(University of Toronto)
Submitted 6 December, 2001, published
January 2002 (HSL/SHL 2)
Both
Dr. Samuel Johnson and his century have often been linked with language that
was explicitly and indeed excessively “literate”. However, shortly after his
death in 1784, memoirs of Johnson also associated him with linguistic
informality: with his own contractions, as mediated by James Boswell, one of
his biographers; and with the notoriously colloquial and idiosyncratic style of
another, Hester Piozzi. “Low” Johnsonian language has already attracted the
attention of scholars like Hudson (1998) and McIntosh (1998, 1995); McIntosh
(see 1995: 149ff) is one recent participant in an old and ongoing debate about
whether Johnson or his biographers should get credit for the stylistic features
of the spoken language represented in biographies and memoirs as Johnson’s (see
also, e.g., Korshin 1991). The present paper will contextualize the social
significance of Johnson’s use of nicknames like “Bozzy” and of Hester Piozzi’s
use of colloquial prose in her Anecdotes of Johnson. Drawing on a new
and unique database corpus of systematically collected linguistic criticism in
the Monthly and the Critical Review (see Percy 1997a), I hope to
illuminate our understanding not just of Johnson but, considering Piozzi’s
style in context, of some eighteenth-century prose genres. I will also consider
how Boswell and Piozzi sought to exploit the connotations of colloquial
language, though not always successfully.
The years immediately after
Johnson’s death saw the publication of several tributes by his former
intimates. Boswell’s famous Life of Johnson was to appear in 1791, but
even before that date other accounts had come out - in 1785 Boswell’s own Journal
of a Tour to the Hebrides, which he had undertaken with Johnson in 1773; a Life
by John Hawkins in 1787; and Hester Piozzi’s Letters from and Anecdotes
of Johnson, published in 1788 and 1786 respectively. In December 1784, Boswell “had learned that
he was not mentioned in Johnson’s will and that six others were preparing
biographies of Johnson”. Goyette has argued that Boswell wrote the Tour
not merely as “a sort of advertisement” for the Life but especially to
authorize his “precarious” position as biographer by “demonstrating his
intimacy with Johnson”, “an intimacy that” – Goyette argues – “did not in fact
exist”. Goyette describes Boswell’s first copy of a combined advertisement for
the Tour and the Life; “stressing the ‘minute accuracy’ of his Tour
and the ‘authenticity’ of the Life”, Boswell “claimed `the intimate
friendship of DR. JOHNSON’ as the basis for his special fitness as biographer”
(Goyette 1979: 311-314).
Some contemporary responses
suggest that many readers found Boswell’s and Piozzi’s material inappropriately
and uninterestingly intimate. For instance, in 1786, the topical verse satirist
John Wolcot, better known as “Peter Pindar”, wrote two poems provoked by
Boswell’s Tour. Bozzy and Piozzi, or the British Biographers,
ridiculed both authors; refereed by Sir John Hawkins, Bozzy and Madame Piozzi
alternately accused each other of falsehood and triviality:
(1)
BOZZY.
How could your folly tell,
so void of truth,
That miserable story of the
youth,
Who, in your book, of
Doctor Johnson begs
Most seriously to know if cats
laid eggs!
MADAME PIOZZI.
Who told of Mrs. Montague the
lie -
So palpable a falsehood? - Bozzy, fy!
BOZZY:
Who, madd’ning with an
anecdotic itch
Declar’d that Johnson
call’d his mother b-t-ch? …
Who would have said a word
about Sam’s wig,
Or told the story of the peas
and pig?
Who would have told a tale
so very flat,
Of Frank the Black, and
Hodge the mangy cat!
MADAME PIOZZI.
Good me! you’re grown at
once confounded tender---
Of Doctor Johnson’s fame a fierce
defender:
I’m sure you’ve mention’d
many a pretty story
Not much redounding to the
doctor’s glory.
Now for a saint upon us you would palm him -
First murder the
poor man and then embalm him!
(Wolcot 1786a:
Part II: lines 274-279; partially quoted in McCarthy
1985: 117)
The initial impetus for this paper was
a line from earlier in Wolcot’s poem. Summoned by Hawkins along with Madame
Piozzi “to farther anecdote”, “Bozzy” tops Piozzi’s enumerations of Johnson’s
favourite foods (“a leg of pork” and “veal pie”) by retorting that Johnson
“took a pride” in contractions:
(2) One Thursday morn
did Doctor Johnson wake,
And call out,
“Lanky, Lanky”, by mistake -
But recollecting - “Bozzy, Bozzy”, cry’d -
For in contractions
Johnson took a pride!
(Wolcot 1786a: Part II: lines 53-56;
emphasis added)
Wolcot’s line identifies two issues: that “Doctor Johnson” used
contractions, and that
Boswell chose to disclose this habit.
2. Boswell and Dr. Johnson’s contractions
Wolcot’s poem alludes to a passage from Boswell’s Journal of a
Tour to the Hebrides in
Which Boswell describes Johnson’s “way
of contracting the names of his friends”:
(3) When Dr. Johnson [MS: “Mr. Johnson”] awaked
this morning, he called, “Lanky!” having, I suppose, been thinking of
Langton; but corrected himself instantly, and cried, “Bozzy!” He has a way of contracting the names of his
friends. Goldsmith feels himself so important now, as to be displeased at it. I
remember one day, when Tom Davies was telling that Dr. Johnson said, “We are
[MS: “We’re”] all in labour for a name to Goldy’s play”, Goldsmith
cried, “I have often desired him not to call me Goldy” (Boswell 1961:
297).
Johnson’s contracted names attracted
contemporary comment. Wolcot had already drawn attention to them in another
poem, his Poetical and congratulatory epistle to James Boswell, Esq., on his
journal of a tour to the Hebrides (1786b):
(4) How sweetly grumbled too was Sam's remark,
'I smell you, Master Bozzy,
in the dark!' (Wolcot 1786b: ll. 35-46).
Johnson’s familiar diminutives of
surnames may have been doubly marked: they were informal, and they may well
have been very unusual in eighteenth-century England or at least in eighteenth-century
writing. Although the OED attests many instances of –y being
appended to a contracted Christian name, the entry for -y describes that
suffix as only “recently appended to surnames to form a familiar name”, with
the 1941 Smithy the first of its three examples (s.v. –y6).
(Forms like Smithy, of course, differ from forms like Bozzy in
that the latter the base has been contracted.)
Wolcot was not the only
contemporary to cite nicknames as a synecdoche of Boswell’s and Johnson’s
style. In 1791, after the publication
of his Life of Johnson, Boswell was parodied in the Morning Herald:
(5) LESSON
IN BIOGRAPHY
OR
HOW TO WRITE THE LIFE OF
ONE’S FRIEND
(An Extract
from the LIFE OF DR. POZZ, in ten volumes folio, written by JAMES BOZZ, Esq.;
who flourished with him near fifty years). (quoted in Boswell 1989: 146)
Moreover, in 1785, Boswell had been
criticized in the Public Advertiser for the lack of “good-manners” and
“good breeding” he exhibited by using such “vulgar diminutives of … christian
names” as “Sam Johnson” and “Jack Lee”:
(6) An admirer at [sic][1]
Mr. Boswell, wonders whether he considers it as any proof of wit or
good-manners to call gentlemen of learning and gravity by the vulgar
diminutives of their christian names? Sam Johnson, Jack Lee, (late
Attorney-General) &c. are familiarities equally disgusting to sense and
good breeding, and they are peculiarly out of character in a Scotchman (Anon.
1785a: 2).
This comment emphasizes that nicknames
were “vulgar” “familiarities” – impolite in speech and in print.
The familiar nickname
“Bozzy” is a key to Boswell’s presentation of himself as Johnson’s future
biographer. “Bozzy” presented this evidence of his status as Johnson’s friend
in the same journal entry (14 October 1773) as he recalled
(7) The Sunday evening that we sat by
ourselves at Aberdeen, I asked him several particulars of his life from his
early years, which he readily told me, and I marked down before him. This day I
proceeded in my inquiries, also marking before him. I have them on separate
leaves of paper. I shall lay up authentic materials for THE LIFE OF SAMUEL
JOHNSON, LL.D., and if I survive him, I shall be one who shall most faithfully
do honour to his memory. I have now a vast treasure of his conversation at
different times since the year 1762 when I first obtained his acquaintance; and
by assiduous inquiry I can make up for not knowing him sooner. (Boswell
1785:389, 1961: 300)[2]
In the published account of the Tour,
Boswell adds further emphasis to the “Bozzy” passage by placing it at the
beginning of the entry (Boswell 1785: 384); the incident not only began
the day, but was a proof of Boswell’s status as Johnson’s friend – and of his
“superiority” to friends like Goldsmith in his happy subjection to Johnson so
appropriate in a biographer.
Goldsmith’s reaction
suggests that Johnson’s “familiarity” could be taken as an insult but also as a
mark of intimacy. McIntosh has observed Boswell’s Johnson using the low style
in order to “deflate pomposity” (1995:143), here Goldsmith’s. Indeed, Boswell was later to contextualize
the same observation about Johnson’s “contracting the name of his friends” in
an extended discussion of “Goldsmith’s incessant desire of [MS, deleted: shining
or] being conspicuous in company”. In both the manuscript and published account
of his Life of Johnson, it is clear that Boswell uses the anecdote to
illustrate how Goldsmith, though “sometimes content to be treated with an easy
familiarity … upon occasions would be consequential and important”. This
passage gives some more examples of Johnson’s
(3a) way of contracting the name of his friends
as Beauclerk Beau Langton Lanky Murphy Mur Boswell Bozzy … I recollect [Tom
Davies] telling me once on my arrival in London, “Sir our great friend has made
an improvement on his appellation of old Mr. Sheridan. He calls him now Sherry
derry (MS, Boswell 1998: 112).
Boswell may have recognized and
rhetorically exploited what Goldsmith rejected as a deflation of his dignity.
The potentially undignified diminutive “Bozzy” may have contributed to what
Schwalm argues was Boswell’s construction of his own “relative inferiority” in
necessary contrast to his elevation of Johnson as a “heroic figure” (1976: 247,
283). However, nicknames also, and
especially, indicated intimacy. Although Goldsmith wouldn’t put up with being
called Goldy, Bozzy seems to have interpreted and welcomed
Johnson’s familiarity as “kindness”. In the manuscript of the Life,
quoted above in (3a), “Bozzy” is given end-position; in the printed edition,
the list is augmented (with “Sherry”) and alphabetized, with “Bozzy” taking his
place amongst Johnson’s intimates:
(3b) Beauclerk,
Beau ; Boswell, Bozzy ; Langton, Lanky ; Murphy, Mur ; Sheridan,
Sherry (printed edition,
Boswell 1934: 258).
It is perhaps possible that Boswell
subtly signals the emotional and economic value of intimacy with Johnson when
in his Journal of a tour to the Hebrides he juxtaposes Johnson’s coining
of “Mony”, his nickname for Lord Monboddo, with his pronouncement that “a man …
cannot coin guineas but in proportion as he has gold”:
(8) ‘But, sir,’ said he, ‘a man cannot make
fire but in proportion as he has wood. He cannot coin guineas but in proportion
as he has gold.’ He came the length this day of contracting Monboddo and
calling him ‘Mony.’ This was a piece of kindness, for he does so to all his
friends (Boswell 1961: 189).
And having revised his manuscript to
change “Mr.” to “Dr.” Johnson (see (3) above), Bozzy perhaps emphasized the
magnitude of his catch. In a letter to his publisher Dilly, Boswell claimed
this “`intimate friendship of DR. JOHNSON’ as the basis for his special fitness
as biographer” to which the Tour attested (Goyette 1979: 312).
Nicknames like “Bozzy”
signalled great intimacy; their use by the wrong person was a social violation.
A recent discussion of Frances Burney on the eighteenth-century
discussion list
has reminded us of how few people knew her as “Fanny”, and how “consternated”
she was when sent a letter addressed to “Miss Fanny Burney” from someone Betty
Rizzo describes as Burney’s “close friend the singer Pachierotti” (Rizzo 2000). At least one of Bozzy’s contemporaries,
the admittedly biased Samuel Lysons, questions Boswell’s claim to intimacy with
his subject in a letter to none other than his friend Mrs. Piozzi. “It was a
shameful thing in Boswell to mention so many foolish things relating to living
persons … Bozzy (as he says Johnson called him) is unique”
(Piozzi 1989: 178). More explicitly, Lyson criticizes Boswell for having made
public so many private, present follies. The printing of such private names is
one example of what for Bozzy and Piozzi’s contemporaries was an issue of
immense importance: the biographers’ indiscriminate indiscretion in making
private details of Johnson’s life - and those of other people - public. Wolcot may have
emphasized Johnson’s contractions in order to epitomize how his biographers
inappropriately made private material public in print.
The presence of contracted
names in print may also have violated other late-eighteenth-century stylistic
conventions. Studies by Biber and
Finegan (1989), Fitzmaurice (1998), and McIntosh (1998) have observed and
explained how some registers of written English acquired even more traits of
“written-ness” during the eighteenth century. The infiltration of written
language by stereotypically oral contractions seems to have been regarded as
particularly impolite in this period. Indeed, the construction of Johnson by
Boswell and his co-editor Edmond Malone (Boswell 1961: xiv-xxi) also involved
removing “informal syntax and inelegant phraseology” as they transformed
Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides for publication (xxi). The manuscript journal contains some
contractions in representations of direct speech; not all of these contractions
survive in the printed edition. For example, We’re on a “tatter[ed] …
leaf” of Boswell’s manuscript was emended to We are in the printed
edition:
(3) I remember one day, when Tom Davies was
telling that Dr. Johnson said, “We are [MS: “We’re”] all in labour for a name
to Goldy’s play[.]” (Boswell 1961: 297, 433; Boswell 1785: 385)
A comparison of a few pages of the
manuscript journal with the printed edition establishes that other contractions
were cut, in the speech of Johnson and others. For instance,
(9) Honest
Mr. Macqueen said of me, “His governor’s gone to bed” (Boswell 1961: 160).
Honest Mr M’Queen observed
that I was in high glee, “my governour being gone to bed” (Boswell 1785:
214).
(10) I took the liberty to observe to Mr. Johnson
that he [always eat fish with his fingers]. “Yes”, said he; “but it is because
I am short-sighted, and afraid of bones; for which reason I’m not fond of
eating many kinds of fish, because I must take my fingers” (Boswell 1961: 165).
“… I am not fond of eating
many kinds of fish, because I must use my fingers” (Boswell 1785: 247)
(11) He
answered, “I’d have it both first and last” (Boswell 1961: 167).
He answered, “I would have
it both first and last” (Boswell 1785: 249).
(12) Mr. Johnson said, “’Tis a good book in
general, but a foolish one as to particulars” (Boswell 1961: 168).
… “It is a good book in
general, but a foolish one in particulars” (Boswell 1785: 251).
I must stress that not all
contractions recorded in Boswell’s journal were expanded for print:
(13) JOHNSON:
“Nay, don’t give us India” (Boswell 1961: 168).
JOHNSON:
“Nay, don’t give us India” (Boswell 1785: 251).
Removing some of the contractions
seems to have taken priority over what Boswell stressed was the “minute
accuracy” of his Tour (Goyette 1979: 312). For in the later eighteenth
century, contractions might signify that their user was “low”, and perhaps also
a social climber. Haugland’s survey of the eighteenth-century distribution of
reduced forms, contractions like don’t and it’s, notes that in
the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century these forms “were being
established as legitimate variants even in scholarly prose” (1995:179), but
their proscription by Addison and Swift, and by later prescriptivists, resulted
in their subsequent disappearance from many genres (1995:180). Prescriptivists
condemned contractions - sometimes for no reason, sometimes on
the grounds that they were harsh-sounding, colloquial, even vulgar (Haugland
1995: 174-176). Haugland identifies Campbell’s Philosophy of Rhetoric
(1776) as “among the few” works on language that “do not approve of the rigid
anti-variationist attitude”. Although Campbell finds some contractions
“intolerably bad” or “vulgarism[s]”, he argues that other elisions “improve …
the sound”; moreover, he argues that contractions are “’natural’” in
conversation and should be “allowable in writings in the familiar style”
(Haugland 1995: 176). However, in the same decade some book reviewers branded
users of contractions as vulgar and uneducated, even when the contractions
appeared in representations of speech in such `conversational’ genres as
comedies and trial transcripts. Contractions like don’t and won’t
certainly appeared in print in originally oral genres like comedies: Sheridan’s
comedy The rivals (1775) contains many types and tokens of contractions
of not (Brainerd 1989[1993]) despite many types having been condemned
decades earlier (Haugland 1995: 165, 172ff). A few book reviewers attributed
contractions like don’t and won’t to such hyperbolically
stereotypical social climbers as the “hair dresser”, the “valet”, and
especially the “milliner”. Hugh Kelly’s play The school for wives (1774)
is criticized for its contractions, for putting “the affected style of a
mincing milliner, or a coxcomb valet, into the mouths of people who are
supposed to have enjoyed the advantages of education” (Woodfall 1774).[3]
In 1770, a reviewer of a supposedly verbatim transcription of the Grosvenor
divorce trial complains about “inaccuracies” and indeed “vulgarisms” in the
“speeches” of “the learned and eloquent speakers”. For instance, Lord
Mansfield’s “vile contraction don’t for do not” “would be rather
expected from the mouth of a hairdresser, or a milliner’s apprentice”. The
vulgarity of the contraction is underscored by its juxtaposition in the review
with a glaring grammatical error, the confusion of lay and lie:
the reviewer “cannot attribute” “this vulgarism” to Lord Mansfield, the
alternative being “the poor people who write paragraphs for the news-papers”
(Anon. 1770: 332). It is important to remember that there is often little
correlation between negative attitudes towards variants and their actual
distribution: comments like these cannot, of course, be used as evidence for
actual milliners’ usage, but merely confirm that politeness was being
configured as writtenness in the 1770s, as Fitzmaurice and McIntosh have
already shown – yet also that there were at least some writers who did not
equate the use of contractions with a lack of education. Moreover, lords might
use whatever linguistic variant they liked: it is a truism that socially
superior speakers ignored prescriptive rules followed by the socially mobile or
marginal. How did educated writers like Johnson use contractions in writing and
in speech? A study of Johnson’s contractions, as represented by Boswell in
manuscript and in print, invites investigation.
3. Dr. Johnson’s low language
Boswell’s
printed account had also omitted a passage in his original manuscript in which
Dr.
Johnson
swore; in Boswell’s manuscript, this passage immediately followed the “Bozzy”
anecdote
discussed in (3) above:
(14) MS: On Monday we had a dispute at the
Captain’s whether sand-hills could be fixed. Mr. Johnson said, “How the devil
can you do it?” but instantly took himself: “How can you do it?” I never before
heard him use such a phrase. (Boswell 1961: 433)
Although the point of Boswell’s
manuscript anecdote is that Dr. Johnson does not habitually use such phrases,
the juxtaposition of Johnson’s swearing and his contractions unintentionally
brands Johnson as “low”.
The association of Johnson
with contractions and invective might seem uncharacteristic of the man who even
in his own day was associated with a register that was not only formal but
overly so:
(15) It is true, that his words are now and then
too gigantesque for familiar letters: he talks of waters, whose stream is
obstructed by protuberances, and exasperated by reverberations,
but pompous words were natural to him, as well in conversation as in The
Rambler. He said every thing as he thought, and always in his own style
(Anon. 1788c: 326).
However, Johnson’s
association with low language was not incompatible with his lavish Latinity.
The excessive and inflexible use of what an earlier age called “inkhorn” terms
was often the sign of a social climber: for the sixteenth-century Thomas
Wilson, it is the “vnlearned” who “Latin their tongues” (quoted in Millward
1996: 229-230). The English Review links his “sesquipedalia verba”
with his professional beginnings as a boys’ schoolteacher (Anon. 1786b: 255).
Johnson was the son of a provincial bookseller and, until he received his royal
pension, a grub street writer. Hudson (1998) continues to remind us how
innovative Johnson was to include “low” words in his folio dictionary, and of
how ungentlemanly Johnson was himself, in person as well as birth. McIntosh’s study of “Boswell’s Artistry”
reminds us that Johnson, a fine stylist, used low words in conversation
sometimes to “driv[e] home a point”, sometimes for “shock value” . Boswell
removed many of these low words when editing the Life, as Mizuno has
demonstrated (1991). However, he retained some low words, thereby preserving
“Johnson’s humanity”, McIntosh argues, and securing his own “principal
achievement as biographer” (1995: 142-143).
Johnson’s
poor manners were well known to his contemporaries. In his memoirs, Johnson’s younger contemporary Wraxall
(1751-1831) sincerely acknowledges Johnson’s “beautiful compositions” but
emphasizes and elaborates on his
(16) rugged exterior and
garb, his uncouth gestures, his convolutions and distortions … the rude and
dogmatical manner in which he delivered his opinions and decisions on every
point …the usages of polished life imposed a very inadequate restraint on his
expressions, or his feelings.
Wraxall’s description culminates in
Johnson’s rudeness, exemplified in his name-calling: opponents are “rascals”,
“dogs”, “blockheads”, “scoundrels” (1904: 88-89). Contemporary reviews noted
that memoirs like Piozzi’s further publicized details of Johnson’s often poor
conduct, “for which he deserved to be expelled from society”. The Critical Review (1786), for
instance, asserts that “there can be no excuse” for Johnson’s inappropriate
manners:
(17) The great attention which was always paid to
him, added a severity and despotism to his manner, which seem to have been
always void either of grace or elegance. For many of the speeches which Mrs.
Piozzi has recorded, he deserved to be expelled from society, if he had not a
power of compensating for his errors, by the moral rectitude of his life, and
the chearing salutary tendency of his precepts … For conduct of this kind there
can be no excuse” (Anon. 1786a: 275-276).
Johnson’s conduct was epitomized by
his comparison of two of God’s creations—Hell and Scotland, “a vile country”
(Anon 1786a: 275-276). The English
Review of Piozzi’s Anecdotes devoted a full page not only to
Johnson’s hatred of “whole societies of men” (Whigs, the Scotch, the French),
but also to his habitual ridicule of his friends and family. “He professed to
love his mother. One day she called him a puppy. `Pray,’ says this dutiful and
loving son, `Do you know what they call a puppy’s mother?’” This review
links Johnson’s “wit” with lowness: “He knew he could not shine by elegant wit
and polished manners, and therefore cultivated the easier graces of the vulgar,
ill nature, insolence, rusticity, and barbarity” (Anon. 1786b: 258-259). The Edinburgh Magazine, perhaps
unsurprisingly, reviews Piozzi’s Anecdotes as an utter failure as a
panegyric, as they reveal Johnson to be “the very quintessence of ill-nature
and pedantry” (Anon 1786c: 213). Bozzy’s and Piozzi’s books were full of many
other Johnsonian insults, for Johnson in life was not polite. So it is not surprising that Pindar should
call to our attention Dr. Johnson’s fondness for contractions: the contractions
recalled Johnson’s unmannerly misanthropy as well as Boswell’s over-familiarity. But contracted names like Bozzy and Lanky
had one final function. A review of
Piozzi’s Letters infers from nicknames like “Queeney”, Johnson’s “little
infantine appellation” for her eldest daughter, “that he possessed a good and
affectionate heart” (Anon. 1788a). That some reviewers emphasized Johnson’s
misanthropy explains why it was necessary for others to emphasize his good
heart.
4. Mrs Piozzi’s “colloquial
barbarisms”
Dr. Johnson had lived in Mrs. Piozzi’s
household when she was married to Henry Thrale: in 1786, Piozzi implicitly
identifies her conversations with Johnson as the source of her authority as a
biographer, asserting that “my acquaintance with him consisted in little else
than talking” (quoted in Parke 1997: 29). However, her recent second marriage
to an Italian musician had publicly estranged her from her own family as well
as from Johnson. Mrs Piozzi now had to
assert her intimacy with Johnson as she published what were the first of a
number of monographs. These included
her Johnsonian Anecdotes and Letters, published in 1786 and 1788
respectively; her travelogue of 1789, Observations and reflections made in
the course of a journey through France, Italy, and Germany; her British
Synonymy of 1794; and her 1801 Retrospection: or a review of the most
striking and important events, characters, situations and their consequences
which the last 1800 years have presented to the view of mankind.
It is well known that Mrs. Piozzi used a deliberately
colloquial and idiosyncratic style for all of these books (see McCarthy 1985:
196ff). McCarthy’s fine literary study (1985: 196-209) persuasively describes
Piozzi as a pioneer in applying women’s conversational style in print. McCarthy
describes other ways in which Piozzi, who could have chosen to write like a
man, artfully exploited the associations of the more feminized register of
conversational, colloquial language with which any woman writer was bound to be
associated anyway. “The mode of drawing room conversation” was “intimate,
social, friendly”; it was also, by association with “Bluestocking
conversation”, an entirely authoritative and appropriate medium for the
dissemination of learning (McCarthy 1985: 204-208). McCarthy observes that British
Synonymy, Piozzi’s potentially transgressive exercise in linguistic
criticism, was framed as a deferential exercise in “direct[ing] the choice of
phrases in familiar talk” (1985: 178ff). Berglund (1999) has observed that
Piozzi also exploited the apparently desultory, conversational structure of her
British Synonymy: or, an Attempt at Regulating the Choice of Words in
Familiar Conversation (1794) in order to make political points about the
French Revolution. Not all women writers wrote in “familiar” language, of
course. McCarthy describes Hannah More’s “career triumph” as the result of “neutering”
her style (1985: 201).
Hester Piozzi’s contemporaries criticized her style as not
only inappropriately colloquial for “collected remarks” or “biography”, but as
too “vulgar” or “barbar[ous]” even for “the conversation of every elegant and
well-educated woman”. Anonymously reviewing her Anecdotes of Johnson,
Charles Burney enumerated “vulgarisms”:
(18) [the final prose sketch], like the rest of
the book, is confused and desultory, and is written with a negligence of method
and arrangement, which ill suits with the true spirit of biography” ¼ ‘The style, indeed, of the
whole is unequal, sometimes elegant, forcible, and decorated, at other times
inaccurate, ungraceful, and degraded by the introduction of vulgarisms: Said
I, and said he occur too frequently, and we are wearied with the
inelegant usage of the particle how, instead of that, which
deforms almost every tenth page. The introduction of the Gallicism one
should likewise have been avoided (Burney 1786: 373-383)
Similarly, the Critical Review,
for instance, complained of the Anecdotes that they were “too often
deformed by colloquial barbarisms” (Anon. 1786a: 278); these barbarisms are
later exemplified in a review, also in the Critical Review of her Observations
with words like such, so, somehow, and one (Anon.
1789b: 104):
(19)
The style which we might have praised
in letters is disgusting in the author of more collected remarks; and the
inaccuracies which are excusable in these unpremeditated effusions, must be
condemned in what appears to be a more serious attempt … Every thing is at
times so elegant—and it is so disgusting … Then it is such;
and this little word, without the corresponding part of the sentence, is
repeated many times in a few lines. Again, it is very often somehow … At
another time, one is wholly predominant . Really, Madam, one
cannot read ten lines without feeling somehow such disgust so: one
is tempted to lay down a work, where one meets with so many
inelegancies, such colloquial barbarisms, which one must always
feel somehow unpleasant. … these little errors, these little offences
against what ought to distinguish even the conversation of every elegant and
well-educated woman. (Anon. 1789b: 104)
Moreover,
Piozzi’s Johnson has subject matter and style that are much more informal than
Boswell’s Johnson, despite Wollstonecraft’s later accusation that Piozzi aped
Johnson’s high style (McCarthy 1985: 197-198). Korshin’s essay on “Johnson’s
conversation” compares the extent to which Boswell and Piozzi “craft” the raw
material of Johnson’s speech (1991: 182).
Colloquial, familiar
language might be exempt from certain grammar rules: for instance, in a now
well-known passage, Lowth asserts that preposition stranding, though
inappropriate to “the solemn and elevated style”, “suits very well with the
familiar style in writing” (Lowth 1762: 127-128; see Percy 1997b: 134; Tieken
forthcoming). Contemporary book reviewers’ comments, positive and negative,
remind us of how easily familiar or informal language could be deemed incorrect,
undignified, or vulgar: not every writer succeeded in combining the colloquial
and the correct. James Ferguson, a
popular science and astronomy writer from the late 1750s onward, exemplifies
the perceived link between familiar language and incorrect language. Ferguson’s
popularizations of science were uniformly praised for their “easy and familiar
manner” and “easy and perspicuous language” (Rose 1756: 236), but in his will,
drawn up in 1776, he ‘absolutely prohibit[ed] my said sons from selling or giving
away or printing any of my manuscripts, because they are not sufficiently
correct to bear printing” (Millburn 1988: 251-252). Although Ferguson’s
published texts might have been corrected, his anxiety suggests a link between
writing that was “familiar” and writing that was subject to linguistic or
stylistic criticism. This was certainly the case in the 1780s. A survey of my
database of book reviews (see Percy 1997a) ascertains that in the 1780s, the
adjective “colloquial” collocated with terms denoting both inaccuracy and
vulgarity. There are at least six co-occurrences of “colloquial” with forms of
“inaccurate” (Anon. 1785b; Anon. 1787; Gillies 1788b), “incorrect” (Anon.
1785e), or “inelegant” (Anon. 1788f; Anon. 1789); two with forms of “low”
(Anon. 1780a; Anon. 1785c), three instances (one applied to Piozzi, Anon.
1786a) of the phrase “colloquial barbarism” (Gillies 1785, 1788), and at least
four co-occurrences with forms of “vulgar” (Anon. 1782; Anon. 1783; Anon.
1785d; Gillies 1788b). The description of William Lothian’s style as “low,
colloquial, and inaccurate” (Anon. 1780a: 377-378) epitomizes these
commonly-held attitudes to colloquial style.
5. Mrs. Piozzi’s style in context
Piozzi’s particular style
must have been distinctive, and indeed unique: “Jane Austen refers to it
offhand in a passage in which she sees herself as parodying Piozzi’s style and
mindset” (Moody 2000) and twice epitomizes it, once with the
adverb somehow and once with the antithesis of her “little” concerns
with her husband’s “great” ones (Austen 1995:44, 156). McCarthy relates similar
observations and objections to Piozzi’s style by Hannah More and Horace Walpole
(1985: 61, 197). Yet it is also essential to contextualize Piozzi’s familiar
style: Biber and Finegan remind us that although the period’s polite ideal did
not embrace orality, “markedly colloquial” styles were widely deployed for a
variety of purposes (1989: 513). A “familiar”, “easy” style had its place, and
was seemingly not easy to achieve. In 1786, the reviewer of Hannah More’s poems
Florio and The bas bleu, or conversation, claims that its style
has “a languid flatness” rather than “the easy familiarity requisite in such
performances” (Anon 1786d: 263-268). My survey of book reviews in two
periodicals of the second half of the eighteenth century, the Monthly
and the Critical Review, identifies language described as “colloquial”
or “familiar” in a variety of genres. Reviewers often observed colloquial
language in genres with oral origins. Colloquialisms were noted in collections
of sermons, for instance. One reviewer acknowledges that the “phrases not
wholly suited to printed discourses” in Thomas Gordon’s Plain sermons on
practical subjects were appropriate for reaching their intended audience of
common people (Hirons 1788: 561-562), but this generous rationalization might
reflect the fact that the publication was posthumous—its language already
archaic and its author beyond criticism.
Book reviewers’ praise of “familiar” styles allow us to identify genres
where such a style was desirable—these include works of simple religious
instruction and the hot new field of children’s textbooks, where authors (male
and female) were criticized for being too formal. In these genres, familiar
language indicated the author’s accommodation to his or her audience. In 1776,
William Enfield criticizes A father’s instructions to his children for
having language “raised above the familiar style of conversation” (184-187). In
1784, Enfield feels that the good advice in School dialogues for boys
“is delivered with somewhat too much sententious formality to suit the
characters of the piece” (1784:78). School dialogues was written by one
of the publisher John Marshall’s lady authors: Marshall obviously felt that the
familiar style came naturally to women: the Kilner sisters and Lady Eleanor
Fenn wrote many books for him (O’Malley 2000: 27, 40-41).
An informal style was more
marked when it conveyed more “learned” content to adults. We have seem that
McCarthy persuasively contextualizes the conversational style of Piozzi’s
publications in the bluestocking salons, where “women’s language” was an
appropriate medium for learned topics and “stood on its strongest ground”
(1985: 204). Indeed, Mrs Montagu’s circle does seem to have been associated
with the colloquial mode, in print as well as in conversation. In 1760, George
Lyttelton, a friend of Montagu, had published Dialogues of the dead, in
which political and philosophical issues were discussed in dialogue format; by
1765 a fourth edition with four further dialogues had appeared. Elizabeth
Montagu herself had written three of the dialogues, which were published
anonymously (Drabble 1985, s.v. Montagu).
Owen Ruffhead reviewed both editions in the Monthly Review, where
he considered the style and content of the dialogue genre generally and of
those in the collection specifically.
Although Ruffhead’s reviews of the collections were favourable, the
“additional dialogues” being “in no degree inferior to those which precede
them”, he doubted “whether the method of dialogue is well adapted to such
subjects as require deep investigation” (1765: 366). In 1760 he had discussed
the difficulty of excelling in the colloquial style, the latter of which he
characterized as more French than English. Ruffhead claimed that “the freedom
of [the English] constitution” permitted the English to display their “strength
of reasoning, and bold energy of expression”; the French were restricted to
“loose, desultory, chit-chat method of writing” (1760: 409-422). By 1765, he
was reiterating his previous doubts about desultory didacticism; chatty writing
is “better calculated to ridicule error, than to illustrate truth”
(1765:366).
Some writers of history
also trod a perilous path between the colloquial and the “low”: Piozzi’s Retrospection
in 1801 was not the first historical work to be criticized for its tone. Some historians were, however, more
successful. In 1788, A short account of the doctrines and practices of the
church of Rome is praised for its “clear and familiar style” (Anon. 1788:
580). In 1780, a response to Gibbon’s Decline and fall of the Roman empire
is criticized for not being written in a “more easy, close, and familiar
manner” (Anon. 1780c: 152-153). The Critical Review describes the “easy,
familiar style” of a biography of Pope Clement XIV (Anon. 1776: 79-80). But
other historians are taken to task for excessive familiarity. Also in 1780,
William Lothian’s History of the United Provinces of the Netherlands is
described as having a “low, colloquial, and inaccurate” “style” that does not
“aspire at the dignity of historical composition” (Anon. 1780a: 372-378). And
William Gordon’s 1788 epistolary history of the United States receives similar
condemnation:
(20) The
epistolary mode of writing, which is far from being congenial to history, may
perhaps, justify Dr. Gordon
in the extreme familiarity of his style, but he sometimes endeavours to
embellish it with such ornaments as are utterly incongruous to historical
composition …(Anon. 1788b 477-480).
Again, it is important to emphasize
the subjectivity of reviewers’ judgements: what the Monthly Review
describes as “low and colloquial” in Lothian’s style, is for the Critical
“dry and inelegant” (Anon. 1780d 161-166).
Published accounts of
travels, perhaps especially epistolary travels (see Smith 1998), often had a
familiar style that some reviewers lamented. Dr. Burney related international
information skillfully. His Present state of music in Germany, the
Netherlands, and United Provinces (1771) has “so pleasing and familiar a
manner as to be interesting and intelligible, even to those who do not profess
or cultivate music” (Bewley 1773: 212-224). But other writers were apparently
less successful. William Sharp’s Rumble from Newport to Cowes in the Isle of
Wight (1784) “is written in that familiar style which is composed without
much trouble, and read with little pleasure” (Anon. 1784: 312-313). Two
competing accounts of an expedition use contrasting styles. In 1789, a reviewer
describes the “lofty” style of Nathaniel Portlock’s Voyage round the world
as written in reaction to Captain Dixon’s account, “an illustrious specimen of
the familiar style” that was “universally disapproved” (Anon. 1789a: 319-324).
Also in 1789, the style of Baroness Elizabeth Craven’s Journey through the
Crimea to Constantinople (1789) is described by the Critical Review
as “sinking to familiar ease, … sometimes colloquial and inelegant” (Anon.
1789: 281). It goes without saying that these judgements are highly subjective:
the Monthly described the Baroness’s style as “natural and easy” (Colman
1789: 200-212).
Surveying contemporary
reviews of eighteenth-century travel letters, Smith observes that “the most
disagreement among reviewers” was generated by the publication of what had been
“private … intimate detail[s]” (1998: 91). Indeed, familiar language implicitly
intimated the author’s often privileged knowledge of highly private subject
matter. Piozzi’s chatty tone reflected
not only the orality of much of Johnson’s contact with her, but also her
intimacy with him. In the latter respect she was not writing within a
specifically female tradition. Women could of course chat about matters
genteel: the Critical Review complains about the “easy, often colloquial
and vulgar” language of An interesting sketch of genteel life, written
in 1782 by “A lady” (Anon. 1782: 234). It is obviously beyond the scope of this
paper to survey the styles of earlier collections of anecdotes: one might
recall that in the 1760s, the Monthly Review’s William Kenrick had
enumerated the linguistic “negligence”, “peculiarities” and “incorrectness” of
Horace Walpole’s Anecdotes of Painting in England (Kenrick
1764:311-315). But it is important to
stress that in the 1780s, a few reviewers complain about the “familiar” or even
“gossipy” style of male writers on biographical or political matters. It is
debatable whether the contractions like mayn’t and don’t in the
1780 poem Private thoughts on public affairs fall into this category
(Anon. 1780b 395-396). The “air of familiarity”, indeed “vulgarity of diction”
in Richard Cumberland’s The observer strikes Joseph White in the Monthly
Review of 1785 (297-299); the Critical Review notes only the
incorrect language concomitant with colloquialism (Anon. 1785: 297-299). Instructions
to a statesman, written anonymously in 1784, have an “easy and rather saucy
familiarity” for Burney (1784: 70-71) in the Monthly Review. Perhaps
more relevant to Piozzi’s style is Joseph Warton’s Essay on the genius and
writings of Pope, a work which “abounds … with … literary anecdotes”. The Monthly
Review’s Cartwright (1782: 265-271) complains that Warton’s style is “too
familiar and gossiping”. Obviously words like “gossiping” blur the distinction
between content and style, and there is not necessarily a one-to-one
correspondence between reviewers’ adjectives (e.g. “familiar”, “colloquial”)
and the linguistic features of specific text types. I merely wish to stress
that Piozzi was not alone in publicizing biographical information in a style
that was deemed to be too “colloquial”.
Piozzi was also not the
only prose stylist with an idiosyncratic style; indeed, an early article by
Mann considers critical awareness and increasingly “favorable attention” to
“singularity in style” in this period (1939: 113-116).[4]
Piozzi’s prolific contemporary Philip Thicknesse seems also to have written in
a style that was similarly singular and informal, for instance. His Sketch
of the Life and Paintings of Thomas Gainsborough, Esq. provoked the
observation that “Mr. T.’s peculiar, easy, style of writing is too well known
to require particular animadversion” (Anon. 1788e), and his Memoirs and
Anecdotes of Philip Thicknesse the comment that “Everything from the pen of
Captain Thicknesse, is peculiarly his own: free, animated, and singular” (Anon.
1789c). Any attempt to assess the originality of Piozzi’s idiosyncratic style
would require a systematic study of the styles of eighteenth-century English Anecdotes.
However, it is interesting to contrast these reviewers’ admittedly grudging
descriptions of Thicknesse’s style with other reviewers’ enumeration of
Piozzi’s “vulgarisms” and “barbarisms”. One might also recall the reception of
the stylistically idiosyncractic Tristram Shandy in the 1760s and – despite
some negative reviews (e.g. Smollett 1761: 314-317)[5]
-- some subsequent imitations of the Shandean style (e.g. by George Keate,
described by Griffiths 1779: 111-117). Under what circumstances might a female
author write in her very own voice and be favourably reviewed?
6. Conclusion
In conclusion, reviewers’ deployment
of adjectives like “colloquial” and of recurring collocations between the
“colloquial”, the “low” and “vulgar”, and the “inaccurate” cannot be taken as
representative of any fixed linguistic or stylistic reality, but they do
suggest that there were some trends in progress that corpus studies might
fruitfully illuminate. For instance, a corpus study might investigate whether
genres like history and biography were, as reviewers suggest, incorporating
more oral elements or even drifting towards more oral norms by the 1780s, thereby
further refining what Biber and Finegan have described as an overall pattern of
drift towards more oral styles in works intended for “a broad popular audience”
(1989: 512-514). A corpus study might also attempt to determine whether there
were specific linguistic features in a text that correlated with its being
described as “familiar”.
However, even a “micro’
study of specific authors and texts can complement what corpus studies might
illuminate about causes and contexts of stylistic variation. This paper has
shown how two authors exploited the not always positive connotations of
contractions and colloquial language in order to cast more favourable light
upon their subject, Dr. Samuel Johnson, and upon themselves as authors and
authorities. Johnson’s rudeness was well known to his contemporaries.
Contracted names like Queeney attest to “surly Sam’s” capacity for warmth and
intimacy, at least with Piozzi in the domestic setting of her first husband’s
household. And just as the name of Bozzy testifies to the Scottish writer’s
intimacy with Johnson, so too does Piozzi’s familiar style—a not specifically
female strategy for signalling authority derived from intimacy with her
subject.
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0 I am most grateful
for the research support that this project has received from the SSHRC of
Canada, the Work-Study Plan (University of Toronto), and the Faculty of Arts
and Science, University of Toronto. I would like to thank the many students who
worked on this project, indexing reviews, entering records into the database,
and doing biographical research on authors and reviewers: they are listed on my
web site at http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~cpercy. I would
also like to thank Steven Lee and Dana Snell for their contributions.
[1] The italics are in the source. The OED (s.v. “admire”,
v., sense 1b) has examples of admire at through the nineteenth century.
[2] I would like to thank Steven Lee for alerting me to the content
and structure of the entry for 14 October 1773, in both the manuscript and the
published version.
[3] This and all subsequent attributions from the Monthly Review
are from Nangle (1934).
[4] I would like to thank Dana Snell for bringing this article to my
attention.
[5] This attribution is from Basker (1998: 263).