund Burke One of the central premises of Burke's writings is complexity itself, the multiple and complex interrelatedness of things. "Circumstances are infinite, and infinitely combined; are variable and transient." "He forms the best judgment in all moral disquisitions, who has the greatest number and variety of considerations in one view before him." "I cannot stand forward, and give praise or blame to any thing which relates to human actions, and human concerns, on a (footnote continued from previous page) however" 125, 163; "like" as adjective 19, 135; "they publickly talked, That Britain had betrayed them" 136; "which the Two Lords at Utrecht knew well to make use of" 158).

< previous page

page_58

next page >

< previous page

page_59

next page > Page 59

simple view of the object, as it stands stripped of every relation, in all the nakedness and solitude of metaphysical abstraction."7 Burke's prose style seems appropriate to this view of truth; it responds in a nuanced and multidimensional way to "circumstances," "considerations," "relations." Burke made good use of the complicated accuracy and refinement that gentrification and literacy put at his disposal. The writtenness of Burke's prose shows up prominently in his vocabulary, in his allusions to and quotations from written documents, especially literary or legal texts, and in the over-all architecture of his prose. But Burke's prose also tests the model more vigorously than we have done so far, by adding a chapter to our notions of orality. If we confine the idea of orality to those aspects of language associated with spontaneous conversation, then Burke's prose is not very oral. If we expand our concept of orality in language to include all appeals to the ear and this is the orality of classical rhetoric then Burke is superbly oral, a maestro of musicality. Any text has and uses rhetoric, in the same way that any text has and uses style. But the use of beautiful or arresting sounds in language as avenues to pleasure or persuasion is rhetoric of the crafted, organized kind.8 A rhetorical perspective on Burke suggests that under certain circumstances an increase of literacy may increase orality. Gentrification is compatible with and may even foster certain dimensions of an oral culture. In general, when eighteenth-century writers discussed "conversational" styles, they meant what we mean by informal styles. When Dryden and Swift and dozens of others genuflected to the "conversation of gentlemen" as a standard for good writing, they did not mean that writing would be improved by the slovenliness, the interruptions, false starts, selfcorrections, redundancies, hems, haws, and blunders of real speech. They were, rather, reacting against what they saw as excessive formality and unnatural embellishments in 7 Reference to Burke's speeches and writings is by date (as listed in the References), except for the Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) and the Letter to a Noble Lord (1796), which will be abbreviated as Reflections and LNL respectively. In this paragraph quotations are from Bohm Works VI 114; 1780a: 462; Reflections 8990; see also Pocock 1971: 2023. 8 F. P. Lock makes a strong case for the Reflections as more rhetorical than philosophical (1985: 90, 92, 93, 99). In his chapter on rhetoric he canvasses every major strategy in the tradition of classical rhetoric: deliberative, judicial, and epideictic arguments; appeals to logic, pathos, and ethos; structure (exordium, peroration, refutatio); style. For other perspectives on Burke's rhetoric, see McCracken, Stanlis, Weiser, Bryant (1973), Reid (1992), Fitzgerald, John Coates.

< previous page

page_59

next page >

< previous page

page_60

next page > Page 60

seventeenth-century prose. Similar caveats apply to Burke's stated preference for prose that does not make "a marked distinction between the English that is written and the English that is spoken" (Correspondence VII 502) I interpret this as a warning against pedantries, not as advocacy for extreme colloquialism. Some of the musicalities of Burke's prose are spectacular. Alliteration and assonance: "fret him with a feverish being, tainted with the jail-distemper of a contagious servitude" (1780b: 237); "the din of all this smithery" (LNL 179); "terrour and torment" (1780b: 236); "the most serious solemnity" (1780b: 246); "difficult trifles and laborious fooleries'' (1780c: 159); "to blow up the blind rage of the populace, with a continued blast of pestilential libels" (1780b: 248); "insensible only through infancy and innocence" (Reflections 168); "foul and ravenous birds of prey (both mothers and daughters) flutter over our heads, and souse down upon our tables, and leave nothing unrent, unrifled, unravaged, or unpolluted with the slime of their filthy offal" (LNL 156). Some of these phrases fall into meter: "the dín of áll this smíthery"; "insénsible ónly through ínfancy and ínnocence." Repetitions of various kinds are among the most characteristic features of orality. We know that in ordinary conversation words and phrases repeat themselves almost obsessively, tying the fabric of discourse together in a web of mutuality, overlap, and confirmation: CHAD: I go out a lot. DEBORAH: I go out and eat. PETER: You go out? The trouble with me is if I don't prepare and eat well I eat a lot, because it's not satisfying. and so if I'm just eating like cheese and crackers I'll just stuff myself on cheese and crackers. But if I fix myself something nice, I don't have to eat that much. DEBORAH: Oh yeah? PETER: I've noticed that, yeah. DEBORAH: Hmmmm . . . Well then it works, then it's a good idea. PETER: it's a good idea in terms of eating. It's not a good idea in terms of time. (adapted from Tannen 1989: 76) Deborah Tannen arranges this excerpt from a real conversation,

< previous page

page_60

next page >

< previous page

page_61

next page > Page 61

recorded in 1979, so that the nine I's in succession appear in a line, vertically, down the page, and so that the other repetitions abut each other as nearly as possible: three go out's, four eat's, two cheese and crackers, two in terms of's, three a good idea's, and so on. People repeat each others' words, when they are talking with each other, for purposes of comprehension, cohesion, appreciation, delay, and "ensemble" or togetherness. I think we can distinguish between the inelegant repetitions of ordinary talk and the rhetorical figures of repetition, which are meant to make beautiful and striking sounds. Classical rhetoric has a battery of schemes depending on repetition. Anaphora ("repetition of beginnings": Quinn 1982: 101) is perhaps the most widely used by public speakers; it appears on almost every page of those of Burke's writings which he intended either to be spoken or read aloud or to move the emotions of his readers. The Letter to a Noble Lord, where Burke pulls out all the stops (thirteen editions in 1796 alone), has memorable examples of anaphora: The consequences are before us, not in remote history; not in future prognostication: they are about us; they are upon us. They shake the publick security; they menace private enjoyment. They dwarf the growth of the young; they break the quiet of the old. If we travel, they stop our way. They infest us in town; they pursue us to the country. (156) Epistrophe, repetition of ends: "The French revolutionists complained of every thing; they refused to reform any thing; and they left nothing, no, nothing at all unchanged" (LNL 156). Anadiplosis, repetition of an end at the next beginning: "They are those on which I value myself the most; most for the importance; most for the labour . . ." (LNL 159). Epanalepsis, repetition of the beginning at the end: "Laws of regulation are not fundamental laws.'' (LNL 161). Epanados, repetition in the opposite order: "But if they are formidable as foes, as friends they are dreadful indeed" (LNL 174). Polyptoton (repetition of the same word or root in different grammatical functions or forms: "so long the mounds and dykes of the low, fat, Bedford level will have nothing to fear from all the pickaxes of all the levellers of France" (LNL 172). Diacope, repetition with only a word or two between: "They will laugh, indeed they will laugh, at his parchment and his wax" (LNL 173). Despite their formidable names, these figures are frequent enough in carefully crafted prose. They make patterns which are arresting or beautiful in themselves, and they

< previous page

page_61

next page >

< previous page

page_62

next page > Page 62

seem in many cases to be the verbal expression of "states of extreme emotion."9 Granted that Burke's vocabulary is frequently polysyllabic and even bookish. He seems to delight in the words of scholars and scientists: "lixiviated" (LNL 178), "mephitick gas" (LNL 177), "dephlegmated" (LNL 176). He makes skillful use of Latinate words, at times almost in the manner of his friend Samuel Johnson: "ferocious indocility'' (Hoffman and Levack 1959: 279); "It was long before the spirit of true piety and true wisdom . . . could be depurated from the dregs and feculence of the contention" (1780b: 232); "emolument," "inculcated," "obloquy," "appellation," (1782a); "They threw a politic, well-wrought veil over every circumstance tending to weaken the rights, which in the meliorated order of succession they meant to perpetuate" (Reflections 103). Burke is attacking enthusiasm here, and the irony depends partly on high-falutin words, like the words that Swift used on enthusiasts in A Tale of A Tub (see Paulson 1983: 5758). In Burke's later anti-Jacobin writings, according to Gerald Chapman (1967), it is "as if words savage and strange enough might charm a savage, strange world into submission" (236), and Chapman adds "genethliacon," "aulnager," "quadrimanous," "diachylon," "founderous," and "turbinating" to our lists. But notice how sonorous these polysyllables are: Burke creates some of his most mellifluous locutions out of inkhorn terms: "ferocious indocility"; "the seeds of destruction are sown in civil intercourse, in social habitudes" (1780b: 236); "secondary, subordinate, instrumental" (LNL 154 three four-syllable words in a row). Recall that in 1711 and 1724 Addison and Swift and Shaftesbury and Thomas Wilson had lambasted the harshness of English monosyllables, the "shocking consonants and jarring sounds" that our "Gothic" language is prone to. Surely Burke, like Johnson before him, was combatting harshness with Latinity.10 There is more of the orality of common talk in Burke than one might expect, given his conservative bent, his formality of diction, and his literariness. "I confess, my notions are widely different; and I never was less sorry for any action of my life," he wrote to the Bristol 9 For the emotional aspects of figures, see Vickers 1970: 94. Definitions here are from Quinn 1982, in some cases word for word. 10 See Spectator, no. 135; Tatler, no. 230; Characteristics II 322; [Wilson] 1724: 23. For an unsympathetic history of polysyllables in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, see Jespersen 1905: 15056.

< previous page

page_62

next page >

< previous page

page_63

next page > Page 63

electorate, stooping to a colloquial asseveration and a colloquial omission of the that which in formal prose precedes indirect discourse (1780b: 255). Catch-phrases, the stereotyped locutions of informal, speech-based prose, also show up in this letter: "Syren song"; "watch and ward" (1780b: 253, 254). Occasionally in Burke we find a loose sentence (1780a: 464), and a sentence that ends with a nonrestrictive which clause (Reflections 103). Sometimes also we encounter an uncomfortable non-parallel construction, such as: "either by some errour in the process, or that the wretch who brought him there could not correctly describe his person" (1780b: 235). The only archaisms I noticed are, I think, literary not dialectal, e.g., the demonstrative-preceding-a-possessive of "this his fulminating bull'' (Reflections 96). Burke's long, long sentences seem to have been planned in advance, and Burke's wordiness is bookish, almost academic, written not oral. As for appeals to the ear in the manner sanctioned by classical and contemporary rhetorics, Burke delighted in them. Periodic sentences, parallel structures of various types including antitheses and fully balanced clauses are at his finger's end, but his sentences can also be short and simple, or medium-sized and compound. We can find in him the same mixture of "dry" and "ejaculative" styles he praised in Somers (Kay 1988: 274). In the famous narrative that leads up to the ten-thousand swords passage in Reflections (16770), the number of words in sentences varies dramatically to correspond to variations in the speaking voice: 50, 5, 95, 25, 58, 16, 32, 141, 37, 30, 20, 66. Elsewhere Burke expresses himself in a series of exceptionally short clauses: for example, eight clauses in a row averaging 5.25 words each.11 Burke's best prose is a talking voice. It uses the first- and second-person pronouns of conversation (1782b: 469). It uses italics as a signal of oral emphasis (Reflections 91; LNL 167). Most interestingly, it breaks into dialogue at crucial points in an argument: We are told that this is not a religious persecution, and its abettors are loud in disclaiming all severities on account of conscience. Very fine indeed! then let it be so; they are not persecutors; they are only tyrants. With all my heart. I am perfectly indifferent concerning the pretexts upon which we torment one another. (1780b: 254) 11 "Happily, France was not then jacobinized. Her hostility was at a good distance. We had a limb cut off; but we preserved the body: We lost our Colonies; but we kept our Constitution. There was, indeed, much intestine heat, there was a dreadful fermentation" (LNL 152).

< previous page

page_63

next page >

< previous page

page_64

next page > Page 64

Quotations and short dialogues are a normal part of ordinary speech (Tannen 1989: ch. 4), and they would seem out of place in highly written genres. I see Burke's rhetoric as shaped or flavored by two premises on the nature of the moral life. In his most powerful prose Burke seems to assume a universe of satanic evil and angelic good: moral extremes. Burke's tendency to idolize friends and diabolize enemies can be seen in his early correspondence, but the best examples of the rhetoric of extreme goodness and extreme evil occur in later writings, such as the Reflections and the Letter to a Noble Lord: Nothing can be conceived more hard than the heart of a thorough-bred metaphysician. It comes nearer to the cold malignity of a wicked spirit than to the frailty and passion of a man. It is like that of the principle of Evil himself, incorporeal, pure, unmixed, dephlegmated, defecated evil. (LNL 176) "Dephlegmated" and "defecated" are ''philosophic words," coined by Renaissance chemists to describe the processes of freeing "(a spirit or acid) from 'phlegm' or watery matter," and of clearing a solution "of dregs or impurities" (Oxford English Dictionary). Here they are chemical metaphors for a terrifying purity of evil. Burke's idealism sometimes expresses itself as extravagant optimism: "Whilst freedom is true to itself, every thing becomes subject to it; and its very adversaries are an instrument in its hands" (1780b: 234). The "moral extremes" premise may help to explain what I consider purple passages in Burke, many of them famous: the "ten-thousand swords" passage from the Reflections; the "proud Keep of Windsor" passage of the Letter to a Noble Lord; and others, especially in the later writings (see Coates 1992). It also justifies the knight-in-shining-armor ethos of Burke's prose: "by night and by day, in town, or in country, at the desk, or in the forest, I will, without regard to convenience, ease, or pleasure, devote myself to their service, not expecting or admitting any reward whatsoever" (1780C: 209). Christopher Reid (1992) traces the melodrama of purple passages like this to Burke's aesthetic writings on "How Words influence the Passions" and to the pathos-dominated theories of tragedy of his time. The related assumption that truth is contextual and complicated makes itself felt at a number of points in Burke's style, but initially in his copiousness, his inexhaustible flow of words. Burke likes to offer the reader several alternatives: "to my ambition, or to my fortune

< previous page

page_64

next page >

< previous page

page_65

next page > Page 65

. . . any anger, or revenge of my own, or of my party" (1780b: 258; emphasis mine). Not unrelated is the fact that so often in Burke adjectives come in pairs and triplets. And when the pairs and triplets are themselves paired up and trebled, complex alternatives become complex series: "constitutions ready made, ticketed, sorted, and numbered; suited to every season and every fancy; some with the top of the pattern at the bottom, and some with the bottom at the top; some plain, some flowered; some distinguished for their simplicity; others for their complexity; some of blood colour; some of boue de Paris" (LNL 17778). Burke must have had Swift in mind as he penned this catalogue. One thing that Burke's complex rhetoric enables him to do is to mix modes. He consciously juxtaposes high and low words, for effect. Immediately before a sententious remark that "No man lives too long, who lives to do with spirit, and suffer with resignation, what Providence pleases to command or inflict," he is speculating about how the Duke of Bedford "cuts up? how he tallows in the cawl or on the kidneys?" (LNL 18081). Immediately after a paragraph on "publick service" and justice and economy, he refuses "to haggle or huckster with merit'' (LNL 16061). The words "tallow" and "cawl," "haggle" and "huckster" were certainly chosen for their shock value. They are meant to contrast violently with the dignity and respectability of "suffering with resignation what Providence pleases," by yanking the reader into the butcher-shop and marketplace stalls. So we should not be surprised to find in Burke occasional homely metaphors not very different from the homely metaphors in Lane and Mattaire. He told his Bristol electorate that he would not "act the tyrant for their amusement" or "throw them any living, sentient, creature whatsoever, no, not so much as a kitling, to torment" (1780b: 257). The Oxford English Dictionary lists "kitling" as dialectal for "kitten." The bill for relaxing laws against Irish Catholics "amounts, I think, very nearly to a toleration, with respect to religious ceremonies; but it puts a new bolt on civil rights, and rivets it to the old one" (1782a: 454). Perhaps such lowly metaphors speak to us most eloquently when they are set side by side with learned, elegant locutions. In the Reflections we encounter "a theory, pickled in the preserving juices of pulpit eloquence, and laid by for future use. Condo et compono quae mox depromere possim" (97). The point here is the ironic gulf between that homely pickle

< previous page

page_65

next page >

< previous page

page_66

next page > Page 66

and the line from Horace Epistle I i ("I am putting by and setting in order the stores on which I may some day draw"). Burke is mocking Richard Price's disingenuous willingness to put the revolutionary doctrine of sovereignty by "popular choice" in cold storage, comparing it, a pickle preserved by the pulpit, to what Horace has ''laid by" the verum atque decens of a poem devoted to self-knowledge. Burke's prose, like Swift's, helps us see how many qualifications and hedges we must add to hypotheses as general as those summed up in the two words "gentrification" and "literacy." A fine recent book on Burke and "the practice of political writing" helps put these hypotheses in perspective. Christopher Reid cautions against a purely literary view of Burke's prose: "It is difficult historically, and even for the purposes of analysis, to separate literary and political elements in Burke" (1985: I). Since most of Burke's writings serve political ends, they fall into non-literary genres: committee reports, Parliamentary resolutions and motions, letters of advice, practical works on political economy. As a result, almost all of them have an "immediate and practical rhetorical function" (4). MPs were not supposed to use notes, much less read from scripts (103). But Burke realized early in his career that his speeches "might have an important extra-parliamentary function" (118), and he took care to prepare them for the press himself (106). In this sense the texts we read are, as I argue above, both oral and written (132). To show how Burke composed his political speeches, Reid compares transcripts of the actual orations, compiled by the shorthand expert Joseph Gurney, with texts of the same orations as Burke revised them for publication. Without question Burke revised for rhetorical and literary effect; so the printed texts are less oral and more gentrified than the actual speeches had been. He changes relatively simple locutions into flowery polysyllables: "we are bold to say" becomes "we are warranted to assert," and "a banya has other names too" becomes "the Banyan is known by other appellations" (130). In another place the printed version is slightly but unmistakably more purple than the spoken version. Here is how Burke spoke about the early spread of Mohammedanism: There can be no doubt that the enthusiasm which animated his first followers, the despotism that was connected with his religion, and the advantages that his followers had over the broken, disunited, countries of the world, extended its influence vastly.

< previous page

page_66

next page >

< previous page

page_67

next page > Page 67

Burke wrote of the same movement: The enthusiasm, which animated his first followers, the despotick power, which religion obtained through that enthusiasm, and the advantages, derived from both, over the enervated great empires, and broken, disunited lesser governments of the world, extended the influence of that proud and domineering sect from the banks of the Ganges to the banks of the Loire. (131) The written version is more wordy, more periodic, more rhetorical, and more self-consciously literary than the spoken. Shaftesbury If Burke's writings complicate our picture of the evolution of prose at one end of the eighteenth century, Shaftesbury's complicate it at the other. The gentrification-plus-literacy hypothesis assumes that habitual modes of exposition in 1710 in general have a middle- or low-class colloquial base, homely, physical, loose, and incorrect. Shaftesbury's prose is seldom homely or physical or loose or incorrect, and its prevailing courtliness of tone and stance is anything but middle-class. Nevertheless, the medium that Shaftesbury fashions for himself as his own distinctive philosophical mode is an oral one: "soliloquy," an author's conversation with himself. Tensions between the informalities and colloquialisms of that medium and Shaftesbury's orientation to written (classical) learning give him a distinctive place in the evolution of English prose. It cannot be expected that every author, or any single work, will conform to the gentrification-plus-literacy model exactly. We saw signs of non-conformity even in the prose on which the model was based, in Mattaire and Lane. The model explains some of the differences between Pope's prose and Wordsworth's, but by no means all: Pope is certainly less written than Wordsworth, less hypercorrect and academic, but his prose is not ungenteel. Similarly, the treatises by Mary Astell and Mary Wollstonecraft have distinctive personalities, though Astell's prose over-all is more oral and informal, while Wollstonecraft's is more written, more tidied-up and polite. Swift's astonishing ability to mimic the tones and cadences of spoken English seems to dominate his prose, even when he is composing a formal written history of negotiations for the Peace of Utrecht, and the revisions he made in his own prose after 1720

< previous page

page_67

next page >

< previous page

page_68

next page > Page 68

suggest that he was aware of his own orality at some level. Burke's writtenness shows up in his vocabulary and in the virtuosity of his rhetoric. The writings of these eight authors, clustered 170017 and 17801800, seem in general to confirm the "gentrification and literacy" hypothesis. The cases of Burke and Swift suggest that we may be obliged to reckon with two kinds of orality in written texts, the conversational/colloquial and the rhetorical. Still, certain authors draw on a wider array of verbal resources than the model allows for. Shaftesbury is one of these, so much so that I shall arrange my discussion of Shaftesbury's prose as a sort of dialogue between "Pro" and "Con": ways in which his writings confirm, and disconfirm, the gentrification-and-literacy model. Con: If the model requires that early eighteenth-century prose be based in middle- or low-class English, it should not apply to Shaftesbury, who wrote as a man of birth and privilege and addressed his writings to an elite audience (including literati overseas). Shaftesbury, like Pope, seemed to disdain the bourgeois world of publication: "But for my own part, 'tis of no concern to me what regard the public bestows on my amusements, or after what manner it comes acquainted with what I write for my private entertainment" (I 197). The only reason, he hastens to add, why this treatise has been published, is his bad handwriting; the booksellers can "save me the trouble of re-copying, and can readily furnish me with as many handsome copies as I would desire" (I 198). And so, he proceeds to argue, enjoying the paradox, "am I nowise more an author for being in print." Shaftesbury seems in historical fact not only to have used his printer as a private xeroxing service, requesting as many copies as were needed for himself and his friends, but also to have followed the pre-print-culture tradition of circulating his writings in manuscript (Voitle 1984: 33839). Shaftesbury therefore seriously recommends patronage as an institution vital to the health of letters; he gives reasons why the Mæcenases of Great Britain should be subsidizing authors (I 148). Elsewhere he recoils disdainfully from the mercenary world of booksellers hustling to "answer" every popular book with a rival (II 325). Though Shaftesbury may have been "a man of masks" (Voitle 1984: 92), all of them are aristocratic: he projects in all his writings the persona of a highly educated and highly civilized nobleman. In

< previous page

page_68

next page >

< previous page

page_69

next page > Page 69

the Inquiry he shows himself at home with "men of wit and raillery, whose pleasantest entertainment is in the exposing the weak sides of religion" (I 238), that is, with the courtly skeptics of his time. The opening treatise of Characteristics addresses an anonymous Lord with easy familiarity (I 9, 17). The author of the second treatise assumes an intimate knowledge of "good company" (I 45), supposes himself questioned by "one who had the countenance of a gentleman" (I 83), and associates himself not with "the mere vulgar" (I 84) but with men ''of thorough good breeding" (I 86). Shaftesbury's "raillery," his teasing good humor, is an expression of the elegance and "ease" that is traditionally associated with courtiers not clowns. The persona projected here reminds me of what Sir Kenneth Clark (Civilization) called "the smile of reason," with its arch perhaps's and its Henry-James-ish qualifications: "'Tis true, the magistrate might possibly have been surprised with the newness of a notion, which he might pretend, perhaps, did not only destroy the sacredness of his power, but treated him and all men as profane" (I 19).12 Shaftesbury's determination to exemplify the charms, not the ardors, of philosophy, his pleasantry and even his jokes (for example, II 300, II 366), call for notice partly because they contrast clearly with the more serious, sage, and even pompous manner of late eighteenth-century philosophers (Godwin, Mill, Bentham, Coleridge). Pro: Most of Shaftesbury's prose is, however, informal, not starched and stuffy like the prose of many late eighteenthcentury writers. For one thing, it is constrained to be informal by the generic conventions of its chosen forms. Five of the six parts of Characteristics bear the labels of informal genres: letter, essay, soliloquy, dialogue, and miscellany. Shaftesbury refers to his work as "cheerful fare" (II 274) tending to "raillery rather than good earnest" (II 240). By consequence, this large, learned, beautiful, scrupulously crafted book deals in homely idioms: "if we will only be so obliging as to break their bones for them" (I 20); "they immediately fall to work" (I 109); "'tis a known case" (I 108); "a sort of pseudo-ascetics" (I 110); "'Tis the hardest thing in the world" (I 112); "fancy and opinion stand 12 The Henry James flavor makes itself felt in Shaftesbury's habit of inserting fairly extensive modifiers or qualifiers between modal auxiliary and finite verb: "Even a good Christian, who would needs be over-good, and thinks he can never believe enough, may, by a small inclination well improved, extend his faith so largely as to . . ." (I 7); "he could not, it seems, but out of curiosity observe . . ." (II 166); "Thus a certain adoration of the sex which passes in our age without the least charge of profaneness or idolatry, may, according to vulgar imagination, serve to justify these galant votaries . . ." (II 21314).

< previous page

page_69

next page >

< previous page

page_70

next page > Page 70

pretty much on the same bottom" (I 122); "without failing in the least tittle of ceremonial" (I 133); "upon the foot things now stand'' (I 141); "with a thousand other the most vehement efforts" (II 180). Similarly, while Shaftesbury took great pains with the text and physical appearance of these three volumes, issuing "voluminous" instructions to his printer (Voitle 1984: 339), he also, occasionally, reaches for low words: "a choice droll" (I 21); "nurses, who are apt to overlay it"13 (I 66); "they were apt to construe every divine saying in a bellysense" (I 184); "wry faces, beggarly tones, mumpings, grimaces" (II 233); false critics "twitch, snap, snub-up or banter" (II 325); "hoggish" (II 30); "a flaw which would cost dear the mending" (II 17); and in the first Miscellany we have "a learned scuffle" and a mock-heroic game of soccer-football, the "bloated battering engine" of which is finally "subdued by force of foot and fist" (II 165). Farmyard and marketplace and back-alley words are the exception in these 700 pages, however, whereas homely colloquialisms like "'Tis the hardest thing in the world to" are routine, and we are not surprised to encounter a courtier's resolve labeled as "a nose of wax" (I 122). Con: On the other hand, Shaftesbury's prose in certain respects is even more written than the late eighteenth-century norm I have hypothesized, because it preserves the Latinisms and literariness fostered by a seventeenth-century classical education. Susan Wright, on the basis of a 41,000-word sample, rates his use of relative pronouns high in propriety but low in modernity compared to his own contemporaries (1994: 266). "Absolute" constructions a non-finite participle clause, the subject of which is different from the subject of the main clause are common in Latin prose, but rare in colloquial or unscholarly English. Our purpose, therefore, being to defend an author who has been charged as too presumptuous for introducing the way of wit and humour into religious searches, we shall endeavour to make appear (II 217) But our criticism being withal an apology for authors and a defence of the literate tribe, it cannot be thought amiss in us to join the royal with the plebeian penman in this common cause. (I 139) There is nothing ungrammatical about such constructions, but they 13 To overlay: here, to kill [a baby] while sleeping in bed with it by rolling over on it; the word in this sense appears among other causes of death in the Bills of Mortality published in the Gentleman's Magazine in the 1730s.

< previous page

page_70

next page >

< previous page

page_71

next page > Page 71

must be very rare in ordinary speech. So is anything like the following: "A worse accident befel the Persian crown, of which the hierarchy having got absolute possession, had once a fair chance for universal empire" (II 185). Syntactic structures of this type are common in (for example) the first narrative chapter of Livy's Roman History. Shaftesbury's vocabulary is sometimes even less colloquial than his syntax, for he seems sometimes to be thinking in Latin or Greek, particularly when he is looking for equivalents to key words such as to prepon, to kalon kai agathon, honestum (II 17679). The following makes very little sense except as an adaptation of a Latin idiom: "'Tis the like moral grace and Venus which, discovering itself in the turns of character and the varieties of human affection, is copied by the writing artist" (I 217). Venus, veneris can be used to mean not the goddess herself but any grace or beauty, as in Horace Ars poetica 320 (quoted by Shaftesbury I 181). The word generous usually has in Shaftesbury its Latin sense of "well-born" (I 155 "generous plants''[!], I 183, 205). "Earth born" (II 250) should not remind us of mud, fungus, weeds, or worms; for Shaftesbury it carries the meaning of its source in Greek, "autochthonous." Pro: Nevertheless, the basic texture of Shaftesbury's prose is oral, colloquial: a speaking voice, one person talking to another, with many of the informalities and some of the casual syntax that belonged to orality in 1710. I interpret frequent sentence-initial coordinating conjunctions as an instrument of the kind of cohesion that speech requires (see Halliday and Hasan 1976), and in some sections of Characteristics a great many sentences begin with and, nor, but, or for: four on the first page of Treatise III ("Soliloquy"), five on the second, five on the fourth, seven on the sixth (I 1038). Doublets, an habitual practice in sixteenth-century prose, crop up also in Shaftesbury. Gapping or ellipsis is commonplace: "What is it then should so disturb our views of Nature?" (II 67); "who is there can afford to make it as he ought?" (I 68). Most noticeable to the reader fresh from late eighteenth-century prose is Shaftesbury's reliance on the contracted forms of the impersonal, "'Tis," " 'Twas," " 'Twere," which appear on almost every page. It seems pedantic to mention solecisms in Shaftesbury when there are so few, but the fact that there are any at all is I think significant. "Tolerable good grace" (II 239) and "dazzling bright" (II 340) would surely have been edited out of a late eighteenth century philosophical discourse. "For that" and "notwithstanding" were perfectly

< previous page

page_71

next page >

< previous page

page_72

next page > Page 72

respectable subordinating conjunctions in the sixteenth century (II 291), but were likely to be corrected by normative grammarians in the late eighteenth. Archaisms? Language change in the eighteenth century characteristically exhibits a gradual erosion of forms and lexical items that were more common or habitual in Shakespeare's time, such as the pleonastic do (I 19). Shaftesbury uses the demonstrative-plus-possessive construction "this our doctrine" (II 224); "this my inward economy" (II 280) which, according to Kytö and Rissanen's search of the Helsinki Corpus, was gradually fading out of Early Modern English between 1500 and 1710. Similarly we find in Shaftesbury the "middle voice'' with verbs that no longer take the middle voice: "The taste of Greece was now polishing" (II 243). Particular lexical items may also strike us as antique or in the process of becoming antique: "withal" (I 139, 142; II 170, 178, etc.); "betimes" (I 141); "an arrant villain" (I 114, and see I 123); "nowise" (I 198); "peradventure" (I 106, 115, etc.); "ken" meaning to know or recognize (II 285). Con: On the other hand, if one permits Edmund Burke to get away with a kind of "literate orality" because of his rhetoric, shouldn't Shaftesbury have the same privilege? I don't think Shaftesbury is the craftsman Burke is, but he too exploits the musical and affective powers of a series of short sentences (II 172; I 105), of periodicity (I 125; II 241), of extended metaphors (I 186; II 286), parallel structure (I 222), antithesis (II 59), and paradox (I 109). Occasionally, we find one of the fancier schemes and tropes: epanalepsis (I 30), praeteritio (I 214), divisio (II 225). And there is no doubt about Shaftesbury's enjoyment of new words, old words, low words, high words: "miscellanarian" (II 215); "monied bliss" (II 345); "ecstasied" (II 281), "ventosity" (I 106), "froth and scum" (I 108). Defending "The Moralists" as a "systematical" but "polite work," Shaftesbury boasts of his own "variety of styles; the simple, comic, rhetorical, and even the poetic or sublime" (II 334). In one of my readings of "The Moralists" I found myself keeping track of prose rhythms at the end of paragraphs: . . . and sécret thoúghts of mén. (II 49) . . . no léss belóved by thém. (II 27) . . . the áll-sustáining glóbe. (II 23) . . . anóther náture's jústly cónquering fórce. (II 23) . . . a móre agréeable enthúsiást! (II 24)

< previous page

page_72

next page >

< previous page

page_73

next page > Page 73

If we decide that the last syllables of the second and fourth examples in this list are short not long, we get the accentual equivalent of paeans not iambs, and paeans were a favorite foot in the Ciceronian clausulae (Orator par. 188, 194). Voitle cites a "typical" note in Shaftesbury's own copy of the 1711 edition of Characteristics as evidence that Shaftesbury "read some of Characteristicks aloud to see how it sounded" (390). Pro: All of which confirms the argument that Shaftesbury's prose is oral. Another aspect of his orality is the fact that almost everything that he writes is couched as argument. Shaftesbury's favorite modes of discourse are dialogue and soliloquy, conversations with imaginary others and with himself. The real point of "Soliloquy or Advice to an Author" is not the judgments it makes on the present state of wit (I 132, 135) or on romances and travel literature (I 22125), or on patronage (I 13943), but its definition and exemplification of "soliloquy," the moral-philosophical discipline that Shaftesbury had already brought to a sophisticated level of intricacy and depth in his private journal. Paragraph eight of ''Advice to an Author" is dialogue about this kind of dialogue with oneself: Accordingly, if it be objected against the above-mentioned practice and art of surgery, "that we can nowhere find such a meek patient, with whom we can in reality make bold, and for whom nevertheless we are sure to preserve the greatest tenderness and regard," I assert the contrary; and say, for instance, that we have each of us ourselves to practise on. "Mere quibble!" you will say; "for who can thus multiply himself into two persons and be his own subject? Who can properly laugh at himself or find in his heart to be either merry or severe on such an occasion?" Go to the poets. (I 105) "Soliloquy" here is a moral or ethical catechism in which the speaker "takes himself to task, without sparing himself in the least," probing faults, teaching, learning (for an example, see I 114). The kind of poet Shaftesbury is thinking of here is surely Horace, the dialoguing Horace of the satires and epistles. There are about twice as many references to Horace as to Aristotle in Characteristics, that is, many more than to any other author. In some of his poems Horace performs the same self-catechism that Shaftesbury advocates. In Epistle I i, he invents a voice telling him to give up versifying, to "turn loose the ageing horse [poetry], lest at the last it stumble"; and in response to this voice Horace declares allegiance to what is true, what is proper: "Nunc itaque, et versus et caetera

< previous page

page_73

next page >

< previous page

page_74

next page > Page 74

ludicra pono, / Quid verum atque decens, curo et rogo, et omnis in hoc sum." Shaftesbury quotes this last line at the end of the first chapter of Miscellany III. Elsewhere he strikes Horatian poses, pretending, for example, that he is not quite equal to "the high function or capacity of author," and asking permission "to imitate the best genius and most gentleman-like of Roman poets" (Horace) in his "honesty and good-humour" (I 211). Characteristics as a whole is full of imaginary dialogues of one kind or another. Shaftesbury's practice of enclosing single arguments or propositions in quotation marks contributes to our sense that even his most abstract demonstrations are partly dialogue. In the "Miscellanies," Shaftesbury extends the conversation with himself to cover his own "multifarious, complex, and desultory" expository mode, "the way of chat" (II 216). But this last Treatise is supposedly written by another author in defense of the author of the first five Treatises, so that the three-page footnote in Miscellany III quoting Cicero and inventing a dialogue with "an airy spark, no friend to meditation or deep thought" becomes in effect a dialogue on a dialogue on a dialogue. If imbrication like this reminds us of Tristram Shandy, well, good; Shaftesbury's humor and irony and multiple consciousnesses have Shandyan potential. It was Shaftesbury who said, ''Gravity is of the very essence of imposture" (I 10), and Sterne who agreed that "The very essence of gravity [is] design, and consequently deceit" (Tristram Shandy, vol. I, ch. 11). Shaftesbury's prose, then, has a solid base in speech; but it is the speech of an exceedingly well-bred gentleman, not low or bourgeois or middle-class. Shaftesbury's prose is class-conscious; he writes as one of only 160 living peers of England, for a polite and international readership. Another reason why in the end he seems an exception to my hypotheses about gentrification and literacy is a book he never published and never intended for publication, a twovolume prose discourse that would have significantly rearranged our picture of early eighteenth-century prose if it had reached the public in 1715, not in 1900. From 1688, when he was only seventeen, until the last years of his life Shaftesbury kept a private journal entitled Askémata, "Exercises," in which he recorded not personal secrets or private events but an ongoing conversation with himself about Stoic virtue: meditations, self-questionings, trains of thought in short, a soliloquy. This is an amazing document, even in the intrusively edited version published by Benjamin Rand in

< previous page

page_74

next page >

< previous page

page_75

next page > Page 75

1900.14 It is not informal or unfinished, and as prose it is extraordinarily flexible, full of fragments and extravagant series, repeated injunctions and self-questionings, sentences very long and very short, redundancies and quotations.15 14 All entries in these two hand-written volumes, now in the Public Record Office, are dated, but Rand has omitted dates except in a few footnotes. It is hard to tell, from those passages that have been accurately transcribed by Voitle and Klein, just how many words or sentences Rand omitted, or even whether Rand's arrangement of the text is Shaftesbury's. 15 Dreams, dreams. A dark night; dead sleep; starts; disturbing visions; faint endeavours to awake. A sick reason; labyrinth; wood, sea. Waves tossing; billows surging; the driving of the wreck; giddy whirlwinds; eddies; and the overwhelming gulf. How emerge? When gain the port, the station, promontory? that ["stands firm and tames the fury of the water around it." Mar. Aurel. Med. IV, par. 49]. Awake; rouse; shake off the fetters of the enchantress; begin. Again retired. See what Providence has bestowed on thee! Once more in thy power to be saved, to redeem thyself, to raise thyself from this sink, these dregs, this guise of a world, to manliness, to reason and a natural life; to come again on the stage as an actor, not as a machine; as knowing the author of the piece, as conscious of the design, to join in the performance, the disposition, the government; to be a spectator, a guest, a friend, and with the same friendship to retire and thank the inviter. But O, these dreams! this sleep! No more. Die altogether, thou wretch; not thus. In the other death there is no harm. But how many deaths in such a life as this? What else but this is deadly? What else should terrify or concern? (1900: 124).

< previous page

page_75

next page >

< previous page

page_76

next page > Page 76

Chapter 4 Loose and Periodic Sentences My lines and life are free; free as the road, Loose as the wind, as large as store. (G. Herbert, "The Collar": 1633) "Periodic" and "loose" sentences are ubiquitous in English prose and poetry. The stylistic contrast between these two modes of articulation has been recognized at least since Aristotle, and it continues to crop up in late twentieth-century rhetorics. Differences between loose and periodic may signify something about a passage's probable date (as we saw in chapter 2), its orality or writtenness (as in chapters 2, 3, and 6), its grandeur or humbleness (chapter 5); and, certainly, they modify what it can do to the reader, or for the author. Nevertheless, important as they are in the arts of language, periodicity and looseness have not been studied systematically. Perhaps one reason for this neglect is that Aristotle supplied grounds for defining a period in grammatical terms, but Cicero conceived of the period as a rhythmic unit with grammatical bases. It is difficult to reconcile these two towering authorities! Cicero was of course better known during the three hundred years when classical ideals of prose style most strongly influenced writers in English. But no genuine equivalent to Cicero's periods is possible in English, because English poetic rhythms are accentual not quantitative. The central tradition of periodicity in English, therefore, is Aristotle's grammatical one, as discussed by John Ward, Blair, Whately, Lanham, and others. I shall begin by trying to clarify this tradition, reanalysing it in terms of syntax and semantics. A periodic sentence, which delays its most important element to the last few words, lends itself naturally to certain kinds of emphasis. The sentence you have just finished reading is a modest example; the which-clause, occurring after the subject, postpones the predicate, and this particular predicate doesn't make sense without a noun

< previous page

page_76

next page >

< previous page

page_77

next page > Page 77

telling us what a periodic sentence lends itself to. So the "arc of suspension" that readers were launched into when they began reading the sentence does not reach completion until the last four words. By building up suspense a writer can enhance the impact of the "important element" at the end of the sentence; the experience of waiting for something gives that something a certain cachet or weight. Here is a sentence from Burke's Reflections that owes its periodicity to a similar form of syntactic suspense: "I am not sagacious enough to discover how this despotic sport, made of the feelings, consciences, prejudices, and properties of men, can be discriminated from the rankest tyranny'' (266). Loose sentences work well in narrative and description, because, having made a major point early on, they can devote most of their words to comment, amplification, or examples, and they can "change their mind" in the middle start on a new tack, explain, develop, and embroider, as this sentence obviously does. If periodic sentences can claim as one of their assets the power to surprise readers and wake them up, loose sentences can claim spontaneity and naturalness. It is difficult to write or speak a periodic sentence without having thought ahead enough to set up the syntactic/semantic apparatus that delays the important element to the end. But a loose sentence can just ramble on informally, following its nose along whatever trail seems most pleasant and informative. The apparently unplanned nature of loose sentences associates them with informal prose, whereas periodic sentences give the impression of being more official, more rhetorical. In an influential article designed for teachers of composition, Francis Christiansen attacked "the eighteenth-century base" of subordinate clause and periodic sentence upon which "hundreds of handbooks and rhetorics" have founded their instruction in writing sentences, and called instead for a rhetoric of composition conceived as "essentially a process of addition." Christiansen extolled the "cumulative" sentence, which makes its way by adding complement phrases, modifiers, and appositives to the grammatical core of subject and predicate. In effect, Christiansen celebrates "loose" sentences. If we teach our students to write periodic sentences, he says, we shall be encouraging them to "represent the idea as conceived, pondered over, re-shaped, packaged, and delivered cold," in the manner of "Cartesian" rationalists (1978: 28, 39). Other scholars have associated prose styles that rely on periodic

< previous page

page_77

next page >

< previous page

page_78

next page > Page 78

sentences either with the rationalism of the Enlightenment or with the conservatism of a ruling autocracy. Analogies for Johnson's prose style are found in the axial symmetries of Paris's new city plan. Olivia Smith argues that "structured syntax" in Burke and Johnson was characteristic of the language of a conservative elite trying actively to keep the establishment intact. Smith sees grammar as "an integral part of the class structure"; accordingly, periodic sentences, like other kinds of "formal syntax," are the mark of a classically educated elite, whose "theories of language, dictionaries, and grammars'' were "centrally and explicitly concerned with class division": intended, that is, to exclude from political power the writers of "vernacular" prose, such as Tom Paine. Thus, George Campbell expressed disdain for colloquialisms and "vulgarisms" spoken by "a person of no birth," and Campbell approved of periodic sentences: they are "more susceptible of vivacity and force" than loose sentences, more suitable to "the dignity of the historian, the political writer, and the philosopher."1 Loose sentences, by contrast, have been connected with "common speech" (Boulton 1965: 10), with the vernacular, with "formal realism" (Watt 1957: 101), with a readership of artisans and ordinary folk. Colloquial language is often assumed to be loose because the usual strategy of informal talk is to say what occurs and then add phrases and clauses for clarification, not to save up one's most important message for last. Defoe is widely acknowledged as a master of the loose sentence, and Defoe is strongly identified with the common people (i.e., the non-genteel majority of the populace) as Johnson and Gibbon and Burke, despite their middle-class origins, have been identified with the establishment, with classical education, and with political conservatism. In Defoe, as George Starr has demonstrated, "character is revealed through response to the other," and the instruments for those revelations are loose sentences (1974: 241). What makes a sentence periodic? A period "has a beginning and end in itself," writes Aristotle in the Rhetoric (III, ix). It is more "pleasant" for reader or hearer than a loose or continuous utterance because "all wish to have the end in 1 Olivia Smith 1984: 148, i, 46, viiviii; Campbell 1776: 142, 169, 37172.

< previous page

page_78

next page >

< previous page

page_79

next page > Page 79

sight." Loose sentences are "unpleasant" because they are "endless." If a period is too long, the auditor loses touch with its shape; if clauses or sentences are too short, "they do not make a period." Scholars disagree on ''the extent to which Aristotle thinks of a period as essentially a rhythmical unit" (Kennedy 1991: 239), but he clearly does not equate periodicity with the periodic sentences of Isocrates, so that what has been thought of as periodic prose in Cicero does not fit easily into Aristotle's notions. It is Aristotle who first and most influentially identified periodicity with completedness. Although the idea of periodic prose originated in the classical era, I'd like to dissociate the periodicity and looseness that you and I encounter in modern languages from what was called "a" period in Greek and Latin. In classical times methods evolved for combining short metrical units of prose, kommata, into longer metrical units, cola, which in turn could be joined to make periodoi. (This is where the names of these three punctuation marks come from; see Clark 1957: 9798.) L. P. Wilkinson quotes Cicero for an example of a ten-word period with four cola: "non metus, non religio, non deorum vis, non hominum existimatio" (1963: 177); and Cicero again for a 64-word period with only five cola (181). The appeal in both cases is to the ear. In Cicero, the period is connected with rhythmic patterns at the ends of clauses, "clausulae." John Ward (1759) incorporates into his lectures some of the Ciceronian directives for adapting periods to the ear and for making them "suited to the breath of the speaker" (I 348). However, most attempts to duplicate in English the gorgeous sound patternings that captivated Roman and Greek audiences strike us as pretty silly. Here is an English translation of a Latin sentence by Gabriel Harvey (1577): "How can I say how great and how perfectly pure a Ciceronian I was, in the choice of each and every word, in the composition and structure of sentences, the discrimination of cases and tenses, in the harmoniousness of set formulas, in the fashioning of phrases and clauses, in measuring my periods, in the variety and charm of rhythm and endings, in the elaborate and accurate accumulation of elegances of every kind?" (Pooley 1992: 78). The grammatical or Aristotelian idea of periodicity has been durable over the centuries. We can find versions of it in Campbell (1776), Whately (1833), Brooks and Warren (1949), Edward Corbett (1965), and Leech and Short (1981). Exercises for writing periodic

< previous page

page_79

next page >

< previous page

page_80

next page > Page 80

sentences appear in the Harbrace College Handbook, 10th Edition (1986). The grammatical concepts this form of periodicity (and its opposite, looseness) depend on are "scope" and "constituent structure"; this is a domain of stylestudies where grammar directly correlates with expressive power. Almost always we experience language linearly in time, as "an extremely complex and ever-shifting network of adjustments" in the nervous system and auditory organs (Sapir 1921: 9). "Much recent work on parsing suggests that parsing is to some extent a 'top-down' process: that the hearer constructs anticipatory hypotheses about the overall structure of the utterance on the basis of what he [or she] has already heard" (Sperber and Wilson 1986: 205). When we use language for ordinary reading or speaking (though much less obviously when we are analysing language), it is "no longer an object, a thing-in-itself, but all event'' (Fish 1972: 386). Periodicity scarcely exists except as a verbal event in time. But words in English do not come to us one by one in a series of equal units; rather, they come in groups. Some belong with others, as an adjective belongs with the noun it modifies. Some refer to others, as a pronoun refers to its antecedent. Some require others in order to make completed sense, as a transitive verb requires a direct object. There are a number of technical terms connected with word grouping in utterances and sentences: "constituency structure" is among the most uncontroversial. In a sentence such as "the cat sat on the mat," we recognize that "the cat" is a constituent with a function distinct from the function of any other single word or group of words in that sentence. "On the mat," similarly, does things in that sentence that no other word or phrase does. No matter what terminology we may call on for explaining the grammar of this sentence, it includes constituents that can be diagrammed: (The [cat]) / (sat [on (the [mat])]). The same somewhat mysterious forces that establish these elementary groupings in "the cat sat on the mat" can create much larger groupings, extending over twenty, forty or more words. Constituent structure may arouse strong syntactic expectations on the part of the reader or listener. When English speakers are presented out of the blue with a noun phrase as topic, we understand it, ordinarily, other things being equal, as grammatical subject, and expect a comment, which will very often emerge grammatically as a predicate (see

< previous page

page_80

next page >

< previous page

page_81

next page > Page 81

Quirk et al. 1985: 136096; Keenan and Schieffelin 1976). A great many words may intervene between the birth of that expectation and its fulfillment. The commonest elements of syntax that can create lengthy constituency structures, in addition to the subject-predicate structure, are clausal subordination and correlative conjunction. For example, the reader of a sentence beginning with a subordinate clause expects a main clause that will complete the sentence: In short, not to keep the reader in long suspence, just at the very instant when his heart was exulting in meditations on the happiness which would accrue to him by Mr. Allworthy's death, he himself died of an apoplexy! (Tom Jones vol. II, ch. 8, par. 4) Readers of this forty-word sentence must work their way through thirty-four words before they get to the main clause, and two more before they learn what it is that the reader is "not" being kept in suspense about. The word "when" as a subordinator tells readers that they must finish the clause introduced by the "when" before they can discover or experience syntactic closure. The dash that Fielding uses to separate the constituent structure that satisfies those expectations from the thirty-six preceding words suggests that periodicity was intended. Periodic sentences make a larger impact when syntax and semantics act in partnership. The best periodic sentences force the reader to expect and wait for something the meaning of which is worth waiting for. "There are minds so impatient of inferiority, that their gratitude is a species of revenge." In this sentence (from Johnson, Rambler, no. 87) the very last word transforms what is virtually a cliché into what is virtually a paradox. Most readers will have cruised calmly through the first fourteen words of the sentence only to be set back on their heels by a potentially shocking contrast between the kindliness of "gratitude" and the malevolence of "revenge." If we substitute an obvious idea for the slightly shocking one in Rambler, no. 87, the sentence loses its restless energy: "There are minds so impatient of inferiority, that their uneasiness is difficult to conceal." Ho, hum. To underline the importance of the partnership between syntax and semantics in periodicity, look at a fifty-nine-word sentence from Moll Flanders which unquestionably, although it postpones an important revelation to the last two words, is not periodic:

< previous page

page_81

next page >

< previous page

page_82

next page > Page 82

After the end of five Weeks I grew better, but was so Weak, so Alter'd, so Melancholly, and recover'd so Slowly, that the Physicians apprehended I should go into a Consumption; and which vex'd me most, they gave it as their Opinion, that my Mind was Oppress'd, that something Troubl'd me, and in short, that I was In Love. (1721: 42) In this sentence the most important element is postponed to last: we had been informed a little earlier that Moll would recover from her illness; the convalescence described in this sentence seems normal; but the public rumor that she is "In Love" is significant, for character and for plot and for theme, as an index both of Moll's humanity and of the treacherous and life-preserving roles that sexuality will play in her history. "In Love" is printed in small capitals in the first edition. The semantics of this sentence, in other words, might support periodicity. But the syntax does not. The syntax of Defoe's sentence reaches closure after nine words, when the reader meets the predicate complement of the main verb "grew"; it resumes forward motion by adding a coordinating conjunction and another verb, sets up another major constituent structure with a so-adverb-that-subject-predicate sequence, which does not end until word 31; it gets under way again with another coordinating conjunction and reaches syntactic closure (the third time) at word 47 ("Oppress'd"), only to start off a fourth time by adding two more noun clauses to form a series, the last two words of which are the climactic ''In Love." Defoe undermines suspense and expectations by coming to the end of major constituent structures four times, at words 9, 31, 47, and 51, in a 59-word sentence. If genuine periodicity demands both syntactic and semantic suspense, then not only a sentence that has semantic suspense but not syntactic, like Defoe's, but also a sentence that has syntactic suspense but not semantic, should fail to convey the impression of controlled strength and authority of true periodicity. Such sentences are not uncommon in Johnson's Rambler, sentences that open with one or more noun clauses used as the subject: "That the mind of man is never satisfied with the objects immediately before it, but is always breaking away from the present moment, and losing itself in schemes of future felicity . . . has been frequently remarked" (Rambler, no. 2). An arc of suspension has been set up here because the reader expects that this subject, the formidable noun clause, must have a predicate, but when the predicate arrives it is unsurprising and predictable; and so the sentence as a whole fails to be periodic.

< previous page

page_82

next page >

< previous page

page_83

next page > Page 83

Judgments as to whether the last words in a sentence are semantically important or not are partly subjective. Judgments as to when in a given sentence syntactic expectations are aroused and when satisfied are much less uncertain. They can be explained and justified in terms of large constituent structures. In formal prose, where we expect full sentences, we expect a predicate to complete a subject (or vice versa, if the normal English word order is inverted). We expect subordinators like because, if, so that, and although to be followed by a full (or reduced) subordinate clause, and of course when a sentence opens with a subordinate clause, we are usually justified in believing that an independent clause will follow; hence Christiansen's association of subordinate clauses with periodic sentences. Similarly, correlative conjunctions that join full clauses pretty much guarantee at least a two-clause sentence ("Either the mail hasn't come yet, or we . . ."): the reader begins to expect a second independent clause as soon as the first one is under way. The structure of a periodic sentence has to be anticipated in advance, whether consciously or not. A periodic sentence therefore gives the feeling of having been crafted or planned. The feeling or the impression that loose sentences may give is harder to specify; loose sentences take many different shapes and forms. I define the extreme of looseness, however, as the opposite of periodicity, and therefore as a sentence that expresses its most important message at the outset, reaches syntactic closure fairly soon, and may as a result do whatever it pleases after that, may seem spontaneous, irregular, vivacious, obsessive-compulsive, or whatever the author can make it seem. The subject and predicate of the main clause of a loose sentence must have been finished off in the first ten or twenty words or in the first third of the sentence. It does not matter what the syntax of the last two thirds of the sentence is, so long as it is not too regular, formal, or obviously shaped. Johnsonian triplets or parallel clauses cannot be thought of as "loose" even if the main idea of the sentence had been stated a dozen words previously, and even when syntactic suspension is not in question. Let's take as an example of an effective loose sentence this from Moll Flanders: But my Case was indeed Deplorable, for I was left perfectly Friendless and Helpless, and the Loss my Husband had sustain'd had reduc'd his

< previous page

page_83

next page >

< previous page

page_84

next page > Page 84

Circumstances so low that tho' indeed I was not in Debt, yet I could easily foresee that what was left would not support me long; that while it wasted daily for Subsistence, I had no way to encrease it one Shilling, so that it would be soon all spent, and then I saw nothing before me but the utmost Distress, and this represented it self so lively to my Thoughts, that it seem'd as if it was come, before it was really very near; also my very Apprehensions doubl'd the Misery, for I fancied every Sixpence that I paid but for a Loaf of Bread, was the last that I had in the World, and that To-morrow I was to fast, and be starv'd to Death. (1721: 190) This sentence is 150 words long, but it reaches syntactic closure in just six words, and then again eight words later, and then a third time eleven words after that, and sixteen times more before it ends. Its syntax is in this sense loose. Its semantics are equally so: the main point, Moll's "deplorable" plight, is stated in the first six words, and the other 144 words detail the circumstances of her "case," especially its financial and psychological circumstances, which seem almost inextricably connected, so that we follow her distress almost inch by inch as it frets over "Debt'' and "Shillings" and "Sixpence" on its way to a vividly tautological apprehension of being "starv'd to Death." This sentence occurs at a critical juncture in the novel, just before Moll's first act of theft; and what we call stylistic looseness seems a brilliant expression of the fretful agony of spirit that Moll suffers as she turns from a woman of easy morals into a criminal. The Domains of Periodicity Periodic sentences turn up surprisingly often in key passages of famous texts, both prose and poetry. Leafing through the Norton Anthology (Abrams: 1993), I encounter a dozen well-known lines that depend on periodicity for build-up and climax. Certain kinds of emphasis and expressivity seem to compose themselves in periodic sentences of various structures and lengths, in every literary era from Chaucer on (more or less). For example, the most famous verse portrait of the eighteenth century, Pope's Atticus (in "The Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot"), is a single periodic sentence. It consists of twenty lines of subordinate clauses raising suspense and expectations, plus two lines of main clauses that satisfy those expectations; and a portion of the impact of the portrait as a whole rests on how well those main clauses at the end complete the arc of suspense that has preceded them. If there

< previous page

page_84

next page >

< previous page

page_85

next page > Page 85

were "One whose fires / True Genius kindles, and fair Fame inspires, . . . Shou'd such a man . . . Bear, like the Turk, no brother near the throne, . . . [should he] give his little Senate laws, / And sit attentive to his own applause . . . , Who but must laugh . . .? / Who would not weep . . .?" The complicated mixture of admiration and fear and dislike and even envy in this portrait requires indirection of at least these two sorts: first posing the satire conditionally, as if it were only a possibility not a fact; and then extending that conditionality to such lengths that the frankly paradoxical apodosis of this multiply compounded protasis may sum up a great many contradictory values and attitudes. The risks of such a structure are breathtaking. As we make our way through the barbed wire entanglement of successively less attractive attributes, we may wonder what could possibly resolve them, what could possibly be the "then" that they are the "if'' for. Two not quite honest questions perform this task. They are not quite honest because the way the portrait is painted gives us glimpses of a painter who fears and envies his subject enough to smear him; there are less honorable responses than laughter and tears in evidence here. We find wonderful examples of periodicity in other centuries than the eighteenth. The famous 310-word sentence in the fourteenth paragraph of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail" deploys eleven when clauses in a row for a galvanizing build-up to a climactic and poignant ending, "then you will understand . . . " The magnificent 197word sentence in Section III.2 of Book I of Richard Hooker's Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (1593) has the same syntax, a series of subordinate clauses: "Now if nature should intermit her course, . . . if the frame of that heavenly arch . . . if celestial spheres should forget . . ." The anticipation of something exuberant that we feel in the opening lines of the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales derives partly from that long periodic sentence climaxing (or anticlimaxing) in "pilgrimages." John Milton's cunningly delayed apology for poetry past and future exploits a constituent structure tied to "so," just as Johnson's pronouncement on "minds impatient of inferiority" did. Milton confesses that he was listening to an inward prompting which now grew daily upon me, that by labour and intent study, (which I take to be my portion in this Life) joyn'd with the strong propensity of Nature, I might perhaps leave something so written to after-times, as they should not wilingly let it die.

< previous page

page_85

next page >

< previous page

page_86

next page > Page 86

For that matter, the first six lines of Paradise Lost are a periodic sentence: "Of Man's First Disobedience, and . . ., whose . . ., and . . ., With . . ., till . . ., and . . ., Sing Heav'nly Muse"!2 (Milton is not drawing on an epic convention of periodic invocations; compare the opening lines of epics by Spenser, Ariosto, Virgil, and Homer.) Let me mention two "parameters" of periodicity, organization and length. If the anticipating section of a periodic sentence is organized as a crescendo, the surprise or delight or astonishment or horror we feel when we reach closure is greater. Thus, in Pope's Atticus, lines 14 describe a man "Blest with each Talent and each Art to please," but lines 58 reveal him as excessively proud, and in lines 914 we come to understand that he is dangerous, and in lines 1520 we begin to feel contempt for his vanity; so that nothing less paradoxical than lines 2122 could resolve these tensions: our growing sense of contamination is contained and sustained by the syntax. The opening of Paradise Lost has less drama but more narrative; it is a summary of divine history from the Fall to the Redemption. Periodicity may also be used simply for amplitude; it may give the writer opportunity to embroider and enrich: When in the chronicle of wasted time I see descriptions of the fairest wights, And beauty making beautiful old rhyme In praise of ladies dead and lovely knights, Then in the blazon of sweet beauty's best, I see their antique pen would have express'd Even such a beauty as you master now. The first five lines of Shakespeare's Sonnet 106 in some measure "waste" historical time by repetition, by the bold redundancies of "fairest," "beauty," ''beautiful," "lovely," and "sweet beauty's best," as a way of enhancing the praise of the poet's beloved. The length of a periodic sentence, and the proportions between that part of it devoted to expectations and that part of it devoted to closure, are almost endlessly variable. We have seen how much energy Johnson can pack into fifteen words. Less concise but equally memorable is this sentence from Burke's Letter to a Noble Lord: But as to our country and our race, as long as the well compacted structure of our church and state, the sanctuary, the holy of holies of that ancient law, 2 For the syntax and aesthetics of "arcs of suspension" in seventeenth-century literature, see Fish 1972.

< previous page

page_86

next page >

< previous page

page_87

next page > Page 87

defended by reverence, defended by power, a fortress at once and a temple, shall stand inviolate on the brow of the British Sion as long as the British Monarchy, not more limited than fenced by the orders of the State, shall, like the proud Keep of Windsor, rising in the majesty of proportion, and girt with the double belt of it's kindred and coeval towers, as long as this awful structure shall oversee and guard the subjected land so long the mounds and dykes of the low, fat, Bedford level will have nothing to fear from all the pickaxes of all the levellers of France. (172) This 135-word sentence catapults the reader into a testament on nationality, religion, and law. Its beginning is slightly clogged; in the first fifty words we as readers are dealt out a sequence of heavy nominals, which may be either in apposition or in series, and we have to expend effort to take them all in. The visual picture of Windsor Castle, however, has momentum and energy. As Paul Fussell points out, this is a progress from abstract to concrete (1965: 208). Notice Burke's use of doublets ("kindred and coeval"; "oversee and guard"; "mounds and dykes"). The effect of these reiterations ("all the pickaxes of all the levellers") is almost like that of repeated V I or perfect cadences at the end of a symphony. Periodicity extended over more than a hundred words enables Burke to build up an intricate structure of paradox, imagery, synonymy, and allusion that enhances contrasts between the castle and the mound. Sheer length, abundance, richness of modification, and amplification contribute to overall power. Ironists may exploit periodicity to place the words that carry irony in a key position; they may take delight in arousing high expectations and then undercutting them. Thus Virginia Woolf, in A Room of One's Own: "Hence the enormous importance to a patriarch who has to conquer, who has to rule, of feeling that great numbers of people, half the human race indeed, are by nature [. . . what is being delayed here is the predicate, which is grammatically essential, but which also reveals what it is 'enormously important' to a patriarch for others to feel . . .] inferior to himself." Thus Jane Austen, in Pride and Prejudice: "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of. . . ." The words "truth universally acknowledged" are the semantic counterparts of the syntax that delays closure past the verb of the that-clause to its object, since by their abstractness and hyperbole they promise that the single man will be in want of something exalted like "prudence" or "a guardian angel'' or "a

< previous page

page_87

next page >

< previous page

page_88

next page > Page 88

worthy purpose in life," not merely (such is the attitude comically/ironically implied by the presence of all that universally acknowledged truth) a "wife." We can illustrate both the grandeur and the bathos that a periodic sentence is capable of with this of Gibbon, on the classical philosophers: When they viewed with complacency the extent of their own mental powers, when they exercised the various faculties of memory, of fancy, and of judgment, in the most profound speculations, or the most important labours, and when they reflected on the desire of fame, which transported them into future ages, far beyond the bounds of death and of the grave; they were unwilling to confound themselves with the beasts of the field, or to suppose, that a being, for whose dignity they entertained the most sincere admiration, could be limited to a spot of earth, and to a few years of duration. (Decline and Fall, ch. 15, par. 17.) Gibbon takes advantage of the momentum gathered in three successive when-clauses to compound his main clause, and in the second branch of the predicate ("to confound . . . to suppose") he initiates a second (syntactic) expectation ("to suppose, that . . ."), the resolution of which has to wait through a very derogatory relative clause before it gets past subject into predicate. Defoe and the Syntax of Accumulation Periodicity can be electrifying or pompous. Loose sentences can trace the most intimate contours of thought and feeling or they can be painfully dull. The key to both is interaction between syntax and semantics: how do syntactic expectations, or syntactic openness, reinforce the sense of a sentence? Excellence in loose sentences requires a syntax of accumulation and a semantics of discovery. There must be a good reason for each of the additional elements that continue to accumulate as the sentence goes on. Most of the sentences we speak and write are loose; and so it is "very loose" sentences that contrast properly with periodic sentences and play a distinct role in historical studies of the language. Such sentences have come in and out of fashion. They were one of the staples of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century prose. Very likely, the English Bible, as it evolved from 1526 on, had some part in the growth and development of very loose sentences, since William Tyndale's genius at finding real English equivalents for a Hebrew

< previous page

page_88

next page >

< previous page

page_89

next page > Page 89

text in which more than 90% of the connectives are "and" profoundly influenced later translations, including the King James Version (Hammond 1982: 1667). The conventions that govern punctuation, in any period, color that period's idea of what a sentence is. M. B. Parkes's recent book on the history of punctuation notes that a very loose sentence in Nashe (1592) is re-punctuated by modern editors as three different sentences. As printed in the sixteenth century, that sentence has what Parkes calls "rhetorical" punctuation: it is divided into four cola, with balanced kommata separated by commas (1993: 889). Parkes contrasts rhetorical punctuation with the more "logical" punctuation that began to take over around 1650 or 1700. This is another reason to read very loose sentences by Defoe, Swift, Mandeville, and Steele as they were first printed, even when they run on for two or three hundred words (see also p. 27 above). What constitutes "closure" in periodic sentences is the completion of clausal constituent structure; but what constitutes "accumulation" in loose sentences is post-modification or conjunction: the addition of more words or constituent structures to a finished clause, either by conjunction or as modifiers of what has been said. In the following, the additional sentence-elements are numbered as they present themselves: I Hope the Time is come at last, (1) when the Voice of moderate Principles may be heard; (2) hitherto the Noise has been so great, and the Prejudices and Passions of Men so strong, that it had been but in vain to offer at any Argument, (3) or for any Man to talk of giving a Reason for his Actions: (4) And this alone has been the Cause why, when other Men, who, I think, have less to say in their own Defence, are appealing to the Publick, and struggling to defend themselves, I alone have been silent (5) under the infinite Clamours and Reproaches, (6) causeless Curses, (7) unusual Threatnings, (8) and the most unjust and injurious Treatment (9) in the World. (Defoe 1715: 161) Notice that the sentence-elements being accumulated may consist of: subordinate clauses, as in the first addition above; or conjoined clauses, as in the second and fourth (the semicolon counts as a kind of null conjunction); or conjoined verbals, as in the third; or post-modification, as in the string of prepositional phrases that make up additions number five through nine. These are the only syntactic resources in English for constructing loose sentences, conjunction

< previous page

page_89

next page >

< previous page

page_90

next page > Page 90

and postmodification.3 Since in order to attach anything to what we have just said, and at the same time include it as part of what we have just said, we must use one of these structures, they are ubiquitous in English. The fact that loose sentences are, in general, more informal and more colloquial than periodic sentences does not necessarily mean that they are disorganized or incoherent in competent prose there is always some reason why element X or element Y is part of that sentence and not somewhere else. Robin Tolmach Lakoff (1971) pointed out that there must be some connection or coherence between two clauses for them to be conjoinable; the "and" between two clauses tells us that they have something to do with each other. The mind will invent a connection between two clauses that seem at first blush totally unrelated. For example, "Today is Friday" in one paragraph would seem quite unconnected to "Overpopulation will be the major problem of the 21st century" in another; but if you hitch them together with an ''and," then they seem to belong together. It has been traditional to assume that a conjunctive syntax is more naive and unsophisticated than hypotaxis (subordination), but Janel Mueller defends both the creativity and the "syntactic independence" of compound sentences (1984: 1833). Most coordination is impure, in the sense that one of the coordinated elements is slightly subordinated to the other: either the conjoined elements cannot be exchanged because they are in sequence, or the coordinating conjunction itself (but, for, so) is asymmetrical (see Gleitman 1965, Talmy 1978). Tracing developments in English prose from Wyclif to Ascham (13801580, more or less), Mueller shows that loose prose can be both oral/colloquial/native and written, artful, literary. The earliest "modern" English prose was full of redundancies, ellipsis, and anacoluthon, like unrevised speech. Here is a fifteenth-century text, John Mandeville on diamonds: "And thei growen togedre, male and femele. And thei ben norysscht with the dew of heuene. And thei 3 Appositives and complements, when tacked onto a completed clause, can usually be analysed as postmodification. It should be clear that in the sentence just quoted from Defoe I have not been entirely consistent in marking "closure." The first clausal unit could have come to a halt after "come." before the adverbial postmodifier "at last." In the third clausal unit, I have respected the cataphora initiated by "so," an arc of syntactic suspension that expects to be completed by a that-clause; but the syntax of that unit would permit it to end after "vain" or after "offer." There are additional stopping-places in the fourth and sixth clausal units as marked here.

< previous page

page_90

next page >

< previous page

page_91

next page > Page 91

engendren comounly, and bryngen forth smale children, that multiplyen and growen all the yeer" (1420: 98). But if this is loose, speech-based prose, so is Tyndale's extraordinarily influential translation of the Bible (1525), large chunks of which were incorporated into the King James Version, including many of its most memorable and beautiful passages. Another pillar of the scriptural tradition in early English prose is Cranmer's Book of Common Prayer (1549), the Collects of which are superbly crafted loose sentences.4 Without question, what Mueller describes as the native tradition of recursive, speech-based, conjunctive prose was alive and flourishing at the outset of the seventeenth century. There is no authoritative study of that tradition as it evolves during the seventeenth century. The Civil War produced a "transformation of literary activity," an "explosion of publication," especially shorter books and journalism, many new genres, women authors, wild experiments in prose style (N. Smith 1994: 144; Hawes 1996). The anti-rhetorical movement that made such a splash in the second half of the century.5 liberated writers from an obligation to various kinds of ornament and design, without encouraging length or syntactic looseness. Anyone who cares to look, however, will find loose sentences in seventeenth-century exposition and narrative of many kinds. The first two sentences of Howell's Epistolae Ho-Elianae Book III No. 7 (To Henry Hopkins, 1 January 1646) are each more than 180 words long and have at least fifteen "breaks" in them, where syntax reaches complete closure. The sentences in the first nine or ten pages of Edward Phillips's Preface to Theatrum Poetarum (1675) average 350-plus words in length. Long, loose sentences crop up in texts by Dissenters (paragraphs 5 and 16 of Bunyan's Grace Abounding [1666], and paragraphs 4, 16, and 19 of Womens Speaking Justified by Margaret Fell Fox [1667]) and in travel books (first five paragraphs of William Methold, Relations of the Kïngdome of Golchonda [1625], chapter 2 of Dampier's A New Voyage Round the World [1697]). I have assumed that prose is loose because writers want to add 4 A Collect for Grace: "O Lord, our heavenly Father, Almighty and everlasting God, who hast safely brought us to the beginning of this day; Defend us in the same with thy mighty power; and grant that this day we fall into no sin, neither run into any kind of danger; but that all our doings, being ordered by thy governance, may be righteous in thy sight: through Jesus Christ our Lord." 5 See Adolph 1968; Arakehan 1979; Croll 191429; Jones 1930, Kroll 1991; Markley 1988; Viekers 1985; Williamson 1951.

< previous page

page_91

next page >

< previous page

page_92

next page > Page 92

something to what they have just said and at the same time to attach it to what they have just said. The logic and the aesthetics of loose prose depend, then, on the order, rationale, and function of these successive additions. Let's look at Defoe's nine-element sentence (quoted above), which opens his anxious political apology of 1715, An Appeal to Honour and Justice. The first two clauses announce Defoe's dearest wish: "I Hope the Time is come at last, when the Voice of moderate Principles may be heard." With characteristic vehemence Defoe had thrown himself into the task of defending his patron the Earl of Oxford; the "enormous effort" he exerted between 1710 and 1714 "had concluded in alienation from almost everyone" (Backscheider 1989: 345), even from Defoe's natural allies the Dissenters. With Harley in exile, his (Defoe's) name now a by-word for mercenary hack-writing, his finances in desperate disarray, Defoe could hardly survive unless vindicated by the public press. Therefore the "hope'' he expresses in those opening clauses is too spare and thin, all by itself; it must be supplemented with additional elements that justify the "Time" he has chosen for his appeal, the "Noise," "Prejudice," and "Passions" of recent months. Still unsatisfied, Defoe tacks on a second version of what all that "Noise" had made it impossible till now to do, "to talk of giving a Reason for his Actions." A lengthy additional element puts his own silence in the context of other men's clamor. If mere grammar, at this point, is satisfied, Defoe's distress is not, and the sentence continues to continue, adding postmodifying prepositional phrases in the language of lament: "infinite Clamours and Reproaches, causeless Curses, unusual Threatnings." The looseness of this sentence is mandated by the urgency of Defoe's need to justify and condole with himself. One of the options a loose syntax can offer is to introduce structures that comment on the writer's own writing as it goes along. Such additional elements may be tuned to self-consciousness, or to summary, or to editorializing, or to reiteration. For example, these add-on clauses on the plague (from the Review, Defoe 1712) repeat and summarize, like a coda in music: . . . and nothing but Death and Horror was to be seen in every place. (149) . . . where many whole Villages were entirely Desolated and not any People left alive; and the like on the Continent. (148) The whole point of non-restrictive which-clauses with clausal ante-

< previous page

page_92

next page >

< previous page

page_93

next page > Page 93

cedents (a bugaboo of the grammarians) is to comment on what one has just said. Defoe's habit of introducing the final clause of a paragraph or a long sentence with "in short" can often serve similar purposes of summary and evaluation. Add-on commentary of this sort makes Defoe's prose copious and self-conscious.6 We get a fuller sense of how many different purposes loose sentences can serve by comparing paragraph one of Defoe's 1715 Appeal with paragraph one of Swift's 1710 "Apology" (for A Tale of A Tub). The expressiveness in both depends on a syntax of accumulation, but what gets expressed in these two paragraphs is very different. If good and ill Nature equally operated upon Mankind, I might have saved my self the Trouble of this Apology.; (1) for it is manifest by the Reception the following Discourse hath met with, that those who approve it, are a great Majority among the Men of Tast; (2) yet there have been two or three Treatises written expressly against it, (3) besides many others that have flirted at it occasionally; (4) without one Syllable having been ever published in its Defence (5) or even Quotation to its Advantage, (6) that I can remember, (7) except by the Polite Author of a late Discourse between a Deist and a Socinian. The contrary-to-fact conditional clause that opens this sentence is quite un-apologetic. It is so aggressive that it turns readers around 180 degrees; what they thought was a defence has suddenly become an attack. Swift administers an acid rebuke to his critics, and then somewhat grimly acknowledges that they are not so negligible that he can afford not to give reasons why he should not have had to apologize. This mixture of prideful disdain and anxiety gives fuel to the accumulation of subsequent clauses, especially additional elements (3) through (7). The details of Swift's critical reception are important enough to him that he refuses to relegate them to another sentence; indeed, they so rankle that they get saddled with emphatics, as if these tacked-on, additional elements were a sort of climax: "without one Syllable . . . in its Defence or even Quotation . . ." Having made that point, Swift disguises what could be interpreted as insecurity with an apparently unconcerned qualification, "that I can remember," and then expresses renewed disdain by lashing out at a so-called ''Polite Author." If Swift's or Defoe's long, loose sentences 6 "The heavy use of appositives, relative clauses, constructions beginning with 'viz.' or 'that is to say,' and what Furbank and Owens have called the 'improvisatory sentence' are aimed at clarifying and at restricting the interpretations available to readers" (Backscheider 1993: 41).

< previous page

page_93

next page >

< previous page

page_94

next page > Page 94

were broken up into their component parts, many of the psychological and rhetorical connections between different ideas and emotions they mention would be lost. Joseph Addison Artfulness in writing loose sentences may also appear in shorter sentences than these, and many writers and readers and critics have felt that the very best prose of the first third of the eighteenth century is keyed to looseness and informality, not to periodicity. I am thinking of The Spectator in general, and of Joseph Addison in particular, whose writings became a model for the middle style and whose essays were celebrated as patterns of "ease." Jan Lannering has described the prevailing syntax of the Addisonian sentence as main clause followed by a succession of relative clauses, resulting in "an extensive delegation of sense-content from main statement to subordinate elements" (1951: 97). Michael Ketcham notes the "structural redundancy" that this often promotes (1985: 144). Stylistic looseness in Addison's prose is in some degree responsible for the ease that so appealed to eighteenth-century readers and critics. Addison specializes in syntactic soft landings; his sentences very often end with a prepositional phrase (24 of the 34 sentences in Spectator, no. 1), and/or with a relative clause (12 of 34), and/or with an adverb clause (7 of 34); very seldom do they end with an important noun. In narrative sentences, the trailing participle construction often replaces finite verbs: "sometimes I am seen thrusting my Head into a Round of Politicians at Will's, and listning with great Attention to the Narratives that are made in those little Circular Audiences." The later eighteenth century was ambivalent about The Spectator. On the one hand, Addison's periodical essay had become an icon; everyone read it and praised it. Michael Ketcham gives astute explanations for this prestige and popularity: unlike anything published in the seventeenth century, unlike The Review and even The Tatler (and certainly unlike the partisan political essays), The Spectator combines "tolerant irony" with "respect for the commonplaces of daily life" (1985: 5) as it conjures up in words a civilized, benevolent urban society. However, by 1790 or so the manners that had seemed polite to readers of 1709 (when drunkenness and profligacy were often the favorite recreation of male aristocrats) had begun to seem

< previous page

page_94

next page >

< previous page

page_95

next page > Page 95

crude; and the prose that had seemed easy and elegant was being censured for solecisms and inaccuracy. Compare easy, loose sentences from The Spectator with more pointed periodic sentences from Richard Cumberland's The Observer (1785). Here again I number the "additional elements" that Addison tacks onto an opening main clause: I have observed, (1) that a Reader seldom peruses a Book with Pleasure, (2) 'till he knows (3) whether the Writer of it be a black or a fair Man, (4) of a mild or cholerick Disposition, (5) Married or a Batchelor, (6) with other Particulars (7) of the like nature, (8) that conduce very much to the right Understanding of an Author. (Spectator, no. 1) Additional elements (6) through (8) add nothing of much interest. In the following, additional elements (5) through (9) placidly repeat or amplify what we have already been told: I was born to a small Hereditary Estate, (1) which, according to the Tradition of the Village where it lies, was bounded (2) by the same Hedges and Ditches (3) in William the Conqueror's Time (4) that it is at present, (5) and had been delivered down (6) from Father to Son (7) whole and entire, (8) without the Loss or Acquisition of a single Field or Meadow; (9) during the Space of six hundred Years. (Spectator, no. 1) Addison's use of doublets ("Hedges and Ditches"; "whole and entire"; "Field or Meadow") seems more intended to reassure than to clarify or to heighten: that is, the second member of the pair adds little to what the first has already said; its presence is merely soothing. Note also the number of prepositional phrases, five in a row at one point, a feature that makes for circumstantiality or cloudiness (Lanham 1979: 313). With these sentences compare two from Obverver, no.1 (1785): When a man breaks in upon a company of strangers, to which he is not invited, the intrusion does or does not demand an apology, (1) according to the nature of the business (2) which brings him thither: (3) if it imports the company only, and he has no interest in the errand, the less time he spends in ceremony the better. At (1) and (2), this sentence reaches syntactic closure and then tacks on an additional element. The break at (3) is not a dependent element but a new beginning; when Cumberland reaches that colon and launches himself into an "if" clause, he initiates an are of suspension that does not end until the end of the sentence. In other words, the modified looseness of the first thirty-six words of the

< previous page

page_95

next page >

< previous page

page_96

next page > Page 96

sentence leads up to a twenty-three-word periodic sequence at the end. Another typical Cumberland sentence from the same essay: For me to conceive, in an age so enlightened as the present, that I can offer any thing to the public which many of my readers will not be as well informed of as myself, would be a very silly presumption indeed. Here even the thirty-five-word constituent structure that serves as subject ("For me to . . . myself") has suspended syntax; once we have got to "any thing which" we do not reach closure till the very last word of this structure ("myself"). Cumberland exploits the anticipations and tensions of periodicity to highlight first a compliment to the reader and then a sweeping bow of ritual self-abasement. He is certainly being polite. Both Addison's ease and Cumberland's elegance have syntactic/semantic bases, the one in accumulation and the other in periodicity. To appreciate the role that Spectatorial "ease" played in the evolution of eighteenth-century prose, to understand why Cumberland, though intensely conscious of writing in the tradition of The Spectator, rejected a loose and easy style, we must look at the reaction against easiness in the second half of the century. Addison figures largely in the lectures that Hugh Blair delivered from 1759 on in Edinburgh. Having praised Addison's essays in Lecture 19 as "the most perfect example" of an ornamented simplicity, in which we see "great elegance joined with great ease" (I 39495), Blair devotes four full lectures (out of twenty-four total) to a sentence-by-sentence critique of Spectators 41144; and he does not let Addison off lightly. He censures grammatical solecisms (I 416, 420, 424); verbosity and redundancy (I 414, 415, 420, 425); misplaced modifiers (I 419, 427); unintentional ambiguities (I 421, 42223); and excessively colloquial or "vulgar" language (I 426227). Robert Lowth, almost certainly writing independently of Blair, quotes Addison ten times to exemplify grammatical errors of various kinds (1762: 26, 38, 43, 48, 87, 99, 126, 130, 146, 151). In the same year (1762) appeared Lord Kames's Elements of Criticism, chapter 18 of which faults Addison repeatedly for infelicities of style, including "languidness,'' feeble endings, and the failure to write periodic sentences. Kames diligently re-writes loose sentences by Addison, Swift, and Bolingbroke to make them more periodic (II 6873). Later in the century, William Godwin can hardly restrain his indignation at the overvaluation of Addison's style, which he considers "eminently enervated": "few authors, distin-

< previous page

page_96

next page >

< previous page

page_97

next page > Page 97

guished in the belles lettres, and of so recent a date, will be found more strikingly loose and unsystematical in their diction" (1797: 43839). By 1804 even the judicious Anna Barbauld must admit that Addison "often allows himself to conclude negligently with a trivial word" (III 94). In these last few pages I have revived the argument of chapters 2 and 3: as eighteenth-century English prose becomes more written and less oral it moves away from looseness and towards periodicity. In chapter 5 I shall pick up another thread from that argument, the contrast between high styles and low. The writtenness and politeness of late eighteenthcentury prose entail a new orientation towards stylistic decorum. In no other area of style, perhaps, is the acute, almost uncomfortable self-consciousness of late eighteenth-century prose more evident. "The fastidious ear," says Barbauld, "may occasionally be offended with some colloquial phrases" in The Spectator, its "readers will seek in vain for those sonourous cadences with which the public ear has been familiarised since the writings of Dr. Johnson" (III 94). There was, however, at least one writer whose "fastidious ear" detected the potential for pretentiousness and bombast in periodic sentences, as early as 1765. Samuel Foote, the actor and playwright who made Johnson laugh against his will (Life III 69), built an overgrown periodic sentence into the mock-eloquent speech of Zac Fungus in The Commissary: When I consider the vast importance of this day's debate; when I revolve the various vicissitudes that this soil has sustain'd; when I ponder what our painted progenitors were; and what we, their civilized successors, are; when I reflect, that they fed on crab-apples and pignuts, and that we feast on green-peas, and on custards: when I trace in the recording historical page, that their floods gave them nothing but frogs, and now know we have fish by landcarriage, I am lost in amazement at the prodigious power of commerce. (quoted Potkay 1994: 9697) Foote's humor is based largely on the discrepancy between a superperiodic syntax, promising heroic/imperial climaxes, and a semantics of "crab-apples and pignuts." Foote's friend James Boswell, as we shall see in chapter 5, exploits a similar set of discrepancies in his Life of Johnson.

< previous page

page_97

next page >

< previous page

page_98

next page > Page 98

Chapter 5 Lofty Language and Low "High diddle diddle" Will rank as an idyll (W. S. Gilbert, Patience: 1881) In chapters 2 and 3 the word "low" was applied to early eighteenth-century prose; and lowness was associated with a certain vocabulary, certain kinds of metaphors, "homely," rural, everyday, and common: Lane's "blunt end of the Wedg," Swift's house on fire that neighbors ''run with Buckets to quench." Chapter 4 investigated some of the uses that periodic sentences can be put to, including the high eloquence of Burke and Gibbon. "High" and "low" describe the end points of a hierarchy of styles constructed according to the rules of decorum; these are concepts that sometimes dominated and always influenced the prose compositions of educated persons from classical times at least until 1800. As chapter 4 explored the expressive potential of loose and periodic styles, so chapter 5 will inventory some of the variations played on high and low language in the eighteenth century. My thesis is that as English prose became more written and more obviously "rhetorical," it was able to exploit the two extremes of high and low more effectively. We find this capacity most completely realized not in Johnson, who wrote grand prose and understood tragedy, but in Johnson's biographer, whose literary instincts were comic and anecdotal. Boswell's Life of Johnson splendidly embodies the verbal energies implicit in the separation of styles. Language and style in this long, lopsided work illuminate contradictions that turn out to be essential to Boswell's biography. It seems to me that the mix of "high" and "low" language in Boswell's Life would not have been possible for writers of the first half of the century. But something very like this mixture was one of the distinguishing achievements of the second

< previous page

page_98

next page >

< previous page

page_99

next page > Page 99

half of the century, not only in Boswell but also in Burke (see chapter 3) and in Goldsmith and Sheridan (see chapter 9). Why was the mix of high and low we find in Boswell and Goldsmith not within the range of earlier writers such as Addison and Swift? Shakespeare and Chaucer certainly commanded both ends of the high-low gradient and exploited them for comedy and pathos. Chapters 2 and 3 imply that even when early eighteenth-century authors were trying to be dignified and formal they stumbled often into low or homely or incorrect locutions. In the third part of this chapter I conclude that what purports to be the grand style in Addison and Shaftesbury is not in fact outstandingly grand. James Boswell Some literary masterpieces are more self-consciously crafted than others, and stylistic variation plays a more varied and obtrusive role in some texts than in others, for example, more in Ulysses than in Middlemarch, in Humphry Clinker than in Moll Flanders. "Appropriateness" is one measure of the stylishness of a given work; variation and foregroundedness are others. Appropriateness as a criterion is both old and new it goes back to Aristotle and his directives for adjusting the rhetoric of different types of discourse to different subjects and audiences; it plays a central role in late Renaissance and neoclassical discussions of decorum. Although the precepts derived from doctrines of decorum can seem tautological ("proper words in proper places"), they nevertheless sanction wide stylistic variation; in this respect they differ in emphasis from expressive theories of style ("the style is the man" seems to imply that only one style is possible for that man), and they anticipate contemporary sociolinguistic frames of reference. Sociolinguists point out that if language were solely and merely a means of communication, stylistic variation would be dysfunctional; that is, all those different ways of speaking would be merely confusing. On the other hand, if language is (among other things) a form of social behavior, it will reflect a variety of social relationships (see Romaine 1982; Hymes 1974). The overlap between neoclassical ideals of decorum and socio-linguistic principles applying to "the ethnography of speaking" is, on reflection, quite understandable. Aristotle's premise, "to each class and habit there is an appropriate style" (Rhetoric III vii 6)

< previous page

page_99

next page >

< previous page

page_100

next page > Page 100

justified not only the separation of styles but also variety of styles, high and low, colloquial and learned, male and female. Compare John Gumperz: "particular stretches of speech can legitimately be associated with speakers of certain ethnic or social backgrounds or with certain distinct speech events" (1982: 3334). Variation of this sort has convinced many linguists to abandon or modify Chomsky's original 1965 assumption that "linguistic theory is concerned primarily with an ideal speaker-listener, in a completely homogeneous speech-community" (3). James McCawley, among many others, recognizes that "a language (or even an idiolect the linguistic system of a single person) normally provides not a single way of speaking or writing but a number of styles and registers'' (1988: I 5). There is plenty of evidence that Boswell had thought about prose style, carefully and at length. He wrote in some measure for posterity, with the thought that his writings would some day be "laid up among the archives of Auchinleck" (1950: 305): his own words tell us this, and so do the ten thousand Boswellian documents actually deposited in those archives (Lustig 1980). When Boswell wrote about his own education (in 1791, in the European Magazine and London Review), the only subject of study that he mentioned by name was rhetoric (Pottle 1929: xxx). Prose style is a central concern of the lectures by Adam Smith that Boswell attended in Glasgow in 1759 and early 1760 (see chapters 2, 48, 1011 of those lectures), and of the lectures on rhetoric and belles lettres that Boswell "heard [Hugh Blair] deliver at Edinburgh" (Life III 172). Quite early in his life as a writer, he journalizes self-consciously about his own journal style, reminding himself to be more "correct" and gloating a little that "words come skipping to me like lambs upon Moffat Hill" (1950: 187). He worried about non-standard locutions in his prose, and among the books he planned some day to write was a dictionary of Scotticisms (1952: 15864). In Frederick Pottle's judgment, he wrote better light verse in Scots than in English a measure of his "diglossic" capacities. Virtually every distinguished late eighteenth-century British writer on language and style was his friend or teacher or acquaintance: Johnson, Kames, Campbell, Blair, Monboddo, Harris, Jones, plus Rousseau on the Continent. He was tutored by Sheridan on pronunciation. He took the trouble of stitching together an imitation of Sterne's prose style (in the Observations . . . by a Genius, 1760; see Pottle 1966: 328). The Life of Johnson and the Journals are

< previous page

page_100

next page >

< previous page

page_101

next page > Page 101

full of references to prose styles in Addison, Temple, Martin, South, Dalrymple, and many others. We can therefore deduce confidently that Boswell was familiar with standard seventeenth- and eighteenth-century ideals of decorum. This principle governed not only the "suitability" of words but also their elegance or vulgarity; most educated writers of the time assume a radical separation between elevated or refined styles (or genres) and "low," popular styles (or genres). High styles were associated with high rank in society, with heroic enterprises and their traditional archetypes in history and poetry, with human nature in its most dignified guise. Low styles were associated with working-class people, barnyard animals (not lions and eagles), the physicality of everyday actions and things, grubby particulars, comedy and satire. All this is reasonably well known, and some of the most celebrated literary critics of the twentieth century take the separation of styles as a major premise.1 How does it affect the Life of Johnson? It allows Boswell to assemble an artful mix of several styles, high for celebration and praise, middle for narrative, and low for humor. Even though, as Geoffrey Scott put it sixty years ago, "Boswell's conscious effort seems to be fixed far less upon art than upon authenticity" (1929: 27), and even though biography is not ordinarily mentioned in eighteenthcentury treatments of decorum, which concentrate on poetry, I cannot believe that Boswell did not know at some level just how various his styles are in the Life. Few critical issues were more widely debated in the eighteenth century than the "lowness" of Homer, Shakespeare, and Fielding, the "highness" of Milton and other "sublime" poets. Boswell himself observes that without big words as a vehicle, Johnson's ''stately ideas" would have been "confined and cramped" (Life I 217). The opening and closing sections of the Life are written in high style. They are keyed to "admiration and reverence" (Life IV 430), filled with the sense of Johnson's "greatness," and inspired by Boswell's need to "worship" Johnson and to feel "awe" for him. The sentences are for the most part long, the diction formal, the structure frequently periodic. Boswell exploits here an almost Johnsonian grandeur of generality: even though the last four paragraphs of the 1 See Auerbach 1946. ch. 13; Bakhtin 1981: ch. 1. For decorum as a critical doctrine in the Renaissance, see Kranidas 1965; Gallaway 1940: 16165. Additional style-studies that are based on decorum: Ehrenpreis 1974, Lanham 1983: ch. 8; McIntosh 1988.

< previous page

page_101

next page >

< previous page

page_102

next page > Page 102

book are a portrait, they do not depend on particular details, on the small specks of pigment that give so much life to Flemish brushwork elsewhere in the biography. In composing this portrait, Boswell rewrote the portrait of Johnson that opens the Tour to the Hebrides (1786), and he deleted a number of particularities, including Johnson's characteristic dress and his twitchings and "cramps." Parallel and antithetical structures are a staple of the grand style in prose, from Gorgias to Churchill. Boswell avoids the spectacular symmetries of Johnson's own prose, but achieves nicely balanced cadences of a comparatively unobtrusive sort: (1) when he walked, it was . . . // when he rode, he had . . . (2) He was prone to superstition // but not to credulity (3) impetuous and irritable in his temper, // but of a most humane and benevolent heart (4) obtrusive ignorance, // or presuming petulance (5) His moral precepts are practical, for they are drawn // His maxims carry conviction; for they are founded . . . (6) a most logical head // a most fertile imagination (Life IV 42529) Only two of these sets of balanced phrases belong to the description of Johnson in the Tour, which consists of a single paragraph ending in a piece of self-puffery (Life V 19). Classical rhetoric was still a staple of ordinary programs of higher education in 1760; Boswell encountered it at several stages; its formal structures play a role in Boswell's high style. He uses the word "climax" in its rhetorical sense quite unselfconsciously in the Life: Johnson. 'Yes, Sir, I knew very well what I was undertaking, and very well how to do it, and have done it very well.' Boswell. 'An excellent climax!' (Life III 405) In this passage Boswell intends to compliment Johnson on his skillful use of the figure gradatio, or climax, a series of similar locutions of increasing weight or intensity (as in Blair 1783: I 237). We can be pretty sure that Boswell was aware of using anaphora in citation (1) above, a chiasmic structure (antimetabole?) in (3), prosopopoia in (4), isocolon in (5). Such figures do not automatically create a high style, but they may enable a writer to adjust cadences, distribute emphasis, and form prose of dignity and power. Traditionally, certain species of the grand style have relied on figures of repetition, word order, and structure (such as anaphora and isocolon) to distance themselves from the ordinary informal speech of everyday life.

< previous page

page_102

next page >

< previous page

page_103

next page > Page 103

It is epideictic rhetoric, the first of Aristotle's major kinds, that is being practiced here in the opening and closing sections of the Life. Less exalted specimens of high epideictic rhetoric occur elsewhere, when Boswell is paying tribute to his friends or flattering eminent personages: This hasty composition is also to be remarked as one of a thousand instances which evince the extraordinary promptitude of Mr. Burke; who while he is equal to the greatest things, can adorn the least; can, with equal facility, embrace the vast and complicated speculations of politicks, or the ingenious topicks of literary investigation. (Life III 85) Note the hyperbole, "a thousand instances," "extraordinary promptitude"; note also the two carefully arranged antithetical structures. Taking advantage of his privileges as narrator, Boswell openly courts friends and important people mentioned in the Life. Many of these acknowledgments or tributes are written in the high style associated with elegant compliment: I was fortunate enough to be found worthy of [Oglethorpe's] good opinion, insomuch, that I not only was invited to make one in the many respectable companies whom he entertained at his table, but had a cover at his hospitable board every day when I happened to be disengaged; and in his society I never failed to enjoy learned and animated conversation, seasoned with genuine sentiments of virtue and religion. (Life II 350) The grammar of courtly compliment depends on "quantities of qualities": I had "enough" fortune to be worthy of Oglethorpe's good opinion, and enough of Oglethorpe's good opinion to be invited to his table. Elevation of style here depends also on copiousness: almost redundant adjectives ("hospitable board"; "respectable companies") and almost unnecessary doublets ("learned and animated''; "virtue and religion"). Periodic sentences get some attention in eighteenth-century rhetorics, perhaps more than the more esoteric tropes and figures did. John Ward tried valiantly to reconcile Cicero's instructions for "cadency" with his own feeling that a sentence and its "sense" should finish at the same time (1759: I 34652). Campbell found periodic sentences "more susceptible of vivacity and force" than loose sentences, which are "apt . . . to languish and grow tiresome" (1776: 369). Blair recommended that the "members" of a sentence be arranged in order of importance, strongest last; to conclude a sentence with "any inconsiderable word" such as a preposition or an

< previous page

page_103

next page >

< previous page

page_104

next page > Page 104

adverb is "always enfeebling and degrading" (1783: I 206, 23740). The first three paragraphs of the Life depend heavily on periodic sentences for dignity and weight. To write the Life of him who excelled all mankind in writing the lives of others, and who, whether we consider his extraordinary endowments, or his various works, has been equalled by few in any age, is an arduous, and may be reckoned in me a presumptuous task. (Life I 25) By inserting relative clauses and a conditional-concessive clause between subject and verb, Boswell focuses attention on the difficulty and importance of his task. The artifice of periodicity is even more obvious in the first sentence of the third paragraph, where five "as" clauses are lined up in sequence, in a sentence 168 words long, to give increasing weight to the "advantages" Boswell is claiming (Life I 2526). We recognize a low prose style by short sentences, colloquial language, and a homely vocabulary of "creaturely" (it is Auerbach's word) objects, animals, and physical vulgarities: He, (said Johnson) the little black dog! (Life I 284) Who's for poonsh? (Life II 464) They will spit upon any place . . . I e'en tasted Tom's fingers. (Life II 403) an old coat with a new facing . . . the old dog in a new doublet (Life III 329) "They talk of runts" [that is, young cows], (Life III 337) how is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes? (Life III 201) Nay, if you are to bring in gabble, I'll talk no more. I will not, upon my honour. (Life III 350) Most of these low words occur in conversation, not in Boswell's narrative or in the writings he quotes, and many of them occur when Johnson is driving home a point, perhaps by means of a homely analogy. Johnson seemed to take pleasure in the "shock value" of some of his statements (Vance 1985: 212). They play a key role in what Brady has called "conversation as performance" (1984: 11011). For example, a member of the Club had read aloud an ode full of "bold words" and "timorous meaning," and the conversation turns to Gray's odes: They are forced plants raised in a hot-bed; and they are poor plants; they are but cucumbers after all. [Someone proposes that they would have been

< previous page

page_104

next page >

< previous page

page_105

next page > Page 105

"better things" as cucumbers than as odes.] Yes, Sir, (said Johnson,) for a hog. (Life IV 13) Or Johnson may simply be illustrating his opinions: A Judge may be a farmer; but he is not to geld his own pigs . . . he is not to play at marbles, or at chuck-farthing in the Piazza. (Life II 344) You may have a reason why two and two should make five; but they will still make but four. (Life III 375) I include this last example for its plainness, its lack of the "metaphors, Grecisms, and circumlocutions" that (for Joseph Addison) give a text "greater pomp" and "preserve it from sinking into a plebeian style" (1697: I 5). Now it seems to me quite remarkable that low' words in the Life are concentrated largely in Johnson's speech and seldom found in other people's speech or in the narrative. (One apparent exception to this general rule in fact confirms it, the animals Johnson is compared to at various times in these thousand-plus pages: bear, ox, bull, dog, rhinoceros, elephant, lion, whale.) Hence the wide and wonderful distance between Johnson the sage and Johnson the jokester, the glutton, the bully. We know from general testimony that Johnson was in fact on occasion profane and bawdy, rough and harsh, and we know that Boswell edited most of this out of his sources and notes. As a rule, Waingrow points out, Boswell devoted himself to the "refinement" of language in his notes and sources, to "polishing an abbreviated or colloquial style." So the roughnesses that remain are surely intentional; they are included because they promote Boswell's over-all artistic goals.2 It follows that both high style and low are necessary to Boswell's art. The high corresponds to his "worship" of Johnson, to his respect for Johnson's wisdom, and to his sense of Johnson as culture hero. The low answers more obviously to his appreciation for Johnson as a human being, a person more fully alive than most people are, more 2 Waingrow 1969: xxx. William C. Dowling makes a "network of antithetical relations," including one between the "slovenly particulars" of Johnson's physical appearance and the sublime eloquence of his conversation, a basis for his stimulating analysis of "a partial grammar of discontinuity" in the Life (1981: 34, 27, xvii). Stanley Brodwin quotes a key passage from Dryden's Preface to the Life of Plutarch (1683) authorizing "various" styles in biography: "There are proper places in it, for the plainness and nakedness of narration, which is ascrib'd to Annals; there is also room reserv'd for the loftiness and gravity of general History, when the actions related shall require the [sic] manner of expression. But there is withal, a descent into minute circumstances, and trivial passages of life, which are natural to this way of writing, and which the dignity of the other two will not admit'' (1983: 75).

< previous page

page_105

next page >

< previous page

page_106

next page > Page 106

closely in touch with reality. Among Johnson's most human acts in the Life are his attempts to deflate pomposity, to clear our minds of cant; and low words and commonplace idioms are proper instruments for this task. We remember the Samuel Johnson of the Life for his passionate temper, capacity for affection, his pugnaciousness, disdain for pretensions, his tough-mindedness, his triumphant sense of humor; and low words are virtually indispensable for the expression of all these qualities. On the other hand, without the respect that Boswell feels for Johnson this long, long life would dwindle to just a string of anecdotes about odd and famous people. The Life draws power from both worship and affection. Decorum and Genre and Boswell's Life How seriously can we take this contrast between high language and low in the late eighteenth century? Boswell certainly knew about the separation of styles, but was he writing at a time when that old-fashioned doctrine still had weight and meaning? Voltaire and Johnson could get away with attacking Shakespeare for low or commonplace words in the tragedies, but Voltaire was a foreigner, a Frenchman forsooth, and Johnson was famous, in part, for endorsing, now and again, extreme positions and lost causes. In critical writings of the eighteenth century, the doctrine of decorum had by no means expired. Hugh Blair, whose lectures on rhetoric were open to the public in the 1760s and 1770s, argued that "the familiarity of common words, to which our ears are much accustomed, tends to degrade Style." High ornament, on the other hand, can "bestow dignity"; it may "have a similar effect on Language, with what is produced by the rich and splendid dress of a person of rank" (1783: I 285). Blair is, I think, echoing Pope's famous lines in the Essay on Criticism: ''Expression is the Dress of Thought, and still / Appears more decent as more suitable." Such statements imply three closely related judgments of low style, two of them hostile. First any text is debased or degraded by low language. "In Descriptions a judicious Author will omit low and vulgar Circumstances," wrote Anthony Blackwall in 1719, and, more specifically, "Things capable of Heightening and Ornament [should not be] debas'd and vilify'd by low Expressions" (239, 158). Both these remarks are reprinted in the condensed version of Blackwall's An Introduction to the Classics that constitutes Part v of The Preceptor,

< previous page

page_106

next page >

< previous page

page_107

next page > Page 107

Dodsley's popular school text with editions in 1748, 1754, 1758, 1763, 1769, etc. (Dodsley 1748: 385, 356). Addison had stated this position more uncompromisingly: any "phrase or saying in common talk" detracts from "solemnity" and adds ''too great a turn of familiarity" (1697: I 45). To William Melmouth, whose Letters . . . By the late Sir Thomas Fitzosborne (1748) were a prestigious model of elegance in prose, "sharking shifts" and "thrusting religion by" were "mean" expressions (110). Richard Hurd in 1749 warned against "too low, or vulgar expression, in the comic parts" of a poem (I 209). Thomas Warton in 1781 excused the gross impropriety with which Dante mixes "familiar and heroic manners" as "common to all early [i.e., medieval] compositions" (III 5). Furthermore, low expressions were associated with low social class. On this topic Lord Kames (1762) offers another paraphrase of Pope, one that highlights the class-consciousness implicit in the lines from An Essay on Criticism: Language may be considered as the dress of thought; and where one is not suited to the other, we are sensible of incongruity, in the same manner as where a judge is dressed like a fop, or a peasant like a man of quality. (I 24) Olivia Smith has presented evidence that correctness and elegance of language were annexed by conservative thinkers in the late eighteenth century as aspects of a "Tory" style and used to disenfranchise political reformers; but here is the radical Joseph Priestley on decorum in 1777: "every term . . . that hath ever had the least connexion with mean subjects, or even which hath been chiefly used by persons of a low and illiberal class of life, should be carefully avoided" (160). Perhaps the most wide-ranging discussion of genteel vocabulary in the eighteenth century is Hester Thrale Piozzi's British Synonymy; or, An Attempt at Regulating the Choice of Words in Familiar Conversation (1794). Mrs. Piozzi wrote (at considerable length, with chatty digressions) for English-as-a-second-language learners who had to choose the right word among all English words with similar meanings. She points out that England, where reputation depends far less on rank than on talent and general behavior, is more self-conscious about language than Italy. The word "cute" is used only by "coarse people" and "low Londoners," and would "shock a polished circle" by its "grossness" (I 14). Latinate words are more "genteel" than Saxon (I 54). "Nothing is so certain a brand of beggary in our

< previous page

page_107

next page >

< previous page

page_108

next page > Page 108

country as coarse and vulgar language" (II 37), including words like "brag," "brawl," "cash" or "chink" (meaning ''money"). Perhaps it is worth noting here that the word "vulgarism" meaning "a colloquialism of a low or unrefined character" is not recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary before 1746 (in Walpole's letters). Boswell probably shared a third perspective on low language, one that recognizes and even welcomes vulgarity as a source of comic vitality. Here is an anonymous reviewer discussing an anonymous book of humor published by F. Newbury in 1768: His jokes are sometimes low, but his editor thinks that they bear strong marks of originality; and he confesses that they are sometimes indelicate, not to say indecent, and hopes that the reader will find he has carefully cleansed the Augaean stable. This passage appeared in the Critical Review (volume 17, p. 205), in the same year as a long and enthusiastic review of Boswell's Corsica. It expresses a point of view that we can find in almost any century, in Ned Ward and Till Eulenspiegel and Al Schock's Jokes for All Occasions. Politeness and refinement were certainly in vogue in the last half of the eighteenth century, but laughter, gross and raucous laughter not excepted, does not go out of style. An explanation of Boswell's use of high and low styles in the Life may perhaps be found in the gravitational pull of genres other than biography. The Life is not only heroic biography but also Lucianic comedy. I am thinking of the Dialogues of the Gods, Lucian's irreverent fantasies featuring the gods as "just folks": Zeus the vulgar rake, Hera the shrew. Exactly how much divinity remains to the Zeus and the Hera thus humanized can be disputed, but the key characters of Lucianic comedy have to be extraordinary in some way, because to portray just folks as just folks is not in itself comical or satirical. Boswell's genuine respect for Johnson, and the high styles that express that respect, guarantee that he is not writing "mere" satire here, and the low words that figure in Johnson's down-to-earth "clinchers" give some of the same feelings of release and freedom that Lucianic comedy does. Patricia Spacks remarks on the pleasure produced when we "challenge the moral grandeur of larger-than-lifesize public figures" (1986: 99) the pleasures of levelling and of realism. The same kind of verbal play that flourishes in Lucianic comedy can be found in Boswell's classical quotations when they are used to

< previous page

page_108

next page >

< previous page

page_109

next page > Page 109

heighten disparities between high and low styles. The deadpan introduction to the Wilkes dinner episode includes a quotation from The Aeneid that gives away the game. This paragraph starts, "I am now to record a very curious incident," and goes on to characterize the incident to follow as one "of which pars magna fui." "I myself saw these sad things; I took large part in them," says Aeneas, acknowledging his heroic part in the tragic war at Troy (II 78, trans. Mandelbaum). Boswell gets similar effects by applying lines from Addison's Cato to Johnson's apparently stoical indifference to the dinner invitation itself (Life III 678). I wonder whether Boswell's excursions into philosophic diction (even including the dreadful "Ode to Mrs. Thrale, by Samuel Johnson": "Cervisial coctor's viduate dame,'' Life IV 387) do not exploit some of the same disreputable energies.3 Boswell was of course strongly attracted to "low" comedy, and the undignified prose styles of the Life have a potential context in genres lower than biography. He tells us himself that once "in a wild freak of youthful extravagance, I entertained the audience prodigiously, by imitating the lowing of a cow" (Life V 396). Wimsatt reminds us of Boswell's fondness for bons mots and puns (1959: 171). One purpose of the Journal was to record Boswell's best efforts along these lines ("I said I would rather see Sir George and the goose, than St. George and the dragon"). In places the Life reads like a joke book. Boswell tells the reader that his book will collect not only Johnson's "wisdom" but also his "wit" (Life I 9). When Boswell thinks of biography he thinks of anecdotes. He is described at dinner by one contemporary as laying down "knife and fork . . . in order to register a good anecdote" (Life I 6n). Anecdotes are amusing; that is, quite frequently they are jokes. At one point in his Journals Boswell "talked how much bons mots were relished by everybody" and named both Plutarch (biographer) and Ménage (anecdotalist). Ménage was a scholar, but the collection of curious facts and witty sayings associated with him (in Ménagiana [1693, 1713, 1729, etc.], archetype of the ana genre), though bookish in character, is not above ribald humor.4 3 The comic effects of Boswell's contrasts between high and low are explored in Bradham (1980), Passler (1971: 467), Nussbaum (1974); and see Lustig (1980: 14344) for Boswell's use of Hamlet to heighten the seriousness of his first meeting with Johnson. 4 Volume 2 of the Columbia University copy of the 1729 edition of Ménagiana has two pages 34, one including a decidedly off-color joke that is replaced in the other. For ana as a genre, (footnote continued on next page)

< previous page

page_109

next page >

< previous page

page_110

next page > Page 110

We can think of the Life, then, as responding to seven or eight forms of generic pressure: biography + autobiography + confession/apology + comic drama + ana + magazine article + journal + jokebook. Its polygeneric character justifies the fact that topics and opinions come up almost as often in response to Boswell's personal anxieties as they do in reference to Johnson. It illuminates Boswell's claim that his biography is also a literary history of the age. It explains why the Life leads at so many points outwards to footnotes, endnotes, appendixes, letters, and associated texts that Boswell or someone else is talking about. Walter Ong proposes that books of "massive and dense" structure like the Life are attempts "to construct on the printed page something that will substitute for the full context of the talking world." Variety of style is surely appropriate to such a work.5 A Map of High and Low: Arbuthnot and Others English prose was plainer and simpler in the first quarter of the eighteenth century than it had been fifty or a hundred years previously. The ordinary texture of discourse was less ornate. The genres that made a real splash during this period "new" genres, or genres the full development of which we associate with the age of Addison, Pope, Defoe, and Swift satire, the periodical essay, the novel specialized in low or informal language. Nevertheless, it is a mistake to assume that no one attempted the grand style during these twenty-five years. In every historical period there are experiments in the high styles as well as in the low. My reading suggests that in the first quarter of the eighteenth century such experiments were not very common and not very successful, by and large; the age delighted most in an easy, middle style, or in lowness for its own sake. Seventeenth-century models for high styles ("the Baroque glory") had been discredited, and nothing had yet been found to take their place. Johnson's reputation was founded partly on his reinvention of spectacularly "artistic" prose. Not surprisingly, none of the great works in prose published between 1700 and 1725 is truly comparable to Boswell's Life, in the sense that (footnote continued from previous page) see Thrale 1951: I xi, I 467; Brady 1984: 340; and Spence 1966: I xviixxi. For Plutarch as a collector of bons mots, see Boswell 1956: 271. 5 Ong, cited Kernan 1987: 225.

< previous page

page_110

next page >

< previous page

page_111

next page > Page 111

none depends on both extremes of high and low styles as Boswell's Life does. Let me suggest the following topography for a map of high and low in early eighteenth-century English prose. Shaftesbury's ventures into "rhapsody" in The Moralists (1709) may represent the best high styles of the period, with Addison's "Vision of Mirzah" as a slightly pallid alternative. Matched with this unconvincing pair is a robust and prolific native strain of vernacular prose: Swift, Arbuthnot, and Defoe, among others. There were two non-native models for brilliant juxtapositions of high and low language, Rabelais and Cervantes, both recently translated into English. We see the influence of Rabelais, his preposterously inflated mock-pedantries, his exuberant vulgarities, in Ned Ward, and, with modifications, in Swift. The Cervantic model, with high styles parodied from romance and low in the rural vernacular, had no prominent followers in English till Fielding. The third Earl of Shaftesbury seems to have tried a slightly different style every time he published. We know that he was acutely aware of his own styles and of their relations to genre because he talks about just these subjects in the Miscellanies, which patiently explain the different ends and means "our author" had in mind for each part of Characteristics. Thus, he describes the Inquiry (Part I of Characteristics, first published 1699), as "formal," proceeding from the pen of a "professed philosopher, a system-writer, a dogmatist and expounder" (II 272). The Moralists (1709) includes, he tells us, "variety of styles; the simple, comic, rhetorical, and even the poetic or sublime" (II 334). Additional evidence of Shaftesbury's sensitivity to styles appears in the philosophic journals that he wrote in private, for his own self-discipline and self-control, recommending to himself ''Neither the Flashy. Suddain, Precipitant Way; nor the Animated; nor the Loud: nor the Emphaticall: But the Still, Quiet, Backward, Soft, Deliberate." Some passages in these notebooks apply to verbal discourse: "Now Remember SIMPLICITY. No Graces of Speech: no Repartees or Sharpness of Witt: no Raileries, Ironyes or Mockeryes: no Narrations" (quoted, Voitle 1984: 93). In The Moralists, Shaftesbury describes his own "poetic or sublime" style as "numbered prose" or "loose numbers" (II 115, 98). Is this a reference to rhythm and meter, to the clausulae of classical prose, to its kommata and periods? It implies that Shaftesbury's high style is intended to be musical. When Theocles surveys the glories of

< previous page

page_111

next page >

< previous page

page_112

next page > Page 112

nature, he makes a poetic progress from Arctic ice to desert sand to Indian spices, stopping to apostrophize the elephants: How tame and tractable, How patient of labour and of thrift Are those large creatures, who, Lifting up their lofty heads, go led And loaden through these dry and barren places! (II 121) Arranged on the page as poetry, this can pass as poetry. Two pages further on, in his description of Alpine wildness, Shaftesbury waxes not only poetic but also pictorial: "And here a different horror seizes our sheltered travellers when they see the day diminished by the deep shades of the vast wood, which, closing thick above, spreads darkness and eternal night below" (II 123). We think of Milton's "Il Penseroso" and of James Thompson's The Seasons: the vocabulary of mountain gloom and mountain glory; alliteration; blank-verse rhythms. One of Shaftesbury's favorite modes in these passages of poetic prose is interrogative/exclamatory. There are nine exclamations in a row in his invocation of the sun (II 113), followed by a rhetorical question, another exclamation, one statement, three more exclamations, and four more questions. (Some readers may be reminded of the "And shall I never see thee more, alas?" school of elevated prose in Huck Finn.) Exclamatory prose tends to sentence fragments, adjectives, and conjoined members: Shaftesbury hails the fourth of the four elements, fire or light, as "the luminous matter so wide diffused through the immense spaces which it fills . . . the invisible ethereal substance, penetrating both liquid and solid bodies" (II 117). The diction of Shaftesbury's grand prose is Latinate, and it is copious even to tautology: the snow "lies incumbent," and the Arctic sea is "immured in walls of crystal" (II 119: the snow lies lying; the sea is walled in walls). The trope here is pleonasmus. He dabbles in poetic compounds, alluding to the earth as "this mansion-globe, this man-container" (II 114). The long, intense summary paragraph at the end of Section 2 of Part 3 (II 144) begins almost every sentence with a conjunction ("and," ''for") or with a word referring to what has just been said ("thus," "this"). Key words such as "beauty" and "mind" recur three and four times each in six sentences. One last musical element in Shaftesbury's prose may best be described in oral/rhythmic terms, as L. P. Wilkinson describes the

< previous page

page_112

next page >

< previous page

page_113

next page > Page 113

classical period. Consider the following sentences, which explain how the "search of beauty" may be a form of selfknowledge. Here aesthetic and stoic currents in the Characteristics converge. One of the central themes of Shaftesbury's philosophy is philosophy itself: And thus, O Philocles, may we improve and become artists in the kind; learning "to know ourselves, and what that is, which by improving, we may be sure to advance our worth and real self-interest." For neither is this knowledge acquired by contemplation of bodies, or the outward forms, the view of pageantries, the study of estates and honours; nor is he to be esteemed that self-improving artist who makes a fortune out of these, but he (he only) is the wise and able man, who with a slight regard to these things, applies himself to cultivate another soil, builds in a different matter from that of stone or marble; and having righter models in his eye, becomes in truth the architect of his own life and fortune, by laying within himself the lasting and sure foundations of order, peace, and concord. (II 144) It seems to me that here and elsewhere Shaftesbury avoids periodicity as we defined it in Chapter 4 above, preferring to cultivate "periods" in the Ciceronian sense. These two kinds of periodic prose are not incompatible, but in Shaftesbury there are relatively few sentences that depend on "arcs of suspension," and there are a great many sentences, like the last one quoted above, carefully constructed of rhythmic units short enough to be spoken in one breath. One of the most characteristic features of the Ciceronian period is the "law of increasing members." Each rhythmical unit in a series is a little longer than the last, so that the final one seems to carry the most weight and convey a feeling of finality. We cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. Whether or not this "law" is, as Wilkinson speculates, "of universal literary, and indeed musical application" (1963: 175), it certainly applies to that last long sentence in the climactic paragraph of The Moralists and to other sentences in Shaftesbury's elevated prose. Other exercises in the grand style, 17001725, are not very impressive. The orientalisms and Old Testament locutions of Addison's "Vision of Mirzah" (Spectator 159) now seem shop-worn and inflated. "Man is but a Shadow"; "the several Generations of Mortals"; ''Think not Man was made in vain"; "more in Number than the Sands on the Sea-shore"; "I wished for the Wings of an

< previous page

page_113

next page >

< previous page

page_114

next page > Page 114

Eagle, that I might fly away to those happy Seats": clichés. Loose, trailing constructions make the essay as a whole languid, to my ear. In many places Addison adds a quite unnecessary relative clause to the end of a sentence: "I passed some Time in the Contemplation of this wonderful Structure, and the great Variety of Objects which it presented"; "a vast Ocean planted with innumerable Islands, that were covered with Fruits and Flowers, and interwoven with a thousand little shining Seas that ran among them" (one trailing relative embedded in another). Some of the weight of asseveration falls on intensifiers: "exceeding sweet''; "altogether different"; "entirely subdued"; "very small"; "quite tired." A dig at the expense of doctors seems out of place in this vision of the Tide of Eternity: "others with Urinals, who ran to and fro upon the Bridge, thrusting several Persons on Trap-doors which did not seem to lie in their Way." Among the finest examples of plain vernacular prose in the early eighteenth century is The History of John Bull (1712), by John Arbuthnot. This rollicking narrative allegorizes negotiations for the Peace of Utrecht as a village squabble between old Lewis Baboon (Louis XIV of France), John Bull (England), Nicholas Frog (the Dutch), and Lord Strutt (Philip V of Spain), plus a dozen other local luminaries including the lawyer Hocus (Marlborough). Some of the comedy in John Bull reminds us of "Pyramus and Thisbe," village worthies all dressed up like dukes and duchesses. Arbuthnot dramatizes a Whig-dominated Parliament urging war against France as Mrs. Bull giving her husband a piece of her mind: You Sot, says she, you loyter about Alehouses and Taverns, spend your Time at Billiards, Nine-pins or Puppetshows, or flaunt about the Streets in your new gilt Chariot, never minding me nor your numerous Family; don't you hear how Lord Strutt has bespoke his Liveries at Lewis Baboon's Shop? don't you see how that old Fox steals away your Customers, and turns you out of your Business every day, and you sit like an idle Drone with your hands in your Pockets? Fie upon't, up Man, rouse thy self, I'll sell to my Shift before I'll be so used by that Knave. You must think Mrs. Bull had been pretty well tun'd up by Frog, who chim'd in with her learn'd Harangue. No further delay now, but to Counsel learned in Law they go. (8) The narrator, as this passage demonstrates, shares the market-square world of his characters and cheerfully confides in his chum the reader ("You must think"; "I told you before"; "and to say Truth"). He deals in colloquialisms, catchphrases, and shirtsleeve locutions

< previous page

page_114

next page >

< previous page

page_115

next page > Page 115

of all kinds: "Lawyers seldom part with so good a Cause till they have got the Oyster, and their Clients the Shell" (1011); "he was not flush in Ready" (7); "there wanted not Yellow-boys to fee Counsel'' (10); "a good swinging Sum of John's readiest Cash" (13). Proverbs seem quite at home in John Bull's world: "Habit is a second Nature" (11). The vogue of polite and decorous speech has not touched him: "Nic. Frog was a cunning sly Whoreson . . . would pine his Belly to save his Pocket" (6); "an extravagant Bitch of a Wife" (12); "Hocus had a Months mind to her Body" (13); "Jade, Bitch and Whore were the best Words that John gave her" (14). It is low vernacular language that gives this pamphlet its humor, authenticity, and charm. Jonathan Swift, with his uncanny ear for local idioms of every kind, could also write authentic-sounding unlettered English; we get a spicy sample of it in the Preface to A Tale of a Tub when a weaver scolds a fat man for complaining about the crowd: "Don't you consider (with a Pox) that you take up more room with that Carkass than any five here? Is not the Place as free for us as for you? Bring your own Guts to a reasonable Compass (and be dn'd) and then I'll engage we shall have room enough for us all" (46). This is one of the passages that John Oldmixon quotes in his indignant Reflections on Dr. Swift's Letter (1712), as evidence of Swift's "genius" in showing "how happily one may use the Figures of Cursing, Swearing, and Bawdy" (3). Oldmixon also objects to "Mrs. Harris's Petition" as being "in the true Stile of Mrs. Abigail" (16). What was censured for lowness by Oldmixon can be celebrated by modern readers for its energy. The oaths, the uninhibited abuse, the "Guts" and "Carkass" and "Pox" are all Rabelaisian elements (Bakhtin 1965: 153, 161). High style is not Swift's forte. I find myself wondering whether anything that looks like eloquence in Swift should not be regarded with suspicion. When Gulliver gets excited about struldbruggs, his description of the happiness in store for him is so overblown ("all arts and methods whatsoever," plans to "excel all others" and "record every action and event . . . with my own observations on every point") that we know something is wrong (Part III, ch. 10; italics added). Even where we have reason to believe that Swift intends a genuine encomium, as in his praise of Sir William Temple in the "Apology" to A Tale of a Tub, the language seems overdone: "a certain great Man then alive, and universally reverenced for every good Quality that could possibly enter into the Composition of the most accomplish'd Person" (II). Irvin Ehrenpreis has written of "a mixed or

< previous page

page_115

next page >

< previous page

page_116

next page > Page 116

impure style" in Swift, where he "drops without warning from refined language into coarse language," and "applies indecorous expressions to decorous subjects" (1974: 94). In the following passage from Gulliver's Travels we see the opposite, an altogether disconcerting shift from in-your-face catalogues of vice to the white-glove, mincing fastidiousness of a Lady Grandison: Perjury, oppression, subornation, fraud, pandarism, and the like infirmities, were amongst the most excusable arts they had to mention, and for these I gave, as it was reasonable, due allowance. But when some confessed they owed their greatness and wealth to sodomy or incest, others to the prostituting of their own wives and daughters; others to the betraying their country or their prince; some to poisoning, more to the perverting of justice in order to destroy the innocent: I hope I may be pardoned if these discoveries inclined me a little to abate of that profound veneration which I am naturally apt to pay to persons of high rank, who ought to be treated with the utmost respect due to their sublime dignity, by us their inferiors. (Part III, ch. 8) For A Tale of a Tub one of Swift's models is Rabelais, which means that high language is mock-pedantic fustian, and low language froths and foams with slang and vulgarities. High: the Tubbean sage boasts of his discovery of Reynard the Fox, "now universally received; nor, do I think, any of the Learned will dispute, that famous Treatise to be a compleat Body of Civil Knowledge, and the Revelation, or rather the Apocalyps of all State-Arcana" (6768). Low: the three brothers of the Tale "Drank, and Fought, and Whor'd, and Slept, and Swore, and took Snuff: They went to new Plays on the first Night, haunted the Chocolate-Houses, beat the Watch, lay on Bulks, and got Claps" (7475). Similar verbal strategies, perhaps more obviously modeled after Rabelais, can be found in Ned Ward's The London Spy (16981700), who presents us with "a little draggle-tail flat-cap" (252); "a parcel of muddling muckworms'' (18); "a tall, meagre, carrionly cony-fumble, and with him his crazy crew of cornigerous halberdiers" (67).

< previous page

page_116

next page >

< previous page

page_117

next page > Page 117

Chapter 6 Nominal and Oral Styles: Johnson and Richardson If we spoke as we write we should find no one to listen; and if we wrote as we speak we should find no one to read. (T. S. Eliot, "Charles Whibley": 1931) If some texts are "more written" than others, the chances are excellent that they will be "more nominal" as well. In a print culture, you could say, language is first frozen in type, then cloned onto pages, with the result that the abstractions and reified states of a nominal style are easier to understand. Or vice versa: nominal prose supplies the categories and fine distinctions into which a print culture tends to proliferate. In what follows, examples of nominal, verbal, oral, and written styles will be drawn from publications and private writings of the eighteenth and other centuries, including passages in Johnson, Swift, Godwin, Joyce, E. E. Cummings, and the Directions for Form 1040 of the Internal Revenue Service (USA). More and Less in Orality and Writtenness In chapter 2, I mentioned the possibility of a graded polarity between orality and writtenness in texts or styles or language use. Many of the features that seemed to differentiate early eighteenth-century prose from more gentrified later texts have a motivation in this polarity; they suggest to us that in general what was published in the first quarter of the century was more closely affiliated to the world of speech than were publications after 1770. Conversely; late eighteenth-century prose is the prose of a print culture. On the one hand, interruptedness, solecisms, loose sentences, redundancies of various kinds (including initial coordinating conjunctions, doublets, and the pleonastic do), proverbs, physical words (as opposed to abstractions) all these have a useful, natural function in speech

< previous page

page_117

next page >

< previous page

page_118

next page > Page 118

(though they are also common enough in printed texts). On the other, a polysyllabic vocabulary, periodic sentences, a nominal style that delights in abstractions, and the studied rhetoricity of parallel structures, series, and self-conscious musicalities these features are rare in conversation but practicable and effective in writing. "Orality" having language but not in written form is a linguistic condition that all of us have lived in during the first few years of our lives; and since the vast majority of verbal communications are oral not written, since the vast majority of all the 5,000-plus natural languages that have ever existed have never been written down, it is reasonable to conclude that orality is in some sense primary, and literacy a secondary condition. Let's explore the polarity between pure, abstract orality and pure, abstract writtenness. Speech takes place in time, written texts exist in space. The physicalities of speech volume, pitch, tempo, intonation, tone, not to mention gesture, facial expression, posture, etc., etc., cannot have physical existence in writing, though some of them can be signaled in print in a rudimentary way. And some of the normal functions of speech are merely occasional functions of writing: speech is not usually employed simply to record data or convey information; it is interactive, "agonistic" (Ong 1982: 43). To take part in conversation is to do things to people with words. Almost all speech is generated by a particular time and place; almost all speech has an immediate audience, present and capable of reacting. The audience of most written texts, by contrast, is less specific and more remote; texts are quite often designed for any place and time that might want to read them. Perhaps it helps to understand the full dimensions of a polarity between extreme orality and extreme literacy if we idealize it and line it up as a series of oppositions: speech writing waves of energy propagated in shapes inscribed in time space audible visible situated; in context; more nearly contextdramatistic free personal, intersubjective impersonal; objective particular, concrete, physical general, abstract, mental medium of social relations medium of information evanescent, unrepeatable designed for permanence unique infinitely reproduceable performance (signs in time) artifact (signs in space)

< previous page

page_118

next page >

< previous page

page_119

next page > Page 119

An oral culture, moreover, sees truth as a matter of experience, practice, and tradition; whereas a print culture may tend to see truth as a matter of logic, theory, reason. We should keep in mind that, pace Monsieur Jourdain, speech is not prose, not the expository prose we read in books: most of the time, the strings of words we talk with have quite different purposes and functions from the same words in written texts, and the discourse conventions of talk are quite different from those of written prose. Discourse analysis, as Stephen Levinson points out, originally assumed that a live conversation could legitimately be analysed as a series of sentences. But that failed to explain oral exchanges such as: A: "How goes it?" B: "The hell with you!" The pragmatics, the psycho-social contexts, the potentially lurid scenarios that will make sense of this bit of domestic repartee do not fit into a grammar of sentences. Sentential analysis finds it hard to cope with the facts that an utterance may perform several speech acts at once and that many speech acts can be performed by actions or by silence. Another way of putting it: writing, the medium, was developed to perform certain specialized functions that speech performs rarely and imperfectly, including lists, record-keeping, arithmetic, and formal logic. The earliest writings were marks and symbols scratched on clay tokens to keep count of herds of goats and jars of oil.1 There has been a good deal of discussion on how literacy affects thinking. Walter Ong was a pioneer in the field, arguing that the printing press may promote a "spatialization of the intellect," by the readiness with which it allows writers to spread their ideas out on paper, in charts and lists and diagrams (1958). Eric Havelock reinterpreted Plato's attack on the poets as an attack on oral culture (1963), implying that philosophy in the western sense would be impossible without literacy. The "discovery" of orality in the 1960s has generated a small industry of academic and educational research in many fields, including anthropology, linguistics, literary history, classics, education, and sociology.2 One strand in recent speculation emphasizes the relation between literacy and consciousness: when 1 Levinson 1983: 28891. For ways that truth-conditional meanings, illocutionary meanings, and implicatures can interact, see Sanders 1987; for the uses of silence, see Saville-Troike; for the inadequacies of any theory that sees language as merely a "code," see Sperber and Wilson 1986. 2 Contributors include such well-known scholars as Brian Stock, Jacques Derrida, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Shirley Brice Heath, Harvey Sacks, Erving Goffman, Lev Vygotsky: Peter Burke, and Dell Hymes. The field is enormously diverse.

< previous page

page_119

next page >

< previous page

page_120

next page > Page 120

we learn to read we become more conscious of language as object the "metalinguistic hypothesis" on literacy (Olson 1991). There are oral dimensions of written prose, too, that we did not discuss in chapter 2, dimensions associated with the pragmatics of speech, its dramatistic quality (to borrow Kenneth Burke's term). Some written texts are not in the least context-free, but respond directly to a particular interlocutor, as in a conversation, or derive directly from a particular time and place, as does most of our everyday speech. Many texts contain inscribed versions of the physicalities of speech, such as intonation, which can be signaled by type fonts or punctuation. Printed texts can also make use of semantic instruments that belong to speech more than to writing; for example, a blank space on the page can represent silence. The musicalities of artistic prose, balanced cadences and parallel structures and figures of repetition, are commoner in writing than in everyday conversation. I shall be examining various texts on the assumption that with the help of these and other features and oral dimensions of written texts, we can identify some printed texts as more written or more oral than others, even when none of them includes direct or indirect discourse. The unbridgeable differences between speech and writing, of course, are those between what is purely audible and what is purely visible; but most traits of speech have analogues or corresponding (but different) traits in writing, and vice versa. There is evidence, for example, that all written texts acquire an oral dimension when people undergo the experience of reading them. All reading, even silent reading, activates the mind's ear, which follows some portion of the sound a text would make if it were spoken. A recent summary of key facts about children learning to read sets it down as axiomatic that "in dealing with words, whether written or spoken, we are dealing basically with phonological structures. Whatever else words may be, they are always phonological structures" (Liberman and Shankweiler 1991: 5). A skilled silent reader does not sound out words, but groups together "just those strings of consonants and vowels that are, in the normal process of speech production, collapsed, merged, coarticulated into a single pronounceable unit" (13). So, even among the deaf, the good readers "utilize abstract phonological information both in reading and in short-term memory'' (II). I would suggest that language-in-use can never be scoured completely clean of orality.

< previous page

page_120

next page >

< previous page

page_121

next page > Page 121

Attempts to make this silent medium (print) convey sounds, of course, are common enough. Novelists have stretched the resources of print to produce a notation for non-lexical utterances: Wheu - - u - - - - u - - - - - - - - cried my father; beginning the sentence with an exclamatory whistle. (Tristram Shandy, vol. ix, ch. 33) Mrkgnao! [a cat] Megegaggegg! Nannannanny! [a goat] Phillaphulla Poulaphouca. [a waterfall] (Ulysses, chs. 4, 15) Some poets write silence by signaling time with space: that is, they use white spaces on the page, the absence of print, to represent pauses of various lengths. Here is a virtuoso performance by E. E. Cummings, where the space between lines, or the space that appears on the page when one moves from one line to the next, becomes a sign for stillness at twilight: silent unday by silently not night did the great world (in darkly taking rain) drown, beyond sound down (slowly beneath sight fall ing) fall ing through touch less stillness (seized among what ghostly nevers of again) Elsewhere Cummings writes the dimension of speech that we call "tempo" onto the printed page by running together words he wants us to hear fast: "and break onetwothreefourfive/pigeonsjustlikethat." It seems to me that silence is part of the semantics of orality. The meaning of silence depends almost entirely on context, on communicative factors surrounding the silence. So, puzzlingly, silence can mean agreement or disagreement; consent or denial; respect or disdain. Silence plays a crucial role in the choreography of ordinary conversation. A short silence tells listeners when they may take a turn; a longer silence encourages a change of subject. Different speech communities have different conventions for the length of silence that constitutes an invitation to say something. The Athabaskans of Canada let about one and a half seconds go by before taking a turn in conversation, whereas Anglos let only about one

< previous page

page_121

next page >

< previous page

page_122

next page > Page 122

second go by; as a result, in meetings with Anglos Athabaskans may never get to say much of anything at all.3 Experiment with phonemic alphabets of one sort or another began to emerge in the second half of the eighteenth century (Joshua Steele, John Walker), another index of language-consciousness in those crucial forty years. But even twentieth-century phonemic alphabets omit intonation, loudness, tone, tempo, and silences. Students of conversation have devised notations that supply some (but not all) of those omissions, telling the reader when a syllable is prolonged, when the flow of words stops, when two or more speakers overlap. For example:

The numbers in parentheses count seconds of silence. Vertical lines mark simultaneous speech. Two colons in a row tell us that that vowel is prolonged. When we move from the oral to the extreme written end of the spectrum, we find sentences in the language called mathematics, in artificial languages like Fortran, and in symbolic logic. It is possible to read such sentences aloud, but not always easy, and they are not designed for ordinary social communications, to say the least. The discourses that generate such sentences place a high value on logic. Goody and Watt proposed in 1963 that purely oral cultures can never develop formal logic. This does not mean that people who live in oral cultures do not think logically. But we can assume that the elaborate logical structures of (for example) computer science would be impossible without writing, and cognitive differences between a more literate and a more oral culture may correlate with the use of different kinds of logic. Slightly down the scale from mathematics and Fortran are 400-word sentences from legal textbooks and the Instructions for Form 1040 sentences concerning the rules of institutions or bureau3 For the roles that silence may play in turn-taking in conversation, see Sacks, Schegloff; and Jefferson 1974; Schegloff 1990; Levinson 1983: ch 6; for silence as a critical element in intercultural communication see Scollon and Scollon 1981: Tannen 1984

< previous page

page_122

next page >

< previous page

page_123

next page > Page 123

cracies, composed for the record and for public information. They are difficult to read aloud. They are written so as to exclude immediate social contexts, with no reference to composer or reader or circumstances of composition or delivery: "If you are a member of a partnership or joint venture or a shareholder in an S corporation, use Part II to report your share of the partnership or S corporation income (even if not received) or loss." Closely parallel to the chain of locutions running from pure inscription to informal chat is another graded polarity, between noun and verb. Many, perhaps most, sentences in English can be sorted according to their use of nominal and verbal constructions: at one extreme, states of being are predicated of abstract nouns; at the other, animate or concrete agents perform energetic actions. J. R. Ross has proposed that noun, verb, and adjective are not a "fixed, discrete inventory of syntactic categories" but a "quasi-continuum": verb > present participle > past participle > adjective > preposition (?) > adjectival noun > noun. ''Nominalizations" are listed among the features that Biber and Finegan coded and counted in their discussion of the "drift" towards orality in English prose, and according to Wallace Chafe there are likely to be about ten times more nominalizations in writing than in speech.4 But nominalizations come in a number of different forms. We can look first at single words. The most "verbal" verb, by stipulation, is a concrete transitive action verb: e.g., to cut, to sprinkle, to grasp. The most "nominal" verb in English is the verb to be, with its dozens of abstract senses, "to be equal to," "to exist," "to subsist in a place," "to have an attribute," and many more. To have is perhaps the second most nominal verb, since its physical meaning, "to hold," was long ago swamped (in any list of its meanings) by abstract and relational senses: "to possess or own legally," "to possess as an attribute," "to cause," "to be in a certain relation to" (Bach 1967; Benveniste 1966). Between these two extremes are numerous degrees of nominalness in verbs. Verbs in the passive voice are more nominal than verbs in the active voice; they attribute to the grammatical subject of the sentence a state of being or having been X-ed or Y-ed. What modern grammars refer to as "stative" verbs are more nominal than 4 See Wells 1960; McIntosh 1975, 1977; Lanham 1983; Ross 1972; Biber 1988; Biber and Finegan 1989; Chafe 1982.

< previous page

page_123

next page >

< previous page

page_124

next page > Page 124

non-stative or "dynamic" verbs, simply because they denote a state or static condition of some sort. We recognize a stative predicate by the fact that it can't be counted and it can't be transformed into the progressive: it doesn't make sense to say that "Tom is tall frequently," and locutions such as "the island is being two miles long" and "Jane is having red hair'' would not in ordinary contexts be accepted as grammatical in English. Be and have can be either dynamic or stative, depending on immediate context and function: "Ingrid is Swedish": stative; "Ingrid is being noisy": dynamic. Many of the verbs that dominate intellectual or academic discourse are stative, though they may also have a dynamic sense: "to mean," "to subsist," "to depend," "to consist in." Underlying the semantics of stative verbs are the larger distinctions between count and non-count locutions, and between state and event (Huddleston 1984: 157; Joos 1964: 11320; Quirk et al. 1985: 17780). Pursuing this line of thought into nouns, we can make similar distinctions: the least nominal nouns are those that most closely resemble verbs, such as gerunds and other deverbal nouns that refer to physical actions: flight, reaping. The most nominal nouns are abstract and conceptual; they cannot be perceived by any of the five senses, and they pertain to the world of ideas not to the physical world. I think we can classify logical terms like truth or class and ontological terms like existence as extremely nominal, but a deverbal noun such as neglect or conduct seems slightly less so. The names of passions (fear, desire) or emotions (suspicion) may be said to be verging on the concrete because we can (in a sense) feel them. Physical objects may be considered less nominal as they are more particular and concrete; we could contend that clod is less nominal than ground, or fever than malady. Almost certainly, the relative importance of the finite verb(s) in a sentence has some influence on how nominal the sentence as a whole may feel to us. A sentence short enough so that a single action verb can color the whole clause, as in D. H. Lawrence, "Odour of Chrysanthemums," ("The trucks thumped heavily past, one by one") is surely more verbish than a sentence where the verbs are muffled in nouns and their modifiers, as in Henry James, Portrait of a Lady: "its main office was to suggest to her that the narrow black house-fronts, adjusted to a standard that would have been low even for backs, constituted quite the publicity implied by such privacies." In some of the nominal prose generated by commerce and govern-

< previous page

page_124

next page >

< previous page

page_125

next page > Page 125

ment, long strings of prepositional phrases stifle whatever action or energy a single verb might carry (Lanham 1979: 13). Swift's writings illustrate the hypothesis that in the eighteenth century a nominal style is associated not only with writtenness but also with politeness. The Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue (1712), which takes the form of a letter to Robert Harley decked out in all his titles ("Earl of Oxford and Mortimer, Lord High Treasurer of Great Britain"), leads off with the finite verbs to have, to be, be confirmed, consulted, agreed, be, think, none of which is an action verb: What I had the Honour of mentioning to Your Lordship some time ago in Conversation, was not a new Thought, just then started by Accident or Occasion, but the Result of long Reflection; and I have been confirmed in my Sentiments by the Opinion of some very judicious Persons, with whom I consulted. They all agreed, That nothing would be of greater Use towards the Improvement of Knowledge and Politeness, than some effectual Method for Correcting, Enlarging and Ascertaining our Language; and they think it a Work very possible to be compassed, under the Protection of a Prince, the Countenance and Encouragement of a Ministry, and the Care of proper Persons chosen for such an Undertaking. (56) There is almost nothing physical in these sentences, except perhaps the people named and that "Conversation" in line two. Four of the seven finite verbs are stative, and one of the three non-statives is in the passive voice. Much of the work of predication is shifted from finite verbs to deverbal nouns: not "mention" but "had the Honour of mentioning"; not "nothing would more effectively improve Knowledge and Politeness" but "nothing would be of greater Use towards the Improvement of Knowledge and Politeness.'' Except for one passive infinitive and one past participle, the last thirtyone words of that last thirty-five-word independent clause consist entirely of noun phrases and prepositional phrases. By contrast, the nasty fanatics, the despicable hacks of A Tale of a Tub perform vigorous physical actions: they "press, and squeeze, and thrust, and climb" to be heard in a crowd (55); they "Drank, and Fought, and Whor'd, and Slept, and Swore" in order to gain a reputation around town (74); they "swaggered" down the street in their shoulder-knots (84). The race of critics "delighted to nibble at the Superfluities, and Excrescencies of Books" (98). Peter's bulls "would Roar, and Spit, and Belch, and Piss, and Fart, and Snivel out Fire" (301). The apparently lunatic philosopher who cannot be satisfied with "the

< previous page

page_125

next page >

< previous page

page_126

next page > Page 126

Superficies of Things" employs his reason "officiously, with Tools for cutting, and opening, and mangling, and piercing" the fair outsides of things (17374). Almost any writer of the second half of the eighteenth century will be more nominal than that. Emily Melville, in Godwin's Caleb Williams (1794), liked dancing and music, as a result of which "She had the honour occasionally of playing [the young squire] to sleep after the fatigues of the chase; and, as he had some relish for harmonious sounds, she was frequently able to soothe him by their means from the perturbations of which his gloomy disposition was so eminently a slave" (45). The four finite verbs here are had, had, was, and was; the semantic weight of predication is borne by a gerund, an infinitive, and a cluster of deverbal nouns (sleep, chase, relish, sounds, perturbations, dispositions). Nominal style in Godwin creates a climate friendly to both stative verbs and polysyllabic, abstract nouns. Consider for example his "maxim, that the beauty of style consists in this, to be free from unnecessary parts and excrescencies, and to communicate our ideas with the smallest degree of prolixity and circuitousness" (Enquirer 370). Writtenness and Orality in Johnson's Prose The style and mode of Johnson's moral essays of 1744 to 1765 are eminently written; but some of his informal letters, especially those to Mrs. Thrale, are quite oral. This fact is surprising in the light of Johnson's well-deserved reputation as champion of the new print culture, and puzzling if we assume that the evolution of English prose in the eighteenth century was uniform and homogeneous. A general trend towards writtenness does not preclude islands of orality in unexpected places. Parallelism, antithesis, and philosophic diction these are the principal features of Johnson's formal style, in W. K. Wimsatt's classic study (1941). Parallelism occurs when two or more locutions have parallel structure: ridiculed exaggerated

with all the pleasantry with all the amplifications

of wit, of rhetorick.

What makes this compound predicate (from Rambler, no. 2) more obviously parallel and more distinctive, is mutual reinforcement between semantics and syntax. The two locutions have the same

< previous page

page_126

next page >

< previous page

page_127

next page > Page 127

grammatical structure past participle + prepositional phrase + prepositional phrase but they also use the same prepositions, with and of, and the same determiners, all and the. Moreover Johnson pulls his nouns and verbs out of the same semantic fields: to ridicule and to exaggerate may both be performed by the same kinds of agents, to similar objects; pleasantry and amplifications in this context pick out similar verbal operations, as wit and rhetorick here denote similar classes of skills. Johnson's characteristic choice of words is abstract and general. A discourse that favors the grandeur of generality facilitates the sharp contrasts of antithesis. Abstractions dominate whole paragraphs of Johnson's prose: the passions, the virtues and vices, the liberal arts, the various ages, attributes, and liabilities of human nature. More exotic abstractions in the Rambler prose are drawn from the specialized, learned vocabulary of seventeenth-century natural philosophy, words like ebullition, emanation, and emollient (Wimsatt 1948). Equally characteristic of Johnson are locutions that attribute one abstraction to another: "the pleasantry of wit"; "the various forms of connubial infelicity" (Rasselas); "catharticks of vice" (Rambler, no. 2). It scarcely needs arguing that quintuple parallelisms and sharp antitheses and learned abstractions do not find a home in the kinds of conversations most of us engage in most of the time. Johnson's fondness for such devices moves his formal prose well over towards the written end of the spectrum. Both parallelism and antithesis embody logical, or apparently logical, distinctions. Wimsatt quotes a sentence from Spectator, no. 267 by Addison to demonstrate how casual and informal an antithesis can be when it is not highlighted in symmetrical structures, when it is housed in a conversational syntax. "The Contents of both which Books come before those of the first Book in the Thread of the Story, tho' for preserving of this Unity of Action they follow them in the Disposition of the Poem" (1941: 45). Addison's sentence is of course more formal than the utterances of Claire and Chloe in the real-life conversation quoted above, but it is more oral than the Rambler style. Although Johnson's Rambler style appeals to the ear, its artifice and symmetries seem more written than Burke's. Johnson was very much aware of having in the Rambler "laboured to refine our language to grammatical purity, and to clear it from colloquial barbarisms, licentious idioms, and irregular combinations," that is, of having weeded out oralities. He also knew that he had added

< previous page

page_127

next page >

< previous page

page_128

next page > Page 128

something "to the elegance of its construction, and something to the harmony of its cadence" (Rambler, no. 208). He certainly knew that a closer parallelism than he was willing to risk could produce the poetical rhetoric of Plato's Gorgias and the "Asian" orators. The Loeb Classics introduction to Isocrates translates a notorious phrase by Gorgias, "Shameful was your sowing, baneful was your reaping," which is only slightly more symmetrical than "pleased with prognosticks of good" / ''terrified with tokens of evil" (Rasselas). Gorgias "sought to depart as far as possible from the language of common speech" (xiii). One more very written structure that we encounter often in the Rambler: noun clauses as subjects. "That man should never suffer his happiness to depend upon external circumstances, is one of the chief precepts of the Stoical philosophy" (no. 6). In what we think of as the normal English word order, this sentence would read, "One of the chief precepts of the Stoical philosophy is that man should" etc. Starting a sentence with a that noun clause requires planning, as does a periodic sentence; one has to have worked out in one's mind what the predicate for this subject will be even before launching the noun clause itself. I think also that this kind of noun clause is congenial with print culture partly because it embodies a proposition, in the logical sense. By means of this syntax, Johnson enables himself to think in terms of sentences with truth value. The Rambler style made a splash. Johnson is himself an event in the history of English prose. His style was recognized by contemporaries as "something extraordinary, a prodigy or monstrosity, a huge phenomenon" (Wimsatt 1941: 133). If a Johnsonian model of English prose made its first appearances in the late 1730s and early 1740s, in the Gentleman's Magazine, the Life of Savage, and elsewhere, it reached full maturity in the 1750s and 1760s, just as the New Rhetoric and the prescriptive grammars were coming into print. The impact of this "huge phenomenon" that we call Johnson's Rambler style was I think on the whole to accelerate the retreat from orality and the pursuit of writtenness sponsored by these schools of rhetoric and grammar; by the example of his writing Johnson for the most part encouraged writtenness in English prose. Alvin Kernan has pointed out that Johnson was the son of a bookseller, grew up among books, read more books than anyone, remembered them in astonishing detail, partnered himself with the booksellers, talked printed paragraphs, and was known for his

< previous page

page_128

next page >

< previous page

page_129

next page > Page 129

Dictionary: that he was, in short, a culture hero for the new literacy. One of the themes of Robert DeMaria's recent biography is that Johnson's literary career was in many ways modeled after the bookish scholar-poets of Renaissance humanism, men like Joseph Scaliger or Angelo Poliziano, who wrote their learned editions, literary criticism, and poetry in Latin. DeMaria maintains that Johnson's literary achievements (and his livelihood in the rough-and-tumble publishing world) depended more on "translating, reviewing, introducing, paraphrasing, criticizing, cataloguing, excerpting, or editing" other people's books than on "creative writing" in the modern sense (1993: 16, 30, 68). These scholars portray Johnson as an exemplary figure for print culture. Nevertheless, some of Johnson's most appealing written productions show features that are more characteristic of speech than of writing. This is, of course, to be expected in familiar letters, which are by convention and in practice more informal, personal, commonplace, and context-dependent than official or public texts. Johnson himself discusses the discourse conventions of letters in Rambler, no. 152. Traditionally, conventionally, classically, and neoclassically, letters were thought of as a form of conversation, the "converse of the pen"; they straddle the "fictive" and the "natural" worlds (Redford 1986: 913). This should mean that they have ''oral styles": they ought to exhibit a greater number of speech-like qualities than other texts. What is intriguing about the most oral of Johnson's letters is that they have not merely the features we found in early eighteenth-century oral texts but also a family of more pragmatic, more dramatistic features. Letters at certain times and places, for Johnson, came to perform some of the human functions of conversation. Reading these letters, we realize that the "features" approach to orality and writtenness has limitations, that perhaps it misses a major point in the relations between orality and writtenness. If the quintessential written text, by stipulation, is abstract, decontextualized, logical, informative, concise, and precise, the quintessential conversation is focused on "interpersonal involvement" (Tannen 1984: 17). Conversation operates by "relevance" theory (Sperber and Wilson 1986), in the sense that most conversations are less concerned with truth-value and information than with the pragmatic needs of the people conversing. "Speakers regularly and intentionally refrain from saying what they mean in service of the higher goal of politeness in

< previous page

page_129

next page >

< previous page

page_130

next page > Page 130

its broadest sense, that is, to fulfill the social function of language" (R. Lakoff, as cited Tannen 1984: 11). The formal aspects of conversation have been much studied in the last twenty years or so. The "simplest systematics" that Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson came up with in 1974, now a model for the analysis of interpersonal talk in many languages, addresses itself to turn-taking, gaps, and overlaps (rather than to strategies or goals), and researchers have followed out the implications of the simplest systematics into silence, "minimal response," interruption, and what could be called the prosody of dialogue (Fasold 1990: 10711). But the "conversations" of familiar letters take place in writing, so turn-taking, gaps, and overlaps can't happen, and a more useful approach to epistolary conversation derives from Deborah Tannen's hypothesis that "involvement strategies are the basic force in both conversational and literary discourse" (1989: 17). Tannen's 1984 book explained why features like pace and frequency of reiteration can enhance communication with some people and destroy it with others. By 1989 she had replaced "features" as a term of analysis for conversation with ''strategies." Interpersonal speech requiring "involvement" seems to generate such strategies as narrativity, figurativeness, and physicality all of which are "literary." We can expect "more oral" texts to be more imaginative and literary. It is no accident that oral dimensions of language play a crucial role in poetry. To overstate and oversimplify, many of the human, emotional, personal, practical, interactive, and literary aspects of prose are likely to be oral. There are, of course, different degrees of familiarity in familiar letters, and eighteenth-century letters were fully naturalized citizens of the world of print. In the 1720s, literati like Alexander Pope sometimes expected that the letters they wrote to friends would be published. Mme. de Sévigné's letters (published 1725, English translation 1727) upset traditional notions by the openness with which they gossiped about intimate and political affairs (Altman 1993). The so-called Embassy Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu were half public, half private: based on letters written to family and friends during 1716 to 1718 while Wortley was ambassador to Turkey, Lady Mary composed them as a travel-memoir and copied them into two small albums. These seemed so much like a publishable text to Mary Astell that she wrote a preface for them; and they were in fact published after Lady Mary's death. The eighteenth century re-

< previous page

page_130

next page >

< previous page

page_131

next page > Page 131

spected letters as a literary form, not merely because letters appeared in the repertory of classical authors like Cicero and Pliny, and not merely because well-bred people like Voiture and Mme. de Sévigné had published elegant collections of letters, but also because the genre was congenial to an age that delighted in familiar essays, miscellany magazines, journals, biographies, and collections of anecdotes letters both published and unpublished profited from, and flourished by virtue of, the discovery of private and personal forms of discourse. Johnson wrote fifty-three years' worth of letters, to noble lords, to children, to merchants, scholars, Scotsmen; some of them courtly, many intimate; letters formal and letters dashed-off-in-haste, letters profoundly sad and letters ludicrous. A couple of his more or less public letters (such as the letter to Lord Chesterfield 1755, to Macpherson 1775) are famous, but the vast majority of the thousand-plus that have survived are not "letters of art," not written with publication in mind as Pope's or Walpole's were. They were for the most part not addressed to his famous friends, Burke, Reynolds, Goldsmith, Garrick and company; rather they went predominantly to people whom he thought of, in one degree or another, as family: about 350 to Mrs. Thrale, and large numbers to old friends from Lichfield and Oxford, his step-daughter Lucy Porter, his college friends John Taylor and Robert Chambers. This does not mean that Johnson never wrote letters in the grand style. Here, as elsewhere, he observes decorum. When Johnson undertook "very serious contemplations" in a letter, he wrote very much as he did in the Rambler (e.g., to Thomas Lawrence, 20 January 1780; III 222). This is, of course, a rejection of the Renaissance doctrine that limited familiar letters to "easy" and artless styles, as James Biester has pointed out.5 The letters I am interested in here are among his most informal, and they were written to an intimate friend under special circumstances. The popularity of Boswell's Life has sometimes obscured the fact that Johnson and Hester Thrale were more intimate friends than Johnson and Boswell. Johnson lived with the Thrales for many months over a period of sixteen years; he was given his own room both in town and at their country house in Streatham; in effect he 5 See Biester 1988. All citations from Johnson's letters are to the Redford edition, by volume and page, or by date.

< previous page

page_131

next page >

< previous page

page_132

next page > Page 132

became part of the family. He devised a durable nickname for their oldest child, "Queeney"; he entered energetically into family games. Henry Thrale offered Johnson not only the hospitality of his homes but also a supporting frame of familial authority; Johnson "would accept correction of his [frequently rough and sometimes boorish] manners from Thrale as he would from no other person" (Bate 1975: 416). Johnson took part in Thrale's Parliamentary campaigns, and consulted in detail over family finances; the manager of Thrale's brewery seems to have depended on Johnson for sensible business advice, especially after financial losses (Hyde 1977: 205, 232). He became an elephantine uncle to the children, and a respectful friend to Mrs. Thrale's mother, drawing on his encyclopedic and not entirely amateurish knowledge of medicine to remedy her illnesses. As interpersonal speech becomes more intimate, its style becomes more oral; so the preceding details are relevant. Intimacy, the private or personal connection between interlocutors, is in this sense a defining condition of orality. So is contextuality: oral texts are acutely sensitive to the character of author and audience, to particularities of time and place. Author: Johnson was a profoundly emotional man who responded warmly to women (as well as to men). His letters give evidence that he had been deeply in love with his wife (I 2224, 302), that he fell in love with another woman a few years after his wife's death and would have married her except that she herself died shortly after he addressed her (I 11723). He wrote regularly to Mrs. Thrale during his annual visits to Lichfield, Ashbourne, and Oxford, where he went to see what was left of his family plus a handful of old friends. But none of the people he was visiting could provide Johnson with the intimacy he felt "at home" with the Thrales. During these visits to Lichfield Johnson felt more painfully than usual the predicament of his last twenty years: he knew himself to be old, ill, famous, and alone. Audience: Though thirty-two years younger than Johnson, Mrs. Thrale shared his love of letters and language; she had learned some French, Latin, Greek, Italian and Spanish in her precocious youth; shortly after Johnson first came to dinner in 1765 the two of them set about a joint translation of the odes of Boethius. It was Mrs. Thrale's task to pour him endless cups of tea, sit up with him till the small hours of the morning, and listen, and talk, and be taught. He criticized her poetry and her clothes. More than two hundred of the

< previous page

page_132

next page >

< previous page

page_133

next page > Page 133

legal papers connected with her inheritance bear endorsements in his handwriting (Clifford 1941: 114). The journals of their 1774 journey to Wales, intended for no one's eyes but her own, record that Johnson "is on every occasion so very kind, feels friendship so acutely and expresses it so delicately" (115). Johnson referred to Thrale as "my Master" and to Mrs. Thrale as "my Mistress"; within the family circle and on the domestic scene he seems to have encouraged her to give him orders and tell him what to do (I 378, 381). Time and place: These letters were written in sets or clusters, during each of the ten years 177073, 177577, and 177981, when Johnson traveled to the midlands. The clustering results from Johnson's attempts to write to Mrs. Thrale by every post, more or less. The mail departed from London for Lichfield on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday evenings, arriving roughly forty-eight hours later. So Johnson wrote sixteen letters in forty-six days in 1771, thirteen in thirty days in 1775. In 1777 he wrote to Mrs. Thrale on August 4, 7, 9, 13, 23, 27, and on September 6, 8, 13, 15, 18, 20, 22, 25, 27, and 29. He wanted to be receiving letters from her just as often, and he complained frequently when letters did not reach him in regular sequence: "Write to me something every post, for on the stated days my head runs upon a letter" (II 22526). It is as if these two friends had been systematically arranging their correspondence so as most closely to resemble a face-to-face conversation, where immediacy of response is essential (Altman 1982). The involvement, the personal interaction made possible by frequent exchanges of short letters, finds expression in reciprocal self-revelations and in a heightened consciousness by each correspondent of the other. "Self-revelations," remarks in which speakers tell their interlocutors something about themselves, are a distinguishing feature of informal talk (Tannen 1984: 7983). As is well known, one way to reduce the formality of conversations with new acquaintances is to tell them something about oneself. So Johnson says something frequently about his health or about his frame of mind. "Rheumatism is come again" (7 July 1770); "Rheumatism which has been very troublesome is grown better" (11 July 1770); ''My Rheumatism torments me very much" (14 July 1770); "I had a sorry night last night, nor is the rheumatism well" (28 July 1770). And he frequently responds to Mrs. Thrale's self-revelations: "I hope your complaint, however troublesome is without danger" (20

< previous page

page_133

next page >

< previous page

page_134

next page > Page 134

July 1770). He asks about her family and teases her about domestic affairs at Streatham. Do not say that I never write to you, and do not think that I expected to find any friends here that could make me wish to prolong my stay. For your strawberries, however, I have no care. Mrs. Cobb has strawberries, and will give me as long as they last, and she has cherries too. Of the Strawberries at Streatham I consign my part to Miss [Queeney] and Harry. I hope Suzy grows, and Lucy begins to walk, though this rainy weather confines us all in the house. I have neither frolicked nor fretted. (I 343) The "interactive nature" of conversation is a first premise of recent research; conversation is not just a matter of two people alternately taking the role of speaker and listener, since "both speaking and listening include elements and traces of the other" (Tannen 1989: 912, citing Gumperz, Chafe). So Johnson's "Do not say," in the passage just quoted, incorporates Mrs. Thrale's letter into his, and his "do not think" anticipates her telling him what he would feel. The result of all these particulars is a very different style of writing from the Rambler. Isobel Grundy has called our attention to "techniques of spontaneity" (1986: 217) in the 1770s letters: references to the moment of writing, exclamations, affectionate mockery, self-disparagement, scene-painting, and allusion. In one letter (3 August 1771), Johnson quotes from a character named "Doodle" in a farce by Henry Fielding, and four lines later quotes the ominous forebodings of Macbeth on "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow"; the preposterous disparity between these two is both serious and playful. Also characteristic of speech is an absence of logical organization and of developed themes. Johnson remarks several times that his writing is unplanned. One letter begins, "Since my last letter nothing extraordinary has happened." Then come three short sentences on his health and his host. In the next sentence a "Mr. Grene the Apothecary has found a book which tells who paid levies in our parish" a hundred years ago. Johnson makes gentle fun of these profound historical researches, but they remind him of the mutability of things, and call up a fragment from Horace: Pulvis et umbra sumus. What is nearest us touches us most. The passions rise higher at domestick than at imperial tragedies. I am not wholly unaffected by the revolutions of Sadler Street, nor can forbear to mourn a little when old names vanish away, and new ones come into their place. Do not imagine, Madam, that I wrote this letter for the sake of these philosophical meditations for when I began it, I had neither Mr. Grene nor

< previous page

page_134

next page >

< previous page

page_135

next page > Page 135

his book in my thoughts, but was resolved to write and did not know what I had to send but my Respects. (I 3456) Quite often in these letters the topics are whatever comes to mind, strung together in any order. One letter includes, as a middle paragraph, some judicious rules for writing journals, and then asks "Why do I write this, which I had no thought of when I begun?" he had begun the letter complaining how little he had to say (III 61). But this mixture of artfulness and spontaneity is still more complicated: in one of his letters Seneca ridiculed Cicero's directive that "Even if you have nothing to say, write whatever enters your head"; so talk about having nothing to talk about is a topos in classical rhetoric (Biester 1988: 164). Equally sophisticated, and according to Deborah Tannen equally characteristic of conversation, is Johnson's roleplaying. Johnson turns himself into a cast of comic characters by imitating various ridiculously non-Johnsonian voices. At the end of a letter with a sober opening paragraph on the desirability of making a will, Johnson mentions that he dined with Frances Reynolds, sketches her "scruples" about all unnamed Lichfield lady, and closes: So no more at present but hoping you are all in good health as I am at this time of writing (excuse haste). I am, Dearest, dearest Lady, Your most obedient servant, Sam. Johnson. (III 203) I would call this a chambermaid style of writing, an excursion into sheer featherheadedness, à la Win Jenkins in Humphry Clinker. Again, in telling Mrs. Thrale about a recent visit from his Ashbourne friend John Taylor Johnson falls into preposterous rant: Dr. Taylor . . . is come to town, brisk and vigorous, fierce and fell, to drive on his lawsuit. Nothing in all life now can be more profligater than what he is, and it, in case, that so be, that they persist for to resist him he is resolved not to spare no money, nor no time. (III 261) A double redundance of archaic conjunctions (if, in case, that so be, that) and the quadruple negative of "not to spare no money, nor no time" are strenuously ungrammatical notes in the voice of a fiercely determined rustic. It is possible that Johnson is miming Taylor here, as elsewhere he seems to mime Lucy Porter and a Mr. Colson at Oxford (I 368, II 217). Among the most engaging of Johnson's unJohnsonian voices are those associated with literary characters and types. Does quoting Falstaff (in a dialogue with Doll Tearsheet!) without quotation marks

< previous page

page_135

next page >

< previous page

page_136

next page > Page 136

make Johnson into Falstaff? "Fal. Thou dost give me flattering busses. Doll. By my troth, I kiss thee with a most constant heart. Fal. I am old, I am old." It is those last six words that Johnson quotes, and two lines later he quotes Virgil (III 77). Elsewhere Johnson pretends to sulk, like a jilted fop: This day I thought myself sure of a letter, but so I am constantly served. Mr. Cumberland, and Mrs. _____ and Mrs. Byron, and any body else puts me out of your head, and I know no more of You than if You were on the other side of the Caspian. (III 204) Johnson plays variations on this role at a number of points (III 67, 126, 235); twice he casts himself as "Colin," unhappy shepherd-lover of a thousand undistinguished pastoral poems. The role expresses his affection, his humor, and his need. For ordinary talk, as Wallace Chafe observes, language is delivered in "spurts" not sentences, in groups of words about seven words long (usually including one verb), each with its own intonation contour, each lasting about two seconds and bounded by pauses (1985: 1068). Some of Johnson's letters to Mrs. Thrale fit this description, sounding almost like baby-talk: There was poor I writing, and writing, and writing, on the 8th, on the 11th, on the 13th; and on the 15th I looked for a letter, but I may look and look. (III 66) So many days and never a letter. Fugere fides, pietasque pudorque. This is Turkish usage. And I have been hoping and hoping. But you are so glad to have me out of your mind. (I 405) Miss Turton wears Spectacles, and can hardly climb the Stiles. I was not tired at all, either last night or to day. Miss Porter is very kind to me. Her Dogs and Cats are all well. (I 364) According to Douglas Biber, a high incidence of first- and second-person pronouns and a low proportion of nouns, prepositional phrases, and subordinate clauses are common in speech but not writing. Some of Johnson's intimate letters were published by Mrs. Thrale in 1788, in an edition which had very mixed reviews. "A salmagundy composed of bulls, cows, calves, cats and Mr. Piozzi," remarked the Morning Post, and the European Magazine questioned whether the "epistolary correspondence of any man be a fit subject for publication." But the English Review compared these letters to Swift's Journal to Stella, which we recall is among the most oral of Swift's

< previous page

page_136

next page >

< previous page

page_137

next page > Page 137

writings. And in the Monthly Review Arthur Murphy the actor-playwright-essayist who had first introduced Johnson to the Thrales in 1765 welcomed a glimpse of the everyday. Johnson: "We see him in his undress, that is, the undress of his mind, which, unlike that of the body, was never slovenly" (Clifford 1941: 31436). Though studded with quotations from Virgil and Shakespeare, these letters have the orality of a conversation between intimate friends. Samuel Richardson: The Uses of Indirection Nominalizations appear on every list of the qualities that make one text more written than another, and nominal styles dominate the prose of the early novelists, including Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, and Burney. This is mildly surprising, since the novel is in large part a narrative form. In the twentieth century critics have tended to disparage nominal style, preferring the "energy"' and "vitality" that action verbs can convey. Composition handbooks, from E. B. White to Sheridan Baker and beyond, have advised students to replace abstract subjects with animate subjects, and passive or stative verbs with action verbs. The "gobbledygook" in George Orwell's famous essay on "Politics and the English Language" is nominal prose. Nothing in the nature of things decrees, however, that nominal styles must always be flabby or vague. They are a large family of styles, with many degrees and kinds of nominal-ness; in skillful hands they may perform otherwise unperformable functions, and in some contexts they can achieve effects occasionally quite beautiful effects that action verbs would destroy. Richardson's Clarissa is something of a virtuoso in nominal prose, which is her preferred medium for expressing complicated feelings and for balancing the psycho-social forces that her family's pride and greed have forced her to contend with. In Tom Jones, both Blifil and Lord Fellamar hide their villainy behind nominal styles. Even the narrator of Tom Jones is sparing in his use of action verbs; he superintends his own craftful plot by means of abstractions, deverbal nouns, and stative predicates. Nominal styles seem to be almost indispensable for certain forms of indirection and self-consciousness. Nominal prose is associated with politeness. Clarissa is set up, rather painfully at times, as "an exemplar to her sex," as a model of true elegance so Richardson tells us in the "Author's Preface" of

< previous page

page_137

next page >

< previous page

page_138

next page > Page 138

1759: her language becomes a medium for the extraordinary "delicacy of sentiments" by which she excels all other women.6 Near the beginning of the novel, Clarissa is recounting the history of her family's quarrel with the rake Lovelace. Her brother James and her sister Arabella have insulted Lovelace, who makes sure that Clarissa knows he has swallowed the affront for her sake. "I was sorry for the merit this gave him in his own opinion with me," writes Clarissa (I 16). She could have said, "I regretted his taking credit for this." "I was sorry" is more nominal than "I regretted," simply because it uses the verb to be not a "real'' verb, and denotes, at least on the surface, a state of being, not a form of behavior. The "merit" that Lovelace thinks he has acquired is an abstraction that can be acquired or lost; the acquisition of so many units of merit is the nominal result of an event, not the event itself. Some pages further on, it is James Harlowe's turn to deal in abstractions; Clarissa says that he "bid me deserve his love, and I should be sure to have it" (I 31). This is different from saying, 'behave yourself, Clariss, and I shall love you,' because it is phrased in terms of static conditions, not actions; both "have" and "deserve" in this context are stative. A number of commonplace locutions in Clarissa's prose use the verb to have plus an abstract quality as a way of introducing a nonstative verb in the infinitive: "I had interest enough to disengage myself" (I 19); "He has not the sense to say anything to the purpose" (I 33); "he had cunning enough to give me, undesignedly, a piece of instruction" (I 14); "Nor has he complaisance enough to spare your uncles" (I 51). Among the most heavily favored predications in Clarissa are "have occasion" and "have reason," as in "I am sorry to have occasion to say it" (I 23), or "the man they had so much reason to hate" (I 29). If the possession of an abstract quality is crucial, then it matters intensely how much of a given abstraction one has or does not have; some of the most characteristic idioms of Richardson's prose measure out quantities of qualities. There may be an excess (Lovelace "was supposed to have given too much cause for their ill opinion" [I 15]; Solmes's family "stands in too much need of his favour" [I 59]), or a deficiency ("they have begun so cruelly with me, that I have not spirit enough to assert my own negative" [I 33]), or just enough, as in 6 Richardson 17478: I xiv; subsequent references to Clarissa are by volume and page of this edition.

< previous page

page_138

next page >

< previous page

page_139

next page > Page 139

two of the phrases quoted one paragraph up. In particularly delicate cases, the writer does not presume to say what action a certain quantity of a quality will cause except in terms of its results. Clarissa is at one point "too much overawed by [her father's] sternness even to make such an expression of my duty as my heart overflowed with" (I 36) (my italics). A few pages further on, she muffles an uncomfortable sum of pounds, shillings, and pence in the same periphrasis: "And surely I will not stand against such an accession to the family as may happen from marrying Mr. Solmes" (I 60). The grammatical subjects of sentences in verbal prose are animate agents; but the grammatical subjects of Richardson's nominal prose are often abstractions. "My brother's antipathy would not permit him to wait for such an event" (I 18). Whether Clarissa herself may be trusted or not, we are not told; rather her Aunt Hervey affirms that "my cousin Clary's prudence may be confided in" (I 27). The abstraction does whatever work is involved here, just as an eighteenthcentury gentleman employed a servant to perform those menial actions which he considered below his dignity; and the higher his rank, the fewer everyday actions he could permit himself. An action may also be placed at one remove from its agent by inserting a state of mind between them: "my father was pleased to hint"; ''he thought fit . . . to make . . . enquiries"; "he is willing to hope you to be all obedience" (I 18, 19, 34). This mannerism seems to be borrowed directly from courtiers, who habitually position the will or pleasure of a royal person before an action predicated of him or her: his Majesty is pleased to signify . . . ; his Grace is willing to give permission (my italics throughout). Nominal prose is among the most effective instruments by which the characters of Clarissa express complicated feelings and judgments. Seven weeks before Clarissa's death, Anna Howe takes it upon herself to inform Arabella Harlowe that Clarissa is "dangerously ill." The first paragraph of Arabella's reply is curt and brutal: "We are told he [Lovelace] has remorse, and would marry her. We don't believe it, indeed. She may be very ill." For the second, she pulls herself together to level a volley of contempt at her old enemy, in nominal prose: "I cannot say, miss, that the notification from you is the more welcome for the liberties you have been pleased to take with our whole family, for resenting a conduct, that it is a shame any young lady should justify" (III 512). The insolence of this letter is more than Anna can bear, but she does not exclaim or "rave" (as

< previous page

page_139

next page >

< previous page

page_140

next page > Page 140

Lovelace does later on); rather, she replies in kind, in nominal prose; her anger pulls the sentence out of shape and overflows into parentheses: If you had half as much sense as you have ill-nature, you would (notwithstanding the exuberance of the latter) have been able to distinguish between a kind intention to you all (that you might have the less to reproach yourselves with, if a deplorable case should happen), and an officiousness I owed you not, by reason of freedoms at least reciprocal. This sentence begins in a passion, but pauses to deliver an insult in parentheses. It starts to scold and then throttles itself down into euphemism: "freedoms at least reciprocal" I interpret as a reference to nasty quarrels. To appreciate the artistry of this letter, try to paraphrase it in less nominal language: "You are so stupid and malicious that you weren't able to understand either my good intentions (I had hoped to lighten your future burden of selfreproach, if Clarissa should die) or my helpfulness, which you did not deserve, since you and I have been insulting each other right along." My paraphrase seems crude and simple-minded, compared to the original. I have had to leave out several of Anna's ideas and feelings in order to make sense, ideas such as the "exuberance" of Arabella's ill-nature, and I have blunted the edge of Anna's irony by choosing one meaning among several implied by her understatement or periphrasis. Clarissa's talents in nominal prose are tested by her tribulations. For example: having escaped from the brothel, Clarissa, in hiding, is checking up on Lovelace, and has written to the real Lady Betty about a visit from the false Lady Betty twelve days earlier. The letter concludes with a paragraph justifying the inquiry, of which this is a part: I think I owe it to my former hopes (however deceived in them), and even to charity, that a person [Lovelace] of whom I was once willing to think better, should not prove so egregiously abandoned, as to be wanting, in every instance, to that veracity which is indispensable in the character of a gentleman. (III 332) It is difficult to express with active verbs some of the things this sentence means to say. "At one time I hoped that Lovelace, whom I admired, would in some instance tell the truth like a gentleman." My paraphrase is less intricate and poignant than Richardson's original: if her "hopes" that Lovelace may not prove ''in every instance"

< previous page

page_140

next page >

< previous page

page_141

next page > Page 141

deficient in a virtue that no gentleman should lack in any instance, if these hopes are "former," i.e., defunct, why should she trouble herself? Conscious perhaps that her letter makes her liable to cross-examination on this and other more painful subjects, she adds another motive, "charity." In what way is this sincere? I do not doubt that it is, at bottom, but since Clarissa suspects that her inquiry will expose Lovelace as a liar, it is disingenuous of her to claim "charity" as a motive for writing. A more obvious motive for her letter, a sense of injured merit, is introduced in parentheses.7 Can we infer that she really knew all the time that Lovelace was "deficient" in "veracity''? Unprovided with the proper quantity of qualities? Her feelings are so knotted up in politesses, that whatever irony may have inhered in these hyperbolical "hopes" vanishes completely. 7 The parenthesis as a trope has not been widely discussed in prose; for parenthesis in poetry, see Lennard 1991.

< previous page

page_141

next page >

< previous page

page_142

next page > Page 142

Chapter 7 The New Rhetoric of 1748 to 1793 Now if the Poet is of all other the most auncient Orator, as he that by good & pleasant perswasions first reduced the wilde and beastly people into publicke societies and ciuilitie of life, insinuating vnto them, vnder fictions with sweete and coloured speeches, many wholesome lessons and doctrines, then no doubt there is nothing so fitte for him, as to be furnished with all the figures that be Rhetoricall, and such as do most beautifie language with eloquence & sententiousnes. (George Puttenham, The Art of English Poesie: 1589) I have proposed that language-consciousness of several sorts may have discouraged the oral, incorrect modes of Swift, Arbuthnot, Mandeville, and Defoe, but encouraged the gentrified, polite, more written modes of Godwin, Burke, and Burney. I see the New Rhetoric as a force for language change in the eighteenth century because it allied itself with prescriptive grammar and with an emergent print culture, under the banner of "civilization," to promote just the kind of changes we have been discussing. This hypothesis applies not only to writing but also, less stringently, to speech. That is, it finds confirmation in the new awareness of dialects, in the rage to get rid of provincial speech-patterns, in the sudden new popularity of pronouncing dictionaries and rhetorical grammars in the second half of the century. Late eighteenth-century rhetoric encouraged both polite usage and the precision and explicitness we associate with writtenness. There are also trends in the evolution of prose that do not fit under the rubrics of politeness and literacy, but do seem related to rhetoric: the move away from loose towards periodic sentences, the move away from overconcatenation towards balance and antithesis, and the new relish for what I call "purple" prose. Rhetorics published by Adam Smith, Lord Kames, George Campbell, and Hugh Blair give instruc-

< previous page

page_142

next page >

< previous page

page_143

next page > Page 143

tions: not only for avoiding vulgarity and achieving elegance in language, which can be explained in terms of politeness; not only for explicitness, precision, and abstractness, which can be explained in terms of the new print culture; but also for steering clear of loose, trailing constructions, for cultivating end-focus, for "sublime" and "pathetic" language. The question of exactly how and when all these interrelated trends got started does not admit of easy answers. From 1750 on, everything seems to have happened at once: the old and new rhetorics of 1748 to 1793; the elocution movement; hundreds of prescriptive grammars; language-conscious book reviews in the magazines; more precise, more "scientific" dictionaries, especially Johnson's; Johnson's own prose, much imitated; women writers, sentimentalism, and the feminization of culture. This was also the period when texts for major addresses in Parliament began to be written out and published and read. Another possible factor: if the teaching of English composition got its start in the dissenting academies after the Restoration, it became commonplace in Scottish universities after about 1730 (Miller 1990b, 1990c; Horner 1990). In this chapter I offer a rough-and-ready frame for understanding what rhetoric in general is, a precise, historical frame (and Chronological Checklist) for eighteenth-century rhetoric, and a discussion of "civilization" as one of the major themes of the New Rhetoric. What is rhetoric? One group of contemporary scholars, a distinguished one, takes classical rhetoric as an indispensable base. Brian Vickers, for example, gives the doctrines of Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian a central place in his thinking; and though he allows numerous and creative permutations on the schemata or frames from which classical rhetoric is built (ethos, logos, pathos; invention, arrangement, style; docere, movere, delectare; the tropes and figures), he assumes that these frames are universal, built into the dynamics of verbal communication among human beings. Vickers defines rhetoric informally as "the systematization of natural eloquence" (1988: 1), which is a variation on Aristotle (I i 2 and 14); and Vickers's early books are highly informative analyses of Shakespeare's prose and Renaissance poetry in terms of rhetorical structures, that is, mainly, classical figures and tropes (1968; 1970). James and Tita

< previous page

page_143

next page >

< previous page

page_144

next page > Page 144

Baumlin's 1994 book on ethos is another example of informed contemporary thinking within some of the frames of classical rhetoric. Nor is this school narrow and restricted in its notions or interests: from Helen North we learn of the specifically erotic and eirenic roles of rhetoric, pictured as peitho (persuasion) in Greek art; James Winn (1981) opens up new intellectual landscapes, where rhetoric and music conduct a continuing dialogue of form and expression in the Renaissance and eighteenth century; Kathy Eden (1997) illuminates new dimensions and unsuspected depths in classical and Renaissance rhetorics by approaching them in relation to hermeneutics. Another group of scholars pursues rhetoric more generally as a discipline that would exist even if Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian had never lived. Stanley Fish defines rhetoric as "the skill which produces belief and therefore establishes what, in a particular time and particular place, is true" (1989: 480). It follows, according to this approach, that every age and every culture has its own rhetoric, its own favored "skills" that ''produce belief." Rhetoric in eighteenth-century Britain cannot have lost its vitality (as Vickers and others believe); it can only have changed strategies and adopted a different costume. Rhetoric in this larger sense has very much revived in the last few decades in the United States and elsewhere; and scholars in a number of fields not primarily concerned with language or communications, such as political science, law, and history, have begun to study the rhetoric of those disciplines. Taking pluralism as a premise, John Nelson (1987) proposes a "rhetoric of inquiry," one that presides over all "negotiations of competing knowledge claims." As a poststructuralist form of thinking, the rhetoric of inquiry embraces the antirhetoric of philosophy and science, seeing scientism itself as rhetoric: nothing has been more persuasive in the last two centuries than the impersonal logic of the physical sciences. Michael McGee points out that we really wouldn't want either rhetoric to "defeat" science or science to defeat rhetoric and the humanities, because they are in a dialectical tension in which "each term for authority is conditioned by the copresence of the other" (1987: 395). Rhetoric, he argues, must resist the academicism and elitism of Rorty's solidarity, Gadamer's phronesis, or Habermas's "ideal speech situation"; it must be committed to practice, as part of the power/knowledge matrix that Foucault attacks it for supporting.

< previous page

page_144

next page >

< previous page

page_145

next page > Page 145

John Bender and David Wellbery position such rhetoric as post-Romantic. It rejects "the originating power of subjectivity" which fueled Romanticism, and it sees human existence through political lenses, which are themselves essentially rhetorical (1990: 19). If rhetoric is always social, as Thomas Farrell argues, always an aspect of community practice, then any culture will always have its own rhetoric or rhetorics, and rhetoric is what philosophy, anthropology, and literary theory must study "now that it has become apparent that the text is non-finalizable" (1993: 2). George Dillon's eye-opening book on "academic discourse" takes this position as a starting-point. I do not intend this division between classical and nonclassical theories of rhetoric to be inclusive or exclusive; of certain contemporary scholars it is hard to say whether they ground their rhetoric in classical rhetoric or not. Richard Lanham assumes a classical basis for text-analysis and explicates with skill the expressivity of classical tropes and figures, but his distinction between homo rhetoricus and homo seriosus (1978), though probably not 100% seriosus itself, is extraclassical. James Kinneavy (1971) refers often to Aristotle, and seems to take his understanding of the communications triangle from Aristotle, but the four goals under which he disposes all language use (Expressive, Referential, Persuasive, and Literary) are not classical. Kathy Eden defines rhetoric as the art of contextualization. The rhetorical speech act, in other words, necessarily and indispensably plays on relations among subject, speaker, and audience. This perspective is surely rooted in classical premises, but it has a broader scope than standard classical doctrines do. Perhaps we can add that in order to be an "art" of contextualization, rhetoric must deal with form, structure, and process. Exotic figures of speech in the Ad Herennium, formalisms in Group mu, and grammatical distinctions in Blair and Campbell should not be dismissed as wheel-spinning or mystification; rhetoric is committed to the how as well as to the what and why. Fish, Nelson, and McGee focus their definitions of rhetoric on its relation to the quest for truth. By contrast, eighteenthcentury rhetoric focused on relations between language and civilized values. I shall argue that the New Rhetoric of 1748 to 1793 defined, supported, exemplified, and encouraged the evolution of English prose by teaching politeness and writtenness in language. What Kames, Campbell, and Blair felt most strongly about was civilized-

< previous page

page_145

next page >

< previous page

page_146

next page > Page 146

ness, the skills and sensitivities that qualify a speaker or reader for membership in an improved society. Blair's Lectures were addressed "to such as are studying to cultivate their Taste, to form their Style, or to prepare themselves for Public Speaking or Composition" (1783: 1 iv). At the heart of this process was learning to speak and write correct, clear, and refined English, free from provincialisms and "barbarisms." What was rhetoric in the eighteenth century? Classical rhetoric had a major presence in eighteenth-century Britain. Even though this was the century when English replaced Latin as the language of instruction in the universities, and even though classical studies were declining during those years, Cicero and Quintilian and Aristotle were still authorities whom most students encountered early in a liberal or a professional education. Classical rhetoric, in other words, was almost as unavoidable in most eighteenth-century curricula as the history of Greece and Rome. In the 1720s and 1730s John Stirling routinely required students just embarked on Latin to memorize ninety-four figures in six weeks, explaining and exemplifying them as he went along. An introduction to classical rhetoric was the fifth of the twelve parts of "Polite Learning" in The Preceptor (1748), a best-selling text for what we would now call secondary schools. And classical rhetoric for ordinary eighteenth-century readers and writers was mostly Roman rhetoric, the "synthesis" of Greek and Rhodian and native ideas that James Murphy says took place around 100 BCE. The Ad Herennium, "a rigorously practical manual," summarizes the basic doctrines of Roman rhetoric, which "remain standard for antiquity, the middle ages and the Renaissance, and have currency well into the eighteenth century" (1990: 24, 26). It is formalist; it sees rhetoric as an "art" that can be taught, the art of finding the means of persuasion (Aristotle 1 2). It lends itself to (over)simplification by means of schemas: three goals (docere, to teach; movere, to persuade; delectare, to delight); five canons (invention, arrangement, style, memory, delivery); three domains (deliberative, judicial, epideictic); three kinds of appeal (ethos, pathos, logos); two kinds of figures (of speech, of thought); three levels of style (high, middle, low). This basic frame extended itself easily and naturally into literary criticism, as in Aristotle, Horace, Quintilian; and the

< previous page

page_146

next page >

< previous page

page_147

next page > Page 147

relative unchangingness of this frame did not prevent rhetoric from being an arena for influential discussions of morality and politics, as in Cicero and Quintilian. We know that rhetoric occupied a substantial area on the intellectual map of eighteenth-century Britain, but we have relatively little direct evidence as to how it was taught, at what levels. We have nothing, that is, as detailed as the accounts of memorization, identification, and invention of figures in Elizabethan grammar-schools (Vickers 1968: 2930). A number of the rhetorics in the Chronological Checklist below are simplified textbooks designed for an elementary level, e.g., Bland (1706), Stirling (1733), Lowe (1737), and Newbury (1746). Grammar occupied more space in the elementary schools than rhetoric did, but many of the most popular grammar texts included either a sketch of rhetorical principles and tropes (for example, Part IV of Kirkby (1746) and Part VI of Fenning (1771)), or a few paragraphs on rhetorical-grammatical terms such as ellipsis, enallage, and pleonasm (Sundby et al. 1991: 10). Ian Michael's analysis of fourteen types of school texts places rhetoric in the same category as belles lettres, criticism, prosody, and history of literature; he counts only twenty-three new school texts in this category published between 1671 and 1770 versus 152 new texts in spelling and elementary reading and sixty-four new texts in grammar (1987: 89), According to Michael, whose topic is the teaching of English in the schools from 1570 to 1870, the three main types of school texts for the subject now known as "English" were spellers and elementary readers, grammars, and more advanced readers. All other texts rank well below these three; only one eighth to one tenth as many new texts in each of these other categories were published. Along with rhetoric in this lower ranking are logic, dictionaries, "compendia," and "writing, expression." This may simply mean, of course, that when all pre-university education is taken together, the elementary skills of spelling and reading take precedence. I infer that rhetoric played a secondary role in the eighteenth-century curriculum, up to the point when students began to learn Latin. That point arrived very early, however, by today's reckonings, around the age of seven or eight (Spufford 1981: 2324). Once we move above the very elementary levels, and once we move away from the dame schools7, the charity schools, and other schools designed to give basic literacy and numeracy to working-class

< previous page

page_147

next page >

< previous page

page_148

next page > Page 148

people, Latin becomes a factor in most curricula; and for boys who expected any sort of liberal education, rhetoric was a given. Students who attended the grammar schools usually swallowed a big dose of rhetoric in the fourth and fifth forms. The dissenting academies also taught rhetoric; it was Joseph Priestley's experience as tutor at Warrington Academy that generated not only his books on grammar and language but also his Lectures on Oratory and Criticism (1777). Since boys took up residence at the elite boarding schools standardly when they were only six or seven, and since Latin declamations and public debates were standard exercises at such schools, we can assume that rhetoric played a central part in the curriculum of institutions like Eton and Winchester.1 Students were expected to have read portions of Cicero's De Oratore, in Latin, before they reached the university. During the eighteenth century there were more editions and translations of the major classical rhetorics than there were original rhetorics in English (see Chronological Checklist). And once students reached the university, they re-read the Latin rhetorics and studied the Greek. The curriculum at Oxford was in part dictated by Laud's 1636 statutes, in force until the University Reform Act of 1854, and those statutes list rhetoric as one of the subjects for required examination. The Latin authors most frequently read at Christ Church, Oxford, between 1700 and 1714, in order of popularity, were Virgil's Aeneid, Cicero De Oratore, Sallust, Cicero De Officiis, and Horace Ars Poetica; also on the lists of prescribed books were Cicero Orator, Longinus, and Aristotle's Rhetoric. Quintilian was "a favorite" early in the century and again after 1767 (Bill 1988: 27880, 284). We must not overstate the importance of classical rhetoric in eighteenth-century education: Rosemary O'Day flags 1660 as a turning-point after which education began to split, with one curriculum for the clergy and gentry and another for Dissenters and young people with commercial ambitions. Much of the energy of the "realist" reformers of the midseventeenth century (Comenius, Dury, Peter, Webster) went into nonconformist institutions, and only a handful of these (Hackney, Kensington, Bath, and presumably Priestley's Warrington) qualified as "elite." "If a youth wished to enter trade and to learn more relevant subjects (such as modern 1 For Priestley and the dissenting academics, see Ruth Watts 1991: 312; M. Bryant 1986: 102, 105; for the public schools, Wallbank 1979: 1213.

< previous page

page_148

next page >

< previous page

page_149

next page > Page 149

languages and mathematics) he could do so only by ignoring the traditional universities" (O'Day 1982: 2601, 2089, 268). The checklist (pp. 15051) is intended to indicate the shape of various traditions in rhetoric from 1654 to 1790: classical, native English, elocutionist (devoted to correct pronunciation and to effective speech), and French (native French rhetorics published in English in England). What entitles a book to appear in this Checklist as a "rhetoric"? First, subject-matter and arguments that eighteenthcentury readers would have recognized as "rhetoric." The book in question must treat some of the standard topoi of classical rhetoric and offer practical rules or recommendations for effective communication. One reason for including James Beattie in the list of British rhetoricians (even though he never published anything called a "rhetoric") is the fact that he writes on major topics in Cicero, Quintilian, and Aristotle: invention, style, pathos/ethos, memory, ridicule, argument by example ("evidence"), and the sounds of language. Second, an interest in more than one of the basic elements of communication (speaker, audience, message, medium), or in more than one of the classical canons of rhetoric (invention, arrangement, style, memory, delivery). So I count Lord Kames's Elements of Criticism (1762) as a rhetoric because it devotes keen attention not only to the figures and to perspicuity in prose style, but also to taste and to the psychology of reception; and I count Thomas Sheridan's Lectures on Elocution (1762) as a rhetoric because it deals not only with delivery but also with language itself. These criteria oust a number of titles named in my sources and elsewhere as "rhetorics." For example, in 1728 appeared a substantial volume by "Bouhours" entitled The Arts of Logick and Rhetorick, which turns out to be a version of La Manière de bien penser, anglicized by John Oldmixon; it is part translation, part paraphrase, with many of Oldmixon's interpolations of what he thought "Bouhours" might have said or should have said about English poets. Under the auspices of "truthfulness" it deals unsystematically with a handful of rhetorical concepts, metaphor, hyperbole, proverbs, comparisons. Isaac Watts's Logick (1725, freqently reprinted) has also been listed as a rhetoric, but it really is a logic: Part IV, ''Of Disposition and Method," is only twenty-six pages long, in a book of 365 pages, and treats mostly analytic and synthetic methods. Watts acknowledges that poetry and rhetoric have their

< previous page

page_149

next page >

< previous page

page_150

next page > Page 150

Classical Translations Date 1654 1655 57 59 1660 62 63 1665 67 68 1670 71 73 1675 76 78 1680Longinus 82 83 1685 86Aristotle (2); Quintilian 88 1690 93Aristotle 94 1695 96

Chronological checklist of eighteenth-century rhetorics Latin/Greek Contemporary Elocution French English (translations) Blount T. Smith J. (7) Walker O. (3) Arnauld Poole

Newton Demetrius

Lamy (3)

Quintilian (2) Blount T. P. Aristotle, Cicero

98Longinus 1700 02 03 1705 06 08 1710 11Longinus 12Longinus 13 14Ad Herennium 1715 16

Le Faucheur (3) Bouhours Cicero

Bland

Longinus

Cicero Quintilian Quintilian; Cicero (4) 18Ad Herennium Cicero; Longinus 1720 22 23Cicero Cicero 24 Longinus 1725 26Aristotle 28Aristotle Aristotle 1730 Longinus 31Longinus (13)

< previous page

Gildon Mackenzie[legal] Felton (6)

Blackwall (6)

Féenelon Fénelon (4)

Henley Constable

page_150

next page >

< previous page

next page >

page_151

Page 151 32 33 34 1735 36Longinus 37 38 39Longinus (8) 1740 42Longinus; Cicero 43 1745 46 48 49 1750 51 52Longinus 53 1755Cicero 56Quintilian 57Longinus 58 59Cicero 1760Cicero 61 62Cicero 64 1765 67 68 1770 71 73 74Quintilian

Cicero; Longinus Longinus

Stirling (16) Rollin Milner Lowe

Quintilian (3) Holmes (3); Turner

Longinus Cicero Cicero Cicero Cicero

Newbury (7) Dodsley (8)

Mason

Longinus Longinus Action

Quintilian Aristotle

Lawson (4) Ward

Ad Herennium

1775 76Cicero

Kames (9) Leland Rice

Burgh (21) Batteux Sheridan

Gibbons Drummond Elphinston Herries Enfield (32) Campbell; Monboddo; Beattie Priestley

77 78 Longinus 79 Steele 1780 81 Walker 83 Cicero Blair (15); Beattie 1785 Walker 86Quintilian 88 1790 Beattie Numbers in parentheses indicate number of editions of that publication. Sources: R. C. Alston; Douglas Ehninger (1965): Winifred Horner (1983); Ian Michael (1987); Michael Moran; The New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature; National Union Catalogue: British Museum General Catalogue.2 2 "Cicero" for 1748 is Orator, not the usual De Oratore. The Ad Herennium of 1761 is bound with De Oratore, according to the National Union Catalogue, vol. 109, p. 519. By comparison with the more complete and scholarly compilations of R. C. Alston and Ian Michael, this list is quite sketchy; and I have not been able to examine all the works here referred to.

< previous page

page_151

next page >

< previous page

page_152

next page > Page 152

own method, which is "arbitrary" rather than "natural" (348), but he does not tell us anything substantial about this unnatural method. I do not list, for similar reasons, the "Dialogue upon Oratory" published in volume II of William Melmouth's Letters (1749): this is a translation of Tacitus's Dialogus de oratoribus, which George Kennedy includes in his chapter on Quintilian's contemporaries, but it is a general discussion of rhetorical schools and makes no practical recommendations about how to speak or write effectively. I have not been perfectly consistent in observing the criteria sketched above: I have listed Felton (1713) even though his book is largely a paean to the classics; and I have listed Constable (1731) even though he confines himself almost exclusively to standard parameters of prose style, its copiousness, ornateness, curtness, or metaphoricity. And a number of works that I have not listed overlap with rhetoric, especially works of aesthetics and literary criticism: Addison and Burke on the sublime and the beautiful; Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments on "ethos" (1759); Gerard on taste (1759); Johnson on high, middle, and low styles; the "Arts" of poetry or criticism of Horace, Boileau, and Pope; the Scriblerian Peri Bathous. One could list books on "genius" (Hurd; Gerard) as eighteenth-century contributions to the classical canon of "invention." The Chronological Checklist is misleading in a number of respects. For one thing, it gives the same status to school texts (Bland, Gildon, Milner, Lowe, Holmes), as to the university lectures of Ward and Blair, which run to two hefty volumes each; and it gives the same status to a somewhat simple-minded, specialized treatise (Constable) as to George Campbell, who is subtle and wide-ranging. More important, it may give the impression that we can understand rhetoric in the eighteenth century or in any century merely by reading "rhetorics." Few of the humanistic disciplines ramify so widely into other disciplines and subjects. Michael Moran's recent survey of eighteenth-century rhetoricians includes philosophers (Locke, Shaftesbury), aestheticians (Burke, Gerard), a preacher (Margaret Fell), and a woman of letters (Mary Wollstonecraft). It seems to me that it is impossible to understand what eighteenth-century rhetoric is doing except in the context of social, intellectual, and literary history. For example, what Smith, Blair, Beattie, and their friends were aiming at in their lectures on rhetoric makes sense only in its Scottish context. As for literary backgrounds, I see W. S.

< previous page

page_152

next page >

< previous page

page_153

next page > Page 153

Howell's misunderstanding of the New Rhetoric's ideas on metaphor and the other tropes as an exemplary case. Howell (1971) associates the New Rhetoric with the new science of Boyle, Newton, and Locke: in both, he says, a plain style was preferred, and the rhetorical figures were disparaged. When Adam Smith observes that figures of speech are characteristic of "Billingsgate language," and when Blair associates tropes with "the beginnings of society," they are, according to Howell, following in the train of Locke, for whom metaphors and figures were "perfect cheat." In fact, however, the New Rhetoric uniformly honors figurative language. What it censures is inappropriate use of metaphor and other tropes. The New Rhetoric accepts the general concept of decorum, the principle that language must be appropriate to speaker, occasion, audience, goal. Tropes and figures "bestow dignity upon Style," said Blair; they "heighten the emotion'' of our language. Volume III of Monboddo's six fat volumes on language is mostly devoted to the tropes and figures in their classical forms. In a thirty-one-page section of his "Essay on Poetry and Music" (1776), Beattie argues forcefully that "Natural Language is improved in poetry, by means of Tropes and Figures"; and in a forty-page section of his Elements of Moral Science (1793) he lists and explicates the major figures. Even Priestley, whose affiliations with the new science were very strong (he cites Newton in Lectures 5 and 9), gives substantial space to the figures, with descriptions and examples, though usually without names. He teaches anaphora, epizeuxis, procatalepsis, and paralepsis to his students without ever using those terms! Locke attacked rhetoric itself; Smith and Blair and Priestley and Beattie taught rhetoric itself, including the rhetorical principle (Aristotle: to prepon "appropriateness") which governs the use of the figures and other rhetorical devices and strategies.3 The New Rhetoric wished to restrain the figures and control them. This is quite different from Locke's and Sprat's wish to get rid of them. What looks like a distrust of the figures in the New Rhetoric is I think better understood as a last flourish of neo-classical literary doctrines, as developed in Italy and France and as adopted in England during the reaction against seventeenth-century wit and in favor of the so-called simplicity of nature. Smith advises that 3 Smith 1762: 30; Blair 1783: I 283; Howell 1971: 508; Blair 1783: I 285; Priestley 1771: 102, 11621.

< previous page

page_153

next page >

< previous page

page_154

next page > Page 154

metaphors must compare similar things; otherwise, they slip into bombast or burlesque (2527), and the same concern for propriety and decorum in figurative language can be found in Kames (II 298 and II 183324 passim), Campbell (294, 298), Blair (I 3001), Monboddo (III 3233, 4142), Priestley (19394, 22729), and Beattie (1793: 48394), echoing Pope (Essay on Criticism lines 289304, 31123), Addison (Spectators 5862), Boileau (L'Art Poétique I 1012, 14154), and Bouhours, who in turn base their doctrines on tendencies in Cicero (De Oratore III xlxlii) and Quintilian (VIII ii 19, VIII vi 17). An understanding of what Addison called "that natural Way of Writing, that beautiful Simplicity, which we so much admire in the Works of the Ancients" (Spectator, no. 62) is an indispensable basis for understanding the eighteenth-century repudiation of "unnatural" ornament. Similarly, Campbell's ideas on humor (Bk. I, ch. 2) and on tragedy (Bk I, ch. 11), and Blair's ideas on taste (Lecture 2) and on the character of the rhetor (Lecture 24) need to be understood in context of the literary cult of sensibility, as exemplified in the novels of Richardson, Rousseau, Goldsmith, and Mackenzie, and in the plays of Richard Steele, Richard Cumberland, and Elizabeth Inchbald. Like Quintilian, the New Rhetoric assumed that poetry, drama, oratory, and history are a single body of knowledge.4 I draw a number of conclusions from patterns in the Chronological Checklist. First, classical rhetoric never lost prestige and currency. From 1654 to 1758, school texts came and went, but Cicero, Quintilian, Longinus, and Aristotle continued to be reprinted and re-translated. Anyone learning rhetoric beyond the elementary level would have had to study the classical texts. Moreover, in almost every eighteenth-century rhetoric, no matter how sketchy or diffuse, we see the bones of classical rhetoric as foundation or frame. All the major rhetorics (Lawson, Ward, Kames, Campbell, Priestley, Blair) start from classical premises or make use of classical schemata; even the belletristic rhetorics paraphrase classical ideas, 4 The argument presented here should not subtract from our admiration of Howell's very great contributions to the history of logic and rhetoric from 1600 to 1800. It has however larger targets: the tendency by students of rhetoric to make generalizations about eighteenth-century rhetoric that are misleading because they do not take into account what eighteenth-century poets and critics and literary historians have said on the matter in question; and the tendency by students of literature to make generalizations that are misleading because they do not take into account the role of (classical) rhetoric in the formation of literary ideals.

< previous page

page_154

next page >

< previous page

page_155

next page > Page 155

such as Aristotle on audiences, Cicero on civilizedness and on style, Quintilian on perspicuity, Longinus on sublimity.5 Second, the number and distribution of elementary school texts in this Checklist, plus Ian Michael's research on the teaching of English (see above, p. 147), seem to indicate that rhetoric continued to be a school subject for most children who got beyond the rudiments of literacy and numeracy most, but not all. Third, from 1650 to 1760, more or less, rhetoric "coasted," as a discipline in English, relying on older English rhetorics, many of which were reprinted well into the eighteenth century, on elementary texts, on introductory treatises or summaries, and on translations from French or Latin or Greek. Most of the fresh thoughts on rhetoric that appeared in print in Great Britain during this period came from France. Not one substantial new English contribution to rhetoric was published between Hobbes (1637) and Lawson (1758). Poole (1663) models his book closely after Erasmus' De copia (1513). The other English rhetorics published 16541758 (column 3 of the Checklist), that I have seen or seen described, are elementary textbooks. We must remember that in the eighteenth century fields of inquiry now organized as academic disciplines were not as antiseptically separate from each other as they later became. No one "majored" in a subject at the university. The ordinary result of education through the B.A. or M.A. level was what we would now call a mixture of classics, history, literature, theology, mathematics (especially at Cambridge), and natural sciences (especially in Scotland). Rhetoric was studied as part of "moral science" or classics or literature, with attention to pulpit oratory for those who intended to take orders. We should keep in mind also that Londoners could hear excellent lectures on rhetoric, during the years from 1720 to 1757, by John Ward. At Trinity College, Dublin, the Erasmus Smith chair in 5 Beattie writes on two of the more neglected of the five canons, memory and invention, his discussion of evidence in the Elements of Moral Science, vol. 2 (1793) concerns itself with Aristotle's inartificial proofs, and his summaries of Scottish ideas on taste, the imagination, ridicule, and the psychology of pathos and ethos are in effect a major revitalization of classical rhetorical topoi. But for another perspective, see Bevilacqua 1967a. Burke (1757) and Gerard (Bevilacqua 1967b) were thinking along many of the same lines as the New Rhetoric, and the Nee Rhetoric relied heavily on their ideas. Monboddo discusses at length not only the figures and tropes, but also musicality in language, ridicule (as in Quintilian VI iii), and history (as in Cicero, De Oratore II XV). Ogilvie is another writer on the fringe of the New Rhetoric. Barron's lectures were not published till 1806.

< previous page

page_155

next page >

< previous page

page_156

next page > Page 156

oratory and history was founded in 1724; Lawson's excellent lectures began in 1750. The New Rhetoric of 1748 to 1793 But in 1748 Adam Smith began his lectures on rhetoric in Edinburgh; when he moved to Glasgow, the series was taken over by Robert Watson, and in 1759 by Hugh Blair, who continued to lecture until his retirement in 1783. In Aberdeen, George Campbell gave lectures on "pulpit eloquence" from about 1757, and brought drafts of The Philosophy of Rhetoric to meetings of the Aberdeen Philosophical Society, where they were discussed by (among others) Thomas Reid and James Beattie. Thomas Sheridan's lectures on elocution (from 1756 or 1757) took him to London, Bristol, Bath, Oxford, Cambridge, and Edinburgh. At Warrington Academy, Joseph Priestley began lecturing on rhetoric in 1762. James Beattie lectured on rhetoric (as an element in "moral sciences") in Aberdeen from 1760 to 1797, and William Barron at St. Andrew's from the 1770S to about 1800. Seven of the eight authors of major publications in rhetoric appearing between 1758 and 1793 gave lectures, and not one of those eight taught at Oxford or Cambridge; they were outsiders, speaking for or to marginalized peoples, Irish, Scots, and in the case of John Ward's lectures at Gresham College, Dissenters.6 These lectures turned into what is now known as the New Rhetoric: probably the right term, given the number of fresh and stimulating ideas it put in circulation (Ehninger 1963; Howell 1971), especially considering how few fresh ideas on rhetoric had come out of British writers during the previous century; but misleading so far as it implies discontinuity with the first half of the century. Indeed, much of the potency of the New Rhetoric is generated by its awareness of the latest thinking by Hutcheson, Hume, Rousseau, Rollin, Hartley, Burke, Johnson, and others. Smith quotes Addison on the pleasures of the imagination and refers to the Abbé Dubos. Kames quotes Dubos and Harris in his Introduction, uses associationist psychology, and, like Campbell, draws heavily on Hume. Priestley alludes to Burke, Akenside, Ward, Hartley, Addison, and Gerard. Blair refers to all the authors so far named plus Fénelon, 6 For Robert Watson, see Bator 1994; for some of the new energy of "outsiders," see Weinbrot 1993: 482.

< previous page

page_156

next page >

< previous page

page_157

next page > Page 157

Pope, Hogarth, and many others. We could say that what is new about the New Rhetoric is its assimilation into rhetoric of recent ideas on taste, beauty, sublimity, orality, and psychology. James Engell points out that the New Rhetoric championed new, Romantic trends in culture and taste (1989: 195), and Nancy Struever that the New Rhetoric's alliance between "the critical construction of taste and the analysis of virtue" makes it a kind of bridge between Hume and Kant (1985: 8289). Almost certainly, the New Rhetoric did not think of itself as a school or movement. The letters of Smith, Kames, Campbell, Priestley, Monboddo, Blair, and Beattie contain no references to their ideas on rhetoric as "new," as a departure from convention or tradition. Nothing was launched upon the public in the way of manifestos or announcements of a "new" rhetoric. The term itself, "New Rhetoric," and discussion of this group of writers as a coherent revitalizing force in the development of rhetoric, are so far as I know twentieth-century innovations. The facts remain, however, that most of the new rhetoricians were friends and colleagues in Scotland, that they were in close communication with each other, socially, intellectually, and in several cases professionally, that they had common roots in the new aesthetics and psychology of the middle third of the century, and that they drew heavily on each other's ideas. Hume's and Hutcheson's publications in the 1730S and 1740s feed into Smith's and Gerard's of 1759; Kames builds on these four in the 1760s; and the very foundations of books that Campbell, Priestley, Blair, and Beattie publish in the 1770s and 1780s are the ideas of sympathy, imagination, perception, taste, beauty, and evidence, that had been developed or explicated by their older colleagues in Scotland. The coherence of the New Rhetoric as a school of thought emerges more clearly by comparison with "aesthetic theorists of the eighteenth century in Britain," who according to Walter Hipple "comprised a clearly defined school," a school identified by references to each other's work, by a consuming interest in "beauty itself," and by an ''empirical and atomistic" method (1963: ixxii). Once this school is established (by Addison, Hutcheson, Hogarth, Gerard, and Burke), "the names crowd more thickly," including philosophers such as Kames, Reid, Stewart, and Alison, "the picturesque group of Gilpin, Price, and Knight," and artists like Reynolds and Repton. Given the number of shared premises between the New

< previous page

page_157

next page >

< previous page

page_158

next page > Page 158

Rhetoric and the aesthetes, their overlapping membership and their joint interest in "beauty itself," perhaps we should approach the New Rhetoric as classical rhetoric re-oriented in terms of eighteenth-century British aesthetics. But the backbone of the New Rhetoric was classical rhetoric. Put all their major publications together and you have substantial discussions and new ideas on the ethical and logical appeals and on appeals to the passions; on all five classical canons except arrangement; on the tropes and figures; on judicial, deliberative, and epideictic rhetoric; on literature; on grammar; on the writing of history; on ridicule; on the inartificial proofs; on the musical powers of language; on the psychology of audiences; and on the nature of language. Six of the eight new rhetoricians do justice to the formal as well as to the philosophical side of rhetoric.7 Many of the "new" ideas of the New Rhetoric seem entirely natural if we think of it as an adjustment of classical rhetoric to print culture. If increasing literacy encourages the stylistic and linguistic values of writtenness, it encourages precise language and grammatical accuracy. The New Rhetoric involved itself explicitly in grammar. Of course, again, "perspicuity" or clarity in language is the first virtue of style in Aristotle (III ii I: saphé) and in Quintilian (VIII ii 22: perspicuitas), as well as in Lawson (18788), Ward (Lecture 21), Smith (Lecture 2), Campbell (21655), and Blair (Lecture 10). But the New Rhetoric carried the concern for clarity to new lengths, and went into unprecedented detail in its pursuit of grammatical accuracy. Many pages in Kames, Campbell, and Blair are as much 7 W. S. Howell (1971) associates the New Rhetoric with Newtonian science; but Vincent Bevilacqua (1965) had anticipated many of Howell's arguments as they apply (more convincingly) to George Campbell alone. Lloyd Bitzer (1969) shows that Hume is at least as important in Campbell as Newton or Locke; it is reasonable to read Bitzer's excellent article as a qualification of Howell. George Kennedy (1980) represents the New Rhetoric as both a return to the classics, based on better knowledge of (Greek, and as an accommodation of new scientific ideas; it is a movement analogous to neoclassicism in architecture, sculpture, and painting (220). Winifred Horner (1983) places Burke, Blair, Smith, Campbell, Kames, and Priestley in a single category, "Belletristic Rhetoric." James Engell (1989) has some rather original thoughts on personification and semiotics in the New Rhetoric. Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg (1990) explicate eighteenth-century rhetoric judiciously in the context of new ideas (empiricism, rationalism, psychology) and old (classical doctrines; Ramism) without committing themselves to a "New Rhetoric" as such. Nan Johnson's analysis of Campbell and Blair is clear and instructive (1991: 1950). Barbara Warnick (1993) offers new evidence for the influence of French Belletrists on Smith, Kames, Campbell, and Blair. H. Lewis Ulman (1994) is excellent on the logic of Campbell's argument. Paul Bator's article on "Rhetoric and the Novel" (Eighteenth-Century Studies 1997) appeared too late to be incorporated into my thinking, which I regret.

< previous page

page_158

next page >

< previous page

page_159

next page > Page 159

grammar as rhetoric; there is a considerable overlap between these three especially and such prescriptive grammarians as Lowth and Murray. An auditor may interrupt a speaker to ask for clarification, but a reader needs clarity first time through. Readers with written texts spread out in front of them can do detailed grammatical analysis more easily than listeners can. Aristotle and Quintilian recommend clarity, but they don't go into detail on how to achieve it. Campbell's discussion of clarity fills forty pages, and covers ellipsis, word order, pronoun reference, polysemy of several kinds, "long sentences," jargon, and many other forms of obfuscation. If we understand the New Rhetoric as classical rhetoric adapted to a print culture, that helps to explain its unprecedented interest in English prose, including prose style. Whatever else it may be, prose is in general less oral than poetry; and it pushes its way to the forefront of the literary and intellectual scene in a print culture. Until the second quarter of the eighteenth century, students at the universities were expected to speak Latin at table and elsewhere in college; but by the end of the century English had pretty much taken over. English, not Latin, became "the language of legal proceedings" in 1731.8 Print culture may also have been a factor in the New Rhetoric's new interest in prose composition in English. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the writing of English prose was almost invariably performed in the shadow of Latin, as translation or imitation, paraphrase or summary, or in the form of a Ciceronian oration. Even letters to friends followed Latin patterns, the six parts of a letter duplicating the six parts of a classical oration (Abbott 1990: 10617). The dissenting academies taught some students to write English. But so far as we know the first systematic instruction in the composition of English prose at the university level took place in the 1730S at the University of Edinburgh. Some of the essays written in English on topics assigned by John Stevenson can still be read in university archives (Miller 1990a). From 1758 on, in Ward, Lawson, and Kames, eighteenth-century rhetorics give explicit instructions for writing good English expository prose. Walter Ong has suggested that "elocution arose, paradoxically, out of the new subjugation of oral delivery to the inscribed word": 8 For complications and exceptions to these rather sweeping generalizations about prose, see Godzich and Kittay 1987; Eisenstein 1983. For Latin and English as the languages of learning and law, see Horn 1967: 47; Twigg 1987: 217; Langford 1989: 300.

< previous page

page_159

next page >

< previous page

page_160

next page > Page 160

that is, the elocutionary movement in rhetoric was a reaction to the new print culture, the "symptom of a major readjustment in the entire noetic economy" (1972: 639). Several of the New Rhetoricians were in the forefront of what amounted to a mid-century "discovery" of orality in language. This was when pronouncing dictionaries, rhetorical grammars, and lectures and books by elocutionists swung violently into fashion. Sheridan ranked the powers of speech far above the powers of writing. Blair was a famous preacher, he taught pulpit eloquence, and his lectures exhibit an unprecedented sensitivity to the sounds of English prose (Lecture 13). In defending Ossian he defended "a musical modulation" in poetry (64). Beattie was a practiced amateur musician, a cellist, singer, and violinist. His "Essay on Poetry and Music as They Affect the Mind" (1776) explores orality (as well as writtenness) in language.9 Civilization as a Cultural Value Politeness in the eighteenth century meant something more than just etiquette, however important manners and ceremony may have been; it was a matter of civilization. It measured in part the distance a person or community had come from savagery. It was an index of worth that included not only traditional values (such as modesty, complacency, cleanliness) but also new aestheticisms and even newer sensibilities. Norbert Elias (1939) pioneered the study of politeness-as-civilization in our period. By comparing explicit rules with presuppositions in courtesy books published in France from 1600 to 1800, Elias was able to argue that "the essential basis of what is required and what is forbidden in civilized society" was established by the end of the eighteenth century. In 1600, spitting and farting and eating with one's fingers and uncontrolled outbursts of rage or joy were part of everyday life; by 1800, all such behavior had been proscribed and outlawed. In the last twenty years or so, historians have recognized politeness as a key to eighteenth-century values. J. G. A. Pocock chronicled the changes by which "virtue," a devotion to the public good that seemed essential to citizenship, was redefined as "manners." Literate 9 See Blair 1783: I 24771 and 1763: 64; for Blackwell and Lowth, who discovered orality even before the New Rhetoric did, see Harshbarger (forthcoming).

< previous page

page_160

next page >

< previous page

page_161

next page > Page 161

Britons during the eighteenth century encountered an "increasingly transactional universe of 'commerce and the arts,' " in which, as Edmund Burke put it, "manners are of more importance than laws"; the old farmer-warrior world with its devotion to Gothic liberty began to seem archaic, as commerce, which created more divisions of labor and more leisure, expanded its domain (1985: 4849). Marvin Becker explored changes from "a heroic honor culture . . . with its strict definition of loyalty, lineage, honor, and fate," to "a more problematic civil society" based on ''the more subdued and less heroic idiom of civility": it was the Renaissance that brought ideals of politeness into full bloom, and in England the Renaissance overlapped deeply with humanism, which meant that ideals of politeness, while still courtly, had a bookish cast to them: they touched not only on dress and dancing but also on literature, learning, art, and justice (1988: xi, 2428). No locus of civilization was more prestigious during the first two decades of the eighteenth century than the court of Louis XIV, and Peter France has described connections between politeness and the "polish" that can be acquired from the court, or from "l'amour," or from "belles lettres" (1992: 5559). Hume discusses two of these three polishing agents, "a civilized monarchy" and "gallantry," in his essay "Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences." Lawrence Klein (1990) contrasts French with English ideals of politeness circa 16801710: whereas in France there were tensions between court-centered notions (to please the king is to please all) and the independence of honnêtes hommes, in England Shaftesbury fashioned a "civic" ideal of politeness, cultivating free discourse among equals. Klein (1984) sees politeness as a key to British cultural ideals between 1710 and 1730: during these years social organization, the arts, learning, national identity, historiography, politics, and style each in its own way felt the power of politeness. By the 1770s politeness was allied not only to commerce and to learning but also to the sentimental moralism that threatened to dominate poetry, the novel, and the stage: "As we have increased in Politeness, we have likewise increased the Chastity of our literary Productions: . . . Our Ancestors placed their Amusement in Laughter; we place our's on Chastity of Sentiment" (quoted Langford 1989: 61011). (Politeness has additional dimensions, too, which I shall develop in chapter 9. It is certainly associated with the feminization of culture, with the rise of the novel, and with the men and women of feeling

< previous page

page_161

next page >

< previous page

page_162

next page > Page 162

who step on stage and into print in Britain during the eighteenth century. It also seems to be a universal in language. Languages all over the world are sensitive to "face" and prestige; they signify different kinds and qualities of politeness in syntax, morphology, and the lexicon.) Now Pope and Swift were almost as interested in politeness as Blair and Campbell were; politeness and civilizedness, as cultural ideals, significantly predate the New Rhetoric. But neither Pope nor Swift is confident that the directives he may give for polite speech can do much to improve verbal culture; both powerfully imagined the decline of civilization, not its rise. Early in his career, in 1698, Swift attacked Bentley for his "barbarity": "All Arts of civilizing others, render thee rude and untractable; Courts have taught thee ill Manners, and polite Conversation has finished thee a Pedant" (1710: 252). Later in his career, Swift had Gulliver portray "modern history" as one long process of decay: "it gave me melancholy reflections to observe how much the race of human kind was degenerate among us, within these hundred years past" (Part III, chapter 8). In 1738 Swift published a mind-numbing satire on vulgarity in language called, ironically, ''A Complete Collection of Genteel and Ingenious Conversation, According to the Most Polite Mode and Method Now Used at Court, and in the Best Companies of England." Swift seems to have felt that civilization was waning not waxing. As a young man Pope wrote an essay on criticism, addressing those critics as "half-learn'd Witlings, num'rous in our Isle, / As half-form'd Insects on the Banks of Nile" (lines 4041). As an older man, Pope's most gorgeous poetry laments the triumph of barbarity. By contrast, one of the attitudes that distinguishes the New Rhetoric from its predecessors is its confidence in the new politeness. These men believed that what they were saying about language would further the process of civilization. "Propriety and eloquence," wrote Blair, are cultivated in proportion to the "improvement" of society; so that rhetoric has become "highly important" "in all the polished nations of Europe" (1783: I 2). Lord Kames dedicated the first edition of Elements of Criticism to George III with the grand hope that his book might help to recreate in Britain in 1762 the "public and private virtue" of ancient Greece (I vii). Thomas Sheridan announced his lectures with the enthusiastic confidence that he had discovered how to "produce effects" by "the living voice" that

< previous page

page_162

next page >

< previous page

page_163

next page > Page 163

generations of moralists had been trying vainly to produce with "the dead letter" (1762: xii). Blair's first lecture, possibly in the words he had used in 1759, proclaims that among nations in a civilized state, no art has been cultivated with more care, than that of language, style, and composition. The attention paid to it may, indeed be assumed as one mark of the progress of society towards its most improved period. (I 2) Progress and improvement in this sense definitely meant "the pursuit of virtue" as well as of wealth (Dwyer 1987). Alan Bewell (1989) sees poetry and prose on the progress of humankind as a major theme of the late Enlightenment, feeding into Wordsworth's and Coleridge's philosophical poetry and generating such lesser poems as "The Progress of Refinement" (by Henry Pye, 1783) and "The Progress of Civil Society" (Richard Knight, 1796). Robert Crawford (1992) traces the "invention of English literature" to Scottish self-consciousness about the degree of improvement of their culture and language. It is no accident that so many of the major writers of the New Rhetoric were Scotsmen. Mid-century Scotland could see itself progressing, and it measured that progress partly in terms of politeness. In his 176263 lectures on jurisprudence, and later in The Wealth of Nations (1776), Adam Smith charted the evolution of civilization in four stages: human beings emerged as hunters, evolved into shepherds, learned farming, and finally developed into merchants.10 While history and the narratives of travellers provided some evidence for this sequence, it could be concretely illustrated and exemplified in the Scotland that Smith and Hume and Kames knew first-hand. Present-day historians estimate that in the middle of the eighteenth century only one quarter of Scotland could be farmed: the valleys tended to be waterlogged, so Scotsmen plowed the sides of mountains where possible; and since the central Highlands were "a desert," too barren or soggy to sustain agriculture, they belonged largely to hunters and shepherds, to fat deer and woolly sheep (Ferguson 1968: 71). "In the age of hunters there can be very little government of any 10 A model that describes the early progress of human civilization in terms of something like these four stages was in the air in mid-century Scotland. The Appendix to Lord Kames's Essays upon . . . British Antiquities of 1747 starts with food-gatherers in family groups, notes the more "extensive intercourse" of farming communities, and brings in judges to handle the quarrels of village life with its arts and industries (I. S. Ross 1972: 53).

< previous page

page_163

next page >

< previous page

page_164

next page > Page 164

sort," said Smith in his 176263 lectures (201). What there is will be democratic, and a hunting community itself, always very small, handles the duties of the judiciary and the executive powers. The age of shepherds initiates not only government as such but also the first inequality, the first rich and poor, the first dependencies, the first luxury and "effeminacy" (202). Successive "ages" are each busier than the last; each leaves less leisure time to its citizens. So when agriculture takes over, judges are appointed to administer an increasingly complicated legal structure built, for example, partly of "testaments" and "contracts" (206). When the land yields ''good returns for cultivation" and when a people improve "in the severall arts and sciences and manufactures," an age can be considered to be commercial (223). Now it is that "Opulence arises from the Division of Labour" (to quote the outline of these lectures: 26), and "improvement in arts and cultivation unfit the people from going to war" (235). The "four-stage" model departs from other models of social development in two ways. It is in the first place more hopeful than moralistic histories based on the classical and Christian premise that luxury corrupts. John Brown, Tobias Smollett, and many others worried at great length about the decline and decay of society, which they saw as a natural result of just the wealth that Smith welcomed. (Belief in improvement, however, did not rule out fear of luxury: see Dwyer 1987: 9697). Also, the four-stage model assumes that an emerging middle-class merchant society like Glasgow's or Edinburgh's exemplifies a mature stage of evolution. Smith does not envision a further stage beyond the busy commercial one of mid-century urban Scotland. If the well-being of a commercial society seems to correlate with its "improvement," citizens must ask themselves what improvement consists in, and politeness is one of the answers. Refinement of various kinds may become the goal of its educational and social institutions. To illustrate this idea we can quote Hume, writing essays with the cultural map of Europe spread open to his mind's eye, on "the superiority in politeness" that must "be allowed to modern times," in contrast both to classical and to medieval times. "The models left us by the ancients gave birth to all the arts about 200 years ago, and have mightily advanced their progress in every country of EUROPE." England is unquestionably one of "the polite and learned nations." "Refinement" in Hume's essay "Of Refine-

< previous page

page_164

next page >

< previous page

page_165

next page > Page 165

ment in the Arts" has economic, moral, and aesthetic senses; he defends "refinements in the mechanical arts" as productive of "refinements in the liberal [arts]," as what we now call "high culture": "The same age, which produces great philosophers and politicians, renowned generals and poets, usually abounds with skilful weavers, and shipcarpenters." In other words, for Hume ''the rise of politeness and learning" has (recently) taken place, has already happened in Great Britain. Almost all the leading citizens of mid-eighteenth-century Scotland thought of themselves as "agents of improvement" devoted to drawing their country "from a state of rudeness to one of cosmopolitan refinement."11 Politeness was a recognized value even for ministers of the Church of Scotland (and the Church of Scotland in 1750 was more conservative than most twentieth-century Protestant sects). In a sermon preached in 1750 for the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, Hugh Blair assured his listeners that religion "civilizes Mankind. It tames the Fierceness of their Passions, and wears off the Barbarity of their Manners." In 1755 William Robertson preached that "Christianity not only sanctifies our souls, but refines our manners" (Sher 1985: 6364). Blair and Robertson were members of the liberal wing of the Church of Scotland, literati who welcomed the new aesthetics of Hutcheson and the new history of Hume. All of them knew each other and read each other's writings: Blair, Campbell, Kames, Smith, Gerard, Robertson, Home, Carlyle, Monboddo, Beattie, Ferguson, Reid. Politeness was one of the issues that divided these men from more conservative members of the Church of Scotland, such as John Witherspoon, who was outraged at the idea of a minister assuming "the air and manner of a fine gentleman" (Sher 1985: 58). But Witherspoon lost a number of battles with the liberals, including a violent controversy over the irreligiosity of stage plays; he ended up taking himself and his anti-politenesses off to America (where he became the first president of Princeton University). A new consciousness of the "progress" of humanity was by no means confined to Scotland or to Scottish thinkers; it was increasingly a hallmark of eighteenth-century historical and cultural consciousness in general. This was the age when "the human sciences" were born, anthropology, psychology, sociology, and 11 Hume 174158: 131, 135, 99, 270; Phillipson 1973: 127.

< previous page

page_165

next page >

< previous page

page_166

next page > Page 166

economics, the first and last of which are premised on a developmental view of society. But many of the inventors of the human sciences were Scots: Adam Smith himself, Adam Ferguson, Thomas Reid. The New Rhetoric can itself be thought of as one of the human sciences: it studied polite language and belles lettres, the forms of language proper to a civilized society. It is not surprising, then, to find that politeness and refinement play a leading role in the New Rhetoric, and that they are yoked with the ideal of civilization. Adam Smith's second lecture on rhetoric (dated 19 November 1762) recommends the linguistic usage of "men of rank and breeding" as a model, because they have "ease." "Mean and low" words "would appear very absurd if used in common conversation by one in the character of a gentleman" (2). Right at the outset of his lectures Smith defines good language as polite language. A major premise for Lord Kames is the moral and social value of refinement (or what he often called "improvement"). "A taste in the fine arts goes hand in hand with the moral sense, to which indeed it is nearly allied" (1762: I 6). "Delicacy of taste tends no less to invigorate the social affections, than to moderate those that are selfish" (I 10). "A just relish for what is beautiful, proper, elegant, and ornamental, in writing or painting, in architecture or gardening, is a fine preparation for the same just relish of these qualities in character and behavior" (I 11). (This is pure Shaftesbury, of course, but neither Shaftesbury nor Hutcheson followed out the implications of this doctrine for language.) Why do we call this kind of thing rhetoric? Because in Kames (as in classical rhetoric, though with differences) polite language is correct and clear, which means that what Kames conceives as the "criticism" of which he is conveying the "elements" includes a lengthy chapter giving specific rules for "perspicuity" and effectiveness in discourse. He advises writers and speakers to end a period with the most important word (as in Aristotle III ix), and to avoid "unnatural" word order, including unnecessary inversions and misplaced modifiers (as in Aristotle III V). Section II of chapter 18 of the Elements (II 1883) makes detailed criticisms of such classics of the immediately preceding age as Swift, Bolingbroke, Addison, and Arbuthnot on English-teacherly rhetorical-grammatical grounds. Hugh Blair builds mightily from these premises, and expatiates widely on these topics. Rhetoric plays a central role in a "liberal

< previous page

page_166

next page >

< previous page

page_167

next page > Page 167

education" in "all the polished nations of Europe" (1783: I 2). The age demands it: "the taste and manners of the present age" are for "grace," "elegance,'' and refinement (I 7); "we can hardly mingle in polite society" without entering into the sort of conversation for which rhetoric is either necessary or helpful "to support a proper rank" (I 9). Almost every topic that Blair takes up in the 1046 pages of his Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres relates to, hinges on, or amplifies the meaning of politeness as a central dimension of civilization. Lectures 6 and 7 on the origin and history of language trace the stages by which language develops over time so as to convey "the most delicate and refined emotions" (I 98), though modern languages are "less striking and animated" than the languages of hunters and shepherds were (I 124). Lectures on taste, on the beautiful, on the characters of style, on Addison and Swift (Lectures 12, 5, 1824) take polite, correct, easy, and elegant prose as the benchmark by which to characterize and evaluate other kinds of prose. This means that the student is taught to avoid language which can "raise in the mind disagreeable, mean, vulgar, or dirty ideas" (I 305). Blair spends a great deal of time and intelligent attention on correctness, calling many of the most revered writers of the first half of the eighteenth century on the carpet for verbal "improprieties": Bolingbroke, Swift, Clarendon, Temple, Addison himself, Sherlock, Shaftesbury, and Tillotson. For George Campbell (1776), rhetoric is (like architecture) partly a "useful" art, partly a "polite, fine, or elegant" art (lxxi). But since its province is "communication" in general, "not of ideas only, but of sentiments, passions, dispositions, and purposes" (lxxiii), Campbell gives it a functional (not a cultural) definition: rhetoric is that "art or talent by which the discourse is adapted to its end" (I). Book I of Campbell's three Books is more philosophical and psychological than Blair or Smith, less aesthetic than Kames. But the standards for usage he outlines in Book II depend equally with Blair's on genteel usage. "Vulgarisms," no matter how generally accepted in common conversation, are "not reputable" (142), and we see "the indelible marks of the clown" in slang and "illiterate" language (169). Rhetoric, then, may be considered a frame for the language-consciousness that played (so I argue) a key role in the evolution of English prose in the eighteenth century. Despite the shapelessness of the New Rhetoric, or perhaps because the New Rhetoric overlapped

< previous page

page_167

next page >

< previous page

page_168

next page > Page 168

so sprawlingly with other intellectual fields, books of rhetoric ended up reinforcing the notions expressed in many other kinds of books, especially prescriptive grammars, dictionaries, and book reviews. These will be the subject of chapter 8.

< previous page

page_168

next page >

< previous page

page_169

next page > Page 169

Chapter 8 The Instruments of Literacy And then he told us such things about verbs, and nouns, and adverbs, that never entered our heads before, and emphasis, and accent; heav'n bless us, I did not think there had been such things in the world. (Samuel Foote, The Orators: 1762) This chapter deals with three genres that encouraged writtenness in English prose of the second half of the eighteenth century. Grammars, magazines, and dictionaries played a role in the increasingly commercial culture of the period, a key to which was the rapidly growing trade of publishing. A few generalizations about the growth of publishing in the eighteenth century may help to introduce these three "instruments of literacy." The eighteenth century saw an extraordinary revolution in publishing and bookselling, one that reflected a rapid assimilation of printed texts of many kinds (not just books) into the daily life of the nation. Terry Belanger's studies of the publishing business between 1695 and 1850 show that "England in the 1790s was a well-developed print society," whereas in 1695 print culture was still in its infancy. In 1695, except for certain parts of certain towns, the life of the written language for most Britons was what Elizabeth Eisenstein calls "scribal" more than printed. A few hundred professionals took care not only of the printing, but also of the binding, distribution, advertising, and selling of books, mostly in London. By 1790, thousands of people made their living from specialized jobs in the printing world all over Great Britain, and the majority of the population had to deal one way or another with printed texts. In 1690, writers who wanted to get their manuscripts into print had relatively few options. The periodical press was still in its infancy, except in London. Very few examples of provincial printing before 1695 have survived. But the Licensing Act was allowed to lapse in

< previous page

page_169

next page >

< previous page

page_170

next page > Page 170

1695, and by the 1740s Birmingham had seven booksellers and a local newspaper; nine printers were at work in Birmingham between 1760 and 1774. In 1790 a fledgling author could take his or her manuscripts to local newspapers or periodicals, or send them to national newspapers or magazines; both relied, to varying degrees and with various provisos, on their readership for copy. Local printers might well be interested in retaining a new writer, and so might those booksellers/publishers who catered to a wider audience.1 One reason that the bookselling trade was more limited in the early eighteenth century than it later became was the lack of financial institutions to support it. "There were virtually no banking services of any kind" in provincial towns before approximately 1760 (Belanger 1978: 12). Another was the tight grip that London booksellers kept (or tried to keep) on copyright. Major London publishers resisted a free market in the book trade. They "insisted that common-law rights to literary property, like other property, were perpetual and could not be abridged by Parliament" (II). By the middle of the century, however, a Scottish bookseller like Alexander Donaldson could in effect wager that copyright was limited and make a fortune on inexpensive reprints of standard works (Rose 1993: 93). The House of Lords abolished perpetual copyright in 1774. Around this time, a bookseller invented (or at least pioneered) cash-only discount retailing. James Lackington, observing the losses in time and money that seemed inevitable "where credit was given," resolved that if I could but establish a ready-money business, without any exceptions, I should be enabled to sell every article very cheap. When I communicated my ideas on this subject to some of my acquaintances, I was much laughed at and ridiculed; and it was thought, that I might as well attempt to rebuild the tower of Babel, as to establish a large business without giving credit. But notwithstanding this discouragement . . . I determined to make the experiment; and began by marking in every book the lowest price that I would take for it; which being much lower than the common market prices, I not only retained my former customers, but soon increased their numbers. (cited from Lackington's Memoirs, Belanger 1978: 13) The expansion of print culture, in other words, whatever its consequences for language and style, was a matter of socioeconomic fact. According to the Eighteenth-Century Short Title Catalogue, 1 See Belanger 1978 and 1982; Davidoff and Hall 1987: 156.

< previous page

page_170

next page >

< previous page

page_171

next page > Page 171

the number of items published from 1701 to 1710 was 20,345; whereas the corresponding figure for the end of the century was 69,229.2 If bookselling was at the center of an expanding print culture, any number of new institutions for communication in print sprang up around the edges. Advertising in magazines, for example, reached almost twentieth-century levels of cheekiness and inventiveness in the 1770s and 1780s (McKendrick et al. 1982: 14694). Subscription libraries (reading clubs, the annual fee of which went into buying books for use by the membership) proliferated after about 1745, and some of them evolved into the first town public libraries (as in Liverpool, Birmingham, Leeds) or later into Mechanics' Institutes (D. Gerard 1980: 20611). Circulating libraries were going strong by 1750. Bell's British Library claimed an inventory of 100,000 volumes in 1787 (21115). The actual percentage of the population that could read and write does not seem to have changed radically between early in the eighteenth century and late. According to David Vincent, four times as many new books (not "items," as above) were published in 1790 as in 1700, but male literacy held stable in the second half of the century at about 60%. Literacy among women grew from about 40% to about 50%. If literacy was still low by modern standards, many who could not write enough to sign their names could nevertheless read. We should not underestimate the vitality of "cheap print" in "pre-industrial communities": 400,000 almanacs were published annually in the 1660s, for example, and 90,000 chapbooks were in stock at one bookseller's.3 Grammars In the second half of the eighteenth century, the goals of English grammarians changed, from the assimilation of English into Latin grammatical categories, to the polishing and improvement of the English language. Grammarians wanted to make English as consistent and rational as possible; they invented general rules for clarity and elegance. 2 I am grateful to Paul Korshin for providing these figures as of June, 1996, based on a search of the database at the British Library. 3 See Cressy 1980; Vincent 1989: 11, 53; Spufford 1981: 127.

< previous page

page_171

next page >

< previous page

page_172

next page > Page 172

The discovery of practical instruments for enhancing "correctness" in English coincided with a tremendous growth in the number of grammars published. That number was not insignificant before 1750, but it more than doubled in the two decades after mid-century, when the New Rhetoric was getting under way. Ian Michael offers the following count:

R. C. Alston lists roughly 400 publications on grammar in the second half of the eighteenth century (counting different editions and reissues of the same titles), versus roughly 100 in the first. I have argued (1986: 47) that "it is in the 1750s and early 1760s that heavy artillery of the learned world begins to rumble on topics related to correctness" the early grammarians are mostly school-teachers, but starting in the sixth decade of the century, scholars of national reputation (Johnson, Lowth, Kames, Priestley) begin to publish on language and grammar. The fully collected rules of all the prescriptive grammars of the second half of the eighteenth century are, from certain perspectives, a confusing hodge-podge. Some of these rules appear to be entirely arbitrary; the grammarians in question seem to have decided without reason or pretext to canonize their own personal preferences. S. A. Leonard calls such rules "ipsedixisms": "I myself have said it" [so it's true]; and we find them even in the most reasonable of the grammars. Robert Lowth (1762) wishes to change "shew bread, which is not lawful to eat" into "shew bread, which it is not lawful to eat" (110).John Knowles (1796) wants to change ''She asked him many questions" to "She put to him many questions" (Sundby et al. 1991: 411). A number of the linguistic "errors" being corrected in the eighteenth century seem to modern readers trivial or arbi-

< previous page

page_172

next page >

< previous page

page_173

next page > Page 173

trary; and the correctors seem out of touch with central currents in the language. But mixed in with the ipsedixisms and the Latinisms are a cluster of rules clearly aimed at promoting precision of reference, explicitness, and non-redundancy that is, rules for promoting writtenness. Closely allied is another cluster of rules outlawing colloquialisms of various sorts. For example, the apparent redundancy of double comparisons is prescribed in Fisher (1750: 83, 120), Lowth (1762: 4243), Ash (1763: 71). The accuracy that derives from subject-verb agreement is enjoined in Fisher (1750: 117), Priestley (1761: 2021, 32), Lowth (1762: 97106), and Ash (1763: 7678). Explicitness is the aim of the common rule against omitting relative pronouns, as in Priestley (1761: 33), Lowth (1762: 137, 147), and Ash (1763: 12324). "Who" for persons, "which" for things turns up in Fisher (1750: 121), Lowth (1762: 4344), Ash (1763: 7576). Grammarians endorsed the clarity or accuracy that parallel construction conduces to, for example Priestley (1761: 3435) and Lowth (1762: 117). And colloquialisms are outlawed by Priestley ("'tis," "e'er," ''tho'" 1761: 37) and Lowth ("never so" 1762: 147). According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the year when the word colloquial as a disparaging term for speech-like usages first appeared in print was 1751 (in Johnson's last Rambler, no. 208). All the examples I have just cited come from four grammars published between 1750 and 1763, the years when prescriptivism came into its own. Hundreds of additional examples could be gathered from the grammars published after 1763. Earlier grammars tend to be less peremptory and detailed in their recommendations; later grammars repeat and refine these rules. The question remains whether such rules and prohibitions actually affected the English language during these decades. Histories of the language in the past have acknowledged the potency of rules and prohibitions by making prescriptivism the most important single event in the eighteenth century. Albert Baugh (Baugh and Cable 1935; 4th edition 1993) devotes his chapter on the years 1650 to 1800 ("The Appeal to Authority") entirely to the dictionaries and normative grammars of the time, with no mention of larger (or smaller) cultural changes that may have affected the history of English. John Nist (1966) calls the English of this period "Authoritarian English," implying that it was autocratic "school-marms male and female" (as Mencken denoted them in The American Language) who dictated the way language behaved during the eighteenth century. Barbara

< previous page

page_173

next page >

< previous page

page_174

next page > Page 174

Strang concedes that "the language after 1770 is a regulated language" (1970: 148). On the other hand, many linguists assume that it doesn't matter what principles or rules anyone came up with, because such rules are "alien to the natural workings of the language" (Pinker 1994: 372). Since language is "the most massively resistant, the most nearly self-determining, of human conventions" (Sledd and Kolb 1955: 33), language change just happens, like changes in climate and the weather; prescriptivism was and is and will always be futile. Edward Sapir's is the classic description of autonomous changes: "Language moves down time in a current of its own making. It has a drift" (1921: 150). And Sapir provides also a classical questioning of the non-rational basis of drift: If the vast accumulation of minute modifications which in time results in the complete remodeling of the language, are not in essence identical with the individual variations that we note on every hand about us, if these variations are born only to die without a trace, while the equally minute, or even minuter, changes that make up the drift are forever imprinted on the history of the language, are we not imputing to this history a certain mystical quality? (154) The central example in Sapir's chapter on drift is the gradual erosion of case markings in Indo-European languages, down (for example) from seven in Sanskrit, to five in Latin, to three in English. Nevertheless, there do seem to be language changes that clearly and undeniably result from human interventions of one sort or another. Robert Cooper describes hundreds of them in his book on Language Planning and Social Change (1989). "Deliberate efforts to influence the behaviour of others with respect to the acquisition, structure, or functional allocation of their language codes" (Cooper's definition of language planning, p. 45) are not always successful, but they have obviously left their mark on many different speech communities. The successful introduction of Hebrew as a vernacular in Palestinian territories in the first half of the twentieth century is one example. Additional examples may be classified as "standardization": the evolution of standard Netherlandic, which was carved out of a graded continuum of dialects stretching from the North Sea to the Alps, during the years after 1609 when Spain agreed to treat the United Provinces as sovereign (140). An example that bears more directly on eighteenth-century English is the "fixing" and "purification" of French by the Académie Française after 1634 (39). An

< previous page

page_174

next page >

< previous page

page_175

next page > Page 175

example that affects millions of people today: "world English," the aggressive promotion of English as a second language in hundreds of nations all over the world, to support commerce, education, science, and modernization. The jury is still out on what language planning can or cannot do. Cooper's book does not deal with creolization, which often involves tense-aspect systems, and which has been implicated in the language planning of such nations as Guyana and Papua New Guinea. So we cannot simply assume that the prescriptive grammars were impotent. Many people have. The total ineffectuality of these grammars was one of the major conclusions reached by Sterling Leonard in his pioneering study of 1929, a study still quoted as authoritative (for example, by Cooper). Leonard claimed that "less [sic!] than a dozen" of the "over three hundred" usages censured in these grammars "are actually regarded as illiterate or popular usage today" (237). I think that that statement is false. It can be refuted by the data that Leonard himself supplies in his "Topical Glossary" (251307). Counting those locutions in Leonard's Glossary which in my judgment would be regarded as incorrect today, I came up with a very different figure: twenty-one in the first seventeen pages (out of fifty-seven pages total), plus at least fifteen obsolete strong verb forms (26871). Leonard did not count "Adjectives as Adverbs,'' for example "extreme jealous," "miserable poor," "not near so accurate" (25354), as a structure that would now be considered illiterate or popular. Nor did he count "my father and him have gone" (263). A great many of the usages he lists are not hairsplitting pedantries, as he says (23738), but archaisms: structures and forms that were perfectly acceptable in the seventeenth century but were in the process of becoming obsolete in the eighteenth, such as "enow" for the plural of enough (266), double comparisons (267), "middle" verbs ("the bridge was building"), -st, -dst, "hath," "doth" (273), the "Bob his dog" form of possessive, and obsolescent subordinate conjunctions such as "except" and "without" (260). Leonard is I think perfectly correct to draw our attention to the inconsistencies and pedantries of many rules in the prescriptive grammars, but the data he himself supplies in his Topical Glossary do not support his dismissal of prescriptivism as a negligible force for change. The prescriptive grammarians were working in a climate of values that honored "reason" and "regularity." This was the Enlightenment, the "siècle des lumières." All the more developed nations of

< previous page

page_175

next page >

< previous page

page_176

next page > Page 176

Europe were experiencing reactions against the irrationalisms of the seventeenth century, plus movements in favor of orderliness and system. Europe during the 1600s had been scarred by what Herschel Baker called the "Wars of Truth." Looking back in the early 1700s on the persecutions and hatred engendered by fanaticism and "enthusiasm," a great many people yearned for order, regularity, and rules. Swift's A Tale of a Tub embodies some of the bitterness that those religious wars aroused. The negative of this, so far as language is concerned, can be represented by the anxiety and distress of Swift's "Proposal'' (1712) and Johnson's "Preface" (1755): for Swift "our Language is extremely imperfect," and "its daily Improvements are by no means in proportion to its daily Corruptions," and "in many Instances, it offends against every Part of Grammar." Johnson professed to find the English language "neglected," exuberant, corrupt, "without order," "without rules," perplexed, and confused. The positive side of the new respect for reason and regularity was new system, orderliness, and rules in a great many domains of knowledge. All three arenas of change named by Foucault, "life, labor, and language," were reorganized under conceptual schemes (biological, economic, and linguistic) not too different from their modern form. It did not seem silly to talk of "the science of man" in the eighteenth century. Joseph Butler in 1726 assumed that "morals" could be "considered as a science," and Hume in 1739 seemed to feel a Baconian confidence that the "human sciences" would soon undergo the same growth and development that the natural sciences had. The line between science and the humanities had not yet been sharply drawn. Johnson treats any attempt to be "regular and systematical" as a science, including literary criticism and Rolt's Dictionary of Commerce. None of his five meanings for the word "science" in the Dictionary is quantitative. In 1767 Ferguson can speak of "the science of nature, morals, politics, and history"; in 1783 Blair can speak of rhetoric and belles lettres as a "science." Samuel Johnson recognized language change as inevitable, and George Campbell knew that usage gives laws to language more often than logic does, but neither man could refrain from trying to "fix" the language or from making rules and using them to "correct" contemporary texts.4 4 See Foucault 1970: 244; Butler 1726: 4; Hume 1739: xvixvii; Rambler, no. 92; Johnson 1759, 1779: 259; Ferguson 1767: 176; Blair 1783: I 4, 10.

< previous page

page_176

next page >

< previous page

page_177

next page > Page 177

A few words in defence of an intelligent prescriptivism. During the last fifty years or so, outspoken enemies of the eighteenth-century normative grammars have often been linguists and political liberals. The former berate Robert Lowth and company for not having a "scientific" attitude that did not exist at the time; the latter for obstructing a form of democracy that did not exist at the time. Some of us who as a matter of professional obligation have been trying to remedy unclear communication, over a period of many years, in student prose, feel differently about the rules that pertain to clarity. One reason why composition teachers find themselves explaining some of the same rules that Lowth and Priestley prescribed is that many of these rules have a basis in the logic of effective discourse. Ambiguous pronoun reference can make it hard for readers to understand what writers intended to say. I disapprove of using the canons of prescriptive grammar to exclude women, Scots, Irish, Americans, and less well-educated writers from the inner circles of power. That does not mean that I cannot at the same time applaud clarity, correctness, and refinement in language.5 Further: the pursuit of clarity and correctness in language is not a local or provincial thing. Prescriptivism in one shape or another exerted a powerful influence on major authors in classical Greece and Rome, in Renaissance Italy and later in France. Aristotle, having championed perspicuity and propriety as the first virtues of style, attacks prolixity and "frigidity" (psykra) as the first vices; the "foundation of style" is ''purity" (hellenidzein), the Greek word for which reveals its insularity and linguistic conservatism. Quintilian recommends "purity" and "clarity"; "Style has three kinds of excellence, correctness, lucidity and elegance" ("emendata . . . dilucida . . . ornata")(I V). Quintilian's lessons on "barbarisms" and "solecisms" in Book I, forty-five pages of them, parallel Ward's (1759) and Campbell's (1776) lessons on those same two vices. Quintilian returns to the subjects of perspicuitas and proprietas in Book VIII, 5 I count thirty-eight rules, more or less, in Lowth (1762), the most influential of the normative grammars. Half of them censure archaisms, such as: old-fashioned plurals ("shoen" instead of "shoes": 23) and strong verb forms (7577, 86); a "to" after "see" and "help" ("I saw him to come": 1089); sequence of tenses (118); archaic conjuncts of various kinds ("whereunto," "so . . . but": 150). About five major rules are still taught in traditional grammars of all sorts: agreement of subject and verb (48, 97104); case markings for subject and object (97, 12627, 144); parallel construction ("Did he not fear and besought?": 117); clear pronoun reference (138); use of articles (16). Other rules seem more arbitrary: "who" for persons, "which" for things (13334); particles in phrasal verbs (129).

< previous page

page_177

next page >

< previous page

page_178

next page > Page 178

section ii. Book III, subsections 3851 of Cicero's De Oratore expresses the same values in more general terms. The prescriptive grammars were intended at least as much to be practical and useful as to be systematic. Murray Cohen (1977) has shown that eighteenth-century grammarians indulged far less in speculative reasoning than seventeenthcentury grammarians had, moving away from the philosophy of language and towards practical instruction. Leonard jeers that the prescriptivists were "mainly clergymen, retired gentlemen, and amateur philosophers like the elder Shandy, with an immense distaste for [the] scientific" facts of language (13). That is seriously misleading. On the contrary, one could claim that half of all eighteenth-century persons with any intellectual energy at all wrote prescriptively about language, Adam Smith and John Wesley, Chesterfield and Burke and Addison, Ann Fisher and Anna Barbauld and Hester Thrale, Swift and Hume and Boswell. In fact a large number of the grammarians disparaged by Leonard as dilettantes were hard-working schoolteachers, like Lane (who described himself as one "long chain'd" to the "Gallies'' of classroom teaching) or Ann Fisher (who wrote "for the USE of Schools") or Priestley 1761 ("adapted to the use of schools"), or Dilworth, or Gough, or Ussher (Tieken 1987: 231). Some of the grammarians were women (Percy 1994), and a great many of them were "outsiders," Scots or Irish or provincials. In fact the immense task of bringing the English language into the domain of consciousness was shared by all kinds of writers in many different genres. The list of 187 publications that Sundby, Bjorge, and Haugland use for the Dictionary of English Normative Grammars 17001800 (1991) includes not only short, simple grammars and spelling books written for elementary schools but also dictionaries (Johnson 1755; Ash 1775) and books of model letters (The Court Letter Writer; or the Complete English Secretary 1773) and rhetorics (Blair 1783) and philosophical treatises (Monboddo 1776) and even a political tract (Swift 1712). And yet that list of 187 publications is incomplete; it slights one category (rhetoric), omits another (periodical essays), and leaves out some titles.6 For all these reasons, I am reluctant to write off the normative grammars as merely naive or reactionary or out of touch with reality. 6 On the political functions of Swift's Proposal, see Kelly 1988: 97; for grammars not listed ill Sundby see Michael 1987: 387606.

< previous page

page_178

next page >

< previous page

page_179

next page > Page 179

Anyone who feels that the grammarians were odd and isolated in their time, "like the elder Shandy," should browse through R. C. Alston's ten volumes of bibliographies on the English language before 1800: the number of different kinds of publications (for example, dialect collections, starting in 1674 and multiplying noticeably in the 1760s), and the sense of a rapidly growing shared awareness of language in general, is almost overwhelming. Not only did the numbers expand tremendously; the messages that grammars were sending to their readers changed: the grammars of the 1760s explicitly set out to correct errors and refine the expression of early eighteenth-century English prose. The very best writers between 1710 and 1740, Addison, Swift, Shaftesbury, Pope, Prior, and Atterbury, are censured for faulty pronoun reference, lack of parallel structure, incorrect parts of speech, failures in agreement, and archaic strong verb forms.7 It is as if Brooks and Warren had devoted about one quarter of their pages to anacoluthon in Hemingway, prolixity in Faulkner, and misplaced modifiers in Henry James. It is as if during the 1970s and 1980s the Atlantic Monthly and the Nation and PMLA had published a series of articles on errors and infelicities in the language of Winston Churchill, E. B. White, and Reinhold Niebuhr. Can such events represent anything less than a major upheaval in literary and linguistic attitudes of the time? The prescriptive grammars must have contributed to a particularly defensive form of language consciousness, insecure and anxious. "If Addison and Bolingbroke could make such egregious errors . . .?" Writers who had any reason to question their own grammatical expertise were surely prey to self-doubts of a kind that twentieth-century writers can hardly imagine. As a young soldier William Cobbett was so distressed at his own "want of a knowledge of grammar" that he memorized Lowth's textbook: I procured me a Lowth's grammar, and applied myself to the study of it with unceasing assiduity, and not without profit; for, though it was a considerable time before I fully comprehended all that I read, still I read and studied with such unremitting attention, that, at last, I could write without falling into any very gross errors. The pains I took cannot be described: I wrote the whole grammar out two or three times; I got it by heart; I repeated it every morning and evening. (1796: 3334) Cobbett, like Priestley a political activist speaking for the working 7 For details, see McIntosh 1986: 5264.

< previous page

page_179

next page >

< previous page

page_180

next page > Page 180

class, like Priestley wrote a grammar. His aim was to make it easier for ordinary folk to speak and write correctly for very liberal political purposes. Little wonder that some women were diffident about the correctness of their writing. Sarah Fielding, though a prodigiously gifted student (Mrs. Thrale remembers hearing her recite "a thousand Lines at a Time without missing one"), was willing to have the first impression of her first novel "corrected" by her brother, and she seems to have accepted his chivalrous but condescending apology for her "small Errors" as just part of the game. The list of accomplished women writers who allowed early published versions of their writing to be ''corrected" includes Clara Reeve, Charlotte Smith, Maria Edgeworth, and Mary Shelley. Fanny Burney experienced such "anxious solicitude" for her first novel that she dedicated it "To the authors of the Monthly and Critical Reviews," half-seriously refusing to plead for their "mercy" and acknowledging her own "temerity" in submitting to them "the trifling production of a few idle hours." Distrust of clever or learned women was deeply ingrained in early modern culture, and writing for publication was still considered unfeminine.8 Similarly, in Scotland some of even the boldest intellects worried and fretted about the correctness of their writing. Between 1750 and 1790, in the heyday of the Scottish Enlightenment, the spectacular successes of the literati in philosophy, political science, and aesthetics were paralleled by a continuing effort to purge their writings of every last vestige of non-standard usage (Rogers 1991; Basker 1991). Mossner blames the demise of the Select Society on their ill-advised efforts to impose "pure" English on the literati of Edinburgh in the early 1760s (1980: 28384, 373). Lists of "Scoticisms" were published by David Hume (in Political Discourses, 1752), by James Elphinston (1771), and by James Beattie (1779); Boswell planned a similar enterprise. A twentieth-century reader of Hume's lists may wonder what all the fuss was about. Certain items seem odd or dialectal (tender, meaning "sickly"; for ordinary instead of "usually"), but others have passed down to modern usage as harmless variants (compete vs. "enter into competition"; tear to pieces vs. "tear in pieces"). I conclude that the normative grammars, both cause and 8 See Thrale 1951: I 78 79; Fielding 1993: 12425; Fielding 1744: 5; Burney 1778: 34; DeForest 1992.

< previous page

page_180

next page >

< previous page

page_181

next page > Page 181

symptom of language consciousness, played a part in enabling writers to make their texts more written and less oral. They were seconded and reinforced by the New Rhetoric. Features that we singled out in chapter 2 as characteristic of early eighteenth-century prose (for example, solecisms, archaisms, interruptedness, physical metaphors, trailing which clauses, overconcatenation) were explicitly censured by the grammarians or can be inferred as offences against the general standards implied by such labels as "inelegant," "inaccurate," "colloquial," or "obsolete." Correctness, a goal that grammars and rhetorics shared, was a central cultural value for the eighteenth century as appealing to political radicals (Priestley, Godwin, Cobbett) as to conservatives (Boswell, Johnson), to pioneers of the "discourse of commerce'' (Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson) as to monarchists (Burke).9 If it is an error for historians and critics to dismiss the prescriptive grammars or look down on them, it is also an error to classify solecisms in every case as flaws or faults. Many locutions are labeled as "errors" merely because they surface in the "wrong" place or time. A diligent sleuth can find errors of some sort in almost any text. The questions are how many, what kind, and how they relate to the effectiveness of the text.10 Review Magazines "In tandem with the growth of print culture generally, the rapid expansion of the periodical press was a pan-European phenomenon. Scholars differ on definitions and methods of counting, but by any measure there was a dramatic increase in the number of periodicals between 1660 and 1800" (Basker 1996). It is estimated that an 9 There is still room, of course, for what John Barrell refers to as a separate discourse of commerce and political economy that evolved to negotiate the new capitalist enterprise (1992: xiii), but its distinguishing features will be semantic and discourse-oriented, not oral/written or correct/incorrect. Similar disclaimers seem also to apply to the new proletarian intellectual prose that Olivia Smith posits for Paine and Cobbett. 10 In his essay "Of English Style" (The Enquirer, 1797), Godwin "with infinite reluctante" decides to flag the errors and faults in well-known writers, by marking them with asterisks (419n), for example this of Temple: "Princes or States cannot *run into every Corner of their Dominions, to *look out Persons fit for their Service, or that of the Public: They cannot see far with their own Eyes, nor hear with their own Ears; and must for the most part *do both with those of other Men, or *else chuse among such smaller Numbers as are most *in their way" (420). Trying to figure out exactly what is "glaringly offensive" in each of the asterisked expressions in the fifty-one pages of text where Godwin follows this practice would be a chastening experience.

< previous page

page_181

next page >

< previous page

page_182

next page > Page 182

average of twenty-five British periodical publications per year made their appearance in 1700, ninety in 1750, and 264 in 1800. Major innovations in the first half of the eighteenth century were the single-essay journal (such as the Spectator, 17711) and the magazine or monthly miscellany (the Gentleman's Magazine, 1731). We are so accustomed to magazines in the 1990s that it is hard to recapture the novelty of this genre. Nowadays even a small university expects to have its own magazine, and a large corporation will sport half a dozen, each specialized for different departments and purposes. It is possible that the gradual multiplication of titles, species, issues, and copies of magazines printed during the eighteenth century contributed to the writtenness of prose: possible, but not inevitable, since in a period during which multiplication and specialization of periodical publication has continued apace (the twentieth century), English has apparently become less written not more. What certainly tightened the screws of linguistic self-consciousness among writers and readers, however, were the book reviews that appeared more and more frequently in magazines. Derek Roper assigns the beginning of book reviews, "in the full modern sense of the term," to the 1750 volume of the Monthly Review. Abstracts and summaries of books had appeared in France as early as 1665, in the Journal des Sçavans, but the English imitations of this journal were short-lived; and a serious attempt to supply criticism of new books, as well as summary and quotations, does not appear on the British literary scene until Ralph Griffiths's Monthly Review of 1749 had been launched for almost a year. The first enthusiastic attack on a book for "words and phrases peculiar to the author" (that is, linguistic, not literary, criticism) occurs earlier than that, in the fourth issue of the magazine, August of 1749: passages from a History of Scotland "By an impartial hand" are quoted, with the offending locution in italics: "Another use of history rightly applied" (271) "I can't help it" (271) "no enemy to Scotland will deny . . . that they were a kingdom . . ." (272) "which creeped in" (272) "The dispute . . . did arise upon" (273) "Edward of England, who affected to act as a mediator, but in the event, snatch'd only, and pick'd the bone from them both" (272). I would classify these, respectively, as a misplaced modifier, an

< previous page

page_182

next page >

< previous page

page_183

next page > Page 183

informal or colloquial usage (the contraction), an error in pronoun reference, an archaic or nonstandard strong verb form, the Elizabethan pleonastic do, and a bit of "low" or proverbial language. All six, and others I have not quoted, fall within the province of the prescriptive grammarians; they are, taken together, more oral and less polite than what late eighteenth-century writers like Godwin would have recommended. This review was almost certainly written by Ralph Griffiths, founder and editor of the Monthly.11 For the most part, early volumes of the Monthly do not go into linguistic detail like this. The July number (1749) alludes in passing to "some low and loose puns and witticisms" (240); the August number condemns a book as "both wrote and printed in such a wretched manner, that . . ." (317). The Gentleman's Magazine included from the beginning a monthly list of recently published books, unencumbered by comments of any kind. The first "criticism" of new books listed appears in June of 1749, a few months after the debut of the Monthly; it consists merely of two one-sentence remarks enclosed in square brackets. By 1753 the register of books had expanded to two pages in very small type, giving space for a half-dozen brief summaries or evaluative comments, some of which deal with language: for example, "the stile is not equal to Swift's or Berkeley's" (1753: 54). But whoever wrote the Gentleman's Magazine register of books for January of 1754 let him- or herself go a little: This is a verbose criticism on dramatic poetry in barbarous language, and even false grammar, of which the following extract is a proof, and therefore a sufficient specimen of the performance. The bulk of the spectators are too agreeably pleased with that variety of changes which immediately strike the senses, that they could bear with the practice of the capricious rules of probability, which in part deprive you of this pleasure. This last sentence is a quote, from the offending "Letter to Mr. Richard Glover"; and the reviewer proceeds immediately to pounce on the locutions italicized: Here we find. 1st. That the bulk are pleasingly pleased with a variety of variety which strike. 2d. That this bulk are too pleasingly pleased, that they could bear, &c. 3d. That rules of probability are capricious. 4th. That these rules deprive A of a pleasure felt by B. (51) What is most interesting about these comments is the mind-set 11 See Roper 1978: 1920: Nangle 1934: 164.

< previous page

page_183

next page >

< previous page

page_184

next page > Page 184

behind them. Grammar is important, yes, and the two failures of agreement between subject and verb here are duly registered. But the reviewer's most contemptuous sarcasm is reserved for pleonasm ("agreeably pleased"; "variety of changes") and fuzzy thinking: "probability" by definition is probable, and so it can't be "capricious.'' Is this not a mindset very close to that of H. W. Fowler in The King's English (1906) and A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926)? Entries in the latter under "Tautology" and "Pleonasm" castigate similar verbal blunders, for example writing "weather conditions" when all that is meant is "weather" (615). Another magazine that made a specialty of savaging what it considered bad English was the Critical Review (1756), edited by Tobias Smollett. Its earliest volumes exhibit an anxious fastidiousness that perhaps exceeds the limits of what simple craftsmanship in English might call for: "ways in which" is corrected to "ways by which" (1756: 67); "this rare lady" is rewritten as "this extraordinary woman" (68). Smollett makes fun of the "embellishments" to the English language he finds in Adolphus Bannac: "elevation of the eye, for looking up; run-a-gate, for renegadoe," and he parodies Bannac's style: "No evil occurrent in life can excruciate reminiscence more than such a melancholy lumpish piece of stuff" (1757: 34).12 If my sampling is representative, starting about 1750 the magazines greatly intensified many readers' awareness of standards for formal, precise written English, and furnished monthly examples of practical criticism based on those standards. They seconded and applied many of the rules of prescriptive grammars. They were widely read and subscribed to by libraries, reading clubs, literary societies, and academies throughout Great Britain and abroad. By these means the "journals carried literary news [and the new standards for literacy] into the quietest villages and to persons of modest means and education" (Roper 26). Dictionaries (And Encyclopedias) It seems reasonable to assume that what we now think of as a print culture will naturally and even inevitably generate, in time, what we now think of as reference books. Books about books, or books about words, or books about our knowledge of the world become more 12 For Smollett's linguistic criticism see Basker 1988: 7682.

< previous page

page_184

next page >

< previous page

page_185

next page > Page 185

useful (and also more profitable) as printed discourse proliferates. The eighteenth century was an age of dictionaries. The word Dictionary appears as a head word in all kinds of new titles: Merchant's Dictionary (1695), Gentleman's Dictionary (1705), A New Law Dictionary (1729), The Scoundrels Dictionary: Or, An Explanation of the Cant Words . . . the Art of Wheedling . . . Flash Songs (1754), Lexicon Physico-Medicum (1719; II editions by 1800); The Farrier's and Horseman's Complete Dictionary (1759), Builder's Dictionary (1734), and many more. This jungle of popular and scholarly reference works grew up almost entirely after 1670 or so.13 Though encyclopedias and dictionaries are now two different genres one organizes our knowledge; the other our lexicon the distinction between them was not clear in the Middle Ages, in the Renaissance, or in the eighteenth century. (And, of course, it is still blurry in the twentieth-century "college" dictionary, with its bite-size portions of general knowledge, its one-sentence biographies, its illustrations and maps.) Thomas Birch, Johnson's friend and grub- street colleague, co-authored A General Dictionary Historical and Critical, in ten volumes, 173441, "in which a new and accurate translation of [the encyclopedia] of Mr Bayle is included": this was a so-called "dictionary" that resembled an encyclopedia; and the first edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (three volumes, 176871) seems very dictionary-like to a twentieth-century reader, with a great many pages devoted to brief entries for "terms of art" in botany, religion, heraldry; "sea-language,'' commerce, rhetoric, agriculture, and mythology. Encyclopedic entries became a feature of English dictionaries in the 1650s. Thomas Blount wrote long, informative entries for legal and feudal terms in his dictionary of 1656, and Edward Phillips included entries on classical myth in 1658. Ephraim Chambers, compiler of the Cyclopaedia of 1728, the premier English encyclopedia before the Britannica, thought of himself as a "lexicographer" and referred to his predecessors as "former Dictionarists."14 Despite their differences, dictionaries and encyclopedias have quite a lot in common. For example, both create a world. They complete the circuit of facts and judgments mapped by their categories. An encyclopedia, etymologically, is 'a circle of instruction.' By what they include and exclude, by the perspectives they stress 13 For list of dictionaries of various kinds, see Alston 1974; New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature; Starnes and Noyes 1946. 14 Sec Béjoint 1994: 2176; Osselton 1990; Chambers 1728: Preface.

< previous page

page_185

next page >

< previous page

page_186

next page > Page 186

and the conceptual frames they recognize, they are an imagined world of ideas and images. We find something like this vision of dictionaries and encyclopedias in Jorge Luis Borges and Umberto Eco, but also, as Robert DeMaria reminds us, in Johnson's predecessors, Comenius and Chambers, and in Johnson himself (1986: x, 56, 267 n4). Both dictionaries and encyclopedias may satisfy a need to self-assess, to take stock of the world of knowledge. D'Alembert's general preface (1755) to the Encyclopédie announces intentions of summarizing, clarifying, and arranging all knowledge. Cassirer observes that "for this age, knowledge of its own activity, intellectual selfexamination, and foresight are the proper function and essential task of thought." The age of dictionaries coincides, more or less, with "the rise of literary history" (Wellek) and with "the ordering of the arts" (Lipking), both retrospective enterprises. Johnson's Dictionary in particular served to historicize the English language by quoting older texts as authorities for a given usage. This is notable because ''ultimately all dictionaries are motivated by and judged against the lexical needs of the language user whom they serve": the readership of 1755 in Great Britain must have hungered for the historical perspective on words that Johnson gave them.15 How did eighteenth-century dictionaries advance the cause of writtenness? First, by simple proliferation: in the second half of the century there were many more new dictionaries, and many more editions of dictionaries, than in the first. In Alston's bibliography, I count sixty-four editions of thirteen dictionaries published between 1700 and 1749, and 246 editions of forty-four dictionaries published between 1750 and 1800. Second, by size and scope: more entries, more words, more senses of words. Osselton, citing Starnes and Noyes, gives the number of entries in Cawdrey (1604) as 2,560, in Phillips (1658) as 17,000, in Bailey (1721) as 40,000, and in Johnson (1755) as 55,000. Kersey (1708) and Bailey (1721) provide only one sense for belly; Johnson, six, including what the serpent crawled upon in Genesis iii.14 and the swollen part of a bottle. Increases in size and scope meant more room for more bookish, print-oriented words. Paradoxically, as dictionaries grew in size and scope they began to invade the territory of orality and ordinary speech. Before Kersey 15 See Cassirer 1932: 34; Wellek 1941; Lipking 1970; Hartmann 1983: 5.

< previous page

page_186

next page >

< previous page

page_187

next page > Page 187

(1702), dictionaries had not tried to include common words like table and do, confining themselves for the most part to words that one might need to look up; and the task of rounding up all the common words was certainly not completed by Kersey: his 1708 Dictionarium Anglo-Britannicum, which is about twice as large as his 1702 A New English Dictionary, omits dirt, do, dumb, scrape, and slim (for example). At the end of the seventeenth century Colbert ordered the Académie Française to compile a dictionary of arts and crafts: that is, to retrieve from the oral domain all technical terms proper to such crafts as wainwright, chandler, cooper, and blacksmith, terms that had been handed down over generations by word of mouth but not systematically recorded. That dictionary appeared in print in 1761 (Collison and Preece 1992: 261). Ordinary English dictionaries, starting with Phillips in 1658 and going at least through Bailey's 14th edition (1751), announced on the title page their coverage of oral domains such as "Seaman's Terms" or "Hunting, Fowling, Fishing, Gardening, Husbandry, Handicrafts, Confectionary, Carving, Cookery, &c" (Bailey 1751). It is my contention not only that dictionaries in general promoted writtenness, but also that dictionaries from 1755 on did so more effectively than had dictionaries before 1730; moreover, the later dictionaries were themselves more written in character, more completely and thoroughly creatures of print culture. I base this argument mainly on four dictionaries, Kersey 1708, Bailey 1721 (which I have had access to in the first, the fourth and the fourteenth editions), Johnson 1755, and Ash 1775. Kersey and Bailey are early examples of what Noel Osselton considers one of the three important kinds of dictionaries that evolved in the eighteenth century, the compact 40,000-word reference dictionary for general users. Bailey's 1721 work, which ran to thirty editions over eighty years, was "the most popular and representative dictionary of the eighteenth century" (Starnes and Noyes 1946: 107). I chose the 1708 Kersey because it is much more substantial than his 1702 volume (which had been written for younger students) and because it revises the definitions in the Kersey-Phillips folio of 1706. Johnson is more scholarly, but also more famous and influential; lexicographers of the next hundred years or more, even those engaged in far less scholarly dictionaries than Johnson's, felt his shadow and responded to his innovations. Ash was not writing Johnson's kind of dictionary; he operated more in the sub-genre of Kersey and Bailey, but he tried to

< previous page

page_187

next page >

< previous page

page_188

next page > Page 188

include as many words as he could; he adopted and adapted many of Johnson's definitions and policies. Before tackling the differences between these two early and these two later dictionaries, we must recognize continuities. Bailey copied from Kersey, and Johnson copied from Bailey, and Ash copied from Bailey and Johnson. When Johnson cites "Dict." as his source (e.g., for entries under reticence, abort), he is acknowledging his use of Bailey, and like other lexicographers he does not hesitate to quote verbatim from his predecessors or to borrow-and-edit at will. The definitions for a substantial number of words in Kersey, Bailey, and Ash are similar or identical, e.g. abacista, abandum, benerth. Ash appropriates Bailey's definitions of abacus, abactor, Aaron, Abaddan, abaisance, abannition. Another index of continuities among dictionaries is the continuing presence of a small population of ghost words handed down from one dictionary to the next, words that have only a shadowy provenance in contemporary texts benerth "a Service formerly rendered by the Tenant to his Lord, with his Plough and Cart," is included by three of our four eighteenth-century dictionaries, but not by the Oxford English Dictionary. Later eighteenth-century dictionaries are more written than early in several ways: they are more precise, more abstract, more correct, less physical, less colloquial, more systematic, and more rational. More precise: more distinctions, more different senses of words, more careful discriminations among meanings. In general, Kersey (1708) recognizes homonyms but shies away from the task of distinguishing among the different senses of a word. "Bubo, (L.) the Owl, a Bird: Also the Groin . . . : Also a kind of Boil, or Botch in the Kernelly Parts of the Body." (It is typical of Kersey's not-always-perfectly-organized text that kernelly does not appear in his own dictionary; though kernelled walls have "Cranies or Notches.") Here the three different homographs spelled ''bubo" are listed seriatim in one entry, separated by colons; elsewhere Kersey lists homonyms as different entries. Bailey sometimes incorporates several senses of one word in the same entry, and sometimes gives lists of synonyms that encompass more than one sense (Simpson 1989: 188). Neither Kersey nor Bailey, however, seems to have appreciated that polysemy (the condition of having different senses or meanings) is a central feature of natural languages. Benjamin Martin (1749) was the first to number senses. Johnson (1755) set a new standard for clarity in definitions and for

< previous page

page_188

next page >

< previous page

page_189

next page > Page 189

sensitivity to different senses of English words. He is especially good at displaying the different meanings that a common word carries in different contexts. "Even the simplest and the most monolithic" words, says Stephen Ullmann, "have a number of different facets depending on the context and situation in which they are used"; "multiplicity of aspects" is a principal cause of the ''vagueness" of words and of polysemy (1962: 124). A good example of Johnson's skills are the seven senses of the noun taste: the act of tasting; the sense of taste; sensibility, perception; the sensation itself; "intellectual relish or discernment"; a trial (in Shakespeare but "not in use"); a specimen. Each of these definitions has its illustrative quotations, which greatly magnify the clarity of the definitions, by furnishing a context in which that particular sense makes sense. It would be hard to see a clear difference, for example, between sense number three of taste, "sensibility; perception," and sense number five, "intellectual relish or discernment," without "I have almost forgot the taste of fears" (Macbeth) for number three, and "he had no taste of true glory" (Addison) for number five. In Johnson, the numbering of senses is a surprisingly sophisticated instrument. It deploys a strategy for dealing with polysemy that Gene Gragg traces in Bréal (1897), Sperber (1923), Bloomfield (1933), and Ricoeur (1973), among others: "this is the notion of a core or primary meaning which takes on an appropriate, derived or related meaning when transferred from its original domain to another" (1978: 174). It anticipates theories of semantics that recognize metaphor as a factor in polysemy (Sweetser 1990): sense number seven for taste can certainly be appreciated and understood as metaphor ("They thought it not safe to resolve, till they had a taste of the people's inclination," Bacon). It illustrates what Langacker (1986) calls "subjectification," the idea that word meanings may evolve over time, from concrete to abstract, from physical to mental. Thus, To INSIST. v. n. [insister, French; insisto, Latin.] 1. To stand or rest upon. 2. Not to recede from terms or assertions; to persist in. 3. To dwell upon in discourse. Johnson has here distinguished not only the physical from the abstract senses but also the abstract (number two) from a discourse-oriented sense (number three). Elizabeth Traugott (1989) would

< previous page

page_189

next page >

< previous page

page_190

next page > Page 190

point out that number three is a "speech-act" sense of the verb, and therefore one of the latest to develop, historically. The precision and scope of Johnson's definitions meant that the Dictionary of 1755, plus its additional six folio editions, eleven quarto editions, twenty-one octavo editions, and nine miniature editions, assisted in the opening up of a new level of literacy to the English-speaking world. One effect of the thousands of illustrative quotations in Johnson is to situate English words in English literature, and more broadly in the accumulated body of printed texts from 1550 to 1750. In the Dictionary Johnson brands the oral tradition in general and speech in particular as without authority. Not only are later eighteenth-century dictionaries more precise and abstract, they are also more correct than the early ones, in two ways: they prescribe correctness, and they are themselves more correct. People had been talking about "correcting" the language at least since the 1660s, when members of the Royal Society advocated a national academy like the Académie Française. The climate of opinion in the 1750s favored prescriptivism. Johnson's contributions to lexicography include the introduction of new labels for words: "low" (s.v. ding, barley broth, to set by the ears) and "very low" (yellowboy); "barbarous'' (wondrous as adverb); "bad" (fraughtage); "familiar" (door 2.); "ludicrous" (deuce, which he spells deuse); "solemn" (thyself 2.); "inelegant" (to pleasure); and "not inelegant" (salliance). Most dictionaries after 1755 were enlisted on the side of correctness of some sort. Ash takes his cue from Johnson in labeling bang, belabour, cajole, conundrum, and doings as "used only in low or droll style." Entries in post-1755 dictionaries also exemplify the new correctness of English prose of the later eighteenth century. In his definitions Bailey, the most popular lexicographer of the first half of the century, sometimes trips over pronoun reference: "ABELLINS, a sort of Christian Hereticks in Africa, who adopted Sons and Daughters to inherit their Estates leaving their Children by their Wives, as if they were illegitimate" does "they" here refer to wives or children or to the Abelins themselves? Kersey too is sloppy with his pronouns: "Ploce, . . . a Rhetorical Figure, in which a Word is so repeated by way of Emphasis, that it not only expresses the thing signify'd, but also the Quality of it." Compare the neater, more correctly-written definition of ploce in Ash (1775): "A mode of speech in which a word is repeated by way of illustration and emphasis." Bailey's definitions sometimes lapse from perfectly parallel construction. In the 1728

< previous page

page_190

next page >

< previous page

page_191

next page > Page 191

fourth edition: "TO ABATE [in Law] to come to nought, abolished, quashed or rendred to no effect." Compare Ash, to abate: "to diminish . . . In law, to defeat, to overthrow." Or compare Bailey's ungrammatical (and erroneous?) definition of Abelins with Ash's Abelonians: "A sect of Christians whose distinguishing tenet was to marry and yet live in abstinence." The grammatical information furnished to readers in the early dictionaries is often skimpy and unclear. Kersey and Bailey usually do not label parts of speech. Here is the totality of Bailey's entry for a common preposition: "AT [æt, Sax.]." In the fourth edition this is expanded to "AT [æt, Sax.] as at a Place." The fact that that can be a demonstrative pronoun, an adjective, a relative pronoun, or a conjunction can hardly be considered a difficult or advanced bit of grammar; Bailey lists that simply as a conjunction. In the fourteenth edition he gives an etymology for any, but leaves the meaning section blank, adding "Adj." Ash, by contrast, defines at as "Near to, in, by, on, with, coincident with, in the state of, in consequence of, imployed about, furnished with." What had intervened between Ash and Bailey, of course, was not only Johnson, who gives about eighteen column inches to at, and whose seventeen numbered senses are ruthlessly pirated and condensed by Ash, but also the increasing popularity of book reviews, grammars, magazines, rhetorics, and books on language in the 1750s and 1760s. Language in the later dictionaries is less physical than language in the early ones. Kersey: "Pituita, (L.) Phlegm, Snivel, Snot"; vs. Ash: "Phlegm, rheum." Kersey defines mucus as "Snot or Snivel"; Johnson's scientific definition takes place at a level of technicality far above such schoolyard terms: "that which flows from the papillary processes through the os cribriforme . . ." Another form of physicalness turns up in Kersey's definition of fallow as ''being of a Palish Red Colour, like that of a Brick half burnt." Ash is less poetic, but allows for an additional sense: "Pale red, pale yellow; uncultivated, unoccupied; unsowed, ploughed but not sowed." Kersey is more likely to define by means of similes or comparisons than Johnson or Ash is, as in his definition of "Ferret, a little Creature like a Weesel." Ash introduces a scientific term in his definition of the same word: "A quadruped of the weasel kind." Where Kersey calls on two comparisons in "Moose, a Beast common in New England, as big as an Ox, and headed Like a Buck," Ash locates his moose in a biological category: "An American beast, the largest of the deer

< previous page

page_191

next page >

< previous page

page_192

next page > Page 192

kind." Linnaeus's major publications were well known in Britain by the 1750s. The earlier dictionaries are more colloquial in their use of language than the later ones. Kersey and Bailey: "Plunge, to dip over Head and Ears." Ash on the same word: "To put under water, to put into any state suddenly, to hurry into distress, to force in suddenly." The later dictionaries are more systematic and abstract. Kersey writes, "Oblong, that is of a Figure, inclining to long.'' Bailey: "that is of a Figure commonly call'd a Long-square." Ash on the same word: "Longer than broad, having the form of a parallelogram." A definition that Bailey adopted unquestioningly from Kersey, "FASCIAE, [among Astronomers] are certain Rows of Spots in the Planet Mars, which appear like Swathes about his Body," is condensed, corrected and depersonalized by Ash: "the belts of Jupiter." What all this adds up to is something larger than literacy or gentrification. Kersey in particular, a man of genuine learning and sophistication, inhabits a different world from Ash and Johnson, less rational, more rural. Ash's definition of gossamer is a straightforward description of fact: "The down of plants, the long white cobwebs which usually float in the air about the time of harvest." Kersey's definition of gossamer postulates mysterious forces and unexplained dangers: "a kind of thin Cobweb-like Vapour that hovers in the Air, and is suppos'd to rot Sheep." There are occasional startling irrationalities in Kersey: "Artificial Lines . . . are Lines so contrived as to represent the Logarithmick Sines and Tangents, which will solve all Questions in Trigonometry, Navigation, &c." "Natural Magick or Natural Philosophy, a useful Science, teaching the Knowledge and mutual Application of Actives to Passives, so as to make many excellent Discoveries." Harkening back, perhaps, to a younger England, Kersey lists the five "Beasts of the Forest": "The Hart, Hind, Hare, Boar, and Wolf." Changes like these, from a world of vapours that rot sheep, or from lines contrived to solve all questions in navigation, to a world organized by Linnaeus and governed by the linguistic (and other) proprieties, seem more closely related to the Enlightenment than to politeness and literacy per se. And it is the Enlightenment, specifically the Scottish Enlightenment, that explains some of the most obvious differences between the first edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica of 176871 and Chambers's Cyclopaedia of 1728. Chambers believed that "the heavenly Bodies have their Influences: . . .

< previous page

page_192

next page >

< previous page

page_193

next page > Page 193

Astrology, therefore, ought not to be exploded, but reformed" (xxviii). Under "Abstinence" he narrates cases of men "passing several Months" without food, including "a Scotchman imprison'd for Felony, and strictly watch'd in [the Tower of London] for six Weeks, in all which time he took not the least Sustenance: for which he had his Pardon.'' Chambers's pages record a good many "wonderful" facts and "curious" events that do not figure in the Encyclopaedia Britannica.16 Chambers does not choose among the various philosophies available to him, but lists them, as a lexicographer would the different senses of a word. "Action" in physics, "A Manifestation of the Power or Energy of a Substance . . . may be consider'd two ways, Entitatively and Connotatively. Action Entitatively taken, is what we call a Cause." Three paragraphs later, Chambers turns from a Scholastic view of action to a Cartesian view. His practice is to combine every perspective he can think of in one entry. "Action" is a term first "in Physicks," then in "Ethicks," then in rhetoric, then in poetry, then in law; almost five times as many words are devoted to the last three of these sorts of "Action" as to the first two together. The first edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (176871) seems to have set out deliberately to bring the hodge-podge of scholars like Chambers up to date (see Kafker 1994). When a word like "Action" needs defining in several different fields, it is listed separately for each field. Immediately after the title page, the first Britannica gives a List of Authors, about 150 names and/or titles, which I take to be major sources; among them are six titles by Linnaeus, "Hume's essays," Newton on optics, Maclaurin's fluxions and Algebra, the Elements of Criticism and Abridgment of the Statutes by Lord Kames, "Sir James Stewart's [Steuart's] political economy," and mid-century books on midwifery, surgery, hydrostatics, agriculture, architecture. I count only three books on religion ("Calmet's dictionary of the bible," "Sale's Koran and life of Mahomed," Campbell on Miracles), and forty-five to fifty books on what we would now call biology. Quite a few entries relate to commerce: thirty-eight pages on Bookkeeping; twelve columns on Annuities; entries on Bill and Broker. Classical history, literature, and mythology are very thinly represented. 16 On eighteenth-century dictionaries as instruments of the Enlightenment, see McIntosh 1998; for Chambers in context see Bradshaw 1981.

< previous page

page_193

next page >

< previous page

page_194

next page > Page 194

I do not see much evidence that the 1771 Encyclopaedia Britannica is more "written" than the 1728 Cyclopaedia, though its prose shows signs of gentrification; certain entries in the later work, however, speak eloquently to the value of print culture in general. Under "printer" the Scots gentlemen who compiled the first Britannica (Andrew Bell, Colin Macfarquhar, and William Smellie) state unequivocally that to the printers of books are chiefly owing our deliverance from ignorance and error, the progress of learning, the revival of the sciences, and numberless improvements in arts, which, without this noble invention, would have been either lost to mankind, or confined to the knowledge of a few. After this handsome tribute to an idealized print culture come six full columns on the technology of printing, with a detailed description of the printing press itself including the bolts that hold it together and the hardware that makes it work.

< previous page

page_194

next page >

< previous page

page_195

next page > Page 195

Chapter 9 Politeness; Feminization From the ease of the language, the vivacity of spirit, the delicacy of sentiment, and the abundance of love and tenderness which we find in this novel, we hesitate not to pronounce, that a Lady wrote it. (Monthly Review 1766) In this chapter I collect a number of topics related to the growth of politeness in the eighteenth century, chief among them the new cultural vitality of women. Politeness in the largest sense is a universal: all societies, no matter how small or undeveloped, will fall apart without cooperation, based on a collective agreement on how to handle status (power); this agreement is codified in the rules and rituals of politeness. But women are politer than men or so the eighteenth century believed, and the rise of the polite lady as an almost archetypal figure in novels, in the drama, in letters and memoirs and essays of the middle decades of the eighteenth century was, in Johnson's phrase, a "powerful fact." Another sense of the term politeness is associated with civilizedness and high culture and luxury. Paul Langford reminds us in the introduction of his very useful history of England 17271783 that luxury was a central preoccupation of these years, Wealth of Nations the most influential book of the period, and politeness "a logical consequence of commerce" even though the great majority of people had few luxuries, virtually zero political power, and not much opportunity to exercise politeness (1989: 34). If "all property" depended on "the chastity of women," as many people believed, then any account of ''a polite and commercial people," as Blackstone called them, must reckon with changes in the position of women during the period.

< previous page

page_195

next page >

< previous page

page_196

next page > Page 196

The Feminization of Culture Terry Eagleton introduces his book on Clarissa with a discussion of "a deep-seated 'feminization' of values" in the eighteenth century. I believe that this same process supported language change. "New forms of subjectivity" were swimming to the surface of British culture; so-called "feminine'' values, that had been relegated to the private realm, returned "to transvaluate the ruling ideologies themselves" (1982: 1315). It is not hard to see a connection between politeness as a cultural ideal and the new vitality of women's ideas, performances, and values in the second half of the century. The feminization of language and literature in the eighteenth century was noticed in the eighteenth century itself. In volume III of his History of English Poetry (1778) Thomas Warton concluded a chapter on the Elizabethans with these general reflections: [In 1600] the importance of the female character was not yet acknowledged, nor were women admitted into the general commerce of society. The effect of that intercourse had not . . . softened the severer tone of our versification with the levities of gallantry, and the familiarities of compliment, sometimes operating on serious subjects, and imperceptibly spreading themselves in general habits of style and thought. Warton goes on to pay tribute to "the great change of manners, which this assumption of the gentler sex, or rather the improved state of female education, has produced, by giving elegance and variety to life" (III 500). James Beattie ascribed the "refinement" of humour in the eighteenth century in part to women: "Nothing, perhaps, has more effectually softened conversation, by discountenancing indelicacy, and by promoting good humour, gentle manners, and a desire to please, than the society of the fair sex; an acquisition whereof neither the sages of Greece and Rome, nor the voluptuaries of Asia, ever knew the value" (1776: 701). Lord Kames recognized the feminization of British culture: "Without a mixture of the two sexes, society can never arrive at any degree of refinement, not to talk of perfection."1 A caveat: we cannot expect everything in the late eighteenth century to be feminized any more than we can expect everyone to be polite. In 1784 a traveler from France observed that "the young 1Sketches of the History of Man [1774], cued 1 S. Ross 1972: 171. Recent scholarship has enlisted Johnson too among late eighteenth-century "champions" of women: see Cafarelli 1992; Basker 1990.

< previous page

page_196

next page >

< previous page

page_197

next page > Page 197

people . . . hum under their breath, they whistle, they sit down in a large armchair and put their feet on another, they sit on any table in the room and do a thousand other things which would be ridiculous in France" (Porter 1982: 277). Ordinary people leading ordinary lives were far more likely to encounter violence, brutal poverty, and the physicalities of animal existence than they are now. Hogarth's "Gin Lane" is dated 1750, and Hogarthian crudities and cruelties were facts of life among rich and poor alike throughout our period. "The Hanoverians inherited a hard-working, hard-living, plain-speaking nation which only gradually became concerned with refinement'' (Porter 1982: 33). Nevertheless, one may distinguish between life and language: there were nasty vulgarities of every kind in late eighteenth-century British life, but one must look hard to find nasty, brutal, low-life language in late eighteenth-century British texts. Consider, for example, how throughly muffled in periphrasis and euphemism is the climax of the "My Fair Lady" episode in Peregrine Pickle (1751). Peregrine picks up a ragged country wench, has her cleaned up for cohabitation, and then decides to "produce her in company, as an accomplished young lady." A few weeks of coaching enable her to be admitted into the "most elegant parties," until one evening she catches one of her genteel playmates cheating at cards. This discovery burst open the flood-gates of her own natural repartee, twanged off with the appellations of b and w, which she repeated with great vehemence, in an attitude of manual defiance, to the terror of her antagonist, and the astonishment of all present: nay, to such an unguarded pitch was she provoked, that starting up, she snapt her fingers, in testimony of disdain, and, as she quitted the room, applied her hand to that part which was the last of her that disappeared, inviting the company to kiss it, by one of its coarsest denominations. (ch. 95) As the eighteenth century wore on, Smollett's fiction was repeatedly criticized for excessive vulgarity, but the only words in this passage that could possibly be considered vulgar are "twang" and the two censored epithets! I shall organize a discussion of cultural contexts for the new politeness around "feminization" because the term encompasses many different aspects of eighteenth-century life: it has a basis in philosophy and in social history; it helps us understand the new cult of sensibility, the new aestheticism, and new attitudes towards

< previous page

page_197

next page >

< previous page

page_198

next page > Page 198

writing and literature; and it makes explicit the strategic position of women in British culture after 1740 or 1750. Janet Todd proposes that in the later eighteenth century, by their association with "emotional, affective and familial qualities . . . [women] achieved an extraordinary centrality in the culture as a whole" (1989: 121). The language of ordinary English prose probably felt the effect of this concentration of cultural values, one of which was politeness. Frances Brooke in 1769 described politeness as "elegance, a lovely delicacy of mind" (quoted Spencer 1986: 123). What philosophers were writing in the mid-eighteenth century was certainly more congenial to a feminized culture than what they had written in the late seventeenth century. Locke's Essay concerning Human Understanding (1690) is in many respects austere and reductionist. It starts by eliminating innate ideas; it builds an epistemology out of minimal sensory experience. Locke himself describes its mode of thinking in retrospect as "semiotic," proto-structuralist. "For since the Things, the Mind contemplates, are none of them, besides it self, present to the Understanding, 'tis necessary that something else, as a Sign or Representation of the thing it considers, should be present to it: And these are Ideas" (72021). As for the passions, they "lead us into Error'' (739). The imagination trafficks in falsehood; and "all the artificial and figurative application of Words Eloquence hath invented, are for nothing else but to insinuate wrong Ideas, move the Passions, and thereby mislead the Judgment; and so indeed are perfect cheat" (508). Though Locke's Essay dictated most of the rules by which the game of philosophy would be played in Great Britain for many years, the reaction against Locke started with his student Shaftesbury, and in the 1750s Hume and Adam Smith both claim that the imagination is what enables us to feel sympathy, which in turn activates the social virtues, "beneficence and humanity, friendship and gratitude, natural affection and public spirit" (Hume 1751: 178). There is nothing in Locke comparable to the "most exquisite sensibility" with which "virtuous and humane" persons in Adam Smith feel "for the misery of others" (1759: 12).2 "Feminization" is something that happened to women, too, during the eighteenth century, whether they liked it or not. At the beginning of the century, "it was customary for women to work 2 For "feminization" as a current in the history of ideas, see Crane 1934; Bredvold 1962; Mullan 1988.

< previous page

page_198

next page >

< previous page

page_199

next page > Page 199

alongside men. Women traditionally did heavy 'men's' work, in the fields or in industry (for example, carrying baskets of coal on their backs up mineshafts)." But as the century wore on, women were more confined to the home, and less welcome in the workplace: a surplus of male laborers kept them out of the fields, men "moved into traditional female vocations such as midwifery and hair-dressing," and "as living grew more refined and the inner emotions of wifehood were cultivated, the lady's role as quartermistress of the house, as commissar of the laundry and maker of cheese, preserves, and poultices, devolved upon the shoulders of the fierce, key-jangling housekeeper. (During the century, more and more household items such as soap and starch were purchased rather than home-made, in any case.) The lady became freed to cultivate the more 'feminine' graces: her toilet, the arts of tea, shopping, spending pin-money, paying and receiving calls, philanthropy, the vapours, scents and sensibility, all encouraged and mirrored by that recent invention, the novel" (Porter 1982: 4647, 43). One could maintain that thanks to economic changes the materials for and resources of femininity became more abundant during the eighteenth century. J. H. Plumb observes that industrialization began with "consumer industries textiles, pottery, the buttons, buckles and pins of Boulton and Watt" (1973: 19). Daniel Roche has traced the evolution from 1700 to 1789 of a new culture of clothes: "in 1700, women were still wearing the centuries-old and unshapely multiple-piece outfit. When the [French] Revolution began, they would be wearing dresses, that is, shapely one-piece outfits that revealed (or hid) body contours"; ''lingères and seamstresses brought about the clothing revolution of the eighteenth century and created the culture of looks."3 "Feminine graces" may be supposed to have benefited from what we would now think of as the gradual "modernization" of ordinary living in the eighteenth century. For example, in the sixteenth century even the queen's living quarters in Hampton Court had a dirt floor, strewn with rushes. There is a famous letter of 1517 by Erasmus, exclaiming over the filth that can build up in dirt floors (Razzell 1994: 224). Until late in the seventeenth century it was common to mine dirt floors for saltpeter, a by-product of organic decay; that is, on the floors of bedrooms, dining halls, and butteries, in ordinary middle-class houses, mixed with the straw and dirt were 3 Roche quoted in Ranum 1991: 526. See also McKeon 1995: 298300.

< previous page

page_199

next page >

< previous page

page_200

next page > Page 200

feces, food, urine, beer. After the Great Fire in London (1666) and during massive construction in and around London over the next hundred years, earth floors were replaced by tile, wood, or brick. Peter Razzell suggests that this may have contributed to the decline of mortality in the eighteenth century, this plus inoculation against smallpox, replacement of seldom-changed wool underclothing with more washable cotton and linen, and the gradual elimination of malaria by draining wetlands. Can we think of the new cultivation of beauty as another thread in the feminization of British culture? "Beauty" as a philosophical category did not much tempt British thinkers of the seventeenth century, Hooker, Bacon, Hobbes, or Locke; but in Shaftesbury (1711) and Hutcheson (1725) and Kames (1762) ethics and aesthetics are closely interrelated. In the poetry of James Thomson we encounter new attitudes to natural beauty, closer to Shaftesbury than to Locke (Sambrook 1986: 103). Raymond Williams (1967) traces the modern concept of "culture" to the second half of the eighteenth century, to a reaction against industrialization and democratization. It was precisely in this period that the first concerts and art exhibits were opened to the public. (Middle-class) aesthetic values found flamboyant institutional expression in the well-publicized pleasures of Ranelagh and Vauxhall. These same years saw the establishment of a London auction market in painting and other artworks (Brownell 1989: 41). Women's rights, of course, were still a dream, but the smell of them was in the air. "If men without land but possessed of movable property" were "campaigning for admission to the political process, as they were by the 1760s," and if some radicals were demanding universal manhood suffrage, as they were by the 1780s, "what was there to stop single or widowed, and possibly in the end, even married women seeking access to similar rights?" (Colley 1992: 239). Family life in general was also being feminized during the eighteenth century. I do not entirely accept Lawrence Stone's ideas on the evolution of the family 1550 to 1800, but we can use them as a starting-place. According to Stone, sixteenth-century families were strictly patriarchal, and functioned as political units, whether bound by affective ties or not. Three generations or more lived together, plus maiden aunts and others. Relations among members of the nuclear family were often no closer than with other kin, intimacy was easy to avoid, privacy hard to come by, and deference

< previous page

page_200

next page >

< previous page

page_201

next page > Page 201

more common than love. Most children left home between the ages of seven and fourteen. But by the middle or end of the eighteenth century, it had become more usual for husbands and wives to choose each other; houses were designed with more private rooms to retire to; and families more frequently generated the intense emotional bonds among parents and children that we nowadays take for granted. Stone proposes that these changes favored the growth of "affective individualism." This was also the era of the "discovery of the child" (Ariès 1962), the time when people began to think of children as a kind of being different from adults, or at any rate the time when the first children's books were written and read in any number (Kramnick 1983). Stone's model probably does not apply to working-class people, but it seems to have had some truth for folk with money; and so it may apply more readily to the literate classes, those who read and wrote, than to the population at large. This picture of the family is almost certainly too happy to be true, so far as it concerns women. Demographic facts undermine the idea that families (except those of the nobility) were more extended in the sixteenth century than in the late eighteenth, and the stereotype of three generations under the same roof, plus miscellaneous cousins and aunts, was apparently never very common in England. From the sixteenth century to late in the nineteenth, the average household size held constant at roughly 4.75 individuals; only 10% of households included other kin than parents and children (Anderson 1980: 2324). Whatever opportunities men might have had for "affective individualism," women were steadily losing legal, commercial, and professional freedom (Staves 1990), and they had not yet begun to overcome the heavy liabilities of simple mortality: For women, the median age at death in 1711 was 35; in 1741, 32; in 1771, 38 (Anderson 1990: 27). Perhaps we can use the well-documented first marriage of Hester Thrale Piozzi as a corrective to sweeping generalizations about the feminization of family life in the second half of the eighteenth century. Mrs. Thrale was married at the age of twenty-two and by the time she was thirty-seven had born twelve children, four of whom survived beyond childhood. Her relation to Henry Thrale might almost have been invented as an exception to Stone's theories. It was strictly a marriage of convenience, for money on her family's side, for progeny on his. The reason Henry Thrale accepted a bride

< previous page

page_201

next page >

< previous page

page_202

next page > Page 202

with so little money was that he had been unable to persuade a wealthy woman of good family to live near his brewery, the basis for his fortune (it later became Courage Ltd.). So different were these two in temperament and interests that one wonders how much affection can ever have developed between them. She was sprightly, and brilliant, and puritanical in her morals; he was a phlegmatic rake. She was literary; he wanted to found a family. The marriage did not offer Mrs. Thrale much in the way of personal freedom. Not only did her husband forbid her to ride horseback (her favorite exercise) or to go to plays or balls or public entertainments; he also dictated the menus and supervised the cuisine; as she wrote in bitter retrospect, "his Wife was not to stink of the kitchen" (McCarthy 1985: 20). "She had been trained to literary ambitions, taught to value herself for her wit, and then delivered over to the only 'profession' women were allowed: pregnancy" (21). He made her wear a wig in the first years of the marriage, and he made her "pull off her wig and dress her own hair" in the fourteenth year of the marriage (Hyde 1977: 194). The Thrale family seems rather old-fashioned, by Stone's model. It was very patriarchal. Three generations were present in the same house for much of the first ten years of the marriage. Husband and wife had not chosen each other, were not in love. A great many children were born, and most of them died very young. Under these circumstances, should we expect parent-child relationships to be less intimate? More deference, less affection? It is true that in 1772, after having born eight children in eight years, exhausted by her recent pregnancy, by cares for the four children still alive, by the suffering of her mother (who was dying of cancer), and by the financial irresponsibility of her husband, Mrs. Thrale did not deeply lament the death of Penelope Thrale, a blue baby who lived just ten hours (Hyde 1977: 55). But that is the only sign I see in the "Family Book," Mrs. Thrale's journal on her children's progress, that she felt less affection for them than we do for ours in the 1990s. A characteristic entry narrates the illness of a child, her own anxiety, her hopes, her fears: Thursday 6: March 1777. Another Agony! Queeney was taken strangely ill yesterday Morning She went to bed the Night before in perfect Health, but Yesterday Morning a Fever seemed coming on with Nausea at the Stomach & Pain in the Head I durst do nothing of my own Accord, so bad has been my Success; but I drove away with her to [Dr.] Jebb, who

< previous page

page_202

next page >

< previous page

page_203

next page > Page 203

gave her an Emetick at Night & a rough Mercurial Purge today I think it will cure her if it does not I am more undone than ever I think however hers would be a Loss I could not outlive. (177) The picture as a whole is mixed: severe constraints on her activities, her affections, and her intellectual life; but an extraordinary circle of friends including many of the most distinguished men and women of letters of the age, and time to scribble voluminous journals and anecdotes. When Henry Thrale died, in 1781, his widow remarried for love. She traveled, and lived abroad. She published a series of books: Johnsonian anecdotes and letters, a travel book, a synonymy in two volumes, a political pamphlet, a history in two volumes. Family life may or may not have been feminized in the 1760s and 1770s, but intellectual life is a different matter. The cult of sensibility washed over Great Britain during just these two decades, following Richardson and taking cues from Jean Jacques Rousseau. Both La Nouvelle Héloise and Emile were published in 1760; both were immediately translated into English. Sentimentality flourished in the novel, not only in women's novels (Sarah Fielding, The Countess of Dellwyn 1759; Frances Sheridan, Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph 1761; Sara Scott, Millenium Hall 1762; Frances Brooke, Lady Julia Mandeville 1763, Susannah and Margaret Minifie, Lady Frances S 1763) but also in Sterne and Mackenzie. It is tempting to laugh at all those delicious tears and all those tremulous ladies and gentlemen, but the cult reflected some of the most cherished values of the age. And those values, which not only promoted polite (written) language but also most emphatically demoted low (oral) language, were associated with "the power of female elegance on the manners of men," as Hannah More put it, since "the general state of civilized society depends . . . on the prevailing sentiments and habits of women." Jean Hagstrum has illustrated the many connections between "sex and sensibility" in the mid-eighteenth century. It is, as Mary Poovey has shown, the ''polite lady" who most vividly and ubiquitously embodies this form of elegance. If every age has its favorite character-types, archetypes who embody its most urgent interests and its most cherished stereotypes (for Elizabethans, the witty courtier; in the later seventeenth century, the rake, the booby squire, or the lustful harridan; in the nineteenth, the Byronic hero or the angel in the house), then the polite lady is certainly a favorite of the second half of the eighteenth century. She is indispensable in the

< previous page

page_203

next page >

< previous page

page_204

next page > Page 204

"new kind of heroism based upon middle-class virtue rather than aristocratic honor."4 We can see how all this relates to language and style by cataloguing some of the principal virtues of the polite lady and her non-female hangers-on. Delicacy seems to have been more precious to these sensitive folk than faith, hope, or charity. Ann Van Sant defines sensibility as "an organic sensitivity dependent on brain and nerves and underlying a) delicate moral and aesthetic perception; b) acuteness of feeling, both emotional and physical; and c) susceptibility to delicate passional arousal" (1993: I; my italics). Clarissa Harlowe, we remember, was advertised by Richardson in his "Author's Preface" as a model of delicacy, and in chapter 6 we saw how nominal prose permits Clarissa to express delicacies of thought and feeling. She seems to possess all four of Claude Rawson's variants of this important virtue: heightened emotional susceptibility; restraint; tact or tactful considerateness; and physical weakness (1985: 34143). The modesty of polite ladies of sensibility was in the first place moderation in general, but it was also sexual timidity or self-consciousness, as Ruth Yeazell makes clear. If "the eighteenth century witnessed . . . a redefinition of virtue in primarily sexual terms" (Watt 1957: 157), the word "modesty" served as a label for the behavior required by that virtue. The modesty of polite ladies had to be both instinctive and learned or cultivated; it served as a sign both of chastity and of erotic readiness (Yeazell 1991: 6). Pamela is so modest that she blushes and stammers when her "master" gives her some stockings (Letter VII). Jean Coates Cleary plausibly suggests that it was fear of female sexuality ("a cultural neurosis'') that stiffened the code by which Pamela and her daughters so exquisitely lived (1995: xxvi). Is it likely that such delicate and modest women or the readers who admired them would relish the belching and farting and fleshy appetites of Arbuthnot's and Swift's prose? Of the polite lady "You'd swear, that so divine a Creature / Felt no Necessities of Nature" (this is Swift on Chloe); and the language that describes our animal nature had almost no existence for her. A familiar irony: the age was devoted to women, but it imprisoned and oppressed them. At exactly the same time that women were 4 Hannah More as cited Armstrong 1987: 90. See also Hagstrum 1980; Poovey 1984; Hughes 1982: 18384.

< previous page

page_204

next page >

< previous page

page_205

next page > Page 205

making a place for themselves in print culture, their "femininity" was being "constructed" ever more exclusively within the private sphere of the home. Kathryn Shevelow (1989) illustrates the ''simultaneous enfranchisement and restriction" of women in the evolution of the periodical press, starting with the "fair-sex-ing" of Addison and Steele, evolving independent voices in Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (The Nonsense of Common-sense, 173738), Eliza Haywood (The Female Spectator, 174446), and Charlotte Lennox (The Lady's Museum, 176061). But if women carved out places for themselves in the magazines and in the novel, the "sentimental family" was a "catastrophe" for women, locking them into a passive, subordinate role within the household. Mrs. Thrale's journals and letters demonstrate how little freedom remained for even a gifted and energetic woman. I see a paradox in the relation of feminization to the evolution of English prose as a whole in the eighteenth century: if "more polite" was more feminine during this period, and if "more written," according to popular stereotypical assumptions, was more masculine, then the drift of English prose went in both directions; it encouraged women's language by certain lights and suppressed it by others. Women's values historically, not essentially have been associated with the more immediate, personal, private, social, emotional environment of an oral culture; while the more remote, impersonal, public, individualistic, and ratiocinative environment of a print culture has been associated with men (Wilentz 1992). One result of the feminization of British culture is the birth of belles lettres. The term comes from France, where they ordered these matters if not better then certainly sooner. In rhetoric, in literary criticism, and in the cultivation of linguistic propriety, as in clothes and polite manners generally, Great Britain tended during this period to model itself after French originals. Though Charles Rollin's book was translated in 1737 as The Method of Teaching and Studying the Belles Lettres, I do not find much use of this term until the 1750s. It was almost certainly Charlotte Lennox who wrote the letter published in 1759 in the Lady's Magazine calling for a "feminine curriculum," exemplary novels, critical observations to guide one's "manners," and "belles lettres" (Shevelow 1989: 18081). The Pamela of volume II of her novel tells us that "an acquaintance with the Muses contributes not a little to soften the manners, and give a graceful and delicate turn to the imagination" (1741: 390). Anna Barbauld, looking back on this period from the perspective of 1810,

< previous page

page_205

next page >

< previous page

page_206

next page > Page 206

agrees with Pamela: "Many a young woman has caught from such works as Clarissa or Cecilia ideas of refinement and delicacy which were not, perhaps, to be gained in any society she could have access to" (1810: 13940). Nancy Armstrong contrasts the novel and other "feminine" genres, such as journals and letters, all of which were flourishing in the mid-eighteenth century, with the classical learning of masculinity; she cites Walter Ong on Latin as "a puberty rite" for men. Hugh Blair began to deliver his lectures on rhetoric and belles lettres in 1759, and Batteux was translated in 1761. I take as a major symptom of the feminization of culture what Stephen Cox calls "the argument of sensibility." "Persuasive discourse that tends to equate intellectual authority with the power to display or elicit emotional susceptibility" (1990: 64) is certainly not new in the eighteenth century, as any reader of Aristotle's Rhetoric can attest, but Cox shows that it entered into many of the most important texts of this period. Tom Paine accuses Burke of the argument of sensibility, but uses it himself in displaying the common people as victims of a predatory government. Hannah More lists the rhetorical devices of this argument in her well-known poem of 1782, "Sensibility": "exclamations, tender tones, fond tears" (v 337). There is, moreover, a considerable difference between what Aristotle says about argument by emotion and what Hugh Blair says about the role of the feelings in rhetoric and belles lettres. Aristotle calmly points out that the orator persuades when his audience is "roused to emotion by his speech" (1 ii). Blair's introductory lecture justifies the study of rhetoric and belles lettres on several grounds, the most important of which he saves for his penultimate paragraph: One thing is certain, . . . that without possessing the virtuous affections in a strong degree, no man can attain eminence in the sublime parts of eloquence. He must feel what a good man feels, if he expects greatly to move or to interest mankind. They are the ardent sentiments of honour, virtue, magnanimity, and publick spirit, that only can kindle that fire of genius, and call up into the mind those high ideas, which attract the admiration of ages; and if this spirit be necessary to produce the most distinguished efforts of eloquence, it must be necessary also to our relishing them with proper taste and feeling. (1783: 1 1314) The phrase "virtuous affections" may allude to Hume or Hutcheson, and the maxim on feeling what others feel may derive ultimately from Horace, but what Blair cooks up from these and other familiar ingredients is certainly an argument by sensibility, whatever else it is.

< previous page

page_206

next page >

< previous page

page_207

next page > Page 207

The expression and the arousal of emotion support Blair's argument in all five parts of this work, the lectures on taste, language, style, eloquence, and the species of composition. Finally, the feminization of culture affected men as well as women, of course. Masculine values were articulated less often in a heroic and more often in a domestic frame (Davidoff and Hall 1987: 1625). Evangelical religious movements inveighed against "the world" and honored retirement to hearth and home. As early as 1750, Johnson observed that "very few are involved in great events," and that "To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition" (Rambler, no. 68); some of the same words and attitudes turn up again when Johnson praises novels at the expense of epics, or when he ranks domestic over imperial tragedies and the "luminous" middle style of Addison over the ''cumbrous splendour" of Gray. The most popular poem of the later eighteenth century celebrated a sofa. The rakishness and brashness of male heroes in the novel before 1750 (Mr. B, Roderick Random, Tom Jones) are largely displaced by sentiment and benevolence in Charles Grandison (175354), the mature Jery Melford (1771), and Lord Orville (1778). "My Fair Lady": Pamela and Ladies of the Stage Although Peregrine Pickle's attempts to haul a woman out of the gutter and insert her into high society ended in blistering profanity, he was not the only Pygmalion of the mid-eighteenth century, and two others had better luck. Admittedly, Mr. B worked with better materials, since the fifteen-year-old Pamela was highly educable and had been given basic training by his mother. She comes to us, however, as a rustic maiden, the daughter of "Goodman" Andrews, ditch-digger. Pamela's family is not totally uneducated: her father started as a school-teacher, and knows psalmody, and can write a letter when needed. But he has no pretensions to a liberal education; moreover, his speech is uniformly homely and plain; unlike Pamela's, it does not change during the course of the book. Pamela's language in the first two hundred pages or so is much more oral and less polite than it becomes after she is betrothed.5 She expresses herself at first in colloquialisms, sometimes of a rural or homespun kind: 5 As many critics have observed: see, for example, Kinkead-Weekes 1973: 43034; Doody 1974: 32, 61.

< previous page

page_207

next page >

< previous page

page_208

next page > Page 208

you might have beat me down with a feather (12) I would have given my life for a farthing (16) Ay, and ashamed of it too (36) they will cost me a sigh, and a tear too (38) and when I had 'em all come home ["when they were all collected together"] (41) I was hurrying out with a flea in my ear (45) Some of these colloquialisms are proverbial or sententious: when a person will do wicked things, it is no wonder he will speak wicked words (35) bashful bodies owe themselves a spite (48) Well, one may see by a little, what a great deal means (49) if I would not do the good gentleman's work, why should I take his wages? (78) Her characteristic forms of asseveration (that is, the characteristic ways in which she asserts something strongly) are idiomatic and colloquial: one of the best ladies in the land (10) no better than he should be (9) Mrs. Jervis gives you a very good word (11) I could neither eat nor drink, for my part (27) [note the tautology here] he is reckoned worth a power of money (38; also 75) more miserable than enough (20) never poor creature sure was so flustered (80) 'Tis neither more nor less than inviting him . . . (34) Grammatical solecisms, or what were soon to be branded as grammatical solecisms by the normative grammarians, as we have noticed, are often archaisms, and though they are not very common in Pamela's early letters they do appear: like as I had read in a book (25) Mrs. Jervis . . . cried over me like as if she was my mother (26) don't your heart ache? (27) she was not sure neither (33; same construction pp. 37, 64) It does not become your poor servant to stay in your presence, sir, without your business required it (16) I resolved to tarry to see how things went, except he was to turn me away (19) my master is horrid cross (49) he was desperate angry (60)

< previous page

page_208

next page >

< previous page

page_209

next page > Page 209

Similarly, what appear to be archaisms might also be dialectal or provincial: he gave her a mort of good things (10) I did not matter it much (69; "it did not matter much to me") I went away with another-guise sort of heart (31) what have I said to her foolatum (38; Oxford English Dictionay lists foolatum with foolarum and foolane, marks them as obsolete, and gives three examples, one from 1684, this passage, and one from 1799) The manner in which clauses in Pamela's early letters are coordinated and subordinated beautifully complements her rustic idiom; she strings together long series of clauses with "and" and "but" and ''for," prattling away as artlessly as possible. Moreover, Pamela's language as originally imagined was more homely, rustic, and "low" than the language I have been describing. Richardson revised every one of the eight editions of Pamela published during his lifetime, and most of the changes he made were "designed to elevate or correct the language" (Eaves and Kimpel 1967: 64). The two editions most frequently read in this century, Everyman (1914) and Norton (1958), reprint neither the first edition nor the edition incorporating Richardson's final revisions. For example, the Pamela of the first edition, published 6 November 1740 (but dated 1741), wrote of a "Curchee" not a "Curt'sy." Her past participles are archaic, or at least old-fashioned, "had broke" and "had wrote," instead of "had broken" and "had written." Her "says I" and "thinks I" in the first edition become "said I" and "thought I" in later editions. In 1740 she told Mrs. Jervis "every bit and crumb of the matter"; later she tells "all that had passed." Compared to this oral and lower-class language from the first two hundred pages of the novel, Pamela's speech after she has secured Mr. B may strike us as astonishingly polite and genteel. We get some samples of her new refinement a hundred pages before the marriage ceremony itself. I count Pamela's return to Mr. B, interrupting her journey home, as the point where we can say that she has won the battle and become a gentlewoman. That afternoon we hear the first bits of courtly-genteel jargon from Pamela, in a speech marked by considerable clausal subordination: Sir, said I, I will not do any thing to disoblige you wilfully; . . . I am sorry, sir, Lady Davers, who loves you so well, should have incurred your

< previous page

page_209

next page >

< previous page

page_210

next page > Page 210

displeasure, and that there should be any variance between your honour and her. (269) A few hours later Pamela is correcting Mr. B in the matter of her occupations: sir, if you will give me leave, I will myself look into such parts of the family economy, as may not be beneath the rank to which I shall have the honour of being exalted, if any such there can be. (276) Abstractions, many of them courtly, take center stage in Pamela's polite speech: I see more and more how much I may depend on your honour and goodness to me. (282) I shall never enough acknowledge the value he is pleased to express for my unworthiness. (326) And some of them function as the grammatical agents in clauses: till your goodness emboldened me to look up to you. (298) how my heart is overwhelmed with his goodness! (386) It seems to me noteworthy both that Pamela acquires her new elegance of speech before she is actually married, and that her full powers of elegant articulation are not brought out except in response to polite lady visitors. Long before Mr. B has decoyed her to Lincolnshire, while she is still in Mrs. Jervis's care, four fine ladies pay a call "to see this paragon," and they praise her beauty and laugh at her blushes. Pamela finally speaks: I beg to withdraw; for the sense I have of my unworthiness renders me unfit for such a presence. (48) The extravagant self-humiliation here resembles politeness formulas in Urdu or another language that takes "face" seriously. Note that it is an abstraction, her sense of unworthiness, that does the work of predication in this sentence. After the betrothal, all the neighboring gentry come to view the girl they have heard so much about. Pamela insists on meeting them in her country clothes, and asks to remain standing while they sit; but Mr. B assures her that they will "indulge" her in sitting for his sake. She answers: Sir, I shall be proud to deserve their indulgence. Lady Darnford tells Pamela that they have all heard her story. She replies:

< previous page

page_210

next page >

< previous page

page_211

next page > Page 211

Madam, you have then heard what must make your kind allowance for me very necessary. Mrs. Peters pays Pamela a compliment, and gets one in return: You are very good, madam, to make me able to look up, and to be thankful for the honour you are pleased to do me. Lady Jones thanks Pamela for serving her with cakes. O, madam, I hope my good master's favour will never make me forget, that it is my duty to wait upon his friends. (300) These are the first four in a series of ten speeches by Pamela to her well-bred visitors, all in this style, all in the obsequiously nominal lingo of the courtier. A second famous "My Fair Lady" episode in the central decades of the eighteenth century is the metamorphosis of Kate Hardcastle in She Stoops to Conquer (Goldsmith 1773). Kate, as everyone remembers, decides to disguise herself as a servant girl to neutralize Marlow's neurotic fear of polite females. She reasons (correctly, as it turns out) that if she can surprise him into a natural male reaction to her ungenteel femaleness, he will fall in love before he knows it. Her disguise in the first place is sartorial, she having put on her "housewife's dress" (1773: 3) to please her father, but it is also linguistic: she wishes to be mistaken for a bar-maid. Not a vulgar slut of a bar-maid; her language is simple and unrefined: MISS HARDCASTLE: Perhaps the other gentleman called, sir? MARLOW: I tell you, no. MISS HARDCASTLE: I should be glad to know, sir. We have such a parcel of servants. MARLOW: No, no, I tell you. (Looks full in her face.) Yes, child, I think I did call. I wanted I wanted I vow, child, you are vastly handsome! MISS HARDCASTLE: O la, sir, you'll make one ashamed. MARLOW: Never saw a more sprightly malicious eye. Yes, yes, my dear, I did call. Have you got any of your a what d'ye call it in the house? MISS HARDCASTLE: No, sir, we have been out of that these ten days. MARLOW: One may call in this house, I find, to very little purpose. Suppose I should call for a taste, just by way of trial, of the nectar of your lips; perhaps I might be disappointed in that, too! MISS HARDCASTLE: Nectar! nectar! that's a liquor there's no call for in these parts. French, I suppose. We keep no French wines here, sir. (3334) Kate's disguise includes one malapropism ("obstropalous"), one old-fashioned colloquialism ("I'll warrant me"), a rural, or at least non-

< previous page

page_211

next page >

< previous page

page_212

next page > Page 212

fashionable, affirmative ("Ay"), and several more or less rustic asseverations: I want no such acquaintance, not I. There's not a screen or a quilt in the whole house but what can bear witness to that. (3335) All this in Act III; in Act IV Kate wishes to be mistaken for a poor but honest relation of the Hardcastles, not a barmaid by birth, and her speech is noticeably more polished: "I hope, sir, I have done nothing to disoblige you. I should be sorry to affront any gentleman who has been so polite, and said so many civil things to me" (42). By Act V, Marlow is in love with her, and she can resume the speech proper to her rank in society. As spokesperson for the most sophisticated gentility in the play, her language is super-polite: I must remain contented with the slight approbation of imputed merit; I must have only the mockery of your addresses, while all your serious aims are fixed on fortune. (57) Marlow immediately notices the change in her language, remarking that "What at first seemed rustic plainness, now appears refined simplicity," and in the dialogue that follows Kate demonstrates her refinement with an elevated vocabulary, asyndeton, anaphora, rhetorical questions and antitheses: No, Mr. Marlow, I will not, cannot detain you. Do you think I could suffer a connection, in which there is the smallest room for repentance? Do you think I would take the mean advantage of a transient passion, to load you with confusion? Do you think I could ever relish that happiness which was acquired by lessening yours? Kate's language here links her with the other wellborn young lovers in the play, Marlow, Hastings, and Miss Neville; these four contrast both with their parents and with the alehouse crew, Tony Lumpkin and friends. I think one can argue that the language of early eighteenth-century stage heroines, though not rustic like Kate's in her character as bar-maid, is nevertheless a good deal cruder than the language of stage heroines after 1770. Audiences in the first two decades of the century hankered after something different from Restoration comedy, and so heroines become less witty and less susceptible, but their language is certainly not as long-windedly polite as it later became.

< previous page

page_212

next page >

< previous page

page_213

next page > Page 213

For example, the nearest Richard Steele comes to a polite lady in The Tender Husband (1705) is Mrs. Clerimont, but her notion of refinement is perky, colloquial, and à la mode. Seated before the mirror, she tells her maid, "Oh, Bless me, Jenny, I am so Pale, I am afraid of my self I have not laid on half Red enough What a Dough-bak'd thing was I before I improv'd my self, and Travell'd for Beauty." Contrast with this the orotund meditations of Charlotte Rusport in Cumberland's The West Indian (1783): "O Charles, Charles, rich in every merit and accomplishment, whom may you not aspire to? And why think you so unworthily of our sex, as to conclude there is not one to be found with the sense to discern your virtue, and generosity to reward it?" The difference is not only vocabulary nothing as low as "Doughbak'd thing'' but also syntax: short, exclamatory clauses, paratactically related, vs. longer clauses in careful subordination, with an elegant antithesis thrown in. The nearest we get to politeness in Farquhar's The Recruiting Officer (1706) is Melinda, the heiress, and though she is set up and displayed in Act I scene ii as a refined young lady, she can still accuse her friend Sylvia of having "the constitution of a horse," and tease her about being tired of the virginity "that you can't so handsomely get rid of in petticoats, as if you were in breeches" (26263). How differently Lady Morden speaks of love in Thomas Holcroft's Seduction (1787): "My heart sighs for an acquaintance, a mate, that, like itself, is subject to all the sweet emotions of sensibility! Yes, it was the first wish of my soul to find this correspondent heart! A heart beating with the same ardour, vibrating to the same sensations, panting for the same pleasures, shrinking from the same pangs; pliant, yet firm; gentle, yet aspiring; passionate, yet pure!" Though deep, yet purple; though gentle, yet dull. Consider, finally, the low words, the slang, and the unabashed physicality of Mrs. Lovely's reproach to Prim in Susanna Centlivre's A Bold Stroke for a Wife (1718): "What were the emotions of your spirit [he boasts of his spirituality and purity] when you squeezed Mary by the hand last night in the pantry, when she told you you bussed so filthily? Ah, you had no aversion to naked bosoms when you begged her to show you a little, little, little bit of her delicious bubby" (31). Changes in sensibility in the next fifty or sixty years are startlingly illustrated by differences between that and the speech of Lady Davenant in Richard Cumberland's The Mysterious Husband of 1783;

< previous page

page_213

next page >

< previous page

page_214

next page > Page 214

here too we have a virtuous woman reproaching an over-eager lover: "That I have lov'd you, Dormer, and still love, superior to disguise, accept my free confession; but when example meets me of the precipitancy of passion in Davenant's case; of the deceitfulness of gratitude in Marianne's; I will be guided only by esteem, and on your delicacy, on your discretion in this mournful crisis will depend, if that affection which I now acknowledge shall subsist or cease." The evolution of the polite lady did not wait till 1760 to begin, however, and we can see traces of the language of polite sensibility in Richard Steele and even in Colley Cibber. Lady Easy in The Careless Husband (1703) is far more genteel than Mrs. Clerimont, Melinda, or Mrs. Lovely; and Indiana in The Conscious Lovers (1722) undergoes raptures of obsequiousness that anticipate those of the 1780s. Nevertheless, in general, late eighteenth-century heroines use politer language than earlier heroines do, despite the variety of comic forms in this period.6 Politeness in the Dictionaries As footnote to chapter 8 and appendix to chapter 9, here are a few paragraphs on the growth of certain kinds of verbal politeness in eighteenth-century dictionaries. One noticeable difference between early and late eighteenth-century dictionaries is that the language they record and the language they use themselves is politer later in the century. Kersey (1708) defines catheter as "a Probe us'd by Surgeons to thrust up the Yard." Ash (1775): "An instrument to be introduced into the bladder in order to search for the stone, or discharge a suppression of urine." Bailey (1721) defines souse as ''the Offal of Swine"; Johnson (1735) defines it as "1. Pickle made of salt. 2. Any thing kept parboiled in salt-pickle." Kersey defines buggery as "the coupling of one Man with another, or of a Man or Woman with a brute Beast." Bailey adds an etymology but changes only one word in Kersey's definition, substituting "copulation" for "coupling." Ash 6 For example, less polite ladies in the first two decades of the century include Dorinda and Mrs. Sullen in Farquhars' The Beaux' Stratagem (1707), Lady Truman in Addison's The Drummer (1715), and Lady Woodvil in Gibber's The Non-Juror (1717). More polite ladies in the last three decades of the century include Julia Languish in Sheridan's The Rivals (1775), Lady Frances Touchwood in Hannah Cowley's The Belle's Stratagem (1782), Mrs. Irwin in Elizabeth Inchbald's Every One has his Fault (1793), and Emily Tempest in Cumberland's The Wheel of Fortune (1795). On the variety of comic forms, see R. Hume 1983: 21444.

< previous page

page_214

next page >

< previous page

page_215

next page > Page 215

whisks biological facts under a carpet of general socio-philosophical terms: buggery is for him "An unnatural intercourse." To bugger in Ash is even vaguer: "to commit an unnatural crime." Johnson omits the word, both noun and verb. On the other hand, Kersey omits piss and pizzle, but both are in Johnson, supported with literary quotations from Dryden, Shakespeare, and Pope; and of course Ash follows suit.7 The definitions of certain words may also seem to have been feminized as dictionaries evolved from Kersey to Ash. Delicacy in Kersey is "Daintiness, Niceness," and in Bailey it is the same two words plus "Tenderness" and "Delicateness." Johnson distinguishes nine different senses of the word, including ''3. Softness; feminine beauty," "5. Neatness; elegance of dress," "6. Politeness; gentleness of manners," and "9. Weakness of constitution," with quotations from Milton, Sidney, Dryden, and Temple. Ash lists his different senses promiscuously, without numbers: "Daintiness in eating, that which is grateful to the senses, softness, feminine beauty; nicety, accuracy; neatness of dress, politeness, complaisance of behaviour; weakness of constitution, tenderness; indulgence, mercifulness." The influence of Johnson here is obvious, and Ash has added at least one meaning that Johnson missed; more important, both Johnson and Ash attempt to do justice to the new complexity and cultural resonance of the idea or ideal behind the word. Sledd and Kolb quote the 1671 editor of Skinner's Etymologicon as hoping "that Englishmen will some day emulate politer nations, establish an academy, and make English the rival of Latin by freeing it of solecisms and improprieties" (1955: 5). Dictionaries were apparently, in this sense, an instrument of polite learning. A gloss on this sense of the word polite is furnished by the title-page of John Trusler's The Difference between Words Esteemed Synonymous, published in 1766: "Useful, to all, who would, either, write or speak, with Propriety, and, Elegance." The assumption seems to have been that using words according to their accepted meanings was a form of politeness. However quaint or even snobbish this may seem, it fed into an ideal of civilizedness that meant a great deal to a great many thoughtful people of the time. 7 For "low bad" words in Johnson, see Siebert 1986.

< previous page

page_215

next page >

< previous page

page_216

next page > Page 216

Politeness as a Universal in Language If "orality" was rediscovered in the 1960s, as we suggested in chapter 8, "politeness" arrived in 1978 with the publication of Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson's essay on the topic, an essay influential enough to be reissued in 1987, with a new fifty-page introduction covering research from the intervening nine years. Brown and Levinson's work was (and is) exciting because it supplies evidence that something like politeness is almost a universal in languages world-wide, because it is based on a handful of common-sense axioms and assumptions about human behavior (for example, the desire for approval), and because it explains all sorts of curious maneuverings in language. "Please bring your ennobling presence to the hut of this dustlike person sometime" is a normal invitation in the Urdu of Delhi Muslims (179; see also Lakoff 1973). As Brown and Levinson define it, politeness modifies the wording of speech acts, not only invitations and apologies but also suggestions, promises, requests, reminders, disagreements, and many others. Languages to which the Brown and Levinson model seems to apply include not only English, German, Italian, and other European languages but also Japanese, Chinese, Tamil (South Asian), Tzeltal (Mayan), Apache, Athabaskan, and many others. Brown and Levinson define politeness in language as an expression of reciprocal needs, the need for approval and the need not to be impeded or hindered. The dynamic for these two needs is contained in a single word or concept, "face": we practice some forms of politeness to enhance positive face (approval) and others to reduce negative face (impedance, restriction). "Face" comes into the picture whenever we have to perform a "face-threatening act" (FTA). For example, someone who has to borrow money from an acquaintance is threatening the face of that person by proposing to take his money, so the borrower can proactively "pay respect, deference, to the addressee in return for the FTA, and can thereby avoid incurring (or can thereby lessen) a future debt'' (72). Politeness in this case may take the form of an apology, which conveys deference by exaggerating the distance between borrower and lender: "I'm terribly sorry to bother you, but . . .," or "I hate to be a nuisance, but . . . " Brown and Levinson name three essential variables in the operations of politeness: power (the difference in power between speaker and hearer); distance (the distance in status

< previous page

page_216

next page >

< previous page

page_217

next page > Page 217

or rank between speaker and hearer); and risk to speaker's or hearer's face. Some FTAs are more threatening than others. A major portion of Brown and Levinson's book (91227) describes and exemplifies the strategies of politeness in English, Tamil, and Tzeltal: fifteen strategies of positive politeness (communicating to hearer that he or she is approved); ten strategies of negative politeness (addressing hearer's need to be "unimpinged upon"); and fifteen strategies of "off-record" politeness (fudging responsibility for the FTA) (see charts: 102, 131, 214). It is not necessary to accept every detail of their analysis, or even to agree with their theory of the nature of politeness, to see that the Brown-Levinson model helps explain what we mean when we say that late eighteenth-century prose is politer than early. In addition, it sheds light on one strategy of eighteenth-century politeness, courtly-genteel language. Late eighteenth-century prose enjoys circumlocution and periphrasis, which can be understood as a way of decreasing negative face. It uses fewer low, physical words, more abstractions, and more polysyllabic, fancy words; it prefers a nominal style; it enjoys being rhetorical in an obvious way. "Nominalization" is Brown and Levinson's strategy number nine of negative politeness (2079). Citing Ross's continuum from verb-ness to nouniness (1972; see p. 123 above), they link degrees of negative politeness with formality and with nominalization; they do not use the term, but in their examples "deverbal nouns" replace finite verbs. It would seem to follow that in many contexts abstract nouns are more polite than concrete, since they are more formal and impersonal (Strategy number eight: State the FTA as a general rule). Strategy number seven of negative politeness is to impersonalize both speaker and hearer (190). Passive voice is therefore preferred to active in conventional formulas of politeness ("you are cordially invited" not "we are inviting you": 194). A central strategy of politeness, one that works both positively and negatively, is to give deference (17887); it is built into the grammar of many languages (Japanese, Korean, Javanese) in the form of honorifics. In English, fancy words (where a plain one would do) may perform some of the same functions as honorifics. Brown's and Levinson's examples: dine is more respectful than eat, bestow than give, volume than book (181). The polysyllabic and high-falutin vocabulary of late eighteenth-century writers who seem to delight in fancy words can be interpreted as a form of politeness.

< previous page

page_217

next page >

< previous page

page_218

next page > Page 218

Strategy number ten for off-record FTAs is to use rhetorical questions, as a way of blurring responsibility for a request or criticism or excuse (22324). While rhetorical questions seem to be more common in polite Tzeltal than in polite English, they fall into a general category of politenesses indirection that accounts for some of the obvious rhetoricalness of late eighteenth-century prose. The theatricality of such rhetorical devices as apostrophe, epanorthosis (selfcorrection), aposiopesis (self-interruption), and paralepsis (pretend not to mention) is often a way of not saying something directly. My 1986 book identified a way of writing called "courtly-genteel prose." "A defining characteristic of courtly-genteel prose is its reliance on a small number of abstract, almost technical terms derived from the social environment of the court. A courtier, simply by being a courtier, is obliged to serve his noble lord, part of whose responsibilities in turn are to extend favor to those of his henchmen who deserve it and to confer honor in return for suitable quantities of merit. In this relationship, superior and inferior alike have an interest in maintaining a balance between duties owed and obligations incurred. We recognize courtly-genteel prose by its reliance on the words italicized here, plus a few related ones. They are the names of variables in terms of which status is conferred and manipulated; they are verbal counters for the politics of dependency. Since the will or pleasure of a noble lord dominates the court, much of the action in courtly-genteel prose is subordinated to these two abstractions or to other more splendid attributes of the sovereign in question, to his or her goodness, to 'his grace' or 'her majesty' " (69). Courtly-genteel language became more or less obligatory between approximately 1550 and 1800 in letters of high friendship, in courtesy books, in diplomatic negotiations (by letter and petition), in love and courtship, in the language of dueling and chivalry, in homily and prayer perhaps because in all these contexts politeness is more or less obligatory. A very large number of texts from these categories and others manipulate status in courtly-genteel terms, and some of the politeness of late eighteenth-century prose derives from the use of courtly-genteel language. Most of Pamela's ten speeches to the neighboring gentry, when she has been put on display as his fiancée by Mr. B, are courtly obeisances of an exaggeratedly polite kind: "Sir, your goodness will make me, every day, worthier of the honour the ladies do me; and when I can persuade myself that I am more

< previous page

page_218

next page >

< previous page

page_219

next page > Page 219

worthy of it than at present, I shall with great joy embrace all the opportunities they will be pleased to give me" (301). Brown and Levinson's theories may explain why courtly-genteel language spread into contexts that on the face of it have little to do with the court, and why they persisted long after the British court had ceased to be a direct model for politeness. Brown and Levinson can tell us why courtly-genteel phraseology may have seemed more polite than other polite formulas or conventions. Brown and Levinson compute the "weightiness" of a face-threatening action by adding distance in status between speaker and hearer (D), to power differential between them (P), to risk posed by the action (R). That is, the greater the discrepancies between speaker's and hearer's status and power, the more politeness is needed. If courtly-genteel language postulates an unusually high D and P, that means that it is unusually polite. Several of the key terms of courtly-genteel language presume a huge distance (D) between speaker and addressee. To be someone's servant is to occupy a very subordinate rank in comparison with that person. Those to whom we owe duty, by definition, are far above us in rank or status. Other key terms create a fiction of enormous power in the addressee, coupled with a fiction of weakness in addressor: a favor is the token of power; an honor can only be conferred by someone in power. The obligations that are generated and noticed so frequently in courtly-genteel style signal both distance between the obliged and the obliger, and a relation of dependency (powerlessness). The special terminology of courtly-genteel language may also be classified as an "in-group" jargon, use of which is strategy number four of positive politeness, while it is also obviously a way of showing deference (negative number five). Finally, the compliments that play such a key role in courtly-genteel exchanges may be understood as ways of attending to the addressee's wants (positive strategy number one). Although the Brown-Levinson theory of politeness has been highly influential,8 it has also been criticized on a number of counts. It fails to recognize how sensitive to immediate context polite utterances are: in some contexts "close the window" is not a face8 See R. Brown and Gilman 1989 for a fascinating application of Brown-Levinson to polite speeches in Shakespeare.

< previous page

page_219

next page >

< previous page

page_220

next page > Page 220

threatening act but merely a directive; in others "Do you think I could possibly prevail upon you to close the window?" is not polite but sarcastic and insulting, even with D, P, and R held constant (Watts et al. 1992: 8, slightly modified). It seems better adapted to status-conscious cultures than to egalitarian cultures. Other theories of politeness may make better allowance for the kind of cultural values that we ascribed to the Scottish rhetoricians in chapter 6. According to Bruce Fraser, "social-norm" theories clarify the fact that a higher degree of formality signifies greater politeness in some societies but not in all (1990: 221). Social norms, as Richard Watts notes, play a role in language standardization, and language standardization is one of the things that was happening during the decades when English was becoming more polite.9 9 See Watts et al. 1992: 5, 910; Brown and Levinson 1987: 16; Ehlich 1992; Sell 1992.

< previous page

page_220

next page >

< previous page

page_221

next page > Page 221

Chapter 10 Style and Rhetoric She had five big wigwams aboard, wide apart, and an open camp fire in the middle, and a tall flagpole at each end. There was a power of style about her. (Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: 1885) Style as a Mode of Understanding "Style" is a word that surfaces when we are talking about different means to a single end. Style, like "character," is a construct; it has no "objective correlative" (Ackerman 1962: 228). Style is not so much a feature, like periodicity or low words, as a meta-feature, referring always to something "about" a feature. We can locate style in almost every branch of human endeavor cooking, clothes, cars, computer programs, estate planning, tennis serves, weddings. The anthropologist A. L. Kroeber observed that ''we can speak of styles of governing, of waging war, of prosecuting industry or commerce, of promoting science, even of speculative reasoning" (1923: 137). All human cultures, no matter how harsh their environment or limited their resources, create stylish objects and practice stylish actions. Different means to a single end: style is usually manner not matter, form not function or content how you grip the tennis racket (not whether the ball goes in or out); how a fabric is cut and dyed (not whether it protects you from rain or snow); how a clarinetist phrases that melody (as opposed to what melody she chooses to play). This is a common-sense idea of style, the one that gets the most play in dictionary entries on the word. When we can infer that someone has paid a great deal of attention to how an action was performed, or how an object was constructed, we sometimes call that action or object "stylish." It was not merely the size of the "monstrous long raft" in Huck Finn that gave it "a power of style." The style that Kroeber defines as "specific method" can become the style that

< previous page

page_221

next page >

< previous page

page_222

next page > Page 222

Huck is talking about if there is enough of it to be unmistakable and distinctive as in the style and stylishness that fashion magazines seek out and sell. Nevertheless, confusingly, matter may play a major role in manner, substance in style. "The what of one sort of doing may be part of the how of another" (Goodman 1975: 799). Biblical subject matter is part of what places an oratorio in baroque stylistic traditions; it wouldn't be baroque if it used words from a cookbook, or if it had no words at all. The Hemingway manner without the Hemingway matter is ludicrous, as any number of parodies have shown. It is I think revealing that the more severely practical and utilitarian an operation is, the less likely we are to conceive of the "different means" that may promote its ends in terms of style. Engineers and building contractors discuss different means to such ends as making a leaky roof waterproof without talking about style. We can assess various ways of traveling from New York to Boston, or of publicizing a concert, or of increasing profitableness, without talking about style. On the other hand, none of these operations roofs, travel, publicity, and profit is always and inevitably unstylish; it is possible to discuss style in them. Therefore, the domain of style is not the same as the domain of function, but they overlap in various ways. Almost any feature or attribute may count for style-studies, when that feature is looked at as an aspect of manner, of how the phenomenon in question is organized: substance, form, tempo, cost, orchestration, audience, intention, medium, channel, size, efficiency, grammar, gender, origin, age, location, or personnel. Until these features are looked at or thought of as features of style, however, they are not features of style: features of substance, form, tempo, etc. are inherent in the operation or object that has style, whereas style itself is not. It is a meta-attribute, and depends on someone's consciousness of the possibility of being organized as different means to an end. "The concept of style," as Charles Rosen puts it, "does not correspond to an historical fact but . . . creates a mode of understanding" (1972: 19). The concept of style makes its first appearance in western thought not in drama or history but in rhetoric, in selfconscious discourse about discourse itself. There must be possibilities for more or less elegant variation in something that is to qualify as the object of stylestudies. If there were only one way to skin a cat, we could not develop an analysis of

< previous page

page_222

next page >

< previous page

page_223

next page > Page 223

cat-skinning styles. If only one poem had ever been written in all human history, it would be hard to talk about its poetic style. It follows that style cannot come into existence unless there is the possibility of choice among different means to a single end. Not necessarily conscious choice, as Leonard Meyer (1989) points out; but at some point as the object or event with style evolves, it turns out to be different from other possible versions of the same thing. As a result, most style-studies are comparative, either explicitly or by derivation; stylistic features are not worth talking about unless they vary from a norm or from comparable features somewhere else. They must fall into a pattern that differs from other comparable patterns. Because we cannot think about style except in a comparative context, the absence of a given stylistic feature may itself count as a central or even a distinguishing stylistic feature (Meyer 1989: 4647). This fact also justifies and constrains quantitative approaches to style-studies; it is hard to defend one thing as having "more X" than another except by counting X's. If style feeds into our understanding of the way our actions or products are organized, it is not a peripheral or trivial concept. Everybody has style, or likes or dislikes a style, or encounters it on the way to work. Style-studies have enhanced our consciousness of cultural values; they have influenced our sense of cultural history, They feed our creativity, our capacity to break free of convention and accepted authority. It was sensitivity to style that enabled pioneers of modernism such as Picasso and Braque to respond to formal patterns in African sculpture that did not fit traditional western generic norms (Schapiro 1953: 292). Linguistics recognizes style as a level of variation nearer to the surface of language than phonology or syntax. Edward Sapir long ago pointed out that "it makes a great deal of difference for the development of style if the language can or cannot create compound words, if its structure is synthetic or analytic, if the words of its sentences have considerable freedom of position or are compelled to fall into a rigidly determined sequence" (1921: 226). William Labov's device for eliciting real street language from his urban informants depended on the distinction between formal and informal styles. He asked them if they had ever been in danger of death. Since every single answer was affirmative, all his respondents became caught up in their narratives and forgot the standards of correctness and refinement they had been inhibited by earlier in the interview; that is, they switched from formal

< previous page

page_223

next page >

< previous page

page_224

next page > Page 224

to informal styles (1966: 90135). Dell Hymes defined a speech community as "a set of styles," and a style as "a way or mode of doing something" (1974: 434); he encountered verbal style as a linguistic anthropologist, and saw style as an alternative to grammar, which "came into existence to dissect and teach just that language, or language-variety, that embodied valued cultural tradition," whereas many patterns of language "can be accommodated only in terms of deviations from the privileged accounts'' (433). The idea of style as variation from a norm flourished among Prague School linguists (e.g., Mukarovsky 1930), and has had a vigorous revival over the past thirty years in sociolinguistics (for summaries, see Fasold 1990). "An individual's choice of speech style has symbolic value and interpretive consequences," writes John Gumperz; different styles play a role in "creating and maintaining the subtle boundaries of power, status, role and occupational specialization" (1982: 6). In his book on Structure and Style in Javanese, Joseph Errington decided to handle the "speech levels" that distinguish Javanese culture as "styles" because they are both fluid and integrated into conduct and behavior: "Javanese speech styles count as stylistic subsystems that are superimposed on the semantico-referential apparatus of the language" (1988: 3, 1112). Elizabeth Traugott and Suzanne Romaine carry this line of thinking into "socio-historical" linguistics; they link style with social class by asking, "What prestige norms apply in a given community at a particular time, and how do they change?" (1985: 18). Sperber and Wilson's "relevance theory" (1986) promises to shed light on a wide range of stylistic phenomena, from stress and word order to irony, metaphor, and rhetorical tropes (such as epizeuxis). They argue that communication, including communication in natural languages, should be understood not only as a matter of encoding and decoding messages but also as a matter of "producing and interpreting evidence" (2). The semiotic model of language is as old as Aristotle, but an inferential model works better for "utterances with the same linguistically determined truth conditions" which do not "have identical contextual effects" (202), that is, for stylistic variation. A Rhetorical Frame Literary history and literary criticism can hardly avoid style-studies if style is defined as broadly as this. When we notice patterns in the

< previous page

page_224

next page >

< previous page

page_225

next page > Page 225

way a poem is put together, when we point out controlling metaphors or discuss rhyme schemes or prosody, we are studying style. If we characterize a person in a novel or a play by reference to her inarticulacy or her pomposity or her wit, we are stepping into the arena of style. Much of what we may find to say about language in literature concerns itself with words as the means to an end, i.e., with style; but also, more generally, "the world" of literature (or of ordinary living: Goodman 1978) is what "the set of conceptual and linguistic conventions generating its significance at any point" make it into (Bogel 1984: 163). Style and substance are convex and concave surfaces of language itself. We can organize verbal style-studies by classifying them within a rhetorical frame: how are verbal features related to author, to audience, and/or to the world outside the text? Traditional rhetoric recommends that the words of a discourse be chosen and adjusted in relation to all three of these parameters. That is (in part) what ethos, pathos, and logos mean. This frame supplies us with categories for style-studies, seven of them at least. (In the rough and tumble of actual stylestudies, two or more of these seven approaches are usually combined.) Under ethos: (1) "Expressive" approaches focus on relations between authors or speakers and the language they produce. Expressive style-studies are interested in emotions, states or qualities of mind and character belonging to authors or personae and detectable in style. (2) "Signature" theories of style, a sub-set of expressive theories, ignore character and use style simply as a way of identifying the source of the language, the person or the period or the group that produced it. Under pathos: (3) "Affective" style-studies concentrate on relations between text and audience, or utterance and hearer; they ask what kind of response that arrangement or choice of words evokes. Under logos, the relationships between a certain piece of language and the outside world may be studied in three ways: (4) The "iconic" view of style dwells on ways that language can resemble the world, as in onomatopoeia. (5) The "veridical" approach studies ways that language conveys true or false information about the outside world. (6) Since language is often taken to reflect something about the real-

< previous page

page_225

next page >

< previous page

page_226

next page > Page 226

world context in which it is used, we can study it as an "index" of that context, for example as a reflection of Modernism or of French national character. (7) And, finally, we can study language apart from all these contexts and relations, study its formal patterns, the way it organizes itself into (for example) a sonnet or a villanelle. M. H. Abrams (The Mirror and the Lamp 1953) sorted literary critical schools in terms of the four variables that produce these seven forms of style-study (author, audience, text, outside world), and James Kinneavy based his theory of discourse on a similar division. The celebrated six-member schema of Roman Jakobson ("Linguistics and Poetics" 1961) starts with approximately the same four elements and adds two more from communications theory, channel and code. Other frames are possible, e.g., James Bennett's in his bibliography of 1986 (theory; period/nation/genre; author; text; reader). We study style as expression when we make a connection between the language of an utterance or text and its author(s), whether this author is actual or implied. This is probably the commonest approach to style, and over the centuries scholars have inferred a remarkable number of different qualities and attributes in authors and speakers, on the basis of their language and style: character or personality in the writer or speaker; personality in fictional characters; mentality or mind-set; emotions and feelings; individual identity (for purposes of attribution); group identity (period styles; stylistic schools). "The style is the man" or the woman (as in Altieri 1987; Robinson 1985). Berel Lang, in a sophisticated discussion of style as expression, cites two advantages of this approach: it conceives of matter and manner as two "modalities of a single and common process"; and it directs our attention to ''either the prospect or the actual experience of a human source" for style of any kind (1978: 724, 729). Style, the word, is kin to stylus, the engraving instrument, which "deposits something of its own character on the surface it scores," according to Arthur Danto: what is presented to viewer or reader or listener is not just a message but a sample of oneself "learning to recognize a style is like learning to recognize a person's touch or his [or her] character" (1981: 97, 207). John Richetti insists that style is "not simply a number of qualities a text possesses but an author's activity visible in a text" (1983: 14). Walker Gibson's book on modern American prose styles "infers a personality" from various texts,

< previous page

page_226

next page >

< previous page

page_227

next page > Page 227

including "a laconic, hard-bitten, close-talking fellow" as speaker of Hemingway's most Hemingway-ish fiction (1966: 8, 32). Leo Spitzer believed that "mental creativity immediately inscribes itself into the language," and assumed that style-studies can "get at the soul of the writer in his language" (1948: 15, 11). An expressive theory of style underlies many of Johnson's literary judgments: ''in Milton every line breathes sanctity of thought, and purity of manners" (1779: 345). Many of the best literary style-studies choose to talk mainly about language and the traits of character it can reveal (Barish 1960; Chatman 1972; Thompson 1984). The style of speeches of characters in novels and plays is routinely interpreted as a clue to their feelings and personalities. Alexander Pope declared that if the speeches in Shakespeare's plays "had been printed without the very names of the persons, I believe one might have applied them with certainty to every speaker" (1725: 162); and hundreds of Shakespeare's editors and readers have remarked on similar correlations between style and character. Anne Barton writes that "The prose of Launce [of Two Gentlemen of Verona], like that of Falstaff and Benedick later, seems to have been created by the character himself, to represent his particular and natural style of expression" (1974: 146). Verbal style may express cognitive style. Janel Mueller's discussion of compound sentences in early modern English cites recent experimental work in the psychology of language that invites us "to consider how syntax serves and perhaps also projects the functional capacities and limits of our minds" (1984: 6). One of T. S. Eliot's most influential essays spends thirteen pages trying to define the "intellectual quality," the distinctive tough-mindedness of Andrew Marvell's poetry as embodied in his versions of metaphysical style. W. K. Wimsatt, despite his opposition to intentional and affective tallacies, saw Samuel Johnson's characteristic inversions as "intrinsically an expressive word order. [They are] part of his inclination to logic, his interest in the pattern of premises and conclusions" (1941: 71). Ian Watt explicates Henry James's style as a reflexion of "the Jamesian habit of mind . . . a supremely civilised effort to relate every event and every moment of life to the full complexity of its circumambient conditions" (1960: 275). A selfconscious and skilled writer can choose to revise the qualities of mind his or her style expresses, as David Hume did in revising the Treatise as Essays and as Enquiries (Sitter 1982: 4145).

< previous page

page_227

next page >

< previous page

page_228

next page > Page 228

Style as expression can reveal something about the emotions of the author or speaker. W. K. Wimsatt argued in 1946 that "even a short lyric poem is dramatic"; therefore we cannot impute the thoughts and emotions of its "dramatic speaker" (persona) to the author, unless we are engaged in "biographical inference'' not literary criticism. But biographical inference is exactly what a great many interpreters are engaged in when they approach a given discourse as the direct expression of the author's or speaker's feeling. (And these inferences can tell us something about the text itself.) The style of a personal letter may express the anger or sorrow of its writer. Classical rhetoric has taken some of the tropes as expressions of the temporary mood-and-emotion-states of the person using them. Longinus said that asyndeton in Xenophon expressed excitement. On the other hand, the states of mind that Longinus infers from asyndeton in Xenephon (xix) are quite different from the states of mind that Lanham infers from asyndeton in Caesar (1983: 33) or that Corbett infers from asyndeton in John Kennedy's Inaugural Address (1990: 51726). It is dangerous to assume that there can be "an inventory of fixed relationships between observable [stylistic] data and meanings" (Fish 1980: 70). Style as signature. Attribution on stylistic grounds assumes that stylistic signatures are consistent enough so that they can aid in identifying the author or date of an unsigned work. Some of what scholars refer to as "internal evidence" for dating Shakespeare's plays is stylistic in nature. E. K. Chambers's classic volumes on Shakespeare's life and works, first published in 1930, collect early research of this kind, but this approach continues to be a viable and useful method of dating what may otherwise be undatable. The statistics of "consistency" in stylistic signatures have been refined to unravel cases of disputed authorship in some books of the Bible, and in the Federalist essays by Madison and Hamilton (Mosteller and Wallace 1984; Hockey 1980). What can be inferred from style about the source of a given discourse extends beyond personality and mentality to group identity. A great many studies of style start from the fact that certain groups of people use language consistently in certain ways. In prose, the features and qualities that differentiate Asian from Attic schools, or Ciceronian from Senecan, have been hotly argued since the time of Cicero and Seneca themselves. In poetry, it was style, among

< previous page

page_228

next page >

< previous page

page_229

next page > Page 229

other things, that identified the metaphysical poets for Samuel Johnson, and set them apart as a school. A slight extension of this way of studying style carries us into sociolinguistics. Lawyers write legal briefs in a legal style (Crystal and Davy 1969); chemists describe their experiments in a "scientific" style. It has also been proposed that in some contexts the style of women's utterances has tended to be different from men's (R. Lakoff 1975; Spender 1980; Coates 1986). Peter Trudgill sorted the language of different social classes in Norwich in terms of vernacular and formal styles (1974). In studying style as affect we make connections between text and reader; we investigate what the style of a discourse does to its audience, what impact it makes. Here, again, classical rhetoric has been before us, assuming for example (with Aristotle) that hyperbole will have more effect on a youthful reader than on a mature one, or (with Quintilian) that the wielder of verbal ornament "fights not merely with effective, but with flashing weapons (416; III 212). The point of Longinus' discussion of figures (xvixxix) is that figures help not merely to persuade the audience but to "transport them out of themselves," to "cast a spell" on them (i). Under Longinus' broad shadow sprouted the numerous eighteenthcentury writings on sublime styles, including the Scriblerian treatise dedicated to producing in the reader "Tranquillity of Mind" (Peri Bathous, chapter ix). Twentieth-century composition handbooks often mention the effect of one or another stylistic trait on readers. A mixture of Latinate and Anglo-Saxon diction, according to Sheridan Baker, will "generate incomparable zip" (1973: 87). More recently, reader-response criticism has explored the details of what happens to readers as they encounter particular stylistic devices and strategies. In an explication of syntactic ambiguities in Donne's prose, Stanley Fish pictures first a reader "involved in the very activity the sentence is warning against," and subsequently a reader undergoing "an uncomfortable and unsettling experience in the course of which the understanding is denied the satisfaction of its own operations" (1972: 43, 47). In a small-scale history of the evolution of reader-response criticism, Jane Tompkins traces a gradual shift of the locus of "meaning" from text to reader: New Criticism held that any consideration given to affect was "a confusion between the poem and its results"; late reader-response critics see the reader as "actively participating in the production of textual

< previous page

page_229

next page >

< previous page

page_230

next page > Page 230

meaning" (1980: ix, xv). The classic treatment of style as affect in music is Leonard Meyer's Emotion and Meaning in Music (1956). We can also study style as icon: verbal style may be put to work at imitating pieces of the non-mental world outside the text. Words and things are very different from each other; but mimesis has had such prestige over the years, and the example of the visual arts has been so compelling, that almost every age has looked however briefly at verbal style as a way of imitating nature. The sound may sometimes seem an echo to the sense, and when the "sense" is an external event like Ajax dragging his vast weight, the writer is using style as icon. The "Sirens" episode of Ulysses invites stylestudy of this sort. E. H. Gombrich (Art and Illusion) has reminded us that styles of visual representation are always conventional or constructed or historically determined, but nothing in his argument implies that style may never be analysed as a mode of imitation. We find iconic style in language that acts out or mimes its own message: there are poems, in J. Hillis Miller's words, that "enact or embody in themselves that function of poetry about which they explicitly talk" (1985: 4). Countless passages of music have been composed to imitate non-musical events, from the creation of light to cuckoos and steam engines (Kivy 1984). Veridical style-studies are concerned with conveying information clearly and truthfully. That is, they try to clarify the verbal representation of phenomena of all kinds, non-verbal and verbal. They deal with expository prose, with the limits or (in neoclassical theory) the dangers of metaphor, with topic sentences and paragraphing, with the differences between fact and judgment, general and particular. The "logos" side of classical rhetoric is sometimes called on to support veridical style-studies, as in composition texts that teach logic as a basis for clarity in exposition (Booth and Gregory 1991). The teaching of "technical writing" requires veridical style-studies. Perhaps the most speculative species of style-studies are indexical; they hunt for correspondences or correlations between the language of a text and major intellectual movements or periods or institutions. European style-studies for many years focused on national styles. Leo Spitzer connects three features of the language of Racine with Baroque aesthetics: use of the verb "to see"; repeated interruptions of the narrative by "intellectual evaluations"; and paradoxical locutions for what appears to be unnatural in nature (1948: 90). It is not difficult, and it seems quite reasonable, to connect the disjunc-

< previous page

page_230

next page >

< previous page

page_231

next page > Page 231

tions, the anti-rational sequences, the failures of affirmation, and the ecumenicism of Eliot's The Waste Land or of Picasso's cubist painting with modernism. Richard Foster Jones (1930) connected the new plain style of the Restoration with the rise of Baconian science. A formalist approach to style concentrates on patterns and harmonies in the words themselves, without reference to author, audience, or outside world. Studies of prosody and versification are formalist when they confine themselves to the music of the text. Johnson's account of accent, elision, and caesura in Milton (Rambler, nos. 86, 88, 90) is formalist, except where he mentions the pleasure that certain rhythms give. The section of Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism which translates four-stress lines into musical notation seems primarily formalist. One thinks also of isocolon, parallelism, and balanced clauses in Lyly or Sidney. Cedric Whitman's diagrams of repeated and contrasted motifs in The Iliad are splendidly formalist. John Hollander argues that "the matter of poetry is metaphor and not pattern," but also that "the energies of patterning are necessary" (1988: 1); Derek Attridge's recent book on Poetic Rhythm contrasts formal patterns of song and speech in poetry (1995: 9798). Since it is hard not to make connections between formal patterns and some aspect of what the words in those patterns may mean, single-mindedly formalist style-studies are comparatively rare in the literary world. (But of course they play a central role in musicology and art history: for example, the dating of anonymous gamba sonatas or landscapes or Navajo pots often depends more on form than on content.) Richard Ohmann's use of transformational-generative grammar to analyse complexity in literary style was a notable exception to this rule. Most style-studies mix two or more of these seven approaches. Horace's famous dictum, si vis me flere, dolendum est / primum ipsi tibi: "if you would have me weep, you must first feel grief yourself" may be paraphrased in the terminology of this chapter, "if you want your style to have 'affect,' it must be 'expressive.'" Most of the "anthropomorphic predicates" (Sircello 1972: 18) that are commonly applied to literary style appeal unspecifically to feelings that are presumed to have been aroused in the reader, or to formal features in the text, or to qualities of mind in the author, or to some combination of the three: we read very commonly of "curt" styles, "jubilant'' verse, "pompous," "racy," "tough," "stuffy," "sophisticated," "lyrical,"

< previous page

page_231

next page >

< previous page

page_232

next page > Page 232

"flowery," and "lean, sinuous" styles one reason such epithets are so widely used is the vagueness (Milic 1967b) and breadth of their appeal. It may be hard to do justice to real live texts and utterances without calling on more than one of these seven forms of style-study. A central concern in Barbara Herrnstein Smith's admirable book on Poetic Closure is interrelationships between formal structure and affect, between all sorts of poetic forms and the "sense of stability," the emotional gratification that a skillful ending can produce in the reader. The great literary critics often practice a mixture of expressive, formalist, and affective style-studies. When Matthew Arnold ("Wordsworth" 1888) describes the "nobly plain manner" of Wordsworth's best poetry, its "bare, sheer, penetrating power," its ''austere naturalness," he may be referring to properties of the poet (austerity, nobleness), to properties of the text (bareness, plainness), and to the impression these poems make on the reader (penetrating power). When C. S. Lewis (English Literature in the Sixteenth Century 1954) discourses on the "clogged, laborious" movement of early sixteenth-century poetry, on "flat" and "cacophonous" verse, he is alluding to formal properties of versification as well as to a reader's responses. Formalist and signature approaches to style are largely descriptive; the other five go beyond description to some type of explanation. Students of style can perform a formalist analysis or identify a stylistic signature merely by listing features, but as soon as they delve into affect, or into qualities in the author or speaker that are expressed, they have begun to offer some sort of explanation of why and how those words are chosen and arranged. Similarly, iconic, veridical, and indexical approaches all have hermeneutic potential. Whenever explanation is attempted, the broadest and deepest context is needed; leaping to conclusions about the "connections" I have been referring to can produce some pretty terrible results, violating common sense and historical probability with equal abandon. It is difficult to settle the preponderance of perniciousness (as Johnson might be said to have said) between a naive expressive stylistics ("balanced clauses indicate a balanced cast of mind") and a naive affective stylistics ("balanced clauses make us feel calm"). Although comparatively few American graduate programs in English nowadays give serious consideration to style as an independent variable in literary texts, almost every American freshman rhetoric does. Hundreds of the books that introduce teen-agers to

< previous page

page_232

next page >

< previous page

page_233

next page > Page 233

the nuts and bolts of academic writing include sections on concrete language, on periodic sentences, on "purity, propriety, and precision of diction" (Corbett 1990: 389). Contemporary rhetorics are likely to disclaim "merely" ornamental views of style, and to recommend an ''integral relationship between matter and form" (381); but their practice often belies such disclaimers, and the experience of trying to teach eighteen-year-olds to write is hard evidence that one can say "the same thing" many different ways, some of them less lucid and effective than others. The flowering of composition studies in America in the last twenty or thirty years is also a flowering of veridical style-studies. Style-Studies and Cultural History In chapter 2, I postulated a connection between certain features of language or style and two groups of writers, a majority or plurality of published authors in English in the first and in the last quarters of the eighteenth century. The way these writers use language was taken as a stylistic signature (number two above) by which we can identify their writings or tell one group from another. Chapter 3 looked for those signatures in seven additional authors, and in the process of finding them, or not finding them, resorted to two or three different modes of style-study: expressive (Pope's antitheses express his anxiety); affective (Mary Astell's ironic jibes at male readers); veridical (Burke's copiousness, his habit of presenting the reader with alternatives, may be read as a reflection of the complexity of things in general). Chapters 2 and 3 also pursue the idea that changes in the characteristic signatures of English prose between 1710 and 1780 may have been motivated in some way by politeness and literacy. Both these hypotheses, which complement each other, are indexical; that is, they aim to show that distinctive features of language and style reflect events in the outside world here, cultural events: gentrification and the development of a mature print culture. Perhaps needless to say, we may sometimes attribute politeness to a chunk of language and find ourselves practicing expressive not indexical style-study, if and when we locate the politeness in an author not in the outside world. Politeness can be attributed to people; it is a quality or a set of characteristics that we can infer from the way people use language, just as Walker Gibson inferred a

< previous page

page_233

next page >

< previous page

page_234

next page > Page 234

"laconic, hard-bitten" character in Hemingway narrators. But it is also a cultural event. We can follow its development and decline in the outside world, in newspapers and magazines, in the annals of educational institutions, in artifacts like clothes, in urbanization, in the social history of families and small communities, in fiction and drama, in the expository prose of writers like David Hume and Fanny Burney. The idea of gentrification in chapter 2, of politeness as a cultural ideal for the New Rhetoric in chapter 7, the conception of polite (correct) language in chapter 8, and the politeness that chapter 9 claimed as part of a newly feminized culture these are not personal traits but aspects of eighteenth-century British culture. Similarly, the point of labeling features of a text as oral or written is to say something not only about the people who composed that text, but also about the culture within which they were writing. At various points and in various ways in chapters 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, and 8 I am claiming that language and style reflect a larger orientation of British culture, towards the domain of speech or towards the domain of print. If we think of style as a mode of understanding, however, then the New Rhetoric, with its branches in prescriptive grammar and the new aesthetics, is deeply implicated in changes in speech, writing, and civility, because the New Rhetoric understood excellence in language as politeness and writtenness. The dimensions of this new understanding extended far beyond the schoolroom. On almost every page of the many writings on language we have sampled between 1740 and 1795, starting with the gentrification of Pamela, Adam Smith's lectures, book reviews in the Monthly Review, and Johnson's Dictionary and going through Fanny Burney's dedication of Evelina and the courtship of Kate Hardcastle to the essays of William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecroft, Vicesimus Knox, and James Beattie, we find a heightened consciousness of style and usage. It was not simply a new technology (printing) that engineered the changes we have been talking about here, but also ideas and ideals (embodied in language) in the minds of human beings.

< previous page

page_234

next page >

< previous page

page_235

next page > Page 235

Epilogue: Language Change To what extent can the changes described in this book be thought of as language change? Should they be counted as data in a general theory of what happens to languages over time? Our answer to these questions will depend in part on how we define language. If English, the language, is conceived as a mass noun, as a single system of verbal communication, then the ordering of English in the eighteenth century did not change that system much. Compared to the changes in English vowels after Chaucer, compared to the loss of Old English inflections, or to the emergence of modern English auxiliary verbs, what happened to English prose between 1700 and 1800 seems minor and peripheral. But if we think of "English" as a count noun, as a great bundle of different systems of verbal communication, written as well as spoken, with its various strands sortable by region, social class, age, gender, genre, and occasion, then the ordering of English can hardly be ignored. It affected syntax, semantics, word order, vocabulary, style. It introduced new conventions and rules for polite and for utilitarian prose, for the genres preferred by women and men of sensibility, for dictionaries and for political tracts. The number of strands written in formal English multiplied exceedingly. Strands of "low" English, the language written by Swift and Arbuthnot and Ward for satire and scurrility, dwindled in number as the century wore on. The only place these changes have been observed, of course, is in written texts. One wonders how "ordered" spoken English can possibly be, in any age. (One wonders, at least I do, how many people in 1800 really spoke as Jane Austen's heroes and heroines speak.) The history of English, however, has never had anything but written texts to go on, as data for the way English evolved before 1900. We assume that the condition of written texts can tell us something about the condition of speech. It seems unlikely that

< previous page

page_235

next page >

< previous page

page_236

next page > Page 236

writing in this period could be so completely separate from speech that the two media did not reflect or echo or mimic each other in certain respects. One measure of the importance of the ordering of English is the degree to which it impacts on various functions of the language. As a way of understanding those functions, consider pidons and creoles. "A pidgin represents a language which has been stripped of everything but the bare essentials necessary for communication" (Romaine, cited McMahon 1994: 258). These essentials may be classified as the directive and referential functions, getting people to do things and describing or alluding to elementary features of subjective or objective existence. But full-blown natural languages, including creoles, perform other functions, for which pidgins are ill adapted, "the interactional function, which involves the promotion of social cohesion," the expressive function, "to indicate inner states or abstract ideas," the poetic function, to create literature, and the metalinguistic function, to talk about language (McMahon 258). Chapters 1 through 9 of this book supply evidence that the ordering of English changed the way people performed all four of these more complicated functions, interactional, expressive, poetic, and metalinguistic. If dictionary entries can be considered referential in this elementary sense, then the ordering of English changed referential functions too. I would like to think that this account of the ordering of English is not only descriptive but also in some ways explanatory. It sheds light on certain issues that historical linguistics, as subject and discipline, is interested in. It may confirm the principle that certain kinds of language change reduce ambiguity and lessen confusion. Well-known instances of this motivation for change include those covered by David Lightfoot's transparency principle, which "requires derivations to be minimally complex" (1979: 121), so that over time linguistic features that have become too exceptional tend to change. "When the patterns of a language become confused, they will in time be reorganised" (McMahon 1994: 122). Thus, the ordering of English replaced ambiguous constructions, including uncertain pronoun reference and misplaced modifiers, with more "transparent" ones. By forsaking very loose sentences, writers after about 1740 moved English prose in the same direction, away from ambiguity and towards precision. The ordering of English also provides a case history on the role of

< previous page

page_236

next page >

< previous page

page_237

next page > Page 237

style in language change. William Labov has showed that stylistic variation can supply materials for innovation; it can invent or foreground the locutions of a new sociolect. Traugott and Romaine (1985) link language change with changing prestige norms, some of which are defined in terms of style. Correct and formal prose of the later eighteenth century could be considered an evolving sociolect. Polite and purple prose of the later eighteenth century seems to have answered to a new prestige norm. Two of the major problems in understanding language change are actuation and transmission. How does language change start? How does it spread? As James and Lesley Milroy point out, "It is not languages that innovate; it is speakers who innovate" (1985: 345) or, in this case, writers. Enlightenment ideals of clarity and order, the needs of a readership oriented to print not speech, and the values of a feminized culture all or any of these could have prompted individual writers to change the way they wrote in the 1740s and 1750s. Once the prescriptivists of the 1760s got the bit in their teeth, once this kind of language change was being touted by book reviewers, novelists, lexicographers, teachers of rhetoric, literature, pronunciation, writing, and politeness, transmission can hardly have been a problem. However, I have not found an explanation for why these changes started just when they did start. It is hard to specify what made one person writing in 1744 (Samuel Johnson on Richard Savage) use the most elegant, periodic, accurate, gentrified language, while another person writing in 1748 (John Mason) is totally ungentrified. We can't rule out the possibility that factors as unpredictable as aesthetics or personal taste or fashion were involved at some point. If school texts on grammar and university lectures on rhetoric and book reviews in the magazines can contribute to changes in English prose, then the ordering of English may be thought of as a sort of language planning. If English after 1770 is, as Barbara Strang puts it, "a regulated language" (1970: 148), then "standardization" must be reckoned with as a factor in language change. By implication I argue that it really is possible for one set of people to influence the linguistic codes of another by less drastic methods than conquest and migration. The explanations offered here for language change are not necessarily of the cause-and-effect variety, however. They consist also in patterns of association and coherence. When we link the

< previous page

page_237

next page >

< previous page

page_238

next page > Page 238

ordering of English with large historical and cultural changes in the non-verbal world, we feel that we have a fuller understanding of all these processes, both verbal and non-verbal. To see that new ways of defining words in the dictionaries directly reflect the scientization of life and thought in late eighteenth-century Britain, or that new syntactic structures and vocabulary in periodical essays of the 1770s answer to socio-cultural ideals of the Scottish Enlightenment, is (for me at any rate) to make a kind of sense where no sense previously appeared. Politeness and print culture are large historical and cultural changes that may by their nature have a direct bearing on language, even when we may be reluctant to classify them as direct causes of language change. Such explanations cannot possibly have predictive power. No newly matured print culture will ever again develop under the same conditions as those obtaining in the middle decades of the eighteenth century in Britain, i.e., accompanied by and associated with a vogue of politeness, new roads and canals, a brand-new industrial revolution, a cult of sensibility, the rise of women writers, an "Enlightenment" in Scotland, etc., etc. Nevertheless, historical linguistics can hardly avoid the problems raised by socio-historical explanations for the evolution of language, including their lack of predictive power. The ordering of English is I believe one kind of language change, perhaps more diffuse than other kinds and more likely to be found in writing than in speech. If we think of "the print community" as a social network with "weak ties" where "supra-local norms (including the legitimized language)" can make their mark, certain elements of James Milroy's 1992 model of language change seem to apply: this change is initiated by the language-user (here, writers as well as speakers); it is constrained by social contexts (that is, it is not a language-internal change); and it consists of a "change in agreement on norms of usage'' (215, 91). It may seem puzzling that a model of language change based on the spoken vernacular of a defiantly unestablished community in present-day Belfast should apply to the formal, written, establishment prose of eighteenth-century England; but perhaps the commonalities of these two cases are more important than the differences.

< previous page

page_238

next page >

< previous page

page_239

next page > Page 239

Refences Abbott, Don Paul 1990, "Rhetoric and Writing in Renaissance Europe and England," in James J. Murphy (ed.), A Short History of Writing Instruction: From Ancient Greece to Twentieth-Century America, Davis: Hermagoras Press, pp. 95120. Abercrombie, David 1967, Elements of General Phonetics, Chicago: Aldine Press. Abrams, M. H. et al. (eds.) 1993, The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 6th edn., New York: Norton. Ackerman, James S. 1962, "A Theory of Style," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 20: 22737. Ad Herennium, trans. Harry Caplan, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1954. Addison, Joseph 1697, "An Essay on Virgil's Georgics," in Scott Elledge (ed.), Eighteenth-Century Critical Essays, 2 vols., Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1961, vol. II: pp. 18. Addison, Joseph, Steele, Richard et al. 1711 14, The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond, 5 vols., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965. Adolph, Robert 1968, The Rise of Modern Prose Style, Cambridge: MIT Press. Alston, R. C. 1974, A Bibliography of the English Language from the Invention of Printing to the Year 1800, a corrected reprint of vols. 1x, Ilkley: Janus Press. Altieri, Charles 1987, "Style As The Man: What Wittgenstein Offers for Speculating on Expressive Activity," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 46: 178792. Altman, Janet Gurkin 1982, Epistolarity: Approaches to a Form, Columbus: Ohio State University Press. 1993, "Epistolary Acts and Literary Careers in the Eighteenth Century: Permutations of Public Sphere and Private Persona among Writers," in McKenzie (ed.), pp. 20128. Alves, Robert 1794, Sketches of a History of Literature, Gainesville: Scholars' Facsimiles, 1967. Anderson, Michael 1980, Approaches to the History of the Western Family 15001914, London: Macmillan. 1990, "The Social Implications of Demographic Change," in F. M. L. Thompson (ed.), The Cambridge Social History of Britain 17501950, vol. II, Cambridge University Press, pp. 170.

< previous page

page_239

next page >

< previous page

page_240

next page > Page 240

Arakelian, Paul 1979, "The Myth of the Restoration Style Shift," The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 20: 22745. Arbuthnot, John 1712, The History of John Bull, Alan W. Bower and Robert Erickson (eds.), Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976. Ariès, Philippe 1962, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, trans. Robert Baldick, New York: Random House. Aristotle, The "Art" of Rhetoric, trans. John Henry Freese, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982. Armstrong, Nancy 1987, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel, New York: Oxford University Press. Ash, John 1763, Grammatical Institutes, Leeds: Scolar, 1967. 1775, The New and Complete Dictionary of the English Language, 2 vols., London. Astell, Mary 1700, Appendix to Some Reflections upon Marriage, in Robert W. Uphaus and Gretchen M. Foster (eds.), The "Other" Eighteenth Century: English Women of Letters 16601800, East Lansing: Colleagues Press, 1991, pp. 3349. Atkinson, Dwight 1992, "The Evolution of Medical Research Writing from 1735 to 1985: The Case of the Edinburgh Medical Journal," Applied Linguistics 13: 33774. Attridge, Derek 1995, Poetic Rhythm: An Introduction, Cambridge University Press. Auerbach, Erich 1946, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard Trask, Garden City: Doubleday Anchor, 1957. Bach, Emmon 1967, "Have and be in English Syntax," Language 43: 46285. Backscheider, Paula R. 1989, Daniel Defoe: His Life, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 1993, "Accounts of an Eyewitness: Defoe's Dispatches from the Vale of Trade and the Edinburgh Parliament House," in McKenzie (ed.), pp. 2147. Bailey, Nathan 1721, An Universal Etymological English Dictionary, Hildesheim & New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 1969. 4th edn. "with large Additions," London, 1728. 14th edn. "with considerable Improvements." London, 1751. Baker, Sheridan 1973, The Practical Stylist, 3rd edn., New York: Thomas Y. Crowell. Bakhtin, Mikhail 1965, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984. 1981, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, Austin: University of Texas Press. Barbauld, Anna Laetitia Aiken 1804, "Critical Essay Prefixed to Selections from the Tatler, Spectator etc.," in The Works of Anna Laetitia Barbauld, 3 vols., Boston: David Reed, 1826, vol. III: pp. 81104. 1810, "The Origin and Progress of Romance-Writing," in The Works of Anna Laetitia Barbauld, 3 vols., Boston: David Reed, 1826, vol. III: pp. 10548.

< previous page

page_240

next page >

< previous page

page_241

next page > Page 241

Barber, Charles 1976, Early Modern English, London: André Deutsch. 1993, The English Language: A Historical Introduction, Cambridge University Press. Barish, Jonas A. 1960, Ben Jonson and the Language of Prose Comedy, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Barrell, John 1983, English Literature in History 173080, New York: St. Martin's Press. 1992, The Birth of Pandora and the Division of Knowledge, London: Macmillan. Barron, William 1806, Letures on Belles Lettres and Logic, 2 vols., Edinburgh: Bell & Bradfute. Barton, Anne 1974, Introduction to Two Gentlemen of Verona, in G. Blakemore Evans (ed.), The Riverside Shakespeare, Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Basker, James G. 1988, Tobias Smollett: Critic and Journalist, Newark: University of Delaware Press. 1990, "Dancing Dogs, Women Preachers and the Myth of Johnson's Misogyny;" The Age of Johnson 3:6390. 1991, "Scotticisms and the Problem of Cultural Identity in Eighteenth-Century Britain," Eighteenth-Century Life 15: 8195. 1996, "Criticism and the Rise of Periodical Literature," in Claude Rawson and B. H. Nisbet (eds.), The Cambridge History of Criticism, Cambridge University Press. Bate, Walter Jackson 1975, Samuel Johnson, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Bator, Paul. G. 1994, "Robert Watson," in Moran (ed.), pp. 24559. Battestin, Martin C., and Battestin, Ruthe R. 1989, Henry Fielding: A Life, London: Routledge. Baugh, Albert C. and Cable, Thomas 1993, A History of the English Language, 4th edn., Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall. Baumlin, James S. and Baumlin, Tita French (eds.) 1994, Ethos: New Essays in Rhetoric and Critical Theory, Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press. Bayly, Anselm 1772, A Plain and Complete Grammar with The English Accidence, Menston: Scolar, 1969. 1789, The Alliance of Music, Poetry and Oratory, New York: Garland, 1970. Beattie, James 1776, Essays ["Truth"; "Poetry and Music"; ''Laughter"; "Classical Learning"], New York: Garland, 1971. 1783, Dissertations Moral and Critical, Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Friedrich Frommann Verlag, 1970. 1790, 1793, Elements of Moral Science, 2 vols., Intro. James Irvine, Delmar: Scholars' Facsimiles, 1976. Becker, Marvin B. 1988, Civility and Society in Western Europe, 13001600, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Béjoint, Henri 1994, Tradition and Innovation in Modern English Dictionaries, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Belanger, Terry 1978, "From Bookseller to Publisher: Changes in the London Book Trade, 17501850," in Richard G. Landon (ed.), Book

< previous page

page_241

next page >

< previous page

page_242

next page > Page 242

Selling and Book Buying: Aspects of the Nineteenth-Century British and North American Book Trade, Chicago: American Library Association, pp. 716. 1982, "Publishers and Writers in Eighteenth-Century England," in Isabel Rivers (ed.), Books and their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England, Leicester University Press. Bellum Grammaticale 1711, Menston: Scolar, 1969. Bender, John and Wellbery, David E. (eds.) 1990, The Ends of Rhetoric: History, Theory, Practice, Stanford University Press. Bennett, James R. 1986, Bibliography of Stylistics and Related Criticism, 196783, New York: the Modern Language Association of America. Benveniste, Emile 1966, Problems in General Linguistics, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek, Coral Gables: University of Miami Press, 1971. Bevilacqua, Vincent M. 1965, "Philosophical Origins of George Campbell's Philosophy of Rhetoric," Speech Monographs 32: 112. 1967a, "James Beattie's Theory of Rhetoric," Speech Alonographs 34: 10924. 1967b, "Alexander Gerard's Lectures on Rhetoric," Speech Monographs 34: 38488. Bewell, Alan 1989, Wordsworth and the Enlightenment: Nature, Man, and Society in the Experimental Poetry, New Haven: Yale University Press. Biber, Douglas 1988, Variation across Speech and Writing, Cambridge University Press. 1995, Dimensions of Register Variation: A Cross-linguistic Comparison, Cambridge University Press. Biber, Douglas and Finegan, Edward 1989, "Drift and the Evolution of English Style: A History of Three Genres," Language 65: 487517. Biester, James 1988, "Samuel Johnson on Letters," Rhetorica 6: 14566. Bill, E. G. W. 1988, Education at Christ Church Oxford 16601800, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Bitzer, Lloyd F. 1969, "Hume's Philosophy in George Campbell's Philosophy of Rhetoric," Philosophy and Rhetoric 2: 13966. Bizzell, Patricia and Herzberg, Bruce 1990, The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Times to the Present, Boston: St. Martin's Press. Black, Jeremy 1987, The English Press in the Eighteenth Century, London: Croom Helm. Blackwall, Anthony 1719, An Introduction to the Classics, New York: Garland, 1971. Blair, Hugh 1763, "A Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian," in The Poems of Ossian, trans. James Macpherson, Philadelphia: Thomas Cowperthwait, 1842, pp. 63122. 1783, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, 2 vols., ed. Harold F. Harding, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1965. Bloomfield, Leonard 1933, Language, University of Chicago Press, 1984. Bloomfield, Morton W. and Newmark, Leonard 1963, A Linguistic Introduction to the History of English, Westport: Greenwood Press, 1979. Blount, Thomas 1654, The Academy of Eloquence, Menston: Scolar, 1971.

< previous page

page_242

next page >

< previous page

page_243

next page > Page 243

Bogel, Frederic V. 1984, "Understanding Prose," in F. Bogel and Katherine K. Gottschalk (eds.), Teaching Prose: A Guide for Writing Instructors, New York: Norton, pp. 155215. Bolinger, Dwight 1986, Intonation and its Parts, Stanford University Press. Bolton, Whitney F. 1982, A Living Language: The History and Structure of English, New York: Random House. Booth, Wayne C. 1988, The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction, Berkeley: University of California Press. Booth, Wayne C. and Gregory, Marshall W. 1991, The Harper & Row Rhetoric, 2nd edn., New York: HarperCollins. Boswell, James 1785, The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., ed. Allan Wendt, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965. 1791, Boswell's Life of Johnson, ed. George Birkbeck Hill and L. F. Powell, 6 vols., 2nd edn, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964. 1950, Boswell's London Journal, 17621763, ed. Frederick A. Pottle, New York: McGraw-Hill. 1952, Boswell in Holland, 176364, ed. Frederick A. Pottle, London: William Heinemann. 1956, Boswell in Search of Wife, 17661769, ed. Frank Brady and Frederick A. Pottle, New York: McGraw-Hill. Bouhours, Dominique 1728, The Arts of Logick and Rhetorick, trans. J. Old-mixon, London. Boulton, James T. 1963, The Language of Politics in the Age of Wilkes and Burke, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. (ed.) 1965, Daniel Defoe, New York: Shocken. Boyer, Abel 1702, The English Theophrastus: or, The Manners of the Age, Ann Arbor: Augustan Reprint Society, 1947. Bradham, Jo Allen 1980, "Comic Fragments in the Life of Johnson," Biography 3: 94104. Bradshaw, Lael Ely 1981, "Ephraim Chambers's Cyclopaedia," in Frank A. Kafker (ed.), Notable Encyclopedias of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: Nine Predecessors of the Encyclopédie, Oxford: The Voltaire Foundation, pp. 10721. Brady, Frank 1984, James Boswell: The Later Years, 17691795, New York: McGraw-Hill. Brady, Frank and Price, Martin (eds.) 1961, English Prose and Poetry 16601800: A Selection, New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston. Brand, John 1777, Observations on Popular Antiquities. Including the Whole of Mr. Bourne's Antiquitates Vulgares [1725], Newcastle. Bredvold, Louis I. 1962, The Natural History of Sensibility, Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Brightland, John 1711, A Grammar of the English Tongue, Menston: Scolar, 1967. Brodwin, Stanley 1983, "'Old Plutarch at Auchinleck': Boswell's Muse of Corsica," Philological Quarterly 62: 6993. Brooks, Cleanth and Warren, Austin 1949, Modern Rhetoric, New York: Harcourt.

< previous page

page_243

next page >

< previous page

page_244

next page > Page 244

Brown, Penelope and Levinson, Stephen C. 1987, Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage, Cambridge University Press. Brown, Roger and Gilman, Albert 1989, "Politeness Theory and Shakespeare's Four Major Tragedies," Language in Society 18: 159212. Brownell, Morris R. 1989, Samuel Johnson's Attitude to the Arts, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Bryant, Donald C. 1973, Rhetorical Dimensions in Criticism, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Bryant, Margaret E. 1986, The London Experience of Secondary Education, London: Athlone Press. Buchanan, James 1762, The British Grammar, Menston: Scolar, 1968. Burke, Edmund 1757, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. Adam Phillips, Oxford University Press, 1990. 1780a, "Speech on a Bill for Shortening the Duration of Parliaments," in The Works of Edmund Burke, New York: George Dearborn, 1834, vol. II, pp. 46267. 1780b, "Speech in Bristol, Previous to the Election," in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Boston: Wells & Lilly, 1826, vol. II, pp. 21459. 1780c, "Speech on Oeconomical Reform," in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Boston: Wells & Lilly, 1826, vol. II, pp. 137213. 1782a, "A Letter to a Peer of Ireland, on the Penal Laws against Irish Catholicks," in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Boston: Wells & Lilly, 1826, vol. III, pp. 44055. 1782b, "Speech on a Motion . . . To Inquire into the State of the Representation of the Commons in Parliament," in The Works of Edmund Burke, New York: George Dearborn, 1834, vol. III, pp. 46772. 1790, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. Conor Cruise O'Brien, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982. 1792, "Letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe," in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Boston: Wells & Lilly, 1826, vol. III, pp. 456504. 1796, Letter to a Noble Lord, in The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, vol. IX, ed. R. B. McDowell, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991, pp. 14587. Correspondence, ed. Thomas W. Copeland et al., 10 vols., University of Chicago Press. Burke, Peter 1978, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, London: Temple Smith. Burney, Fanny 1778, Evelina; or, the History of a Young Lady's Entrance to the World, ed. Edward A. Bloom and Lillian D. Bloom, Oxford University Press, 1968. Butler, Joseph 1726, Five Sermons Preached at the Rolls Chapel, ed. Stuart M. Brown, Jr., Indianapolis: BobbsMerrill, 1950. Cafarelli, Annette W. 1992, "Johnson and Women: Demasculinizing Literary History," The Age of Johnson 5: 61114. Campbell, George 1776, The Philosophy of Rhetoric, ed. Lloyd F. Bitzer, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1963.

< previous page

page_244

next page >

< previous page

page_245

next page > Page 245

Cassirer, Ernst 1932, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, trans. J. C. A. Koelln and James P. Pettegrove, Boston: Beacon, 1995. Catano, James V. 1988, Language, History, Style: Leo Spitzer and the Critical Tradition, Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Centlivre, Susanna 1718, A Bold Stroke for a Wife, ed. Thalia Stathas, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1968. Chafe, Wallace L. 1982, "Integration and Involvement in Speaking, Writing, and Oral Literature," in Deborah Tannen (ed.), Spoken and Written Language: Exploring Orality and Literacy, Norwood: Ablex, pp. 3553. 1985, "Linguistic Differences Produced by Differences between Speaking and Writing," in Olson, Torrance and Hildyard (eds.), Literacy, Language, and Learning, pp. 10523. Chambers, Ephraim 1728, Cyclopaedia: or, an Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, Microfilm: Woodbridge: Research Publications, 1991. Chapman, Gerald 1967, Edmund Burke: The Practical Imagination, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Chatman, Seymour 1972, The Later Style of Henry James, New York: Barnes & Noble. Chesterfield, Philip Dormer Stanhope, fourth Earl of, Letters, 6 vols., ed. Bonamy Dobrée, London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1932. Christiansen, Francis 1978, Notes toward a New Rhetoric: Nine Essays for Teachers, 2nd edn., New York: Harper & Row. Cibber, Colley 1705, The Careless Husband, ed. William W. Appleton, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1966. Cicero, Marcus Tullius, De Oratore, trans. H. Rackham, 2 vols., London: Heinemann, 1960. Orator, trans. H. M. Hubbell, London: Heinemann, 1939. Clark, Donald Lemen 1957, Rhetoric in Greco-Roman Education, New York: Columbia University Press. Cleary, Jean Coates 1995, Introduction to Frances Sheridan, Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph (1761), Oxford University Press. Clifford, James L. 1941, Hester Lynch Piozzi (Mrs. Thrale), Oxford: Clarendon Press. Coates, Jennifer 1986, Men, Women and Language, London: Longman. Coates, John 1992, "In Defense of Civilization: Techniques of Burke's Late Prose," Prose Studies 15: 295318. Cobbett, William 1796, Life and Adventures of Peter Porcupine, ed. G. D. H. Cole, Port Washington: Kennikat Press, 1970. Cohen, Murray 1977, Sensible Words: Linguistic Practice in England 16401785, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Colley, Linda 1992, Britons: Forging the Nation 17071837, New Haven: Yale University Press. Collison, Robert L. and Preece, Warren E. 1992, "Encyclopaedias and Dictionaries," in The New Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th edn., Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, vol. XVIII, pp. 25786.

< previous page

page_245

next page >

< previous page

page_246

next page > Page 246

The Connoisseur 175456, ed. George Colman and Bonnell Thornton, in Robert Lynam (ed.), British Essayists, 30 vols., London, 1827. Constable, John 1731, Reflections upon Accuracy of Style, New York: Garland, 1970. Cooper, Robert L. 1989, Language Planning and Social Change, Cambridge University Press. Corbett, Edward P. J. 1965, Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student, New York: Oxford University Press. Cox, Stephen 1990, "Sensibility as Argument," in Syndy M. Conger (ed.), Sensibility in Transformation: Creative Resistance to Sentiment from the Augustans to the Romantics, London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, pp. 6382. Crane, Ronald S. 1934, "Suggestions toward a Genealogy of 'The Man of Feeling,' " ELH: A Journal of English Literary History 1: 20530. Crawford, Robert 1992, Devolving English Literature, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Cressy, David 1980, Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England, Cambridge University Press. 1983, "The Environment for Literacy: Accomplishment and Context in Seventeenth-Century England and New England," in Daniel P. Resnick (ed.), Literacy in Historical Perspective, Washington, DC: Library of Congress. The Critical Review: or, Annals of Literature 1759, ed. Tobias Smollett, Washington, D.C., Microcard Editions: n.d. Croll, Morris W. 191429, "Attic" and Baroque Prose Style, ed. J. Max Patrick and Robert O. Evans, with John W. Wallace, Princeton University Press, 1966. Crowley, Tony 1989, The Politics of Discourse: The Standard Language Question in British Cultural Debates, London: Macmillan. Crystal, David and Davy, Derek 1969, Investigating English Style, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Cumberland, Richard 1783, The Mysterious Husband, in The Plays of Richard Cumberland, ed. Roberta F. S. Borkat, 6 vols., New York: Garland, 1982. 1785, The Observer, in The British Essayists, 30 vols., London: J. F. Dove, 1827. Cummings, E. E. 1954, Poems 19231954, New York: Harcourt, Brace. Dampier, William 1697, A New Voyage Round the World, ed. Sir Albert Gray, London: Adam & Charles Black, 1937. Danto, Arthur C. 1981, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Davidoff, Leonore and Hall, Catherine 1987, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 17801850, University of Chicago Press. Defoe, Daniel 1706 [17041713], A Review of the State of the British Nation, ed. Arthur W. Secord, Facsimile Book 8 of vol. III, New York: Columbia University Press, 1938. 1712 [17041713], A Review of the State of the British Nation, in Michael F. Shugrue (ed.), Selected Poetry and Prose of Daniel Defoe, New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1968, pp. 14554.

< previous page

page_246

next page >

< previous page

page_247

next page > Page 247

1715, An Appeal to Honour and Justice, in Michael F. Shugrue (ed.), Selected Poetry and Prose of Daniel Defoe, New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1968, pp. 159202. DeForest, Mary 1992, "Eighteenth-Century Women and the Languages of Power," Classical and Modern Literature 12: 191207. DeMaria, Robert, Jr. 1986, Johnson's "Dictionary" and the Language of Learning, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 1993, The Life of Samuel Johnson: A Critical Biography, Cambridge: Blackwell. Dennis, John 1702, "A Large Account of the Taste in Poetry," in The Critical Works of John Dennis, 2 vols., ed. Edward Niles Hooker, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1939, I, pp. 27995. Dillon, George L. 1991, Contending Rhetorics: Writing in Academic Disciplines, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Dilworth, Thomas 1740, A New Guide to the English Tongue, Leeds: Scolar, 1967. D'Israeli, Isaac 179193, Curiosities of Literature, 6th edn., 3 vols., London: John Murray, 1817. Dobson, Michael 1992, The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation and Authorship, 16601769, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Dodsley; Robert 1748, The Preceptor, 4th edn., 2 vols., London, 1763. Doody, Margaret Anne 1974, A Natural Passion: A Study of the Novels of Samuel Richardson, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Douglas, Ann 1977, The Feminization of American Culture, New York: Knopf. Dowling, William C. 1979, The Boswellian Hero, Athens: University of Georgia Press. 1981, Language and Logos in Boswell's Life of Johnson, Princeton University Press. Drake, Nathan 1805, Essays Biographical, Critical, and Historical Illustrative of the Tatler, Spectator, and Guardian, 3 vols., New York: Johnson, 1968. Dwyer, John 1987, Virtuous Discourse: Sensibility and Community in Late Eighteenth-Century Scotland, Edinburgh: John Donald. Dwyer, John and Sher, Richard B. (eds.) 1993, Sociability and Society in Eighteenth-Century Scotland, Edinburgh: Mercat Press. Dyche, Thomas 1707, A Guide to the English Tongue, Menston: Scolar, 1968. Eagleton, Terry 1982, The Rape of Clarissa: Writing, Sexuality and Class Struggle in Samuel Richardson, Oxford: Blackwell. 1990, The Ideoloey of the Aesthetic, Oxford: Blackwell. Eaves, T. C. Duncan and Kimpel, Ben D. 1967, "Richardson's Revisions of Pamela," Studies in Bibliography 20: 6188. Eden, Kathy H. 1997, Hermeneutics and the Rhetorical Tradition: Chapters in the Ancient Legacy & Its Humanist Reception, New Haven: Yale University Press. Ehlich, Konrad 1992, "On the Historicity of Politeness," in Watts, Ide, and Ehlich (eds.), pp. 71107. Ehninger, Douglas 1963, "Campbell, Blair, and Whately Revisited," in Lionel Crocker and Paul Carmack (eds.), Readings in Rhetoric, Springfield: Charles C. Thomas, 1965.

< previous page

page_247

next page >

< previous page

page_248

next page > Page 248

1965, "Dominant Trends in English Rhetorical Thought 17501800," in Lionel Crocker and Paul Carmack (eds.), Readings in Rhetoric, Springfield: Charles C. Thomas, 1965. Ehrenpreis, Irvin 1962, 1967, 1983, Swift: The Man, his Works, and the Age, 3 vols., Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1974, Literary Meaning and Augustan Values, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Eisenstein, Elizabeth L. 1983, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe, Cambridge University Press. Elias, Norbert 1939, The History of Manners: The Civilizing Process, trans. E. Jephcott, New York: Pantheon, 1978. Encyclopaedia Britannica; or, A Dictionary of Arts and Sciences 176871, 3 vols., Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1968. Engell, James 1989, Forming the Critical Mind: Dryden to Coleridge, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Errington, J. Joseph 1988, Structure and Style in Javanese: A Semiotic View of Linguistic Etiquette, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Erskine-Hill, Howard 1983, The Augustan Idea in English Literature, London: Edward Arnold. Farquhar, George 1706, The Recruiting Officer, in The Complete Work of George Farquhar, ed. Charles Stonehill, 2 vols., New York: Gordian Press, 1967. 1707, The Beaux' Strategem, ed. William Archer, New York: Hill and Wang, 1959. Farrell, Thomas B. 1993, Norms of Rhetorical Culture, New Haven: Yale University Press. Fasold, Ralph 1990, The Sociolinguistics of Language, Cambridge: Basil Blackwell. Febvre, Lucien and Martin, Henri-Jean 1958, The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing 14501800, trans. David Gerard, London: Verso, 1976. Fell, John 1784, An Essay towards an English Grammar, Menston: Scolar, 1967. Felton, Henry 1713, A Dissertation on Reading the Classics, New York: Garland, 1972. Fénelon, François de Salignac de la Mothe 1718, Dialogues on Eloquence, trans. W. S. Howell, Princeton University Press, 1951. Fenning, Daniel 1771, A New Grammar of the English Language, Menston: Scolar, 1967. Ferguson, Adam 1767, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, ed. Louis Schneider, New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1980. Ferguson, William 1968, Scotland: 1689 to the Present, Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd. Fielding, Sarah 1744, The Adventures of David Simple, ed. Malcolm Kelsall, London: Oxford University Press, 1969. The Correspondence of Henry and Sarah Fielding, ed. Martin C. Battestin and Clive T. Probyn, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993. Fish, Stanley E. 1972, Self-Containing Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature, Berkeley: University of California Press.

< previous page

page_248

next page >

< previous page

page_249

next page > Page 249

1980, Is There a Text in This Class?, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1989, Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies, Durham: Duke University Press. Fisher, Ann 1750, A New Grammar, 2nd edn., Menston: Scolar, 1968. Fitzgerald, John J. 1965, "The Logical Style of Burke's Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents," Burke Newsletter 7: 46578. Fogg, Peter Walkden 1792, 1796, Elementa Anglicana, Menston:Scolar, 1970. Foucault, Michel 1970, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, New York: Random House. Fowler, H. W. 1965, A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, 2nd edn., rev. Sir Ernest Gowers, Oxford University Press. Fox, Margaret Fell 1667, Womens Speaking Justified, in Moira Ferguson (ed.), First Femmists: British Women Writers 15781799, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985, pp. 11527. France, Peter 1992, Politeness and its Discontents Problems in French Classical Culture, Cambridge University Press. Fraser, Bruce 1990, "Perspectives on Politeness," Journal of Pragmatics 14: 21936. Fussell, Paul 1965, The Rhetorical World of Augustan Humanism: Ethics and Imagery from Swift to Burke, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Gallaway, Frances 1940, Reason, Rule, and Revolt in English Classicism, New York: Octagon Press. Gay John 1711, The Present State of Wit, ed. Donald F. Bond, Ann Arbor: Augustan Reprint Society, 1947. The Gentleman's Magazine 1731, ed. Edward Cave, London. Gerard, Alexander 1759, An Essay on Taste, 3rd edn, 1780, ed. W. J. Hipple, Gainesville: Scholars' Facsimiles, 1963. Gerard, David E. 1980, "Subscription Libraries," in Allen Kent, Harold Lancour and Jay E. Daily (eds.), Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science, New York: Marcel Dekker, 29: 20421. Gibbons, Thomas 1767, Rhetoric; or, A View of its Principal Tropes and Figures, Menston: Scolar, 1969. Gibson, Walker 1966, Tough, Sweet & Stuffy: An Essay on Modern American Prose Styles, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Gill, Stephen 1989, William Wordsworth: A Life, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Gleitman, Lila R. 1965, "Coordinating Conjunctions in English," Language 41: 26093. Godwin, William 1794, Caleb Williams: or, Things as They Are, New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1960. 1797, The Enquirer: Reflections on Education, Manners, and Literature, New York: Garland, 1971. Godzich, Wlad and Kittay, Jeffrey 1987, The Emergence of Prose: An Essay in Prosaics, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Goffman, Erving 1974, Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience, New York: Harper.

< previous page

page_249

next page >

< previous page

page_250

next page > Page 250

Goldsmith, Oliver 1773, She Stoops to Conquer: or, The Mistakes of a Night, ed. Shane Weller, New York: Dover, 1991. Goodman, Nelson 1975, "The Status of Style," Critical Inquiry I: pp. 799811. 1978, Ways of Worldmaking, Indianapolis: Hackett. Goody, Jack 1986, The Logic of Writing and the Organization of Society, Cambridge University Press. 1987, The Interface Between the Written and the Oral, Cambridge University Press. Goody, Jack and Watt, Ian 1963, "The Consequences of Literacy," Comparative Studies in Sociology and History 5: 304345. Gordon, Ian A. 1966, The Movement of English Prose, London: Longmans. Gough, James 1754, A Practical Grammar of the English Tongue, Menston: Scolar, 1967. Graff, Harvey J. 1987, The Labyrinths of Literacy: Reflections on Literacy Past and Present, London: Falmer Press. Gragg, Gene B. 1978, "Redundancy and Polysemy: Reflections on a Point of Departure for Lexicology," in Donka Farkas, W. M. Jacobsen and K. W. Todrys (eds.), Papers from the Parasession on the Lexicon, Chicago Linguistic Society, pp. 17483. Greenwood, James 1711, An Essay Towards a Practical English Grammar, Menston: Scolar, 1968. Group mu [J. Dubois et al.] 1970, A General Rhetoric, trans. Paul Burrell and E. M. Slotkin, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981. Grundy, Isobel 1986, "The Techniques of Spontaneity: Johnson's Developing Epistolary Style," in Paul J. Korshin (ed.), Johnson After 200 Years, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Gumperz, John 1982, Discourse Strategies, Cambridge University Press. Hagstrum, Jean H. 1980, Sex and Sensibility: Ideal and Erotic Love from Milton to Mozart, University of Chicago Press. Halliday, Michael A. K. 1989, Spoken and Written Language, Oxford University Press. Halliday, Michael A. K. and Hasan, Ruqaiya 1976, Cohesion in English, London: Longman. Hammond, Gerald 1982, The Making of the English Bible, Manchester: Carcanet New Press. Harshbarger, Scott forthcoming, "The Road of Excess: Hugh Blair's Lectures and the Oral Enthusiasm of EighteenthCentury Rhetorical Theory." Hartmann, R. R. K. 1983, "Theory and Practice in Dictionary-Making," in R. R. K. Hartmann (ed.), Lexicography: Principles and Practice, London: Academic Press, pp. 311. Havelock, Eric A. 1963, Preface to Plato, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1986, The Muse Learns to Write: Reflections on Orality and Literacy from Antiquity to the Present, New Haven: Yale University Press.

< previous page

page_250

next page >

< previous page

page_251

next page > Page 251

Hawes, Clement 1996, Mania and Literary Style: The Rhetoric of Enthusiasm from the Ranters to Christopher Smart, Cambridge University Press. Heath, Shirley Brice 1983, Ways with Words: Language, Life, and Work in Communities and Classrooms, Cambridge University Press. Hendrickson, G. L. 1905, ''The Origin and Meaning of the Ancient Characters of Style," American Journal of Philology 26: 24990. Hipple, Walter J., Jr. 1963, Introduction, An Essay on Taste, by Alexander Gerard, Gainesville: Scholars' Facsimiles. Hobbes, Thomas 1637, A Briefe of the Art of Rhetorique, in The Rhetorics of Thomas Hobbes and Bernard Lamy, ed. John T. Harwood, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986. Hockey, Susan 1980, A Guide to Computer Applications in the Humanities, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Hoffman, Ross J. S. and Levack, Paul (eds.) 1959, Burke's Politics: Selected Writings and Speeches, New York: Knopf. Holcroft, Thomas 1787, Seduction, in The Plays of Thomas Holcroft, ed. Joseph Rosenblum, 2 vols., New York: Garland, 1980. Hollander, John 1988, Melodious Guile: Fictive Pattern in Poetic Language, New Haven: Yale University Press. Horace [Quintus Horatius Flaccus], Satires, Epistles and Ars Poetica, trans. H. R. Fairclough, London: William Heinemann, 1961. Horn, D. B. 1967 A Short History of the University of Edinburgh 15561889, Edinburgh University Press. Horner, Winifred Bryan (ed.) 1983, The Present State of Scholarship in Historical and Contemporary Rhetoric, Columbia: University of Missouri Press. 1990, "Writing Instruction in Great Britain: Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries," in James J. Murphy (ed.), A Short History of Writing Instruction From Ancient Greece to Twentieth-Century America. Davis: Hermagoras Press. Howell, James 1726, Epistolae Ho-Elianae: Familiar Letters, 9th edn., London. Howell, Wilbur Samuel 1971, Eighteenth-Century British Logic and Rhetoric, Princeton University Press. Huddleston, Rodney 1984, Introduction to the Grammar of English, Cambridge University Press. Hudson, Nicholas 1995, Writing and European Thought, 16001830, Cambridge University Press. Hughes, Peter 1982, "Wars within Doors: Erotic Heroism in Eighteenth-Century Literature," in Robert Folkenflik (ed.), The English Hero, 16601800, Newark: University of Delaware Press, pp. 16894. Hume, David 1739, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Sellby-Bigge, 2nd edn., ed. P. H. Nidditch, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978. 174158, Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller, Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1985. 1752, "Scotticisms," in Philosophical Works, 4 vols., ed. T. H. Green and T. H. Grose, Darmstadt: Scientia Verlag Aalen, 1964, 4: 46164. Hume, Robert D. 1983, The Rakish Stage: Studies in English Drama, 16601800, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

< previous page

page_251

next page >

< previous page

page_252

next page > Page 252

Hurd, Richard 1749, Q. Horatii Flacci Ars Poetica Epistola ad Pisones, in The Works of Richard Hurd DD, London: T. Cadell & W. Davies, 1811. Hutcheson, Francis 1725, An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, London. Hyde, Mary 1977, The Thrales of Streatham Park, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Hymes, Dell 1974, Foundations in Sociolinguistics: An Ethnographic Approach, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Jespersen, Otto 1905, Growth and Structure of the English Language, Garden City: Doubleday, n.d. Johnson, Nan 1991, Nineteenth-Century Rhetoric in North America, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Johnson, Samuel 1740, Samuel Johnson's Prefaces and Dedications, ed. Allen T. Hazen, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1937. 1750, The Rambler, ed. W. J. Bate and A. B. Strauss, 3 vols., New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969. 1755, A Dictionary of the English Language, 2 vols. in one, London: Times Books, 1979. 1759, 1779, Rasselas, Lives of the Poets, in Bertrand H. Bronson (ed.), Rasselas, Poems, and Selected Prose, 3rd edn., San Francisco: Rinehart Press, 1971. The Letters of Samuel Johnson, ed. Bruce Redford, 5 vols., Princeton University Press, 199294. Jones, Richard Foster 1919, Lewis Theobald: His Contribution to English Scholarship with Some Unpublished Letters, New York: Columbia University Press. 1930, "Science and English Prose Style, 165075," in Stanley E. Fish (ed.), Seventeenth-Century Prose: Modern Essays in Criticism, New York: Oxford University Press, 1971. Joos, Martin 1964, The English Verb, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Joseph, John Earl 1987, Eloquence and Power. The Rise of Language Standards and Standard Languages, New York: Blackwell. Kafker, Frank A. 1994, "William Smellie's edition of the Encyclopaedia Brittanica," in Frank A. Kafker (ed.), Notable Encyclopedias of the Late Eighteenth Century: Eleven Successors of the Encyclopédie, Oxford: The Voltaire Foundation, pp. 14582. Kalmar, Ivan 1985, "Are There Really No Primitive Languages?" in Olson, Torrance and Hildyard (eds.), Literacy, Language, and Learning, pp. 14866. Kames, Henry Home, Lord 1762, Elements of Criticism, 2 vols., 6th edn., 1785, New York: Garland, 1972. Kay, Carol 1988, Political Constructions: Defoe, Richardson, and Sterne in Relation to Hobbes, Hume, and Burke, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Keenan, Elinor Ochs, and Schieffelin, Bambi 1976, "Topic as a Discourse Notion: A Study of Topic in the Conversations of Children and Adults," in Charles N. Li (ed.), Subject and Topic, New York: Academic Press.

< previous page

page_252

next page >

< previous page

page_253

next page > Page 253

Kelly, Ann Cline 1988, Swift and the English Language, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Kennedy, George A. 1963, The Art of Persuasion in Greece, Princeton University Press. 1972, The Art of Rhetoric in the Roman World, Princeton University Press. 1980, Classical Rhetoric and Its Christian and Secular Tradition from Ancient to Modern Times, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 1991, Aristotle on Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse, New York: Oxford University Press. Kernan, Alvin B. 1987, Printing, Technology, Letters, and Samuel Johnson, Princeton University Press. Kersey, John 1702, A New English Dictionary, Menston: Scolar, 1969. 1708, Dictionarium Anglo-Britannicum, Menston: Scolar, 1969. Ketcham, Michael G. 1985, Transparent Designs: Reading, Performance, and Form in "The Spectator" Papers, Athens: University of Georgia Press. Kinkead-Weekes, Mark 1973, Samuel Richardson: Dramatic Novelist, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Kinneavy, James L. 1971, A Theory of Discourse, Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall. Kirkby, John 1746, A New English Grammar, Menston: Scolar, 1971. Kivy, Peter 1984, Sound and Semblance, Princeton University Press. Klein, Lawrence E. 1984, "The Third Earl of Shaftesbury and the Progress of Politeness," Eighteenth-Century Studies 18: 186214. 1990, "Politeness in Seventeenth-Century England and France," Journal of the Southeast American Society for French Seventeenth-Century Studies 4: 91106. 1994, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness, Cambridge University Press. Knox, Vicesimus 1782, Essays Moral and Literary, "a new edition," 2 vols., London. Kramnick, Isaac 1983, "Children's Literature and Bourgeois Ideology: Observations on Culture and Industrial Capitalism in the Later Eighteenth Century," in Harry C. Payne (ed.), Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 12: 1144. Kranidas, Thomas 1965, The Fierce Equation: A Study of Milton's Decorum, The Hague: Mouton. Kroeber, A. L. 1923, Anthropology: Culture Patterns and Processes, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1963. Kroll, Richard W. F. 1991, The Material Word: Literate Culture in the Restoration and Early Eighteenth Century, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Kytö, Merja, and Rissanen, Matti 1993, "'By and by enters [this] my artificiall foole . . . who, when Jack beheld, sodainely he flew at him': Searching for Syntactic Constructions in the Helsinki Corpus," in M. Rissanen, M. Kyto, and Minna Palander-Collin (eds.), Early English in the Computer Age, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 25366. Labov, William 1966, The Social Stratification of English in New York City, Washington DC: Center for Applied Linguistics.

< previous page

page_253

next page >

< previous page

page_254

next page > Page 254

Lakoff, Robin Tolmach 1971, "If's, And's, and But's about Conjunction," in Charles J. Fillmore and D. T Langendoen (eds.), Studies in Linguistic Semantics, New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, pp. 11449. 1973, "The Logic of Politeness; or Minding Your P's and Q's," Papers from the Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, 9: 292305. 1975, Language and Woman's Place, New York: Harper and Row. Lamy, Bernard 1676, The Art of Speaking, ed. John T Harwood, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986. Lane, A. 1700, A Key to the Art of Letters, Menston: Scolar, 1969. Lang, Berel 1978, "Style as Instrument, Style as Person." Critical Inquiry 4: 71539. Langacker, Ronald W. 1986, "Abstract Motion," Berkeley Linguistic Society [Proceedings], 12: 45571. Langford, Paul 1989, A Polite and Commercial People: England 17271783, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Lanham, Richard A. 1978, The Motives of Eloquence, New Haven: Yale University Press. 1979, Revising Prose, 2nd edn., New York: Macmillan, 1987. 1983, Analysing Prose, New York: Scribners. Lannering, Jan 1951, Studies in the Prose Style of Joseph Addison, Uppsala: A.-B. Lundequistska Bokhandeln. Lawson, John 1758, Lectures concerning Oratory, eds. E. Neal Claussen and Karl R. Wallace, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1972. Leech, Geoffrey N. and Short, Michael 1981, Style in Fiction: A Linguistic Introduction to English Fictional Prose, London: Longman. Leith, Dick 1983, A Social History of English, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Lennard, John 1991, But I Digress: The Exploitation of Parentheses in English Printed Verse, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Leonard, Sterling A. 1929, The Doctrine of Correctness in English Usage 17001800, New York: Russell & Russell, 1962. Levine, Joseph M. 1991, The Battle of the Books: History and Literature in the Augustan Age, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Levinson, Stephen C. 1983, Pragmatics, Cambridge University Press. Liberman, Isabelle Y. and Shankweiler, Donald 1991, "Phonology and Beginning Reading: A Tutorial," in Laurence Rieben and Charles Perfetti (eds.), Learning to Read: Basic Research and Its Implications, Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum, pp. 317. Lightfoot, David 1979, Principles of Diachronic Syntax, Cambridge University Press. Lipking, Lawrence 1970, The Ordering of the Arts in Eighteenth-Century England, Princeton University Press. Lock, F. P. 1985, Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, London: George Allen & Unwin. Locke, John 1690, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979.

< previous page

page_254

next page >

< previous page

page_255

next page > Page 255

Longinus, On the Sublime, trans. W. Hamilton Fyfe, London: Heinemann, 1965. Lowth, Robert 1762, A Short Introduction to English Grammar, Menston: Scolar, 1967. Lustig, Irma S. 1980, "Fact Into Art: James Boswell's Notes, Journals, and the Life of Johnson," in John Browning (ed.), Biography in the 18th Century, New York: Garland, pp. 12846. Lyons, John 1995, Linguistic Semantics: An Introduction, Cambridge University Press. MacDermott, Kathy 1982, "Literature and the Grub Street Myth," Literature and History 8: 15969. Mack, Maynard 1985, Alexander Pope: A Life, New York: Norton. Mackenzie, Henry 1785, The Lounger, 2 vols., London, 1822. Mandeville, John 1420, Travels, in Kenneth Sisam (ed.), Fourteenth Century Verse and Prose, Oxford, 1959. Marchand, Hans 1969, The Categories and Types of Present-Day English Word-Formation, 2nd edn., Munich: C. H. Beck. Markley, Robert 1988, Two-Edg'd Weapon: Style and Ideology in the Comedies of Etherege, Wycherley, and Congreve, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Mason, John 1748, An Essay on Elocution and Pronunciation, Menston: Scolar, 1968. Mattaire, Michael 1712, The English Grammar, Menston: Scolar, 1969. McCarthy, William 1985, Hester Thrale Piozzi: Portrait of a Literary Woman, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. McCawley, James D. 1988, The Syntactic Phenomena of English, 2 vols., University of Chicago Press. McCracken, David 1971, "Rhetorical Strategy in Burke's Reflections," Yearbook of English Studies I: 1204. McGee, Michael Calvin 1987, "What Are Nice Folks Like You Doing in a Place lake this? Some Entailments of Treating Knowledge Claims Rhetorically," in John Nelson, Allan Megill, and Donald McCloskey (eds.), The Rhetoric of the Human Sciences: Language and Argument in Scholarship and Public Affairs, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, pp. 381406. McIntosh, Carey 1973, The Choice of Life: Samuel Johnson and the World of Fiction, New Haven: Yale University Press. 1975, "Quantities of Qualities: Nominal Style and the Novel," Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 4: 13953. 1977, "A Matter of Style: Stative and Dynamic Predicates," PMLA 92: 11021. 1986, Common and Courtly Language: The Stylistics of Social Class in 18th-Century British Literature, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 1988, "High Styles and Low in Pope," The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 29: 20824. 1992, "The Gentrification of English Prose, 17001800," in Claudia Blank (ed.), Language and Civilization, Frankfurt: Peter Lang, pp. 72035.

< previous page

page_255

next page >

< previous page

page_256

next page > Page 256

1998, "Eighteenth-Century English Dictionaries and the Enlightenment," Yearbook of English Studies 28: 116. McKendrick, Neil, Brewer, John, and Plumb, J. H. 1982, The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. McKenzie, Alan T. (ed.) 1993, Sent as a Gift: Eight Correspondences from the Eighteenth Century, Athens: University of Georgia Press. McKeon, Michael 1985, "Generic Transformation and Social Change: Rethinking the Rise of the Novel," in Leopold Damrosch (ed.), Modern Essays on Eighteenth-Century Literature, New York: Oxford University Press, 1988, pp. 15980. 1995, "Historicizing Patriarchy: The Emergence of Gender Difference in England, 16601760," Eighteenth-Century Studies 28: 295322. McMahon, April M. S. 1994, Understanding Language Change, Cambridge University Press. Melmouth, William 174849, Letters on Several Subjects, 2 vols., London. Ménagiana ou Les Bons Mots et Remarques Critiques, Historiques, Morales & d'Érudition, de Monsieur Ménage 1693, 4 vols., Paris, 1729. Methold, William 1625, Relations of Golconda [1st publ. in Purchas his Pilgrimage], ed. W. H. Moreland, London: Hakluyt Society, 1931. 2nd ser., no. 66. Meyer, Leonard B. 1956, Emotion and Meaning in Music, University of Chicago Press. 1989, Style and Music: Theory, History, and Ideology, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Michael, Ian 1970, English Grammatical Categories, Cambridge University Press. 1987, The Teaching of English: From the Sixteenth Century to 1870, Cambridge University Press. Milic, Louis T. 1967a, A Quantitative Approach to the Style of Jonathan Swift, The Hague: Mouton. 1967b, "Against the Typology of Styles," in Seymour Chatman and Samuel Levin (eds.), Essays on the Language of Literature, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, pp. 44250. Mill, John Stuart 1843, A System of Logic, vol. VII of Collected Works, ed. J. M. Robson and R. F. McRae, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Miller, J. Hillis 1985, The Linguistic Moment: From Wordsworth to Stevens, Princeton University Press. Miller, Thomas P. 1990a, "Witherspoon, Blair and the Rhetoric of Civic Humanism," in Richard Sher and Jeffrey Smitten (eds.), Scotland and America in the Age of the Enlightenment, Princeton University Press, pp. 10014. 1990b, "The Formation of College English: A Survey of the Archives of Eighteenth-Century Rhetorical Theory and Practice," Rhetoric Society Quarterly 20: 26186. 1990c, "Where Did College English Studies Come From?" Rhetoric Review 9: 5068.

< previous page

page_256

next page >

< previous page

page_257

next page > Page 257

Millward, Celia M. 1988, A Biography of the English Language, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Milroy, James 1992, Linguistic Variation and Change: On the Historical Socio-linguistics of English, Oxford: Blackwell. Milroy, James, and Milroy, Lesley 1985, Authority in Language: Investigating Language Prescription and Standardisation, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Monboddo, James Burnet, Lord 1776, On the Origin and Progress of Language, vol. III, Edinburgh. Monk, Samuel and Lipking, Lawrence 1993, "Introduction," The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 6th edn., New York: Norton. Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley 1708, The Complete Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, ed. Robert Halsband, 3 vols., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965. The Monthly Review 1749, ed. Ralph Griffiths, London. Monroe, B. S. 1911, "An English Academy," Modern Philology 8: 10722. Moran, Michael G. (ed.) 1994, Eighteenth-Century British and American Rhetorics and Rhetoricians: Critical Studies and Sources, Westport: Greenwood Press. More, Hannah 1782, "Sensibility," The Works of Hannah More, 12, vols., London: Henry G. Bohn, 1854, vol. v, pp. 32940. Mossner, Ernest Campbell 1980, The Life of David Hume, 2nd edn., Oxford: Clarendon Press. Mosteller, Frederick, and Wallace, David 1984, Applied Bayesian and Classical Inference: The Case of The Federalist Papers, New York: Springer-Verlag. Mueller, Janel M. 1984, The Native Tongue and the Word: Developments in English Prose Style 13801580, University of Chicago Press. Mukarovsky, Jan 1930, Aesthetic Function, Norm and Value as Social Facts, trans. Mark Suino, Ann Arbor: Department of Slavic Languages and Literature, 1970. Mullan, John 1988, Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Murphy, James J. 1990, "Roman Writing Instruction as Described by Quintilian," in James J. Murphy (ed.), A Short History of Writing Instruction: From Ancient Greece to Twentieth-Century America, Davis: Hermagoras Press, pp. 1976. Murray, Lindley 1795, English Grammar, Menston: Scolar, 1968. Nangle, Benjamin C. 1934, The Monthly Review, First Series, 17491789: Indexes of Contributors and Articles, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Nelson, John S. 1987, "Seven Rhetorics of Inquiry," in John S. Nelson, Allan Megill and Donald McCloskey (eds.), The Rhetoric of the Human Sciences: Language and Argument in Scholarship and Public Affairs, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, pp. 40734. Nevalainen, Terttu and Raumolin-Brunberg, H. 1989, "A Corpus of Early Modern Standard English in a SocioHistorical Perspective," Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 90: 67110. The New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature 1971, ed. George Watson, Vol. 2, Cambridge University Press.

< previous page

page_257

next page >

< previous page

page_258

next page > Page 258

Newman, Gerald 1987, The Rise of English Nationalism: A Cultural History 17401830, New York: St. Martin's. Nist, John 1966, A Structural History of English, New York: St. Martin's. North, Helen F. 1993, "Emblems of Eloquence," Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 137: 40630. Nussbaum, Felicity A. 1974, "Boswell's Treatment of Johnson's Temper: 'A Warm West-Indian Climate'," Studies in English Literature 14: 42133. Obelkevich, James 1987, "Proverbs and Social History," in Peter Burke and Roy Porter (eds.), The Social History of Language, Cambridge University Press, pp. 4372. O'Day, Rosemary 1982, Education and Society 15001800, London: Longman. Ogilvie, John 1774, Philosophical and Critical Observations on the Nature. Characters, and Various Species of Composition, 2 vols., Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1968. Ohmann, Richard 1964, "Generative Grammars and the Concept of Literary Style," Word 20: 42339. Oldmixon, John 1712, Reflections on Dr. Swift's Letter, Menston: Scolar, 1970. Olson, David R. 1991, "Literacy as Metalinguistic Activity," in David Olson and Nancy Torrance (eds.), Literacy and Orality, Cambridge University Press, pp. 25170. Ong, Walter J., S.J. 1958, Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1971, Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 1972, Review of Howell (1971), William and Mary Quarterly 29: 63743. 1982, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, New York: Methuen. Osselton, Noel Edward 1990, "English Lexicography from the Beginning Up to and Including Johnson," in Franz Josef Hausmann, Oskar Reichmann, H. E. Wiegand, L. Zgusta (eds.), Wörterbücher Dictionaries Dictionnaires, 3 vols., Berlin & New York: de Gruyter, pp. 194353. Parkes, M. B. 1993, Pause and Effect: An Introduction to the History of Punctuation in the West, Berkeley: University of California Press. Paine, Thomas 1791, Rights of Man, New York: Penguin, 1984. Passler, David L. 1971, Time, Form, and Style in Boswell's Life of Johnson, New Haven: Yale University Press. Paulson, Ronald 1983, Representations of Revolution (17891820), New Haven: Yale University Press. Percy, Carol 1994, "Paradigms for their Sex? Women's Grammars in Late Eighteenth-Century England," Histoire Epistémologie Langage 16: 12141. 1996, "English 'Normative' Grammar in Practice: The Case of Captain Cook," in Derek Britton (ed.), English Historical Linguistics 1994, Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 33962. Perry, Ruth 1986, The Celebrated Mary Astell: An Early English Feminist, University of Chicago Press. Phillips, Edward 1675, Theatrum Poetarum, in Joel E. Spingarn (ed.), Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century, 3 vols., London: Oxford University Press, 1908, vol. II, pp. 25672.

< previous page

page_258

next page >

< previous page

page_259

next page > Page 259

Phillipson, Nicholas 1973, "Towards a Definition of the Scottish Enlightenment," in Paul S. Fritz and David Williams (eds.), City and Society in the 18th Century, Toronto: Hakkert. Pinker, Steven 1994, The Language Instinct, New York: William Morrow. Piozzi, Hester Thrale 1794, British Synonymy; or, An Attempt at Regulating the Choice of Words in Familiar Conversation, 2 vols., Menston: Scolar, 1968. 1951, Thraliana: The Diary of Mrs. Hester Lynch Thrale, 2 vols., ed. Katharine C. Balderston, 2nd edn., Oxford: Clarendon Press. Plumb, J. H. 1973, The Commercialization of Leisure in Eighteenth-Century England, University of Reading. Pocock, J. G. A. 1971, Politics, Language and Time: Essays on Political Thought and History, New York: Atheneum. 1985, Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century, Cambridge University Press. Poole, Joshua 1663, Practical Rhetoric, Menston: Scolar, 1972. Pooley, Roger 1992, English Prose of the Seventeenth Century, 15901700, London: Longman. Poovey, Mary 1984, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer. Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen, University of Chicago Press. Pope, Alexander 1711, An Essay on Criticism, ed. Emile Audra and Aubrey Williams, London: Methuen, 1961. 1717, Preface to Works, in Emile Audra and Aubrey Williams (eds.), An Essay on Criticism, London: Methuen, 1961. 1725, Preface to Shakespeare, in Bertrand A. Goldgar (ed.), Literary Criticism of Alexander Pope, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965, pp. 16175. 1728, Peri Bathous, in Bertrand A. Goldgar (ed.), Literary Criticism of Alexander Pope, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965, pp. 4390. 1729, The Dunciad, ed. James Sutherland, 3rd edn, London: Methuen, 1963. 1734, "Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot," in Imitations of Horace, ed. John Butt, London: Methuen, 1961. Porter, Roy 1982, English Society in the Eighteenth Century, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Potkay, Adam 1994, The Fate of Eloquence in the Age of Hume, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Pottle, Frederick A. 1929, The Literary Career of James Boswell, Esq., Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1966, James Boswell: The Earlier Years, 17401769, New York: McGraw-Hill. Price, Glanville 1984, The Languages of Britain, London: Edwin Arnold. Priestley, Joseph 1761, The Rudiments of Grammar, Menston: Scolar, 1969. 1777, A Course of Lectures on Oratory and Criticism, ed. Vincent M. Bevilacqua and Richard Murphy, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1965. Quinn, Arthur 1982, Figures of Speech, Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith.

< previous page

page_259

next page >

< previous page

page_260

next page > Page 260

Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, trans. H. E. Butler, 4 vols., London: Heinemann, 1963. Quirk, Randolph, Greenbaum, Sidney, Leech, Geoffrey, and Svartvik, Jan 1985, A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language, London: Longman. Rader, Ralph W. 1968, "Literary Form in Factual Narrative: The Example of Boswell's Johnson," in Philip Daghlien (ed.), Essays in Eighteenth Century Biography, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 2139. Ranum, Orest 1991, Review of Daniel Roche, La Culture des Apparences, Eighteenth-Century Studies 24: 52431. Rawson, Claude 1985, "Notes on Delicacy," in Order from Confusion Sprung, London: Allen and Unwin. 1994, Satire and Sentiment 16601830, Cambridge University Press. Razzell, Peter 1994, Essays in English Population History, London: Caliban Books. Redford, Bruce 1986, The Converse of the Pen: Acts of Intimacy in the Eighteenth-Century Familiar Letter, University of Chicago Press. Reid, Christopher 1985, Edmund Burke and the Practice of Political Writing, New York: St. Martin's Press. 1992, "Burke's Tragic Muse: Sarah Siddons and the 'Feminization' of the Reflections," in Steven Blakemore (ed.), Burke and the French Revolution: Bicentennial Essays, Athens: University of Georgia Press, pp. 127. Richardson, Samuel 1740, Pamela: or Virtue Rewarded, vol. I, ed. William M. Sale, Jr., New York: Norton, 1958. 1741, Pamela, vol. II, London: J. M. Dent, 1961. 17478, Clarissa: or, the History of a Young Lady, 4 vols., London: J. M. Dent, 1962. Richetti, John J. 1983, Philosophic Writing: Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. (ed.) 1994, The Columbia History of the British Novel, New York: Columbia University Press. Rissanen, Matti, Ihalainen, Ossi, Nevalainen, Terttu, and Taavitsainen, Irma (eds.) 1992, History of Englishes: New Methods and Interpretations in Historical Linguistics, Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Robinson, Jenefer M. 1985, "Style and Personality in the Literary Work," Philosophical Review 94: 22747. Rogers, Pat 1991, "Boswell and the Scotticism," in Greg Clingham (ed.), New Light on Boswell, Cambridge University Press, pp. 5671. Rollin, Charles 1737, The Method of Teaching and Studying the Belles Lettres, London. Romaine, Suzanne 1982, Socio-Historical Linguistics: Its Status and Methodology, Cambridge University Press. Roper, Derek 1978, Reviewing before the "Edinburgh" 17881802, Newark: University of Delaware Press. Rose, Mark 1993, Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

< previous page

page_260

next page >

< previous page

page_261

next page > Page 261

Rosen, Charles 1972, The Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, New York: Norton. Ross, Ian S. 1972, Lord Kames and the Scotland of His Day, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Ross, John Robert 1972, ''The Category Squish: Endstation Hauptwort," Papers from the Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society 8: 31628. Rydén, Mats 1984, "The Study of Eighteenth Century English Syntax," in Jacek Fisiak (ed.), Historical Syntax, Berlin: Mouton, pp. 50920. Sacks, Harvey, Schegloff, Emanuel, and Jefferson, Gail 1974, "A Simplest Systematics for the Organization of Turntaking in Conversation," Language 50: 696735. Sambrook, James 1986, The Eighteenth Century: The Intellectual and Cultural Context of English Literature, 17001789, London: Longman. Samuels, M. L. 1972, Linguistic Evolution: with Specific Reference to English, Cambridge University Press. Sanders, Robert E. 1987, Cognitive Foundations of Calculated Speech: Controlling Understandings in Conversation and Persuasion, Albany: SUNY Press. Sapir, Edward 1921, Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Saville-Troike, Muriel 1985, "The Place of Silence in an Integrated Theory of Communication," in Deborah Tannen and M. Saville-Troike (eds.), Perspectives on Silence, Norwood: Ablex, pp. 318. Schapiro, Meyer 1953, "Style," in A. L. Kroeber (ed.), Anthropology Today: An Encyclopedic Inventory, University of Chicago Press, pp. 287312. Schegloff, Emanuel A. 1990, "On the Organization of Sequences as a Source of 'Coherence' in Talk-in-Interaction," in Bruce Dorval (ed.), Conversational Organization and its Development, Norwood: Ablex, pp. 5177. Schegloff, Emanuel A. and Sacks, Harvey 1973, "Opening up Closings," Semiotica 8: 289327. Scollon, Ron, and Scollon, Suzanne B. K. 1981, Narrative, Literacy and Face in Interethnic Communication, Norwood: Ablex. Scott, Geoffrey 1929, "The Making of the Life of Johnson as Shown in Boswell's First Notes," in James L. Clifford (ed.), Twentieth Century Interpretations of Boswell's Life of Johnson, Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1970, pp. 2739. Sell, Roger D. 1992, "Literary Texts and Diachronic Aspects of Politeness," in Watts, Ide, and Ehlich (eds.), pp. 10929. Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl 1711, rev. 1714, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. John M. Robertson, 2 vols. in one, 1900, New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1964. 1900, The Life, Unpublished Letters, and Philosophical Regimen of Anthony, Earl of Shaftesbury, ed. Benjamin Rand, New York: Macmillan. Sher, Richard B. 1985, Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Moderate Literati of Edinburgh, Princeton University Press. Sherburn, George and Bond, Donald F. 1948, The Restoration and Eighteenth Century, 2nd edn. 1967, New York: Appleton Century Crofts.

< previous page

page_261

next page >

< previous page

page_262

next page > Page 262

Sheridan, Thomas 1762, A Course of Lectures on Elocution, Menston: Scolar, 1968. Shevelow, Kathryn 1989, Women and Print Culture: The Construction of Femininity in the Early Periodical, London: Routledge. Siebert, Donald T. 1986, "Bubbled, Bamboozled, and Bit: 'Low Bad' Words in Johnson's Dictionary," Studies in English Literature 26: 48596. Simpson, John A. 1989, "Nathaniel Bailey and the Search for a Lexicographical Style," in Gregory James (ed.), Lexicographers and their Works, University of Exeter Press, pp. 18191. 1990, "English Lexicography after Johnson to 1945," in Franz Josef Hausmann, Oskar Reichmann, H. E. Wiegand, L. Zgusta (eds.), Wörterbücher Dictionaries Dictionnaires, 3 vols., Berlin & New York: de Gruyter, pp. 195366. Sircello, Guy 1972, Mind and Art: An Essay on the Varieties of Expression, Princeton University Press. Sitter, John E. 1982, Literary Loneliness in Mid-Eighteenth-Century England, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Sledd, James H. and Kolb, Gwin J. 1955, Dr. Johnson's Dictionary: Essays in the Biography of a Book, University of Chicago Press. Smith, Adam 1759, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Charlottesville: Ibis, n.d. 1762, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, ed. John M. Lothian, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1971. 176263, Lectures on Jurispsrudence, ed. R. L. Meek, D. D. Raphael, P. G. Stein, Works, vol. V, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978. Smith, Barbara Herrnstein 1968, Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End, University of Chicago Press. Smith, John 1657, Mystery of Rhetoric Unveiled, Menston: Scolar, 1969. Smith, Nigel 1994, Literature and Revolution in England 16401660, New Haven: Yale University Press. Smith, Olivia 1984, The Politics of Language 17911819, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Smollett, Tobias 1751, The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, ed. James L. Clifford, Oxford University Press, 1969. 1771, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, ed. Lewis M. Knapp, rev. Paul-Gabriel Boucé, Oxford University Press, 1984. Spacks, Patricia Meyer 1986, Gossip, University of Chicago Press. Spence, Joseph 1966, Observations, Anecdotes, and Characters of Books and Men, ed. James M. Osborn, 2 vols., Oxford: Clarendon Press. Spencer, Jane 1986, The Rise of the Woman Novelist: From Aphra Behn to Jane Austen, London: Basil Blackwell. Spender, Dale 1980, Man Made Language, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Sperber, Don and Wilson, Deirdre 1986, Relevance: Communication and Cognition, and edn. 1995, Oxford: Blackwell. Spitzer, Leo 1948, Linguistics and Literary History: Essays in Stylistics, Princeton University Press. Spufford, Margaret 1981, Small Books and Pleasant Histories: Popular Fiction and

< previous page

page_262

next page >

< previous page

page_263

next page > Page 263

Its Readership in Seventeenth-Century England, Athens: University of Georgia Press. Stallybrass, Peter and White, Allon 1986, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Stanlis, Peter L. 196263, "Burke's Prose Style," Burke Newsletter 4: 18184. Starnes, De Witt T. and Noyes, Gertrude E. 1946, The English Dictionary from Cawdrey to Johnson 16041755, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Starr, George A. 1974, "Defoe's Prose Style: The Language of Interpretation," in Leopold Damrosch (ed.), Modern Essays on Eighteenth-Century Literature, New York: Oxford University Press, 1988, pp. 23760. Staves, Susan 1990, Married Women's Separate Property in England, 16601833, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Steele, Richard 1705, The Tender Husband, ed. Calhoun Winton, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1967. 1709, The Tatler, ed. Donald F. Bond, 3 vols., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987. 1722, The Conscious Lovers, ed. Shirley Strum Kenny, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1968. Stein, Dieter 1990, The Semantics of Syntactic Change, New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Stein, Dieter and Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Ingrid (eds.) 1994, Towards a Standard English, 16001800, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Sterne, Lawrence 175967, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, ed. Graham Petrie and Christopher Ricks, London: Penguin, 1967. Stirling, John 1733, A System of Rhetoric, Menston: Scolar, 1968. Stone, Lawrence 1977, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 15001800, New York: Harper & Row. Strang, Barbara M. H 1967, "Swift and the English Language: A Study in Principles and Practice," in To Honor Roman Jakobson, 3 vols., The Hague: Mouton, vol. III, pp. 194759. 1970, A History of English, London: Methuen. Struever, Nancy 1985, "The Conversable World: Eighteenth-Century Transformations of the Relation of Rhetoric and Truth," in Brian Vickers and Nancy Struever, Rhetoric and the Pursuit of Truth: Language Change in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Library, pp. 77119. Sundby, Bertil, Bjorge, Anne Kari, and Haugland, Kari E. 1991, A Dictionary of English Normative Grammar 17001800, Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Sutherland, James 1957, On English Prose, University of Toronto Press. Sweetser, Eve 1990, From Etymology to Pragmatics: Metaphorical and Cultural Aspects of Semantic Structure, Cambridge University Press. Swift, Jonathan 1701, A Discourse of the Contests and Dissentions between the Nobles and the Commons in Athens and Rome, in Herbert Davis (ed.), The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1939, I, pp. 191236.

< previous page

page_263

next page >

< previous page

page_264

next page > Page 264

170410, A Tale of a Tub, ed. A. C. Guthkelch and D. N. Smith, 2nd edn., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958. 1711, The Conduct of the Allies, in Herbert Davis (ed.), The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1951, vol. VI, pp. 365. 1711, Journal to Stella, ed. Harold Williams, 2 vols., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1948. 1712, A Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue, Menston: Scolar, 1969. 1726, Gulliver's Travels, in Louis A. Landa (ed.), Gulliver's Travels and Other Writings, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960, pp. 1239. 1738, Polite Conversation, London: Mathews and Marrot, 1927. 1758, The History of the Four Last Years of the Queen, in Herbert Davis (ed.), The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1951, vol. VII, pp. 1167. Tacitus [attrib.], "A Dialogue upon Oratory," in William Melmouth, Letters on Several Subjects, vol. II, 1749, microfilm, Woodbridge Research Publications, 1986. Talmy, Leonard 1978, "Figure and Ground in Complex Sentences," in Joseph H. Greenberg (ed.), Universals of Human Language, Stanford University Press, vol. IV, pp. 62549. Tannen, Deborah 1982, "The Oral/Literate Continuum in Discourse," in Deborah Tannen (ed.), Spoken and Written Language: Exploring Orality and Literacy, Norwood: Ablex, pp. 116. 1984, Conversational Style: Analyzing Talk Among Friends, Norwood: Ablex. 1989, Talking Voices: Repetition, Dialogue, and Imagery in Conversational Discourse, Cambridge University Press. Tate, Nahum 1707, "To my Ingenious Friend the Author," in Dyche, A Guide. Thompson, E. P. 1963, The Making of the English Working Class, New York: Random House, 1966. Thompson, James 1984, Language in Wycherley's Plays: Seventeenth-Century Language Theory and Drama, University of Alabama Press. Thorpe, James 1987, The Sense of Style: Reading English Prose, Hamden: Archon Press. Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Ingrid 1987, The Auxiliary "Do" in Eighteenth-Century English: A Sociohistorical-Linguistic Approach, Dordrecht: ICG Printing. Todd, Janet 1989, The Sign of Angellica: Women, Writing and Fiction, 16601800, New York: Columbia University Press. Tompkins, Jane P. (ed.) 1980, Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Traugott, Elizabeth Closs 1972, A History of English Syntax: A Transformational Approach to the History of English Sentence Structure, New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston. 1982, "From Propositional to Textual and Expressive Meanings; Some Semantic-Pragmatic Aspects of Grammaticalization," in Winfred P.

< previous page

page_264

next page >

< previous page

page_265

next page > Page 265

Lehmann and Yakov Malkiel (eds.), Perspectives on Historical Linguistics, Amsterdam and New York: John Benjamins, pp. 24571. 1989, "On the Rise of Epistemic Meanings in English: An Example of Subjectification in Semantic Change," Language 65: 3155. 1990, "From Less to More Situated in Language: The Unidirectionality of Semantic Change," in Sylvia Adamson, Vivien Law, Nigel Vincent, Susan Wright (eds.), Papers from the Fifth International Conference on English Historical Linguistics, Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, pp. 497517. 1991, "English Speech Act Verbs: A Historical Perspective," in Linda R. Waugh and Stephen Rudy (eds.), New Vistas in Grammar: Invariance and Variation, Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, pp. 387406. Traugott, Elizabeth Closs and Pratt, Mary Louise 1980, Linguistics for Students of Literature, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Traugott, Elizabeth Closs and Romaine, Suzanne 1985, "Some Questions for the Definition of 'Style' in SocioHistorical Linguistics," Folia Linguistica Historica 6: 739. Trudgill, Peter 1974, The Social Differentiation of English in Norwich, London: Cambridge University Press. Trusler, John 1766, The Difference between Words Esteemed Synonymous, Menston: Scolar, 1970. Twigg, John 1987, A History of Queens' College, Cambridge 14481986, Woodbridge: Boydell Press. Ullmann, Stephen 1962, Semantics: An Introduction to the Science of Meaning, New York: Barnes & Noble, 1979. Ulman, H. Lewis 1994, Things, Thoughts, Words and Actions: The Problem of Language in Late Eighteenth-Century Rhetorical Theory, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Ussher, George Neville 1785, The Elements of English Grammar, Menston: Scolar, 1967. Van Sant, Ann Jessie 1993, Eighteenth-Century Sensibility and the Novel, Cambridge University Press. Vance, John A. 1985, "The Laughing Johnson and the Shaping of Boswell's Life," in John Vance (ed.), Boswell's Life of Johnson: New Questions, New Answers, Athens: University of Georgia Press, pp. 20427. Vickers, Brian 1968, The Artistry of Shakespeare's Prose, London: Methuen. 1970, Classical Rhetoric in English Poetry, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. 1985, "The Royal Society and English Prose Style: A Reassessment," in Brian Vickers and Nancy Struever, Rhetoric and the Pursuit of Truth: Language Change in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Library, pp. 376. 1988, In Defence of Rhetoric, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Vincent, David 1989, Literacy and Popular Culture: England 17501914, Cambridge University Press.

< previous page

page_265

next page >

< previous page

page_266

next page > Page 266

Voitle, Robert 1984, The Third Earl of Shaftesbury 16711713, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Waingrow, Marshall (ed.) 1969, The Correspondence and Other Papers of James Boswell Relating to the Making of the "Life of Johnson," New York: McGraw-Hill. Wallbank, M. V. 1979, "Eighteenth-Century Public Schools and the Education of the Governing Elite," History of Education 8: 119. Ward, John 1759, A System of Oratory, 2 vols., London. Ward, Ned 16981700, The London Spy, ed. Paul Hyland, East Lansing: Colleagues Press, 1993. Warnick, Barbara 1993, The Sixth Canon: Belletristic Rhetorical Theory and Its French Antecedents, Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Warton, Thomas 177481, The History of English Poetry, 3 vols., New York: Johnson, 1968. Watt, Ian 1957, The Rise of the Novel, Berkeley: University of California Press. 1960, "The First Paragraph of The Ambassadors: An Explication," in Glen Love and Michael Payne (eds.), Contemporary Essays on Style, Glenview: Scott, Foresman, 1969, pp. 26683. Watts, Isaac 1726, Logick, 2nd edn., London. Watts, Richard J., Ide, Sachiko, and Ehlich, Konrad (eds.) 1992, Politeness in Language: Studies in its History, Theory and Practice, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Watts, Ruth 1991, "Revolution and Reaction: 'Unitarian' Academies, 17801800," History of Education 20: 30723. Weinbrot, Howard D. 1993, Britannia's Issue: The Rise of British Literature from Dryden to Ossian, Cambridge University Press. Weiser, David K. 1975, "The Imagery of Burke's Reflections," Studies in Burke and His Time 16: 21333. Wellek, René 1941, The Rise of English Literary History, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Wells, Rulon 1960, "Nominal and Verbal Style," in Thomas A. Sebeok (ed.), Style in Language, Cambridge: MIT Press, pp. 21320. Welsted, Leonard 1724, "A Dissertation Concerning the Perfection of the English Language, the State of Poetry, etc.," in Scott Elledge (ed.), Eighteenth-Century Critical Essays, 2 vols., Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1961, vol. I, pp. 32048. Whately, Richard 1833, Elements of Rhetoric, 3rd edn., Cambridge: Brown, Shattuck. Whitman, Cedric H. 1957, Homer and the Heroic Tradition, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Wilentz, Gay 1992, "Toward a Diaspora Literature: Black Women Writers from Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States," College English 54: 385405. Wilkinson, L. P. 1963, Golden Latin Artistry, Cambridge University Press. Williams, Raymond 1967, "Culture and Civilization," in Paul Edwards (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, New York: Macmillan, vol. II, pp. 7396.

< previous page

page_266

next page >

< previous page

page_267

next page > Page 267

Williamson, George 1951, The Senecan Amble: A Study in Prose Form from Bacon to Collier, University of Chicago Press. [Wilson, Thomas] 1724, The Many Advantages of a Good Language to Any Nation, Menston: Scolar, 1969. Wimsatt, William K. 1941, The Prose Style of Samuel Johnson, New Haven: Yale University Press. 1946, "The Intentional Fallacy," in The Verbal Icon, Lexington: the University Press of Kentucky, 1954. 1948, Philosophic Words: A Study of Style and Meaning in the Rambler and Dictionary of Samuelo Johnson, New Haven: Yale University Press. 1959, Hateful Contraries, Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1965. Winn, James Anderson 1981, Unsuspected Eloquence: A History of the Relations between Poetry and Music, New Haven: Yale University Press. Wollstonecraft, Mary 1792, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Carol H. Poston, New York: Norton, 1975. Wordsworth, William 1800, Preface to Lyrical Ballads, in W. J. B. Owen and Jane Smyser (eds.), The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, vol. I, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974. The World 175356, ed. Edward Moore, in Robert Lynam (ed.), British Essayists, 30 vols., London, 1827. Wright, Susan 1994, "The Critic and the Grammarians: Joseph Addison and the Prescriptivists," in Dieter Stein and Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade (eds.), Towards a Standard English 16001800, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 24384. Yeazell, Ruth B. 1991, Fictions of Modesty: Women and Courtship in the English Novel, University of Chicago Press. Zupko, Ronald Edward 1968, A Dictionary of English Weights and Measures, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

< previous page

page_267

next page >

< previous page

page_268

next page > Page 268

Index A Abbott, Don Paul 159 Abercrombie, David 34 Abrams, M. H. 84, 226 Académie Française 174, 187 Ackerman, James S. 221 Addison, Joseph 13, 15, 62, 99, 152, 154, 205, 214n on false taste 17 on harshness of English 16 on high style 105 on low language 107 prose style of 20, 9497, 207 solecisms in 20, 179 "Vision of Mirzah" 111, 11314 Ad Herennium 145, 146, 150, 151 Adolph, Robert 2n, 91n aesthetics 13, 15758, 200, 231 see also expressivity Alston, R. C. 151, 172, 179, 185n Altieri, Charles 226 Altman, Janet Gurkin 130, 133 Alves, Robert 20 Anderson, Michael 201 Arakelian, Paul G. 91n Arbuthnot, John 3, 21, 34 History of John Bull 11415 archaisms 1617, 2830, 44, 72, 175, 2089 in Swift 5557; in Johnson 135 Ariès, Philippe 201 Aristotle 47, 143, 150, 151, 155, 166, 229 on clarity 158 on decorum 99, 152 on periodic and loose sentences 25, 76, 7879 Rhetoric 146, 148, 177, 206 Armstrong, Nancy 204n, 206 Arnauld, Antoine 150 Arnold, Matthew 232 Ash, John 14, 173, 18792, 21415 Astell, Mary 5053, 67, 130 Atkinson, Dwight 35 Attridge, Derek 231

Auerbach, Erich 40, 59, 101n, 104 Austen, Jane 49, 8788 B Bach, Emmon 123 Backscheider, Paula 93n, 140 Bailey, Nathan 18692, 21415 Baker, Sheridan 137, 229 Bakhtin, Mikhail 34, 101n, 115 Barbauld, Anna Laetitia 20, 97, 178, 2056 Barber, Charles 22 Barish, Jonas 227 Barrell, John 7, 181n Barron, William 155n, 156 Barton, Anne 227 Basker, James 180, 181, 196n Bate, Walter Jackson 132 Bator, Paul 156n, 158n Battestin, Martin C. and Ruthe 18 Batteux, Charles 151 Baugh, Albert 173 Baumhn, James and Tita 14344 Bayly, Anselm 22 Beattie, James 149, 152, 153, 154, 15667, 180, 196 Becker, Marvin 161 Béjoint, Henri 185n Belanger, Terry 16970 Bell, Andrew 194 Bellum Grammaticale 16 Bender, John 145 Bennett, James 226 Benveniste, Emile 123 Bevilacqua, Vincent M. 158n Bewell, Alan 163 Biber, Douglas 3538, 47n, 123, 136 Bible, the 2, 8889, 139 Biester, James 131, 135 Bill, E. G. W. 148 Birch, Thomas 185 Bitzer, Lloyd 158n Bizzell, Patricia 158n Bjorge, Anne Kari 49, 178 Black, Jeremy 5n Blackwall, Anthony 21, 106, 150

< previous page

page_268

next page >

< previous page

page_269

next page > Page 269

Blackwell, Thomas 160n Blair, Hugh 8, 27, 40, 76, 96, 145, 146, 152, 15667 Boswell and 100, 102, 103 on figures of speech 15354 on high and low styles 106 on periodic sentences 158 on refined English 1920, 16263 on rhetoric and sensibility 2067 orality in 160 Bland, Charles 147, 150, 152 Bloomfield, Leonard 7 Blount, Thomas 150, 185 Blount, Thomas Pope 150 Bogel, Frederick C. 225 Boileau, Nicolas 152, 154 Bond, Donald F. 2n Book of Common Prayer 91 Booth, Wayne 14, 230 Boswell, James 3, 207 Life of Johnson 47, 98110 Tour to the Hebrides 102 Bouhours, Dominique 149, 150, 154 Boulton, James T. 25n, 44, 66, 78 Boyer, Abel 19 Bradham, Jo Allen 109n Bradshaw, Lael Ely 193n Brady, Frank 2n, 104, 110n Brand, John 12 Bredvold, Louis 198n Brightland, John 16, 2430, 39, 5859 British Museum General Catalogue 151 Brodwin, Stanley, 105n Brooke, Frances 198, 203 Brooks, Cleanth 79 Brown, Penelope 21620 Brown, Roger 219n Brown, Tom 25 Browne, Thomas 2 Brovnell, Morris 200 Bryant, Donald C. 59n Bryant, Margaret E. 148n Bunyan, John 91 Burgh, James 151

Burke, Edmund 5867, 77, 118, 152, 156 Letter to a Noble Lord 8687 on manners 161 sentence-length in 26, 63 Burke, Kenneth 120 Burke, Peter 12, 13, 119n Burney, Fanny 137, 180 Burns, Robert 13 Butler, Joseph 176 C Cable, Thomas 173 Cafarelli, Annette W. 196n Campbell, George 8, 40, 145, 152, 154, 15667 Boswell and 100 on periodic sentences 78, 103 on polite language 23, 167 Cassirer, Ernst 186 Catano, James V. 14 Cawdrey, Robert 186 Centlivre, Susanna 19, 213 Cervantes 11 Chafe, Wallace 36, 37, 47n, 123, 134, 136 Chambers, E. K. 228 Chambers, Ephraim 4, 185, 186, 19293 Chambers, Robert 131 Chapman, Gerald 62 Chatman, Seymour 227 Chatterton, Thomas 13 Chaucer, Geoffrey 85, 151 Chesterfield, Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of 11, 131 Chomsky, Noam 100 Christiansen, Francis 25n, 77 Cibber, Colley 18, 214, 214n Cicero 26, 76, 79, 113, 135, 150, 151, 15455 De Oratore 148, 178 Orator 73, 148 Clark, Donald Lemen 79 Clark, Sir Kenneth 69 Cleary, Jean Coates 204 Clifford, James 133, 137 Coates, Jennifer 229 Coates, John 59n, 64 Cobbett, William 17980 Cohen, Murray 178 Colley, Linda 7, 200 Collison, Robert L. 187

colloquial language 2729, 4043, 64, 70, 78, 108, 127 in Addison 96 m Arbuthnot 11415 in Astell 51 in Boswell 104 in Burke 6263 in dictionaries 192 in Pamela 20710 in Pope 4748 in Shaftesbury 71, 10810 in Swift 5358 Congreve, William 46 Connoisseur 10 Conrad, Joseph 26 Constable, John 150, 152 Cooper, Robert L. 6, 17475 Corbett, Edward P. J. 79, 228, 233 Cowley, Hannah 214n Cowper, William 207

< previous page

page_269

next page >

< previous page

page_270

next page > Page 270

Cox, Stephen 206 Crane, Ronald S. 198n Crawford, Robert 163 Cressy, David 36, 171n Critical Review 8, 108, 184 Croll, Morris W. 91n Crowley, Tony 7 Crystal, David 229 Cumberland, Richard 9596, 21314, 214n Cummings, E. E. 121 D d'Alembert, Jean Le Rond 186 Dampier, William 91 Danto, Arthur 226 Davidoff, Leonore 9, 170n, 207 Davy, Derek 229 decorum 99, 101 Defoe, Daniel 25n, 34, 42, 78, 8894 Appeal to Honour and Justice 89, 92 Moll Flanders 8184, 151 The Review 4345 DeForest, Mary 180n DeMaria, Robert, Jr. 129, 186 Demetrms 150 Dennis, John 17, 42 Derrida, Jacques 119n de Sévigné, Marquise Marie de Rabutin-Chantal 130 Dillon, George 145 D'Israeli, Isaac 19 Dobson, Michael 5 Dodsley, Robert 107, 146, 151 Doody, Margaret 207n Douglas, Ann 9 Dowling, William 105n Drake, Nathan 20 Drummond, John 105n Dubos, Jean Baptiste 156 Dwyer, John 163, 164 Dyche, Thomas 16 E Eagleton, Terry 9, 196 Eaves, T. C. Duncan 209 Eden, Kathy 144, 145

Edgeworth, Maria 180 education, in rhetoric 14649 Ehlich, Konrad 220n Ehninger, Douglas 151, 156 Ehrenpreis, Irvin 53, 54, 55, 101n, 11516 Eisenstein, Elizabeth 159n, 169 Elias, Norbert 160 Eliot, T. S. 227, 231 Elledge, Scott 17n Elphinston, James 151, 180 Encyclopaedia Britannica (176871) 4, 185, 19294 Engell, James 157, 158n English language 3, 1621, 87, 159 Elizabethan English 11, 29, 30 Enlightenment, the 17576, 19294 Erasmus, Desiderius 11, 155, 199 Errington, Joseph 224 Erskine-Hill, Howard 17n expressivity ii, iii, vi, 121, 136, 142, 22529 loose sentences and 36, 128 low styles and 161 nominal styles and 137 41 periodic sentences 8083 F Farquhar, George 213, 214n Farrell, Thomas 145 Fasold, Ralph 130, 224 Febvre, Lucien 7 Fell, John 24, 3134 Fell, Margaret see Fox, Margaret Fell Felton, Henry 19, 27, 150, 152 Fénelon, François de Salignac de la Mothe 150, 156 Fenning, Daniel 28, 147 Ferguson, Adam 165, 176 Ferguson, William 163 Fielding, Henry 81, 134, 137 Fielding, Sarah 180, 203 figures of rhetoric: see tropes and figures Finegan, Edward 3538, 123 Fish, Stanley 80, 86n, 144, 228 Fisher, Ann 49, 173, 178 Fitzgerald, John J. 59n Fogg, Peter Walkden 24, 3134 Foote, Samuel 97 Foucault, Michel 144, 176 Fowler, H. W. 184

Fox, Margaret Fell 91, 152 France, Peter 161 Fraser, Bruce 220 Frye, Northrop 231 Fussell, Paul 87 G Gallaway, Frances 101n Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. 119n Gay, John 15 genres 9, 10610, 13031 Gentleman's Magazine 128, 18984 Gerard, Alexander 152, 156, 157 Gerard, David E. 171 Gibbon, Edward 88, 13435 Gibbons, Thomas 151 Gibson, Walker 26, 22627 Gildon, Charles 150 Gill, Stephen 49 Gilman, Albert 219n Gleitman, Lila R. 90

< previous page

page_270

next page >

< previous page

page_271

next page > Page 271

Godwin, William 3, 20, 42, 55, 9697, 181n Caleb Williams 126 Godzich, Wlad 159n Goffman, Erving 36, 37n, 119n Goldsmith, Oliver, She Stoops to Conquer 21112 Gombrich, E. H. 230 Goodman, Nelson 222, 225 Goody, Jack 34, 122 Gordon, Ian 2n Gorgias 128 Graft, Harvey 36 Gragg, Gene 189 Gray, Thomas 104 Greenwood, James 16, 2430, 49, 55, 64 Gregory, Marshall W. 230 Griffiths, Ralph 18283 Group mu 145 Grundy, Isobel 134 Gumperz, John 100, 134, 224 H Hagstrum, Jean 203, 204n Hall, Catherine 9, 170n, 207 Halliday, M. A. K. 34, 108 Hammond, Gerald 89 Harbrace College Handbook 80 Harris, James 100, 156 Harshbarger, Scott 160n Hartmann, R. R. K. 186 Hassan, Ruqaiya 108 Havelock, Eric 119 Hawes, Clement 54, 91 Haywood, Eliza 205 Heath, Shirley Brice 119n Helsinki Corpus 28, 39, 72 Hemingway, Ernest 26 Hendrickson, G. L. 26 Henley, John 150 Herder, Johann Gottfried von 13 Herries, John 151 Hervey, John 20 Herzberg, Bruce 158n high styles 52, 9899, 1014, 11015, 131 Hipple, Walter 157

Hobbes, Thomas 155 Hockey, Susan 228 Hoffman, Ross J. S. 62 Hogarth, William 157, 197 Holcroft, Thomas 213 Hollander, John 231 Holmes, John 152 Hooker, Edward Niles 17 Hooker, Richard 85 Horace 66, 71, 7374, 134, 148, 152, 231 Horn, D. B. 159n Horner, Winifred 143, 151, 158n Howell, James 91 Howell, Wilbur Samuel 15354, 156, 158n Huddleston, Rodney 124 Hudson, Nicholas 13n Hughes, Peter 204 Hume, David 156, 158n, 161, 16465, 176, 180, 198, 227 Hume, Robert D. 214n Humphry Clinker 99, 135 Hurd, Richard 107, 152 Hutcheson, Francis 156 Hyde, Mary 132, 2023 Hymes, Dell 99, 119n, 224 I Inchbald, Elizabeth 214n Isocrates 128 J Jakobson, Roman 226 James, Henry 26, 69, 124, 227 Jefferson, Gail 122, 130, 193 Jespersen, Otto 62n Johnson, Nan 158n Johnson, Samuel 26, 78, 156, 227, 229 in Boswell's Life 10110 Dictionary 2, 7, 14, 18692, 21415 imitations of 3132 letters 12937 on refined English 20 Preface to the Dictionary 176 prose style: artistic 110, excellent 20, extraordinary, 218, pompous 20,

sonorous 97 Rambler 8183, 12628, 207, 231 Rasselas 51 Jones, Richard Foster 18, 91n, 231 Jones, Sir William 100 Joos, Martin 124 Joseph, John Earl 6n Joyce, James Ulysses 99, 121, 230 K Kafker, Frank A. 193 Kalmar, Ivan 36 Kames, Henry Home, Lord 14, 40, 96, 149, 151, 15667, 196 on decorum 107, 154 Kay, Carol 63 Keenan, Elinor Ochs 81 Keener, Frederick C. 10n Kelly, Ann 178n Kennedy, George 32, 79, 152, 158n Kernan, Alvin B. 5n, 31, 110n, 128 Kersey, John 18692, 21415 Ketcham, Michael 94 Kimpel, Ben D. 209 King, Rev. Martin Luther 85 Kinkead-Weekes, Mark 207n

< previous page

page_271

next page >

< previous page

page_272

next page > Page 272

Kinneavy, James 145, 226 Kirkby, John 28, 147 Kittay, Jeffrey 159n Kivy, Peter 230 Klein, Lawrence 15, 75n, 161 Knowles, John 172 Knox, Vicesimus 20 Kolb, Gwin 174, 215 Korshin, Paul 171n Kramnick, Isaac 201 Kranidas, Thomas 101n Kroeber, A. L. 221 Kroll, Richard W. F. 91n Kytö, Marja 28, 29, 72 L Labov, William 22324, 237 Lackington, James 170 Lakoff, Robin Tolmach 90, 130, 216 Lamy, Bernard 150 Lane, A. 18, 2430, 55, 178 Lang, Berel 226 Langacker, Ronald W. 41, 189 Langford, Paul 35, 159n, 161, 195 language 3, 80, 186 commodification of 8 language change 14, 1314, 1921, 2241, 62, 23538 language planning 17475, 237 Lanham, Richard 76, 95, 101n, 123n, 125, 145, 228 Lannering, Jan 94 Lawrence, D. H. 26, 124 Lawson, John 27, 151, 154, 155, 156 Leech, Geoffrey N. 26, 79 Le Faucheur, Michel 150 Leith, Dick 2, 3, 7 Leland, Thomas 151 Lennard, John 141n Lennox, Charlotte 5, 205 Leonard, Sterling A. 172, 175, 178 Levack, Paul 62 letters, familiar 13037 Levine, Arthur 18 Levinson, Stephen 119, 122n, 21620 Lewis, Clive Staples 232

lexicon see vocabulary Liberman, Isabelle Y. 120 Lightfoot, David 236 linguistics 1314, 153, 22324 Linnaeus, 192, 193 Lipking, Lawrence 2n, 186 literacy 58, 23, 36, 49, 119, 16994 Livy 71 Lock, F. P. 59n, 92 Locke, John 142, 153, 198 London 45, 35 Longinus 148, 150, 151, 155, 228, 229 loose sentences 2528, 43, 7697 in Swift 5457 orality and 54 low styles 2627, 51, 10416, 17484 homely, physical idioms 26, 41, 55, 191 in Arbuthnot 114 in Burke 98 in Centlivre 213 in Shaftesbury 6970 in Swift 55, 57, 11516 Lowe, Solomon 147, 152 Lowth, Robert 29, 96, 160n, 172, 173, 177n, 179 Lucian 1089 Lustig, Irma 100, 109n Lyons, Sir John 3, 31 M MacDermott, Kathy 18 Macfarquar, Colin 194 Mack, Maynard 46, 103 Mackenzie, George 150 Mackenzie, Henry 19, 203 Macpherson, James 207 Malone, Edmund 20 Mandeville, Bernard 27 Mandeville, John 9091 Marchand, Hans 33n Markley, Robert 91n Martin, Benjamin 188 Mason, John 151, 237 Mattaire, Michael 16, 2430, 3839, 59 McCarthy, William 202 McCawley, James 100 McCracken, David 59n McGee, Michael 144

McIntosh, Carey 52n, 101n, 123n, 179n, 193n, 218 McKendrick, Neil 4, 171 McKeon, Michael 25n McMahon, April M. S. 236 Melmouth, William 107, 152 Ménage, Gilles 109 Methold, William 91 Meyer, Leonard 223, 230 Michael, Ian 147, 151, 155, 172, 178n Milic, Louis 30, 40, 232 Mill, John Stuart 14 Miller, J. Hillis 230 Miller, Thomas 143, 159 Millward, Celia 2n Milner, John 151 Milroy, James 6n, 237, 238 Milroy, Lesley 6n, 237 Milton, John 8586, 112 Minifie, Susannah and Margaret 203

< previous page

page_272

next page >

< previous page

page_273

next page > Page 273

Monboddo, James Burnet, Lord 14, 100, 152, 153, 154, 15667 Monk, Samuel 2n Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley 130, 205 Monthly Review 7, 44, 18283 Monroe, B. S. 16 Moran, Michael 151, 152 More, Hannah 203, 204n, 206 Mossner, Ernest C. 180 Mosteller, Frederick 228 Mueller, Janel 20, 9091, 138, 227 Mukarovsky, Jan 224 Mullan, John 198n Murphy, James 146 Murray, Lindley 23, 24, 28, 3134 N Nangle, Benjamin C. 183n National Union Catalogue 151 New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature 151, 185n Nelson, John 144 Nevalainen, Terttu 39 New Rhetoric, the 10, 14243, 15660 Newbury, John 147, 151 Newman, Gerald 7n Newton, Isaac 153, 158n Newton, John 150 Nist, John 173 nominal styles 3234, 11726, 217 in Johnson 12629 in Richardson 13741 North, Helen 144 Noyes, Gertrude E. 185n, 186, 187 Nussbaum, Felicity A. 109n O Obelkevich, James 10, 11 O'Day, Rosemary 14849 Ogilvie, John 155n Ohmann, Richard 231 Oldmixon, John 115, 149 Olson, David R. 120 Ong, Walter J. 36, 110, 118, 119, 15960, 206 oral styles 3438, 5051, 11726, 205 in Burke 5964 in Johnson 199216

in Shaftesbury 10813 in Swift 5354 orality 1, 28, 34, 54, 59, 11719, 127, 208 intonation 54, 118 New Rhetoric and 160 oral dimensions of written texts 5968, 12026, 2079 women and 205 Orwell, George 137 Osselton, Noel Edward 185n, 186, 187 Ossian 13 Oxford English Dictionary 2, 53, 64, 65, 108, 173, 188, 209 P Paine, Thomas 3, 7, 4345, 118 Parkes, M. B. 89 Passler, David L. 109n Paulson, Ronald 62 Percy, Carol 8, 178 Percy, Thomas 13 periodic sentences 31, 4345, 50, 52, 7697, 101, 11549 Aristotle's definition of 25 in Boswell 1034 in Shaftesbury 72, 113 writtenness and 38 Perry, Ruth 5051 Philips, Ambrose 27 Phillips, Edward 91, 185, 186, 187 Phillipson, Nicholas 165n Pinker, Stephen 174 Piozzi, Hester Thrale see Thrale, Hester Salisbury Plumb, J. H. 4, 199 Plutarch 105n, 109, 110n Pocock, J. G. A. 59n, 160 poetry, language of 3n politeness 1, 23, 195220 as cultural ideal 15, 196 in the New Rhetoric 13, 14243, 16067 nominal style and 125, 137 Poole, Joshua 150, 155 Pooley, Roger 79 Poovey, Mary 203, 204n Pope, Alexander 17, 19, 62, 67, 130, 154, 227 ''Atticus" portrait 8486 Dunciad 5, 162 Essay on Criticism 1718, 106, 152, 162 1717 Preface 18, 4549 solecisms in 40, 179

popular culture 1213 Porter, Lucy 131, 135 Porter, Roy 197, 199 Potkay, Adam 9, 97 Pottle, Frederick A. 100 Pratt, Mary Louise 40 Preece, Warren E. 187 prescriptive (or normative) grammars 21, 28, 40, 65, 85, 142, 17181 see also solecisms; writtenness language change and 78, 17376 Price, Glanville 7n Price, Martin 2n Priestley, Joseph 107, 148, 152, 153, 154, 15667 on grammar 173, 178 print culture 58, 32, 3438, 159, 16994 nominal styles and 117

< previous page

page_273

next page >

< previous page

page_274

next page > Page 274

prose rhythms 72, 112 proverbs 1012, 37, 53, 181, 208 publishing 6, 68, 16971 punctuation 278, 5051, 89, 189 Q Quinn, Arthur 52n, 61, 62n Quintilian 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 154, 155, 158, 17778, 229 Quirk, Randolph 46n, 47n, 81, 124 R Rabelais 111, 11516 Ramsay, Allan 13 Rand, Benjamin 7475 Ranum, Orest 199n Raumolin-Brunberg, H. 39 Ray, John 11 Rawson, Claude 204 Razzell, Peter 199200 Redford, Bruce 129, 131n Reeve, Clara 180 Reid, Christopher 59n, 64, 66 Reresby, Tamworth 17 rhetoric 910, 13, 47, 14346 see also style, rhetorical; tropes and figures; New Rhetoric classical 61, 14344, 14655, 15859 ethos 47, 64 (in Burke), 144, 225 orality and 59 Ricchetti, John 226 Rice, John 151 Richardson, Samuel 137 Clarissa Harlowe 11, 13741, 204 Pamela 204, 205, 20711, 21819 Rissanen, Matti 28, 29, 72 Robertson, William 165 Robinson, Jenefer M. 226 Roche, Daniel 199 Rogers, Pat 153, 180 Rollin, Charles 151, 156, 205 Romaine, Suzanne 99, 224, 236, 237 Roper, Derek 182, 183n, 184 Rose, Mark 8, 170 Rosen, Charles 222 Ross, Ian Simpson 163n, 196n Ross, J. R. 123, 217 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 76, 100, 203

Rowe, Elizabeth 20 Rowe, Nicholas 5 Rydén, Mats 22 S Sacks, Harvey 37n, 119n, 122n, 130, 205 Sambrook, James 200 Samuels, M. L. 37n Sanders, Robert E. 119n Sapir, Edward 80, 174, 223 Saville-Troike, Muriel 119n, 192 Schapiro, Meyer 223 Schegloff, Emanuel 37n, 122n, 130, 205 Schieffelin, Bambi 81 Scollon, Ron and Suzanne B. K. 122n Scotland 163 see also New Rhetoric Enlightenment in 16468, 238 language and 7, 153, 28081 Scott, Geoffrey 101 Scott, Sara 203 Scott, Walter 1 Sell, Roger D. 220n semantics 20, 6061 sensibility, sentimentalism 9, 154 language and 2037 separation of styles 26, 50, 6566, 98101, 1068 Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of 3, 21, 62, 6775, 161, 198 Askémata 7475, 111 on harshness of English 1617 high styles in 11113 prose style pompous 20 Shakespeare, William 11, 52, 86, 109n, 134, 13536, 214, 227 in printed books 5 Shankweiler, Donald 120 Shelley, Mary 180 Sher, Richard 165 Sherburn, George 2n Sheridan, Frances 203 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley 42, 151, 214n Sheridan, Thomas 100, 149, 151, 156, 16263 Shevelow, Kathryn 205 Short, Michael 26, 79 Siebert, Donald T. 215n Simpson, John A. 188 Sircello, Guy 231 Sitter, John E. 227 Skinner, Stephen 215

Sledd, James 174, 215 Smellie, William 194 Smith, Adam 27, 152, 153, 15667, 198 four stages of history 16364 Smith, Barbara Herrnstein 232 Smith, Charlotte 180 Smith, John 150 Smith, Nigel 91 Smith, Olivia 7, 78, 107, 181n Smollett, Tobias 137, 164, 184, 197 social class 23, 38, 4344, 4647, 6769, 118 see also high styles; low styles; separation of styles colloquialisms, archaisms, solecisms, and 28, 85 lower-class language 1068

< previous page

page_274

next page >

< previous page

page_275

next page > Page 275

solecisms in language 2829, 135, 175, 179181, 19091, 208 in book reviews 18184 in Paine 44 in Shaftesbury 7172 in speech 3637, 55 in Swift 57 South, Robert 154 Spacks, Patricia 108 Spectator 2, 2425, 127, 14348 speech acts 216 Spence, Joseph 110n Spencer, Jane 198 Spender, Dale 229 Sperber, Dan 80, 119n, 129, 224 Spitzer, Leo 227, 230 Sprat, Thomas 2, 153 Spufford, Margaret 147, 171n Stallybrass, Peter 50 standardization 57, 2324, 237 Stanlis, Peter J. 59n Starnes, De Witt T. 185n, 186, 187 Starr, George 25n, 78 Staves, Susan 201 Steele, Joshua 1516, 122, 152 Steele, Richard 20, 22, 25, 42, 214 The Tender Husband 213 Stein, Dieter 6n, 14 Sterne, Lawrence 74, 100, 120, 203 Stirling, John 49, 146, 147, 151 Stock, Brian 119n Stone, Lawrence 2003 Strang, Barbara 2, 23, 58, 174, 237 Struever, Nancy 157 Sundby, Bertil 49, 147, 178 Sutherland, James 32 Sweetser, Eve 189 Swift, Jonathan 2, 21, 62, 98, 67, 148, 162 Conduct of the Allies 5456 Contests and Dissentions 5657 high and low styles in 34, 111, 11516 History of the Four Last Years 5758 Journal to Stella 5354 oral prose in 3031, 5358

Polite Conversation 11, 53, 162 Proposal for Correcting 16, 125, 176, 178 solecisms in 40, 56n, 57 Tale of a Tub 18, 9394, 11516, 176 Tatler (no. 230) 16 verbal styles in 12526 T Tacitus 152 Talmy, Leonard 90 Tannen, Deborah 54, 60, 64, 122n, 129, 130, 133, 134 Tate, Nahum 16 Tatler 20, 23 Taylor, Bishop Jeremy 2 Taylor, John 131, 135 Theobald, Lewis 18 Thompson, E. P. 36 Thompson, James (the poet) 112, 200 Thompson, James (the scholar) 227 Thorpe, James 28 Thrale, Hester Salisbury (later Mrs Piozzi) 1078, 13137, 2013, 205 Thraliana 110n Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Ingrid 6n, 22, 30, 178 Tillotson, John 29 Todd, Janet 198 Tompkins, Jane 229 Traugott, Elizabeth Closs 4041, 224, 237 tropes and figures of rhetoric 6162, 153 alliteration 52, 60 anacoluthon 138 anadiplosis 61 anaphora 61, 102, 153, 212 antimetabole 102 antithesis 3132, 4546, 57, 6768, 72, 103, 127, 200, 212 aposiopesis 218 apostrophe 218 assonance 60 asyndeton 212, 228 chiasmus 157 diacope 61 divisio 72 ellipsis 49, 56, 56n, 58, 109, 138, 232 epanados 61 epanalepsis 61, 72 epanorthosis 218 epistrophe 61 epizeuxis 153, 224

euphemism 197 exclamation 112 gradatio (climax) 102 hyperbole 45, 103, 229 irony 50, 62, 8788 isocolon (balanced or parallel structures) 63, 72, 102, 126 metaphor 52, 65, 72, 99 oxymoron 52 paradox 46, 52, 72 paralepsis 32, 153, 218 parenthesis 50, 141 periphrasis 197, 217 personification (prosopopoia) 52, 102, 170 pleonasmus (tautology) 112, 147 polyptoton 52, 61 praeteritio 72 procatalepsis 153 rhetorical questions 32, 112, 212, 218

< previous page

page_275

next page >

< previous page

page_276 Page 276

Trotter, Catharine 25 Trudgill, Peter 259 Trusler, John 215 Twigg, John 159n Tyndale, William 8889, 139 U Ullman, Stephen 189 Ulman, H. Lewis 158n Ussher, George Neville 24, 3134 V Van Sant, Ann 204 Vance, John 104 verbs and verbal style 33, 12326 see also oral styles vernacular language 3n, 910, 114 Vickers, Brian 62n, 91n, 143, 144, 147 Vincent, David 171 Virgil 109, 136 vocabulary abstractions 3233, 38, 47, 12324, 12627, 13739, 210, 217 courtly 32, 1025, 21819 in Johnson 200 Latinate 62, 7071, 107, 112 low 44, 5657, 70 middle-class 44, 56 physical words 21415 polysyllables 32, 49, 62, 72, 126, 217 Voitle, Robert 68, 70, 73, 75n, 111 Voltaire, François-Marie Arouet de 106 Vygotsky, Lev 119n W Waingrow, Marshall 105 Walker, John 122, 151 Walker, Obadiah 150 Wallace, David 228 Wallbank, M. V. 148n Walpole, Horace 44 Warburton, William 47n Ward, Edward 111, 116 Ward, John 27, 76, 79, 103, 151, 154, 155, 156 Warnick, Barbara 158n Warren, Austin 79 Warton, Thomas 19, 107 Watson, Robert 156

Watt, Ian 25n, 78, 122, 204, 227 Watts, Isaac 149, 152 Watts, Richard J. 220 Watts, Ruth 148n Weinbrot, Howard 7n, 156n Weiser, David K. 59n Wellbery, David 145 Wellek, René 186 Wells, Rulon 123n Welsted, Leonard 17 Wesley, John 12 Whately, Richard 76, 79 White Allon 34 Whitefield, George 12 Whitman, Cedric 231 Wilentz, Gay 205 Wilkinson, L. P. 79, 11213 Williams, Raymond 200 Wiiliamson, George 91n Wilson, Deirdre 80, 119n, 129, 224 Wilson, Thomas 17, 62 Wimsatt, William K., Jr. 117, 109, 126, 127, 128, 227, 228 Winn, James 144 Witherspoon, John 165 Wollstonecraft, Mary 2021, 5053, 67, 152 women and language 89, 195214, 229 Woolf, Virginia 87 Wordsworth, William 1, 4549, 67 World 10 Wotton, William 18 Wright, Susan 70 writtenness (vs. orality) 1, 612, 4849, 59, 6667, 70, 118, 12325, 128 see also publishing; print culture in dictionaries 18792 in Johnson 12629 in the New Rhetoric 142, 158 in Shaftesbury 7071 in prescriptive grammars 173 language change and 3438 politeness and 2324, 125, 14243 Y Yeazell, Ruth 204 Z Zupko, Ronald Edward 6

< previous page

page_276