In The Newcomes the Anglophile French aristocrat Florac aspires to be the perfect English squire: ‘In conversation with his grooms and servants he swore freely – not that he was accustomed to employ oaths in his own private talk, but he thought the employment of these expletives necessary as an English country gentleman.’ Always a commentator on his fictional creations, Thackeray offers numerous asides on this theme. So, for instance, ‘rich baronets do not need to be careful about grammar, as poor governesses must be’, and in speech the true ‘distingué English air’ consists of ‘dawdling’. To be a gentleman or a minor aristocrat was to articulate oneself in a manner both incoherent and inconsequential. Thackeray was not the first, and certainly not the last, to spot that some of the linguistic habits most derided when practised by the working classes were nonetheless common among those near the top of the social pyramid. In a book entitled The Vulgarisms and Improprieties of the English Language (1833), W. H. Savage commented, ‘we know many who would feel ashamed of a false quantity in Greek or Latin that are absolutely incapable of reading with propriety an English newspaper.’22 In his novel Mr Scarborough’s Family (1883), Anthony Trollope writes of the Belgian government official Grascour, ‘He would only be known to be a foreigner by the correctness of his language.’ Compare this with the judgement of the American critic Harry Thurston Peck in the 1890s: ‘The speaker and writer who is always spick and span in his verbal dress … may perhaps be an “educated” man; but his education is, in all probability, a very superficial one, for he is not sufficiently educated to be on easy terms with his education.’23
Marie Corelli, the author of a string of best-selling melodramas, presents a different angle. One of her characters is described as ‘taking a fantastic pleasure in … bad grammar’ (his own), while in another novel she satirizes ‘Miladi in Belgravia, who considers the story of her social experiences, expressed in questionable grammar, quite equal to the finest literature’. Corelli thought of herself as a purifier of language, inheriting the spirit though not the design from the man whose illegitimate child she was: the Scottish poet Charles Mackay, author of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841). Mackay’s attitude to English was most fully expressed in Lost Beauties of the English Language (1874), in which he asserted that ‘Old English … is a passionate rather than an argumentative language; and poets, who ought to be passionate above all else … should go back to those ancient sources’. He was intent on reviving archaic words, arguing that English literature ‘might advantageously borrow from the language of the people’.24 The sort of words he wanted to bring back were trendency, ‘a strong deviation’; flaucht, ‘a flash of lightning’; and whommle, ‘to turn over clumsily and suddenly’; but also lodestar, chancy and afterword, which do not look strange now.
For Mackay, a good style was one that exploited the full resources of English, the defining character of which was ‘vitality’. Style was understood as an expression of soul. Towards the end of the century, quantitative methods of analysing style came in: T. C. Mendenhall’s essay ‘The Characteristic Curves of Composition’ was published in Science in 1887, and a technical approach to stylistic analysis was separately developed by Lucius Sherman. Yet to most of us style remains a matter of effects and impressions, not of calculations: when we classify it, we use descriptive labels. These are hardly definitive. Francis Bacon drew a distinction I rather like between the ‘magistral’ and the ‘probative’ – the authoritative and dogmatic, on the one hand, and the testing and investigative, on the other. A more modern view, set out by Walker Gibson, is that modern prose, in America at least, is always tough or sweet or stuffy. We may find a distinction being drawn between the organic and the ornamental, or between the expository and the argumentative. More simply, the formal is contrasted with the informal. The adjective ‘colloquial’ labels a kind of writing that resembles the spoken word.25
Changing attitudes to style had much to do with the rise of the newspaper and the periodical. In 1700 there had been no daily paper in London; by 1811, there were fifty-two.26 Provincial weeklies had also sprung up during this period. Some of these publications featured pronouncements about style, and, beginning around 1750, reviewers in specialist literary magazines made a point of criticizing what they considered bad English, exerting a surprisingly large influence as they did so. But more significant than the achievements of critics was a fundamental alteration in writers’ conception of what they were doing – especially with reference to factual prose. By the end of the eighteenth century, writers of pamphlets and news pieces were increasingly convinced that nice diction and honesty were not at all the same. This view matured in the nineteenth century. Between 1836 and 1880 the number of British newspapers rose from 221 to 1,986, and the reporting of news, though sometimes melodramatic, was typically carried out in a corporate style that was precise, pure and informative.27 All the while other beliefs about style flourished: there were advocates of soulfulness, athleticism and ‘virile’ bluntness. Of a character in Trollope’s The Eustace Diamonds (1871–3) it is said, ‘He had escaped from conventional usage into rough, truthful speech’, and it was not unusual to make this equation between roughness and truth. Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man was regarded as a founding work here, beginning a tradition of radical writing that dispensed with the meretricious colour of adjectives and adverbs. In fact, Paine’s style is not exactly plain. He belongs to a somewhat different tradition, in which political writers deplore the rhetorical embellishments of their adversaries, claiming that these demonstrate the hollowness of their arguments, yet gild their own writing with many of the devices they profess to loathe. Nonetheless, Paine’s writing was regarded as an exemplar of unadorned enlightenment.
The conversational style in English prose was championed by William Hazlitt, who argued that any author whose works could not be read aloud was scarcely fit to be read at all. Writing in the 1820s, Hazlitt railed against vulgarity, affectation and the monotony of academic tracts. He criticized the lack of variety in Johnson, arguing the need for greater flexibility and pressing the case for what he called ‘familiar style’, a form of writing free from meaningless pomp, pedantic flourishes and stilted theatricality; such a manner, idiomatic and relaxed yet tactful, would be suited to ‘the real purposes of life’. (A similar approach had of course been promoted by Wordsworth and Coleridge in Lyrical Ballads.) Hazlitt cleaved to the principle that good writing should serve the reader, making use of plain words and straightforward modes of expression. A further principle of style, as important now as then, is that it should be suited to one’s subject. In many circumstances one’s writing can and should convey one’s personality, but sometimes the personal should be suppressed, out of a sense of gravity or tact.
The poet Matthew Arnold spoke up for a laconic style, calling it ‘Attic prose’. By ‘Attic’ he meant writing like that of Plato – direct, restrained, concise. Instead of theatrical sincerity he desired an accessible simplicity. As Jason Camlot explains, ‘One of the most familiar arguments forwarded by Victorian theorists of style … was that writing made available to the English public should work to unite all of its readers and thus consolidate the English as a people’.28 For those who wanted to achieve that solidity, the language advocated by Hazlitt did not seem apt, but neither did one full of frills and curlicues.
Thomas Kington Oliphant, a Scottish grandee, published in 1873 a remarkable book entitled The Sources of Standard English. Its surprising character is dramatically established on the opening page, where the author says, ‘There are many places, scattered over the world, that are hallowed ground in the eyes of Englishmen; but the most sacred of all would be the spot … where our forefathers dwelt in common with the ancestors of the Hindoos, Persians, Greeks, Latins, Slavonians, and Celts – a spot not far from the Oxus’.29 When Kington Oliphant has completed a 320-page history of the ‘advance’ of the language, he surveys ‘good and bad English in 1873’. He identifies the following ills: the middl
e class’s ‘amazing love of cumbrous Latin words’, the ‘Babylonish speech’ of hack journalists, the ‘long-winded sentences’ of clergymen, and the tendency to ‘daub stucco over the brick and the stone’ – by which he means the importation of foreign terms to supplement the Anglo-Saxon word-stock.30 The last of these is the subject to which we now turn.
13
‘Our blood, our language, our institutions’
Purism and the comforts of ignorance
In his novel The Fixed Period (1882) Anthony Trollope imagines a former British colony called Brittanula, where all citizens are removed when they turn sixty-seven to an institution called The College. A year after their ‘deposition’ at The College, they are meant to proceed to the next stage – ‘departure’. This is a euphemism for their being killed. When one character hears the taboo word murder and complains that it is ‘very improper’, he is met with the down-to-earth response that ‘English is English’. It’s a familiar type of statement: it looks like a tautology, but we grasp that the first ‘English’ means something different from the second, and we understand it to be another way of saying ‘Don’t be so fussy’. If we think about the sentence more closely, though, we may unpack more complex meanings: one is, ‘The English that people actually use is what we should accept as the language’s standard form’; another, ‘The English language has qualities and properties that disclose the English national character’.
‘English is English’ is a striking line to find in a novel by Trollope, a writer perennially concerned with the performance of Englishness and the enjoyment of property. Owners, in Trollope, are unusually apt to be absent-minded; they are happy to let others get the benefit of their possessions. A recurrent theme is the way the bonds of ownership and also of nationality are taken for granted.
Trollope and Kington Oliphant introduce us in different ways to one of the great arguments of the Victorian age, which was about the true character of the English. Specifically, their true racial character. In 1841 Thomas Arnold, giving his inaugural lecture as Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford, claimed that Anglo-Saxon history was modern. ‘We, this great English nation,’ he declared, ‘whose race and language are now overrunning the earth from one end of it to the other, – we were born when the white horse of the Saxons had established his dominion from the Tweed to the Tamar. So far we can trace our blood, our language, the name and actual divisions of our country, the beginnings of some of our institutions. So far our national identity extends.’1 The theme, a revival of the seventeenth-century arguments of Camden and Verstegan, became prevalent, and found especially vivid expression in John Mitchell Kemble’s The Saxons in England (1849). Kemble, who had studied under Jacob Grimm and had immersed himself in analysing the Teutonic languages, argued that an account of ‘the principles upon which the public and political life of our Anglosaxon forefathers was based, and of the institutions in which those principles were most clearly manifested’ was ‘the history of the childhood of our own age, – the explanation of its manhood’.2 The triumphalism of Arnold and Kemble was contested, but it was widely repeated, as well as being rather mournfully echoed in America by Elias Molee in his Plea for an American Language, or Germanic-English (1888), and it is in the arguments of this period that current obsessions about the purity of English are rooted.
Thomas Arnold’s son, Matthew, mocked those of his contemporaries who gorged on fantasies of the Anglo-Saxon age. He called them ‘Teutomaniacs’. There were plenty of them, eager to claim that the English were an unmixed race of Germanic origin, and eager also to play down the historical influence of the French. According to the most fervent, all the crucial elements of Englishness were established long before 1066, and everything that had happened since was bastardization. The historian Edward Augustus Freeman – who had been beaten by Matthew Arnold to a scholarship at Balliol College, Oxford – was the most vehement exponent of this view, but it was his pupil J. R. Green who found the largest audience. Green’s hugely successful A Short History of the English People (1874) began with the statement that ‘For the fatherland of the English race we must look far away from England itself … [to] what we now call Sleswick, a district in the heart of the peninsula which parts the Baltic from the Northern seas’.3 Green was not a straightforward Teutomaniac, but he captured the period’s passion for the Anglo-Saxon. His fanciful, emotive style meant his account of ‘the people’s history’ caused a sensation, and for fifty years it was the standard popular history of England.
These historians were not primarily concerned with language, but they stirred up the national memory, inspiring nostalgia for an Anglo-Saxon past that was robustly embodied in the vocabulary of Old English. No one articulated that nostalgia better than the poet William Barnes. As Philip Larkin pointed out, Barnes looks rather like a successful version of Thomas Hardy’s worshipper of learning, Jude Fawley: born into a family of impoverished Dorset farmers, he secured his first job as a clerk in a solicitor’s office by virtue of his neat handwriting. Thanks to vigorous self-education he was able to flourish as a schoolmaster, and in due course he became a successful lecturer on historical and literary subjects. As philology became his chief focus, he began to speak out against the foreign textures of what he called ‘book English’, arguing instead for a return to the simplicity of Anglo-Saxon. His poetry, appropriately rustic in subject matter and vocabulary, won him many admirers – Hardy for one, but also Robert Browning, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and even Matthew Arnold.
Barnes preferred wheelsaddle to bicycle – a detail quoted by Hardy in his obituary of Barnes in 1886 – and nipperlings to forceps. More alarming, perhaps, was his suggestion that leechcraft was better than medicine. But not all his proposals were shunned: it was Barnes who revived the Old English term Wessex, steeped in associations with paganism and Saxon kingship, and we can see a Barnesian flavour in the use of foreword and handbook instead of preface and manual.
Wessex is more often associated with Hardy than with Barnes, and the author of such works as Under the Greenwood Tree, Far from the Madding Crowd and The Return of the Native appears to be among the most poetically nostalgic figures of the period. Yet in the 1890s he recoiled from romanticizing the past. Immersed as a child in the songs and rituals of rural Dorset, Hardy was sensitive in his own writing to the delights of a rustic orality. But he also recognized the stigma that attached to it. In Hardy’s Wessex, language is a source of anxiety. At times of crisis, characters relapse into usage they have tried to leave behind. Hardy pictures archaisms as dangerous mementoes; they link us to our losses. So, in The Trumpet-Major (1880) the hot-tempered yeoman Festus Derriman is described ‘dropping his parlour language in his warmth’, while the heroine, Anne, disappoints her mother because of the ‘readiness’ with which she ‘caught up some dialect-word or accent from the miller and his friends’. In The Well-Beloved (published as a serial in 1892) the innocent Avice Caro has been brought up in a manner calculated ‘to teach her to forget all the experiences of her ancestors; to drown the local ballads by songs purchased at the Budmouth fashionable music-sellers’, and the local vocabulary by a governess-tongue of no country at all’. In Jude the Obscure (1895) the schoolmaster Gillingham uses the odd dialect word ‘lumpering’ while talking to his fellow teacher Phillotson, and Hardy feels the need to editorialize: ‘Though well-trained and even proficient masters, they occasionally used a dialect-word of their boyhood to each other in private.’ In Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) he parenthetically explains that Tess’s mother habitually speaks dialect, while Tess herself, ‘who had passed the Sixth Standard in the National School under a London-trained mistress, spoke two languages: the dialect at home, more or less; ordinary English abroad and to persons of quality’.
Hardy grasped that trying to perpetuate the obsolete and obsolescent requires an act of forgetting that is almost a kind of sickness. Far from subscribing to William Barnes’s revivalism, he opined that ‘Purism, whether in grammar or in vocabulary, almost a
lways means ignorance.’ The addicts of Anglo-Saxonism might care to consider the possibility that the language they cherish – a hybrid of the several languages brought to Britain in the fifth century by the Angles and the Saxons (as well as by the Frisians and the Jutes) – was itself far from pure. Its Proto-Germanic source had been coloured by contact with other tongues – including, quite possibly, that of Phoenician adventurers.
No such awareness modified the arguments of the composer and virtuoso pianist Percy Grainger (1882–1961), an athletic Australian who took a keen interest in Norwegian dialects and old English folk songs. It may well be that Grainger knew nothing of William Barnes’s writing, but he shared Barnes’s love of a kind of bygone language more poetically immediate than ‘book English’, and his most memorable project was championing what he called ‘blue-eyed English’. The Anglo-Saxons, he insisted, had had blue eyes, and all imports into the language since their time had debased the Anglo-Saxon stock. Grainger was serious about eradicating foreign words, but his blue-eyed prose is hardly pretty: readers will tire quickly of joy-quaffed standing in for enjoyed, othery (‘different’), tone-tool (‘instrument’) and the especially absurd thor-juice-talker (‘telephone’). Moreover, Grainger hardly helped his cause by being an enthusiastic advocate of flagellation, racial separatism and incest.
Barnes and Grainger were creative amateurs. For a professional perspective on purism at the end of the Victorian period we can turn to Thomas Lounsbury, Emeritus Professor of English at Yale University (or, as the title pages of his books state, ‘in Yale University’), who writes in The Standard of Usage in English (1908) of ‘phrases borrowed from foreign tongues, especially from the French’ that ‘replace and drive out the genuine vernacular’. Emotive words – Lounsbury plainly sees this is a loss. He goes on to say that ‘the history of language is the history of corruptions’, yet makes the point that ‘a return to what is the theoretically correct usage would seem like a return to barbarism’.4
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