In recognizing the likelihood of this presumption, James Paul Cobbett saw the degree to which the language of class and status had become imbued with morality. An interesting example of this is the word villain. In the fourteenth century it had meant something like ‘simple-minded yokel’; by the early nineteenth, though sometimes used playfully, it denoted a criminal – and typically an important one, as in a play or a novel. The adjective vulgar, which from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries meant before all else ‘ordinary’, began to have the senses ‘plebeian’ and ‘unrefined’ around 1550 and 1650 respectively; these became much more common in the nineteenth century, especially to describe not just ‘vulgar’ behaviour, but the people who exhibited it. In that period, too, emerged the adjectives vulgar-minded and vulgar-looking. Rascal was a term for a member of the lowest social class – and for a common soldier – before it began to be used of people lacking principles. Ignoble was in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries used of people who were not of noble birth; beginning in the 1590s, and increasingly thereafter, it signified baseness and dishonour, and by the Victorian period using it in the older sense was a consciously old-fashioned gesture. Beggar is another word that has made this journey from being merely descriptive to being emotive, and wretch denoted an exile hundreds of years before it became a term of contempt. C. S. Lewis neatly summed up this phenomenon as ‘the moralization of status words’. It began long before the age of Dickens and Disraeli, but the emotive use of status words was exaggerated as an increasingly urban population advertised its distance from rustic living and its less affluent forebears.
It became normal for the more privileged members of society to dismiss those less privileged as an amorphous mass or a monstrous glut of flesh. This grew more pronounced at the beginning of the twentieth century, thanks in part to the influence of Friedrich Nietzsche’s eloquently nasty condemnation of the crawling Christian rabble – an idea explored at length in John Carey’s book The Intellectuals and the Masses.13 But nineteenth-century discussions of usage tend to emphasize the gulf between the gentleman and the commoner.
The definition of gentlemanliness was contentious. According to whose criteria you applied, it could mean maintaining a carriage, being indifferent to money matters, or having no profession. Lord Chesterfield mockingly noted in the 1750s that the word gentleman was applied to ‘every man, who, with a tolerable suit of cloaths, a sword by his side, and a watch and snuff-box in his pockets, asserts himself to be gentleman, swears with energy that he will be treated as such, and that he will cut the throat of any man who presumes to say the contrary’.14 Chesterfield borrowed from French the word etiquette to speak of a code of manners not directly connected to morals. In one of his letters he suggested that a man of the world should be a chameleon. Doing the right thing was less important than doing as others did. With regard to language, this meant being smoothly conformist. One should not speak of oneself, but should fit in with one’s group. ‘Avoid singularity,’ he cautioned.
Where morals were concerned, the opposite position to Chesterfield’s was that of Samuel Richardson, whose novels resembled conduct books. In Sir Charles Grandison (1753–4) Richardson envisaged a succession of situations in which his protagonist had the opportunity to prove himself a gentleman. Richardson portrayed a kind of eighteenth-century Christ, a paragon of benevolence. Grandison is a man of honour but also of commerce – devoted to his family and to promoting marriage, forever resolving conflicts and bringing harmony to the lives of others, admired by women and held in universally high regard. One of his stated virtues is that ‘He never perverts the meaning of words’. Yet his use of language is animatedly sentimental, and Richardson’s French translator Prévost found it necessary to tone down this excess.
Both Richardson and Chesterfield informed the Victorian notion of gentlemanliness. But while Richardson was cherished mainly by female readers, Chesterfield was the more common model for male ones – an important divergence. The latter’s detachment of propriety from ethics was wonderfully convenient: it made being ‘proper’ so much easier. The Spectator essays of Joseph Addison and Sir Richard Steele were also highly valued; their nineteenth-century audience, reading them a century and more after they were composed, noted the restraint they counselled. It was decorous but also cunning. Addison declared the essays ‘calculated to diffuse good Sense through the Bulk of a People’. In fact, they suggested one should be an actor in the theatre of daily life. Reading other people’s gestures was a crucial part of this, and so was interpreting the fabric of one’s environment. Steele had previously advised in The Tatler that ‘the Appellation of Gentleman is never to be affixed to a Man’s Circumstances, but to his Behaviour in them’. Often in The Spectator there is close attention to particular words, such as good-breeding or conversation, and the behaviours they imply are discussed. Ideals of conduct are suggested by repetition of these terms, and they become a kind of shorthand for a code of comportment. In Victorian arguments about English, such repetition is a substitute for examining the truth.
In Victorian Britain gentlemanly conduct was variously defined, but always involved the idea of exclusivity – of keeping the ungentlemanly at arm’s length. John Ruskin suggested that ‘the essence of a gentleman’ is that he ‘comes from a pure gens, or is perfectly bred. After that, gentleness and sympathy, or kind disposition and fine imagination’.15 In The Book of Snobs (1848) William Makepeace Thackeray provides a definition that is effectively an article of faith:
What is it to be a gentleman? Is it to be honest, to be gentle, to be generous, to be brave, to be wise, and, possessing all these qualities, to exercise them in the most graceful outward manner? Ought a gentleman to be a loyal son, a true husband, and honest father? Ought his life to be decent – his bills to be paid – his tastes to be high and elegant – his aims in life lofty and noble? In a word, ought not the Biography of a First Gentleman in Europe to be of such a nature, that it might be read in Young Ladies’ Schools with advantage, and studied with profit in the Seminaries of Young Gentlemen?
One of Thackeray’s projects was to redefine gentlemanliness, in a way that reflected a shift in the balance of power that occurred during his lifetime (1811–1863): from the landowners to the new middle classes. Thackeray thought that the middle classes should reject the example of their social superiors, rather than modelling themselves on it. Yet as the ideal of gentlemanliness became entrenched, so the word itself became awkward. It was a yardstick, but it was also a form of trap. Harold Laski, in an essay published in the 1930s on ‘The Danger of Being a Gentleman’, reflected on the anti-democratic and anti-intellectual nature of gentlemanly conduct; the gentleman Laski pictured was a leisured amateur, unimaginative, accustomed to command, and narrow in his social loyalties.16
The Victorian gentleman was judged on his inner qualities as well as his outward bearing, and those inner qualities were inferred from his language. In Basil (1852), Wilkie Collins’s first novel of modern life, a character’s speaking ‘pure English’ leads to his being imagined ‘a gentleman’. Pronunciation was a key part of this perceived purity. In one of his later novels, I Say No (1884), the flighty wife of a manservant asks a woman to whom she has just been rude, ‘Do you notice my language? I inherit correct English from my mother – a cultivated person, who married beneath her. My maternal grandfather was a gentleman.’ And in the more celebrated The Woman in White (1859–60) there is Pesca, an Italian professor who ‘prided himself on being a perfect Englishman in his language, as well as in his dress, manners, and amusements’. He has ‘picked up a few of our most familiar colloquial expressions’ and sprinkles them in his conversation ‘whenever they happened to occur to him, turning them, in his high relish for their sound and his general ignorance of their sense, into compound words and repetitions of his own, and always running them into each other, as if they consisted of one long syllable’. The man who considers himself ‘a perfect Englishman in his language’ is a stock comic figure: t
o be correct is one thing, but to take pride in what one believes to be one’s correctness is quite another.
The ‘correct English’ spoken of so archly by the character in I Say No is, in her eyes, a marker of status. But, for Collins, her decision to draw attention to it belies this. The need for discretion about one’s correctness is a symptom of the contemporary cult of the ‘lady’. An anonymous publication of 1835, Woman: As She Is, and As She Should Be, argued that ‘Whatever nature or law may have denied women, art and secret sway give them all’. The author claimed that women were ‘glorified with a false worship’ and had an ‘unwholesome liberty’. ‘Mental strength is not the gift, nor can it be the glory of the woman,’ it was claimed, and ‘it is to her no legitimate source of public or even private influence.’ Creating an ideal of ladylike behaviour was a means of remedying this: women were ‘by no means to be left in darkness, as regards wholesome knowledge’, and should be trained in ‘conversation with sensible men, and the virtue of listening’.17 As a term for a woman having the characteristics of high social standing, lady is a phenomenon of the middle decades of the century, accompanied by ladydom, ladyhood, ladyish and ladykind. Today many find the word lady an absurd relic of a less enlightened past, but it holds on, a little mistily. As the author of a Reader’s Digest style guide dating from 1983 justly notes, it is ‘so full of social overtones and built-in gender assumptions that no one can prescribe rules of its usage for others’.18
For a Victorian lady, the key concern was voice. Among the qualities considered desirable in a female voice were elegance, correctness, purity and refinement. Efforts to explain these were patchy, but clear articulation was essential, as was a carefulness about emphasis and breathing. In Jane Eyre (1847), one of the novels Queen Victoria read to her husband Prince Albert (reading aloud being a necessary accomplishment among socially superior women), Miss Temple displays a ‘refined propriety in her language, which precluded deviation into the ardent, the excited, the eager: something which chastened the pleasure of those who looked on her and listened to her, by a controlling sense of awe’. In The Black Robe (1881), Wilkie Collins comments that ‘Even in trifles, a woman’s nature is degraded by the falsities of language and manner which the artificial condition of modern society exacts from her.’
George Vandenhoff’s The Lady’s Reader (1862) was one of the more notable works aimed at helping young women achieve this expected artificiality. His opening words are ‘Grace of speech is particularly attractive in woman’. He goes on to characterize grace in terms of ‘sparkling accentuation’ and ‘an agreeable tone of voice’. ‘Every lady,’ he claims, ‘should be able to take up a book of prose or poetry, and read any passage in it smoothly, intelligently, and musically, without aiming at effect or display, but in a sensible, pleasing, and graceful manner.’ He continues in this vein, lamenting that while ‘many ladies’ can play and sing Rossini and Verdi ‘with taste, elegance, and effect’, there are few ‘who can read aloud with clearness, sentiment, and expression’. Vandenhoff throws in a certain amount of technical material – bits about ‘nasal-labials’ and ‘labia-dentals’ – but even in 1862 many would have been loath to share his assumption that women differ from men by tending to ‘stumble and confuse themselves’ when reading aloud.19 What Vandenhoff does estimate correctly, though, is the capacity of his audience to learn. Suspiciously sexist though it may sound, there is a lot of cogent modern research suggesting that women have tended to be more receptive than men to prestige forms of language. The work of Peter Trudgill in Norwich illustrates this. Trudgill makes the point that men have traditionally been evaluated in terms of what they do (‘Oh, so you’re a barrister?’, ‘Sheep-shearing – how interesting’), while women have been evaluated according to how they look and other markers of their status, one of which is their use of language. He argues that ‘Women in our society are more status-conscious than men, generally speaking, and are therefore more aware of the social significance of linguistic variables’. Men are more likely to be influenced ‘from below’ and women ‘from above’.20
Nineteenth-century novels reflect on such concerns intriguingly. Novelists capitalized on readers’ familiarity with prescriptive rules and related notions about accents and dialects to position their characters precisely in the social hierarchy. In Middlemarch the newly rich are characterized by the gossipy Mrs Cadwallader as having an accent which is ‘an affliction to the ears’ and confirms that ‘such people were no part of God’s design in making the world’. Those who, like Mrs Cadwallader and Rosamond Vincy, sniff out the ‘aroma of rank’ are limited by this delicacy, even though they think it elevates them.
Dickens’s characters perfectly exhibit many tics we recognize and others we sense are typical of the age. So, in Bleak House (1852–3) there are lawyers who leave out syllables and sometimes several words as they clip through their patter, and Dickens’s prosecutors are apt to cross-examine the people to whom they speak not just in the courtroom, but beyond it. Many of those who populate his novels are defined by their catchphrases, like modern game-show hosts whose personalities are annihilated by their professional joviality. Then there are characters who embody familiar conversational mannerisms: Littimer the manservant in David Copperfield who uses no superlatives, Mr Chillip the doctor in the same novel whose meekness means he cannot ‘throw’ a word at anyone and instead gently offers fragments of speech as if proffering a treat to a mad dog, the gentlemen in Hard Times who ‘yaw-yawed in their speech’, and gouty Sir Leicester Dedlock in Bleak House who ‘had so long been thoroughly persuaded of the weight and import to mankind of any word he said, that his words really had come to sound as if there was something in them’. We also see the snottiness with which the speech of foreigners is regarded; Cavalletto in Little Dorrit is mocked for his dodgy conjugations and overcooked adverbs, and the people with whom he mixes ‘spoke to him in very loud voices as if he were stone deaf’ – which is still the standard approach of the English when addressing people who do not speak their language.
Better known is Dickens’s facility for capturing ordinary London folk’s everyday speech. His deliberate and significant misspellings include arternoon, sov’ring, tremendjous, earnins, fi’typunnote, particklery, gen’lm’n, hinfant and everythink, and there is a mass of cracked syntax, among which a favourite example is Joe Gargery’s line in Great Expectations that ‘it were understood … and it are understood’. Now and then, when Dickens is dealing with the manglers of speech, the membrane between narrator and character is perforated. Sam Weller in The Pickwick Papers cannot pronounce his vs or his ws, but he can use the word mottle-faced (already used by the narrator – though of course Sam’s not supposed to know that). Occasionally characters seem to be turning into ventriloquist’s dummies, as they give forth melodramatic orations that are dense with sub-clauses and far removed from the usual register of spoken language.
Dickens as an author is forever a performer – deliberately making detours, subverting expectations, exuberantly clustering images, and exaggerating – and his reflections on language suggest that he sees it as a source and object of amusement. In Our Mutual Friend there are young women, the daughters of army officers, who are ‘accustomed to every luxury of life (except spelling)’, while in Nicholas Nickleby the brutal Squeers says confidently that ‘A horse is a quadruped, and quadruped’s Latin for beast, as everybody that’s gone through the grammar knows, or else where’s the use of having grammars at all?’ Where indeed? Characters in Dickens express aversions to the words plunder and must (as in ‘I reckon you must do it’); barber is condemned as a dishonourable poor relation of hairdresser. But Dickens also has fun at the expense of larger phenomena of the age. The Circumlocution Office in Little Dorrit parodies the prolix absurdities of Victorian administration. In Oliver Twist he includes some of the ‘flash’ language of the criminal underworld; struck by Dickens’s evocation in that novel of squalor and vice in all their colour, the teenage Queen Victoria recommended it to
Lord Melbourne. He was far from smitten, objecting to the novelist’s depiction of pickpockets, coffin makers and other things he did not wish to see in either life or art. Melbourne was a relic of the previous age; Victoria noted in her diary that he pronounced Rome and gold as Room and goold, and she therefore thought he might be the best person to explain to her the difference between who and whom.21
A greater historical range is found in Thackeray, who illuminates questions of language in a thoroughly knowing fashion. He frequently alludes to the changes in linguistic standards over the preceding century and a half. In The History of Henry Esmond (1852), which is set at the end of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth centuries, he creates a pastiche of that period’s style that is at once amusingly archaic and perfectly natural. He carefully uses obsolete words and period slang to evoke his setting, employs some antique spellings, and indeed comments that ‘spelling was not an article of general commodity in the world then’. In Catherine, which also has an early-eighteenth-century setting, he notes that ‘People were accustomed in those days to use much more simple and expressive terms of language than are now thought polite; and it would be dangerous to give, in this present year 1840, the exact words of reproach which passed between Hayes and his wife in 1726.’ Characters’ accents, spelling and handwriting are forever being used to place them socially: one aristocratic lady ‘wrote like a schoolgirl of thirteen’, while another ‘breaks the King’s English, and has half a dozen dukes at her table’. In the nineteenth century new terms of reproof for bad handwriting included the adjectives spidery, scrawly, cramped, shaky, stiff, niggling and unreadable, which added considerably to the existing stock – illegible, foul, scribbled, scrabbled and loose. Bad script was, implicitly, the result of bad posture, and it comes as little surprise to find that an important article for the nineteenth-century penman (or penwoman – a word first attested in 1747) was blotting paper.
The Language Wars Page 19