Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

ROMANTICISM AND THE RISE OF ENGLISH

Stanford University Press

Contents

Acknowledgments.......................................................viiIntroduction: the dust of Philology...................................1 1 Purifying English.................................................18 2 Romantic syntax...................................................45 3 Bad Englishes.....................................................73 4 Sounding Meaning..................................................108 5 Sentencing Romanticism............................................144 6 Afterlives: Philology, Elocution, Composition.....................185Afterword.............................................................216Abbreviations.........................................................221Notes.................................................................223Works Cited...........................................................239Index.................................................................265

Chapter One

Histories of English all agree, as Murray Cohen notes, that "there is more of almost everything linguistic in the second half of the eighteenth century than in the first: more grammars and more kinds of grammar, more theories of language, more sorts of questions asked about language, more dictionaries, spelling books, proposals for reordering pedagogy, and more languages taught" (Sensible Words 78). Philologists, grammarians, lexicographers, and orthoepists (codifiers of correct pronunciation) developed rules about usage that changed how English was defined, taught, analyzed, judged, and printed. While guides to English had existed for centuries, they had previously helped foreigners wanting to learn English; if people (usually foreigners) spoke "good English," the phrase meant that they were comprehensible. The eighteenth century saw the rise of books of usage for natives, which aimed to teach readers not how to speak English, but how to do it correctly. Good English was now not just comprehensible: it followed rules for right usage.

Traditional philological histories have treated this prescriptivism as a very bad thing. Hatred of prescriptivism runs deep in linguistics. The first chapter of a standard linguistics textbook, for example, insists that "all grammars are equal" and commands that "any statement of the rules and conventions for speech and writing must reflect the way language is actually used, not someone's idealized vision of how it should be used" (O'Grady et al., Contemporary Linguistics 6, 7). Since linguistics long ago renounced prescriptivism in order to enter into the academy as a respectable scientific discipline, such textbooks make sure to teach the uninitiated that prescriptivism is deluded and harmful.

Historians of English follow the general trend of linguistics by carrying back to the eighteenth century the mistrust of prescriptivism: "One cannot escape the feeling that many of them [the prescriptivists] took delight in detecting supposed flaws in the grammar of 'our most esteemed writers"' (Baugh and Cable, History of the English Language 273); "Such writers fail to see that language has to remain variable in order to be able to respond to all kinds of changes as a result of developments in technology, culture and global communication generally. To think that language could be fixed in the same way as, say, the metre or shoe sizes or video systems is an illusion" (Nevalainen and van Ostade, "Standardisation" 285). Such comments turn later linguistic historians into unwitting prescriptivists, sternly separating good from bad linguists just as earlier writers separated good from bad usage. Yet the English experts have the last laugh, since the English of later historians obeys all their rules and helps to guarantee their continued power.

The changes in English in the eighteenth century are more profound than traditional philology has admitted. These changes meant less that English became rule-bound than that the nature of what it meant to be an English-using person changed. The English experts transformed English so as to recast personal identity, intra- and inter-group bonds, and collective agency. Their work drastically expanded the potential functions and results that could be expected of actions that took place in English. Most of all, they created a new urgency and excitement surrounding practices enabled by English.

At the center of this change was print. While Britons spoke many language varieties during this period, English ruled print: no utopian upheavals were needed to create print monolingualism. For many, print meant the diffusion of liberty and civilization themselves; as Samuel Johnson told Adam Fergusson, "The mass of every people must be barbarous where there is no printing" (Boswell, Life of Johnson 477). Print changed not only the amount of English available to readers but also the link between author and audience. As Michael McKeon notes, in discussing Defoe,

Publication is represented as an act of depersonalization that abstracts both author and reader from the concrete presence of face-to-face exchange; and yet the very impersonality of the exchange imposes upon the author an unprecedented burden of personal and ethical obligation. Publication is here felt to be an act of supreme mastery ... and yet by virtue of this mastery it is also felt to entail an alienation, a loss of control over what has been said, a disowning of what henceforth remains in the possession of others. (Secret History 54)

The abstraction and depersonalization described by McKeon had a side effect: English became the assumed source of commonality between author and reader. As other sources of common ground vanished, understanding printed English was left as the chief and possibly the only bond that an author had with an audience. Instead of writing for particular readers, authors faced an amorphous general public, of whom little could be known beyond the fact that it read English. As a result, print made the stakes in a common linguistic ground higher than ever before, and the standardizers of English worked hard to make it a reality.

The English experts' works glory in the dazzle of print. J. Paul Hunter has noted that by the beginning of the eighteenth century, novelists made up for the lack of a previous connection with their readers through devices aiming to mimic orality, such as introductions, direct addresses, and appeals to common interest (Before Novels 156-61). The English experts did the opposite. Rather than masking their print status, their books showcased the art of the page. At the level of layout, they feature elaborately varied formats, with beautifully aligned lists, columns, charts, and tables. At the level of typeface, they varied fonts and the size of type to distinguish between major topics, minor topics, exceptions, and examples. New symbols appeared for intonation, emphasis, syllabification, and special notes.' Although these books rarely mention print explicitly, their visuality proved that print had revolutionized communication. English would now be defined not through speech or handwriting, but through print. Even works about spoken English would be works in print, so that the meaning of pronunciation itself needed to be redefined.

Although later historians have called the work of...