Language, Science and Popular Fiction in the Victorian Fin-de-Siècle

The Brutal Tongue

Christine Ferguson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351923323
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

Christine Ferguson's timely study is the first comprehensive examination of the importance of language in forming a crucial nexus among popular fiction, biology, and philology at the Victorian fin-de-siècle. Focusing on a variety of literary and non-literary texts, the book maps out the dialogue between the Victorian life and social sciences most involved in the study of language and the literary genre frequently indicted for causing linguistic corruption and debasement - popular fiction. Ferguson demonstrates how Darwinian biological, philological, and anthropological accounts of 'primitive' and animal language were co-opted into wider cultural debates about the apparent brutality of popular fiction, and shows how popular novelists such as Marie Corelli, Grant Allen, H.G. Wells, H. Rider Haggard, and Bram Stoker used their fantastic narratives to radically reformulate the relationships among language, thought, and progress that underwrote much of the contemporary prejudice against mass literary taste. In its alignment of scientific, cultural, and popular discourses of human language, Language, Science, and Popular Fiction in the Victorian Fin-de-Siècle stands as a corrective to assessments of best-selling fiction's intellectual, ideological, and aesthetic simplicity.

CHAPTER ONE

What Does Brutal Language Mean?

Fixing English: R.C. Trench and the Oxford English Dictionary

1884 was an annus mirabilis for the English language. The year witnessed the publication of the first number of the much-anticipated New English Dictionary, later known as the OED, a monumental tribute to a language that was rapidly becoming universal. With its astonishing inclusiveness, consistent pronunciation guides, exhaustively researched citations, and extensive supporting literary quotations, the dictionary seemed poised to impose order on the burgeoning mass of the nation’s language. Just as England was colonizing the globe, so too would the dictionary colonize English, charting the historical procession of meanings attached to its individual words and labelling its family relationships with great detail. Such, at least, is the common triumphant interpretation of the OED’s cultural work, one that has endured with remarkable persistency and has come to fuel a wider perception of Victorian language scholarship in general.¹ The period continues to be viewed as a predominantly historical, empirical, and often nationalistic interlude between the whimsical speculations of the eighteenth-century philosophical tradition and the revolutionary semiotics of Ferdinand de Saussure and the Neogrammarians.² Recent scholarship has tended to reinforce such a perception by emphasizing the hierarchical, scientific, and often jingoistic mandate of Victorian linguistic thought (Bailey 1996; Crowley 1989) and placing it in stark contrast to late-century developments, such as Neogrammarianism, that seem to anticipate an incipient modernism (Dowling 1986; Jankowsky 1972). If we are to rethink this assessment of Victorian linguistic thought, we need to begin, not by denying its imperial and scientific impulses, but by showing how these very impulses generated the perplexities and romantic fantasies about the status, meaning, and function of English in specific and language in general they seemed designed to quell. What follows is not intended to be a comprehensive or wholly representative survey of language study in nineteenth-century Britain, but rather an examination of some of the field’s more provocative debates, many of which are persistently excluded from, or downplayed in, conventional linguistic histories of the period.³

The OED has become a crowning symbol of the conservatism overassigned to Victorian linguistics, and as such it provides an ideal opening ground for a re-evaluation of this myth. Initiator Richard Chenevix Trench envisioned the dictionary as a lexicographic testament to the beauty and magnitude of the English language, and it was clearly received as such by many of its readers (Willinsky 16). Yet even in the most glowing reviews of its initial numbers, there lurks a curious hesitancy as to the social consequences of such a meticulous documentation of the language. Some reviewers felt distinctly uneasy about the dictionary’s democratic inclusiveness, seeming to fear that the insertion of vulgar words and contemporary citations might lead to a sapping of the language’s power, or at least, dignity. An 1884 London Times review of the dictionary’s first section, while lauding its scientific vigour and deeming it ‘a great and mature birth of the time,’ nonetheless qualifies its praise by suggesting that ‘in some cases a little too much use has been made, in the case of perfectly common words, of ephemeral and anonymous publications of the present day … though a scientific dictionary should be by no means Della Cruscan in its selection of words, it should surely maintain as far as possible a classical standard in its selection of authors quoted’ (6). Clearly recognizing the dictionary’s authorizing force, the reviewer senses that the use of contemporary rather than classical citations for words will confer an unearned legitimacy on modern speech and literature, admitting unruly elements of not-yet proper English into a domain whose purity derives from precedence. A similar concern haunts later Times reviews of the dictionary’s subsequent numbers. ‘We are almost tempted to say that the dictionary is, if anything, too complete,’ writes the reviewer of the 1886 A-B section, ‘[…] nothing is gained by the quotation of passages from daily newspapers and magazines. A dictionary, such as the New English Dictionary aims at being, is sure to be quoted as a standard authority, and in that case we fear it will exercise a somewhat questionable influence on the future of the English language’ (12). Here the ephemeral phrases of modern mass literature assume an even more clearly antithetical relationship to ‘proper’ English, acting not simply to clutter up its ranks but to exert a pernicious influence on its progress. When restricting its scope to the Arnoldian ‘best-that-is-known-and-thought,’ the dictionary was to be unequivocally commended; when dipping into the pages of the popular and thus ‘invest[ing] Grub-street with the authority of an academy,’ as an 1889 review put it, it raised troubling questions about the parameters and effects of English (‘The Oxford Dictionary’ 4). In its very rigour, the volume seemed poised to police the language and to barbarize it by recognizing words and phrases that should, by some accounts, be left unsaid.

The most fascinating aspect of the Times reviews is their muted indictment of the fruits and methods of linguistic taxonomy itself. In their cautious misgivings about the dictionary’s scope, the reviews move beyond the type of snobbish aversion to vulgar neologisms we might expect to find in a Victorian middle-class publication and take a different target entirely. English is most at risk, not from ‘bad’ words or usage, but from an amoral classifying system that collapses the difference between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ in its relentlessly broad scope. Critic and translator Henry Reeve stated the dimensions of this problem explicitly in his 1889 response to the dictionary’s first volume. Like previous critics, his review combines intense praise for the project with lamentations about its regrettable inclusion of slang, quotes from contemporary literature, and dialect words. The problem with Oxford’s latest collection of English definitions, according to Reeve, was that the project itself lacked an adequate definition of its own object – language. He notes:

A language is not what any man pleases to make it by the coinage of strange words or the adoption of foreign idioms. Language is a tradition from the wise and great, who have found in it ample means to convey every inflexion of thought without having recourse to fanciful or mean alloys, and it should be guarded with respect by those who mean to use it. There are, we are happy to say, not a few writers of our own age whose English is pure and unimpeachable … But they are in a minority, and it would be deplorable if the popular current, backed by the authority of this great Dictionary, should tend to lower the tone and remove the landmarks which protect and preserve the purity of English composition. (349–50)

English, in order to retain its integrity, must keep the barbarians – here represented by the crass voices of popular fiction – outside its precincts. For Reeve, the disturbing dual potential of the dictionary project to both authorize a rich linguistic history and to act as a portal for contamination was far more dangerous than any passing fad for slang. Corrupt language, when clearly identified as such, had its uses, but when incorporated alongside words of established provenance and merit, it threatened to undermine the criteria which separated proper English from other types of language and communication styles. What Reeves fears is a linguistic scholarship whose zeal for thoroughness would eliminate the hierarchical coherence of its object.

Reeve’s canny understanding of the ontological dilemma presented by the cataloguing labour of the lexicographer – how do we define words without first defining what a language itself should be? – built on tensions also present in the popular linguistic writings of the dictionary’s initiator, Richard Chenevix Trench. Prominent theologian, former Cambridge Apostle, and early member of the Philological Society, Trench was the mid-century’s most renowned writer on the English language, penning the highly successful On the Study of Words (1851) and English Past and Present (1855). ‘Both books,’ writes Hans Aarsleff, ‘did far more than any previous publication to make language study popular and without that popularity it seems unlikely that the New English Dictionary would have been able both to get the readers it needed and to arouse the general interest which sustained it’ (235). Ironically, the very literary popularity that purists such as Reeve viewed as anathema to the English language had worked to create an audience for the dictionary, and, indeed, the success of Trench’s two studies seems at least partially attributable to their deployment of the rhetoric of literary romance and mythological imagery. Based on lectures originally delivered to a group of school boys at the Diocesan Training School in Winchester, the books glamorize their subject by presenting language study, not as the tedious and dry task of the antiquarian, but as the central conduit into the great mysteries surrounding mankind’s origin, place in nature, and relationship with the divine. In a characteristically stirring style, he declared in On the Study of Words that ‘there is no study which may be made at once more instructive and entertaining than the study of the use, origin, and distinction of words’ (3). More so than any other human endeavour, language was:

full of instruction, because it is the embodiment, the incarnation … of the feelings and thoughts and experiences of a nation, yea, often of many nations, and of all which through long centuries they have attained to and won. It stands like the pillar of Hercules to mark how far the moral and intellectual conquests of mankind have advanced, only not like those pillars, fixed and immoveable, but ever itself advancing with the progress of these … Language is the amber in which a thousand precious and subtle thoughts have been safely embedded and preserved. (On the Study of Words 25)

To study a language was thus to see the history and metaphysical impulses of its originators laid bare. In a period obsessed with questions of human, racial, and national origin, it is little wonder that Trench’s evocative description of language study as a sort of mental archaeology should have created such a wide appeal. Philology was uniquely disposed to excavate the nation’s ancestral memories, desires, and moral instincts in much the same way that geology, the most radical science of the midcentury, was delivering new revelations about the age, formation, and speciation of the earth. Trench’s use of the amber metaphor seems to borrow from the latter discipline’s scientific and romantic cache, presenting words as fossil evidence capable of revealing long-hidden truths to the trained observer.

However, the very philological methods that exposed, for the first time, all of English’s historical variations and semantic gradations, were also capable of registering the cultural and intellectual decline that their academic production seemed to disprove. Trench found etymological work to be as dismaying as it could be inspiring. What particularly troubled him was the ever-expanding array of new words used to describe acts of sin and feelings of sorrow that presumably had not existed before being named. He ruefully notes, ‘It needs no more than to open a dictionary, and to cast our eye thoughtfully down a few columns, and we shall find abundant confirmation of this sadder and sterner estimate of man’s moral and spiritual condition. How else shall we explain this long catalogue of words, having all to do with sin, or with sorrow, or with both? How came they here? We may be quite sure that they were not invented without having been needed’ (On the Study of Words 30). In English society at least, moral turpitude might be diagnosed through linguistic profusion – the more words for immoral acts, the more deviance must exist.

Yet Trench’s mode of assessing linguistic corruption was far from stable or universal, a fact evident in the very different aetiology of decline he applied to non-Western languages. In these, it was not verbal profusion but dearth that marked moral turpitude. Like many theologians of the period, Trench was a confirmed advocate of the degeneration hypothesis that argued that all humankind had derived from a single pair created by God.⁴ All subsequent variations of race, social organization, and cultural advancement were the result of lapses from the original state of perfection. The theory both defied and fuelled the ethnocentric prejudices of the day by assuming an original kinship of man that had been severed only by the moral infidelities of non-Western groups. For Trench, there was no better evidence of the degeneration theory than the language of savages,⁵ which showed its debasement through its limited vocabulary.

Fearful indeed is the impress of degradation which is stamped on the language of the savage, more fearful perhaps even than that which is stamped upon his form. When wholly letting go the truth, when long and greatly sinning against light and conscience, a people has thus gone the downward way, has been scattered off by some violent revolution from the portion of the world which is the seat of advance and progress, and driven to its remote isles and further corners, then as one nobler thought, one spiritual idea after another has perished from it, the words also that expressed these have perished too. As one habit of civilization has been let go after another the words which those habits demanded have been dropped as well, first out of use, and then out of memory, and thus after awhile have been wholly lost. (On the Study of Words 19)

Trench then lists examples of savage languages that (apparently) lacked words for genteel concepts and courtesies such as ‘thank you,’ citing the omission as evidence of their speakers’s absence of spiritual feeling.⁶ Decline, in savage societies at least, is evidenced through a silencing of words, through an absence where there should be presence. By this standard, the abundance of English words with negative meanings and connotations should fill the Victorian citizen with some confidence. First of all, the mere fact of their existence is indicative of a lively expansion contrary to the immobility of savage language, and second, such words at least have the benefit of conveying the morally correct connotations of their referent. That is to say, the general recognition of such words as sinful or saddening implies the existence of a Christian, right-thinking community equipped with a moral sense of semantics. The very transparency of these words in their reference to evil acts and conditions might stand as a virtue rather than simply as a sign of decline.

Trench’s failure to acknowledge the comforting clarity of words that name immorality is further complicated by his censorious discussion of euphemism. He is no less troubled by words that use connotation to soften our outrage at the baneful conditions they name than by those that represent evil in what he would recognize as a direct and clear manner. More alarming than the proliferation of words dealing with sin, he warned, was the amoral tendency of modern speakers to detach these terms from their original, spiritually correct meaning. This semiotic slippage has the potential to lead Christians into sin by disguising vice as virtue. He singles out ‘love-child’ and the French ‘femme de joie’ for particular opprobrium, suggesting that such misnamings might encourage young women to acts of sexual infelicity (On the Study of Words 56). The solution, he argues, is to replace euphemism with exactly the type of transparent naming of sinful actions that had produced the sorrowful modern words he had elsewhere lamented.

How much wholesomer on all accounts is it that there be an ugly word for an ugly thing, one involving moral condemnation and disgust, even at the expense of a little coarseness, rather than one which plays fast and loose with the eternal principles of morality, which makes sin plausible, and shifts the divinely reared landmarks of right and wrong, thus bring the user under the woe of them, ‘that call evil good, and good evil, that put darkness for light, and light for darkness, that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter,’ […] How awful, yea, how fearful, is the force and imposture of theirs, leading men captive at will. (54–5)

Trench’s fulminations on the vicious consequences of morally duplicitous language leave the reader to negotiate two fundamentally opposed diagnoses of verbal immorality – one that it is too brutally explicit and detailed, and one that it deliberately misrepresents certain phenomena. He seems to long for a more limited English, or at least, one from which the names of the vices have been expunged (because the acts they name are no longer in existence), while recognizing that such a romanticized simplicity is a sign of savagery. The abundance of ‘plain speech’ descriptions of immorality are as alarming as the foreign importations and whimsical coinages that recast them in a positive light. At the heart of On the Study of Words lies a deep confusion about the nature of linguistic signification and, more importantly, of its relationship to the minds, hearts, and social development of its users.

Trench’s uncertainty reached a peak in English Past and Present (1855), a highly nationalistic work that directly anticipates the concerns about English’s boundaries later provoked by the OED. Here Trench lavishes praise on his native tongue, noting its eminent fitness and suitability for position as the new world language. Its vitality, he contends, is not a result of insular purity, but of its unique assimilative properties. No other language is so strong, he claims, because no other language is so willing to admit new and foreign phrases within its ranks. Pluralism, long a feature of British political and social life, also operates at the level of linguistic growth. He unites these elements in a striking developmental analogy:

It is the very character of our institutions to repel none, but rather to afford a shelter and refuge to all, from whatever quarter they come; and after a longer or shorter while all the strangers and incomers have been incorporated into the English nation, within one or two generations have forgotten that they were ever extraneous to it, have retained no other reminiscence of their foreign extraction than some slight difference of name and that often disappearing or having disappeared. No language has shown itself less exclusive; none has stood less upon niceties; none has thrown open its doors wider, with a fuller confidence that it could make truly its own, assimilate, and subdue to itself, whatever it received into its bosom; and in none has this ...