Jane Austen

A Style in History

Cris Yelland

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780367666293
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429941849
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

From 1809 until just before her death, Jane Austen lived in a small, all-female household at Chawton, where reading aloud was the evening's entertainment and a crucial factor in the way Austen formed and modified her writing. This book looks in detail at Jane Austen's style. It discusses her characteristic abstract vocabulary, her adaptations of Johnsonian syntax and how she came to make her most important contribution to the technique of fiction, free indirect discourse. The book draws extensively on historical sources, especially the work of writers like Johnson, Hugh Blair and Thomas Sheridan, and analyses how Austen negotiated her path between the fundamentally masculine concerns of eighteenth-century prescriptivists and her own situation of a female writer reading her work aloud to a female audience.

1 Prescriptivism, Perspicuity and the Female Reader and Writer

Jane Austen wrote her novels in a cultural context of tension between two quite different ways of thinking about language. Later chapters will explore one of these, the spoken and domestic dimension of language: the other current in linguistic thinking in Austen’s time was concerned with written language and the importance of prescribing correct, formal and clear usage. My argument here is that elements of Austen’s writing were rooted in eighteenth-century principles of formality, but also that most of these principles were to do with more ‘serious’ writing than fiction, and women’s fiction especially. Austen’s situation, as a woman novelist at the beginning of the nineteenth century, was a historically complex one, and her relationship with eighteenth-century thinking was a complex one as a result. Her style bears very strong marks of the influence of the movement towards formal correctness in writing, although she was negotiating with the precepts of writers like Johnson, Blair, Lowth and Priestley in a genre which they did not much value.

The most comprehensive account of eighteenth-century English is McIntosh’s The Evolution of English Prose 1700–1800.¹ There are 11 chapters in the book; each one deals with a different aspect of eighteenth- century prose or with theoretical questions associated with it. There are two of McIntosh’s themes which are most relevant to Jane Austen. One of them is a broad movement from ‘oral’ styles of writing at the beginning of the eighteenth-century to more clearly ‘written’ styles at the end of it; the second is the movement in the second half of the century towards laying down rules and principles for English, or ‘prescriptivism’ as it is called.

One major change which McIntosh describes is the spread of printed material. In 1700, London had no daily newspaper; by 1811 it had 52. By the end of the eighteenth-century, the reading public was enormously bigger than it had been at the beginning, so that a high-volume printing like the 500,000 copies of Paine’s The Rights of Man was possible.² More generally, towards the end of the eighteenth-century, there was a very rapid expansion in book and magazine production, as well as in the number of readers.³ This growing cultural and economic importance of the printed, the written, had its impact on the style of written prose, which increasingly lost its connections with speech. In technical detail, some of the changes in English prose during the course of the eighteenth- century included the following:

1 Sentences tend to get shorter.

2 Loose syntax becomes less popular and less acceptable: periodic syntax becomes the norm.

3 Concrete metaphors become less acceptable.

4 Parallel and antithetical syntax becomes more favoured.

5 ‘Oral’ constructions such as demonstrative + possessive determiner (‘this my shoe’), prepositions at the end of a sentence and conjunctions at the beginning of a sentence come to be thought of as vulgar.

6 Lexis becomes more Latinate and polysyllabic.

7 Nominalisations, in which a verb or an adverb is transformed into a noun, often ending in ‘-ness’ or ‘-tion’, become more favoured.

These changes, says McIntosh, can be understood as changes along a spectrum of style from the oral to the written:

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 (though they are also common in printed texts). On the other hand, 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 conversing language but practicable and effective in writing.⁴

These changes in the direction of ‘writtenness’ in style were massively supported by the work of prescriptivist writers on language and style, particularly in the second half of the eighteenth century. Prescription is viewed with disfavour by most modern linguists, but it was very prominent in the second half of the eighteenth century, and many of the ‘rules’ about writing which people half remember from their schooldays (don’t put a preposition at the end of a sentence, don’t begin a sentence with ‘and’, and so on) were first widely stated in that period. The means of prescription included dictionaries: there were 64 editions of 13 dictionaries published between 1700 and 1749, but there was a huge increase in production between 1750 and 1800, to 246 editions of 44 dictionaries.⁵ Another of the ‘instruments of literacy’, as McIntosh describes them, was magazines. The production of these increased greatly too, from an average of 25 new titles a year around 1700 to an average of 264 in 1800, and many of the magazines carried pieces about language and polite usage which ‘intensified many readers’ awareness of standards for formal, precise, written English, and furnished regular examples of practical criticism based on those standards’.⁶

For an example of prescriptivism in a magazine, consider this piece from the Gentleman’s Magazine for July 1770. One of the regular features in the magazine was the ‘List of Books’. This consisted of notices of books received by the magazine, and it contained items of differing lengths. Sometimes a book would be simply noted, sometimes it would be extracted from at length, and sometimes it would be commented on as well. Number 21 in the list for July⁷ is a very long treatment of a book called Reflections on the English Language, in the nature of Vaugelas’s reflections on the French, being a detection of many improper Expressions used in Conversation, and many others to be found in Authors. The account of the book goes through ten ‘improper Expressions’, which are as follows:

1 Whether ‘as follow’ or ‘as follows’ is correct in a construction like ‘the things involved are as follows/follow’.

2 Using ‘since’ and ‘ago’ together, as in ‘It is ten years ago since I saw him’.

3 The correct meaning of ‘demean’.

4 Should it be ‘go there’ or ‘go thither’? ‘Go thither’ is correct, as is ‘come hither’ not ‘come here’.

5 The meanings of ‘famous’ and ‘infamous’, and the fact that these words are not precise antonyms.

6 Adverbs and participles should not be separated. ‘So ill going a horse’ is correct, not ‘so ill a going horse’.

7 Question marks should not be used unnecessarily. A construction like ‘your aunt asked when I had heard from you?’ is wrong. This ‘error’ is in fact quite common in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fiction. It occurs dozens of times in Frances Burney’s Evelina [1778], for example.

8 The verbs ‘fly’, ‘flee’ and ‘flow’, and their correct past tenses.

9 The differences, especially in the past tense, between ‘set’ and ‘sit’.

10 When to use ‘who’ and when to use ‘whom’ and ‘whose’.

Each of these ten points of usage is discussed and exemplified at some length. Some of the accompanying comments are as follows: ‘we ought not… we should say… This is wrong… But this is not English… false English… is not proper… This sounds better… but it is false grammar’. And because of this didactic quality, it is perfectly clear that the purpose, of the book, and of the review of it, is to prescribe correct usage, not to illustrate variety. This is writing which is strongly, and explicitly, prescriptive.

As well as magazine articles, the most interesting and accessible source for a study of prescriptivism is the books on grammar and rhetoric which were produced in great numbers in the second half of the eighteenth century, of which the book reviewed in the Gentleman’s Magazine was one example. It is one example among very many, because the production of books about grammar and correct usage increased dramatically in the later eighteenth century. McIntosh gives a count of 38 new books on grammar published between 1700 and 1750, and 204 published between 1751 and 1800. I shall quote freely from some of these books in my more detailed discussions later on, but for the present I want to describe some of the central ideas and characteristics of prescriptivist grammars in general. The main source for this will be the most important and the most comprehensive of the prescriptivist writings of the eighteenth century, Hugh Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres.

Blair was appointed Regius Professor of Rhetoric at Edinburgh University in 1762, the first holder of the chair. His book Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres is a collection of 47 lectures which he gave to undergraduates, and was first published in 1783, when he retired from teaching. Blair’s reputation as a sermon-writer and a rhetorician rose very high, despite one dissenting voice in the Westminster Magazine, which attacked him for lack of originality in September 1783 and again in December of that year.⁸ Nevertheless, the book was very successful: Blair’s publisher paid him the remarkable sum of £1500 for it, and it later went into 130 editions in Britain and the USA, the last one appearing as late as 1911.⁹ Blair’s ideas about rhetoric were not especially original, and he owed a lot to Adam Smith in particular,¹⁰ whose own lectures on rhetoric and belles-lettres he had read in manuscript form,¹¹ but his book was successful because of its comprehensiveness (it was published in two volumes and was over 1000 pages in total) and its readability. One indication of Blair’s popularity and salience as a prescriptivist and a writer of model sermons is that he is mentioned three times in Jane Austen’s work, by Mrs Percival in Catharine, by Eleanor Tilney in Northanger Abbey and by Mary Crawford in Mansfield Park. Blair was a central figure in the Scottish Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, and his list of friends and associates reads like a Who’s Who of that movement; it includes David Hume at the start of Blair’s career and Robert Burns at the end of it. Correspondingly, Blair’s Lectures are made up of a comprehensive series of statements of current thinking on questions of rhetoric and style, for both writing and public speaking.

Lectures begins with an introduction in which Blair defines language and its importance, and then asserts that attention to linguistic style is a feature of refined taste, and as such it is an expression of high civilization: ‘… that immense superiority which education and improvement give to civilized, above barbarous nations, in refinement of Taste’ (p. 19). Lectures 3–6 discuss various applications of the ideas of taste, beauty and sublimity; then Lectures 6 and 7 give a historical account of the rise of languages from their primitive origins. Lectures 8 and 9 discuss the history and the structure of the English language and conclude that English is not the most regular of languages, nor the smoothest, but it is strong, expressive and ‘copious’, in the sense of having a large stock of words. In Lecture 10, Blair expands on a central idea for prescriptivists, the notion of ‘perspicuity’: ‘This [perspicuity] must be our first object, to make our meaning fully and clearly understood without the least difficulty’ (p. 193).

Perspicuity is also recommended by Joseph Priestley, Lindley Murray and other prescriptivist writers of the time; in fact, ‘recommended’ is too mild a term – they see perspicuity as the most important quality of any good writing. Murray has a whole section devoted to it, and its applications to lexis and to syntax.¹² Perspicuity, he says at the outset, is ‘the fundamental quality of style; a quality so essential in every kind of writing, that for the want of it nothing can atone’. In terms of lexis, perspicuity involves purity (not using obsolete words, nor coining new ones), propriety (not using slang, or ‘low’ words, or technical terms) and also precision. For every idea, says Murray, there will be one word which is precisely fitted to express it, and this must be the word chosen. Murray’s belief here is based on a psychological principle, that the mind ‘never can view, clearly and distinctly, above one subject at a time’. In terms of syntax, perspicuity is achieved by making sure that sentences are neither too short nor too long, and that their structure is not unclear or ambiguous. In particular, misplaced modifiers and ellipses are to be avoided, because they make the structure less than perfectly clear. And perspicuity of syntax is based on the same principle of one-thing-at-a-time as perspicuity of lexis: a sentence ‘i...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Prescriptivism, Perspicuity and the Female Reader and Writer
• 2 Abstraction, Synonymy and Metaphor in Jane Austen’s Lexis
• 3 Reading Aloud
• 4 Jane Austen and Johnsonian Syntax
• 5 Experiments with Speech and Thought
• 6 Jane Austen and Free Indirect Discourse
• 7 The Victorian (Re)Construction of Jane Austen – and a Coda
• Bibliography
• Index