Book announced at https://linguistlist.org/issues/35-2648

Title: The Victorians and English Dialect
Subtitle: Philology, Fiction, and Folklore
Publication Year: 2024

Publisher: Oxford University Press
http://www.oup.com/us
Book URL: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-victorians-and-english-dialect-9780198888123?utm_source=linguistlist&utm_medium=listserv&utm_campaign=linguistics

Author(s): Matthew Townend

Reviewer: Christine Wallis

SUMMARY

This book deals with the activities of a group of nineteenth-century researchers who laid the foundations of English dialect study, giving an account of their methods, works and intellectual context. Central to the book is the claim that ‘the nineteenth-century discipline of philology is the primary context in which the period’s dialect study should be placed and understood’ (13), and a twin thread running throughout is the rise and eventual fall in popularity of this approach. Townend emphasises the regional nature, not only of the subject matter, but also of the participants who undertook the bulk of nineteenth-century dialectal study; not only were the fieldworkers themselves often part of the communities where they collected their material, but the English Dialect Society itself owed much of its vitality (and at times its existence) to the civic world beyond London and the universities. After an introduction, six chapters deal with different facets of dialect study in Victorian Britain, from collectors of dialect glossaries and phonology, to the symbiotic relationships between dialect, folklore and creative writing, to the compilation of the English Dialect Dictionary (EDD). The book’s chapters fall into two parts: the first three chapters introduce some of the movement’s main figures and areas of interest in dialect (vocabulary, phonology and literary uses of dialect), while the final three chapters focus on the activities of the English Dialect Society and folklorists, culminating in the creation and publication of the EDD. An Epilogue discusses the fate of philology in the twentieth century, as it gave rise to the new disciplines of literature and linguistics, and largely fell from favour.

The introduction contextualises the nineteenth-century dialect movement by outlining the rise and popularity of the ‘new philology’ as it spread from its German and Danish roots in the early part of the century. This ‘fresh, exciting, revolutionary’ (4) discipline was based on three modes of thinking: historical (language changes over time), comparative (change was systematic) and oral (spoken language was primary, and written language secondary). Townend points out that some of the major scholars of nineteenth-century historical English work (e.g. Walter Skeat (b. 1835), James Murray (b. 1837) and Henry Sweet (b. 1845)) were youngsters caught up in the enthusiasm of this new discipline in the 1850s and 1860s, and he captures the philologists’ sense of discovery as they realised the wealth of existing data waiting to be collected. Philology was a popular and influential movement (its principles also underpinned the compilation of the Oxford English Dictionary, begun by the Philological Society of London in 1857) and Townend emphasises the variety of people caught up in the movement, as ‘many of the leading philologists were autodidacts from a working-class or lower middle-class background’ (10). Dialect study was therefore accessible to enthusiasts who had traditionally been excluded from a (Latin-based) university education, such as women or lower class researchers. Although made up of individuals with varying priorities and outlooks, the group was characterised by its interest in variation in regional and local speech and customs, often explicitly contrasted with the contemporary national standard. Townend sets out three main research questions: firstly, why did the Victorians start investigating local speech? Secondly, why was it so important to them? And thirdly, how were dialect researchers connected with other intellectual networks, such as local historians, folklorists, novelists, and poets? Despite the abundant surviving evidence of their activities, parts of this movement have received comparatively little attention so far.

Chapter 1, ‘The Pioneers’, begins with a survey of early studies of local language by writers such as John Ray, Francis Grose and Joseph Hunter. There was a recognition of language change even among some of these early writers, especially in lexical and semantic domains, while social variation – usage peculiar to educated or rural speakers – was also commented on. The subsequent influence of the new philology led to an awareness of the conservative nature of rural speech and its links to earlier states of the language, as exemplified in medieval texts, and the strong interests of antiquarians meant that dialects became increasingly valued for their preservation of an older, ‘purer’ state of English. The perception that dialects were under threat from contemporary developments such as widespread education and the rise of the railways leant a degree of urgency to the collection of dialect vocabulary in the form of regional glossaries. The chapter concludes with a case study of one such collector, J.C. Atkinson, whose 1868 Glossary of the Cleveland Dialect drew on his decades of experience as a vicar in that district.

Like many early collections, Atkinson’s book provides abundant detail of Cleveland’s vocabulary, however, much less attention is paid to phonology, which is the subject of Chapter 2, ‘The Phoneticians’. Phonetics had its roots in areas such as spelling reform, shorthand notation and elocution, and because of the technical expertise required, fewer collectors focused on this level of detail. The chapter focuses predominantly on two researchers, Alexander Ellis and Thomas Hallam. Ellis was responsible for the development of two alphabets, Palaeotype and Glossic, designed to represent speech more closely than standard orthography (a practical issue also faced by writers of early pronouncing dictionaries, who resorted to various schemes to represent sounds (Sen et al. 2020)). His dialect investigations culminated in the multi-volume The Existing Phonology of English Dialects; much of the fieldwork, however, was undertaken by volunteers such as Thomas Hallam, whose job as a railway clerk enabled him to travel widely through the country, collecting and transcribing speech samples from a variety of informants as he went. Hallam’s own comments on his fieldwork allow for an insight into his methodology, and Townend notes how Ellis and Hallam’s preoccupations foreshadow a number of present-day linguistic theories, such as the Uniformitarian Principle (Bergs 2012) and the Observer’s Paradox (Hallam observes that ‘peasants do not speak naturally to strangers’ (77)). Other observations, naturally, stand up to present-day scrutiny less well; recent research projects such as The Language of the Labouring Poor in Late Modern England (LALP) complicate Ellis’s view of peasants as ‘entirely untaught’ (69).

The third chapter, ‘Dialect and Literature’ surveys the rise of dialect as a feature of literature from the 1840s onwards. This chapter focuses, not only on the use of dialect by novelists, but also on the philological framing that authors provide for their use of regional features. For example, Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton was provided with extensive footnotes by her husband William, which glossed dialect words and provided commentary on non-standard features. Townend highlights how authors used their own observations and experiences of regional speech, but also how they made use of published glossaries (with varying levels of success) to provide detail for individual characters. Novelists were not the only creative writers making use of dialect; the works of poets such as William Barnes and Thomas Hardy are also analysed to illustrate the contribution of dialect to the ‘new register’ (135) these writers were able to create.

Chapter 4, ‘The English Dialect Society’, focuses on what Townend describes as ‘the forgotten society of Victorian language study’ (144). In existence for only a short period of time, from 1873-1896, the society left no archive, and comparatively little historiography exists of its members’ efforts. Townend therefore uses the society’s annual reports and the (sometimes limited) surviving personal papers of members such as Walter Skeat to build a picture of the society’s activities and achievements, including the publication of original glossaries, the re-publication of earlier, important dialect collections, and the establishment of the society’s library at Manchester Free Library, which enabled researchers access to useful and rare materials. Three main phases of the society are traced: firstly, its inauguration and early years, when it was run by Skeat from Cambridge, followed by its move to Manchester under the leadership of John Nodal, where it flourished as part of that city’s vibrant intellectual life. The society’s final phase saw its relocation to Oxford under Joseph Wright, whose publication of the English Dialect Dictionary is dealt with in Chapter 6.

Chapter 5, ‘Folklore and the Past’ leaves off the story of the English Dialect Society to consider the interests of Victorian philologists in the lives of people in the past. These scholars ‘studied the languages of the present for the purposes of understanding the past’ (187), in an early application of the Uniformitarian Principle. This led to a virtuous circle, whereby dialects were consulted in order to elucidate the language of the past, while medieval literature provided a pedigree for regional speech. Publications such as the dictionaries by Joseph Bosworth (1838), and Richard Cleasby and Gudbrand Vigfússon (1874) were important tools for the investigation of linguistic parallels in Old English and Old Norse respectively. For many fieldworkers, the collection of local customs, children’s games and other folkloristic details went hand in hand with an interest in the local vernacular, and the chapter traces the intellectual context and activities of the Folklore Society, producing records not only of local language, but also the way of life that this vernacular was embedded in. Novelists of the period did not restrict themselves to dialect features to lend an air of authenticity, or a sense of time and place to their works, and the chapter also investigates the use of folkloric details by writers such as R. D Blackmore and Sabine Baring-Gould.

The final main chapter, Chapter 6, presents the crowning achievement of Victorian dialect collectors, ‘The English Dialect Dictionary’ (EDD), published between 1898 and 1905. The creation of the dictionary was one of the long-standing aims of the English Dialect Society, which appointed firstly Abram Palmer, and subsequently Joseph Wright as its editors. The dictionary’s compilers were able to rely on works of poetry and fiction, as well as the substantial number of regional glossaries published by the society. The bulk of the chapter is devoted to the processes involved in making the dictionary – its compilers, scope, organisation and the shape of its entries – as well as spin-off projects. In addition to the dictionary itself, Wright’s English Dialect Grammar offered a companion-piece in the form of a study of dialect phonology. While Wright’s plans for an abridged version of the EDD never came to fruition, Elizabeth Wright’s Rustic Speech and Folk-Lore used material from the EDD in her thematic digest, demonstrating the EDD’s enduring utility and popularity.

EVALUATION

Townend successfully puts human faces to the names involved in nineteenth-century dialect collection, pointing out the sheer number and variety of people involved, including academics, clergymen and their families, teachers, and industrialists. The role of women is also highlighted, as collectors, fieldworkers, novelists and compilers of the English Dialect Dictionary. It has become a commonplace that older linguistic surveys restricted their informants to NORMS (Non-mobile, Older, Rural Male Speakers (Chambers & Trudgill 1998: 29)); yet this study shows that, in the case of Victorian dialect collectors this is an oversimplification. Thomas Hallam not only included women and children among his informants, but also noted differences in the usage of different groups, while Alexander Ellis was well aware of the importance of factors such as age and gender in language variation. Differences in opinion and motivation within the research community are also dealt with, giving a real insight into the varied language attitudes of the time. The book offers a more nuanced understanding of the methods, aims and preoccupations of these early collectors, who were simultaneously pro-dialect, yet deeply imbued with with standard language ideology (Milroy & Milroy 2012). Dialect was perceived as having dignity because it represented an older and purer state of English than the nineteenth-century standard; however the the value of the standard was apparently never criticised by Victorian philologists. A key strength of this book, then, is its exploration of the diversity of thought among nineteenth-century philologists, in several cases providing clear forerunners of later linguistic theories. We are also reminded that crowdsourcing and public engagement are not new scholarly endeavours. In this respect, Townend’s research questions on the motivations of this group and the different networks involved are explored in depth and detail.

The book is philological, rather than linguistic in its focus. Links to linguistic theory are made where relevant, but there is plenty for those interested in branches such as historical linguistics to pursue here, especially in areas such as enregisterment, language attitudes and communities of practice. It is clear that an abundance of evidence exists to investigate these and other questions in more detail, and this book provides an excellent jumping off point for further avenues of research. This fascinating book will be of interest to scholars working in many areas, for instance, history of linguistics, historical dialectology, historical sociolinguistics, or dialect and literature. The book is well written and easy to read, considering its wealth of detail, and is an exciting contribution to the field.

REFERENCES

Bergs, Alexander. 2012. The Uniformitarian Principle and the Risk of Anachronisms in Language and Social History. In Juan Manuel Hernández-Campoy & Juan Camilo Conde-Silvestre (eds.), The Handbook of Historical Sociolinguistics. Malden MA: Wiley. 80-98.

Bosworth, Joseph. 1838. Dictionary of the Anglo-Saxon Language. London: Longmans.

Chambers, J. K., & Peter Trudgill. 1998. Dialectology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Cleasby, Richard, & Gudbrand Vigfússon. 1874. Icelandic-English Dictionary. Oxford: Clarendon.

LALP = The Language of the Labouring Poor in Late Modern England. www.wp.unil.ch/lalp

Milroy, James, & Lesley Milroy. 2012. Authority in Language: Investigating Standard English, 4th edn. London: Routledge.

Sen, R., J. C. Beal, N. Yáñez-Bouza, & C. Wallis (eds.). 2020. ‘Studies in Late Modern English Historical Phonology using the Eighteenth-Century English Phonology Database (ECEP)’, Special Issue of English Language and Linguistics 22(3).

Wright, Joseph (ed.). 1898-1905. English Dialect Dictionary. Oxford: Frowde.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Christine Wallis is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Westminster. Her research interests include language variation and change, literacy, and the material text in Old, Middle and Late Modern English. She has worked on digital humanities projects, including the Eighteenth Century English Phonology Database, and the Mary Hamilton Papers. Her current project investigates the production and reception of manuscripts of John of Garland’s Dictionarius, a thirteenth-century text for teaching Latin vocabulary, and will provide a digital edition of the text, its commentary and its multilingual glosses.