Of Dodsley’s projects and linguistic influence:
The language of Johnson and Lowth
Submitted autumn 2001, published April
2002 (HSL/SHL 2)
1. Introduction
In his Life of Johnson (1791), Boswell wrote as follows:
I have been informed by Mr. James Dodsley, that … when Johnson
was one day sitting in his brother Robert’s shop, he heard his brother suggest
to him, that a Dictionary of the English Language would be a work that would be
well received by the publick; that Johnson seemed at first to catch at the
proposition, but after a pause, said in his abrupt decisive manner, ‘I believe
I shall not undertake it.’ (ed. Chapman 1953 [1970]:132).
We will probably
never know how much persuading it took on Robert Dodsley’s part before Johnson
decided to undertake the project, but undertake it he did, and the result was
to have a lasting influence on English lexicography and to make Johnson into
one of the main codifiers of the English language. As for grammar writing,
another major codifier was Robert Lowth with his Short Introduction to
English Grammar (1762), which had an enormous influence on the English
language: there are many normative rules in use today, such as that you cannot
use a preposition at the end of a sentence, which go back directly to this
grammar. And like the Dictionary of the English Language, Lowth’s
grammar had been commissioned by Robert Dodsley (Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2000):
apparently, Dodsley believed that an English grammar “would be a work that
would be well received by the publick”, too, and the reception of the grammar
proved him right. So rather than merely for linguistic reasons, the
codification of the English language, that is, the publication of an
authoritative grammar and dictionary, was taken up for economic reasons as
well, and the main driving force in this process was Robert Dodsley, one of the
major English booksellers of the eighteenth century (Tierney 1988:xiv). It
might be asked why he approached these two authors rather than anybody else:
neither of them held any obvious qualifications for the job, which in our day
and age would have been an important consideration. The answer to this question
lies in the fact that they were both friends of his (Reddick 1990:13 and
Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2000:30). To understand why Dodsley would have drawn on
his friends rather than on people who might already have earned their spurs in
English lexicography or English grammar writing can be explained by looking at
him and his two projects from the perspective of the social network to which he
belonged.
2. Social network
analysis
Social networks can
be of great personal use; finding a new cleaner, for example, or a man to do
odd jobs around the house is usually done through one’s informal social
contacts. This was also the case in the eighteenth century, as is shown in
Amanda Vickery’s The Gentleman’s Daughter. One of the people described
in the book is Mrs. Shackleton (1726-1781), who had what Vickery calls a Servant Information Network
(1998:387-389) which she called upon whenever one
of her servants had run off. Dodsley similarly had a social network he could
draw on whenever he wanted to set up a new publishing project. This social
network was enormous, for Dodsley had published most of the major authors of
the eighteenth century: Burke, Gray, Johnson, Sterne, Pope, Smollett, Swift and
Young (Tierney 1988:xiv). In addition, he was acquainted with many “eminent”
people of the period; Solomon (1996:5), his biographer, mentions Akenside,
Shenstone, Fielding, Richardson, Garrick, Joseph and Thomas Warton, William
Collins, the Earl of Chesterfield and Horace Walpole. As for Johnson, according
to Reddick (1990:13), Dodsley was “well acquainted with his work and
abilities”, and he recognised the fact that the man “was in need of a large
project to establish a wider reputation and to secure a steady income … in
order to support himself and his wife”. Something similar applies to Lowth, for
Dodsley had published most of his major works, and he knew from their
correspondence that Lowth had a knack for explaining grammatical problems
(Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2000). For other projects, too, Dodsley drew upon his
social network, as in the case of his Select Fables of Esop (1761),
which consists of three volumes of which the third is filled with fables
written by himself and his friends: Graves, Lowth, Melmoth, Percy, Spence, his
brother James and possibly several others (Tierney 1988:15-16).
Analysing a person’s social network is
therefore of very great interest historically speaking, as in the case of
Amanda Vickery’s study or when trying to explain why Dodsley approached certain
authors for his publishing projects. It is also of use in literary studies in
tracing a particular kind of literary influence with the help of, say, Suzan
van Dijk’s databasse “Women Writers” (2001). In social network analysis,
basically three groups of people can be distinguished: innovators, early
adopters and followers (see Milroy 1987 for a detailed description of this
research model). Early adopters are usually central network members, people
with such high status that they set a norm to those around them. But early
adopters are not the ones to innovate, as innovating is a risky business: an
innovation may be successful or not, and if it isn’t, someone might risk losing
their position of standing in the network in question. Instead, innovators are
marginal network members, people who are only loosely integrated into a
network, and who are usually socially and geographically mobile, so that they
are in touch with many people from different social networks. Consequently,
they can pick up an innovation and transport it from one network to another. A
good example of such an innovator is John Gay. Nokes (1995), in his biography
of Gay, identifies several literary innovations as coming from Gay and being
picked up by people of greater literary eminence. The idea for a new literary
genre called the town eclogue, for example, was Gay’s, though it only gained
popularity when it was picked up by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (Nokes 1995:223-224; see also Tieken-Boon van Ostade
1998:373). That he was never given any recognition for the originality of his
ideas is the typical fate of the innovator: it is the early adopters who
usually get the credit for an innovation.
Social network analysis is one of the
research models currently in use in sociolinguistics, and is beginning to be
more widely applied in historical sociolinguistics, too. It is a potentially very
useful tool for analysis, because linguistic innovators, as marginal network
members, can function as vehicles along which linguistic change can travel
(Milroy & Milroy 1985): social network analysis can help to explain how,
and perhaps also why, linguistic change took place. The most recent issue of EJES,
edited by Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Nevalainen and Caon (2000), has been devoted
to exploring the potential of social network analysis as a research model in
historical studies. In our paper today, we will provide two examples of the
usefulness of this new method of research in studying language change and
linguistic influence, and we will do so by each presenting a case study drawn
from Robert Dodsley’s social network, namely Samuel Johnson and Robert Lowth.
Though they don’t appear to have known each other, both men have in common the
fact that they were close friends of Dodsley’s, which was one of the reasons
why they were commissioned to write a dictionary and a grammar of the English
language. But they differed from each other in the roles they played in the
networks to which they belonged, as we will proceed to show.
2. Samuel Johnson: central figure, early
adopter
One of Samuel Johnson’ s admirers and
close friends was Hester Thrale (1741-1821). Both of them were central members of the Thrales’ Streatham
Circle, though Johnson more so than Mrs. Thrale (Bax 2000:286-288), and the question presents itself
whether Mrs. Thrale’s language was at all influenced by that of Johnson. An
analysis of the spelling of her letters produced some interesting results. For
the purpose of this paper, a single spelling feature was analysed, one that may
perhaps be called typically Johnsonian: the spelling of lexical items that in
modern English end in -ic, such as domestic and romantic,
but which in eighteenth-century English were spelled variably with or without
final -k. Though in 1755 Johnson’s Dictionary prescribed dramatick,
logick, musick and publick, by the late 1760s, as one of Johnson’s
other friends James Boswell (1740-1795) points out, it had become common practice to omit the -k
(Pottle 1966:359); in other words, the modern spelling had become fashionable
by that time. Mrs. Thrale’s usage, however, developed into the opposite direction,
for in the course of June 1775 she switched to the older pattern in her letters
to Johnson (see Table 1). From that time onwards, public no longer ends
in -c, and other words similarly occur in the older spelling. The
question is what caused the change in her spelling habits, for as she was
susceptible to almost everything fashionable, this change seems particularly
odd.
|
Chronology -ic -ick c30-05-’73 fantastic 05-01-’75 comic 01-03-’75 emetic 07-06-’75 public 24-06-’75 publick 29-06-’75 publick 21-05-’76 enthusiastick 07-11-’77 frolick 17-06-’79 lethargick 20-04-’80 musick 20-04-’80 musick 20-04-’80 publickly 03-05-’80 musick |
|
Table 1. All words ending in -ic(ly)
and -ick(ly) in the letters of Hester Lynch Thrale to Samuel Johnson
1770-1784. |
It is also odd that there is no similar
change in her spelling when she writes to other people. In a letter to Fanny
Burney, for example, dating from 1784, we come across the words Catholick
and publicly (July 25 1784. Berg collection, New York Public Library);
what is more, in her journals and commonplace-books there is no such switch
either. Table 2, which shows a fraction of all the occurrences found,
illustrates that Mrs. Thrale used both variants interchangeably throughout the
period analysed. She evidently considered herself a good speller, for she wrote
in one of her diaries: “My Children write very prettily, spelling as exactly as
myself” (ed. Hyde 1977:214).
|
Chronology -ic -ick 14-07-’80 dramatic public 06-08-’80 critick Sept. ’80 comic 22-11-’80
apoplectick 29-12-’80 music Apr. ’81 pathetic |
|
Table 2. An illustrative sample of words
ending in -ic(ly) and -ick(ly) in the journals of Hester Lynch
Thrale. |
Mrs. Thrale, then, used both spelling variants in her journals,
commonplace books, and in her letters, but not in those to Johnson. It is therefore
plausible that Johnson had something to do with this particular change. But
what? When we examine Johnson’s letters and the spelling he adopted in his Dictionary
of the English Language, we find that he had a preference for the older
spelling. None of Johnson’s letters in Redford’s edition (1992) contain any
instances of the modern variant. Despite the Dictionary’s prescriptions
in this matter, it would no longer have been a risky move for Johnson, even as
an early adopter, to switch to the modern spelling, as some ten years later the
-ic variants were, as Boswell pointed out, commonly used; but Johnson
continued to use -ck in an effort to preserve the final k as “a
mark of Saxon original” (as quoted in Pottle 1966:359). Mrs. Thrale’s adoption
of the older pattern may be interpreted as an example of linguistic
accommodation (see Bax forthc. and Bax 2002), but the question remains what
could have compelled her to do so. Social network analysis may shed some light
on this question.
On
the basis of what we know about Johnson and the nature of the relationships he
had with other members of his social network, we can classify Johnson as an
early adopter rather than an innovator or follower (see Bax 2000). Holding a
central position in Mrs. Thrale’s personal network, he was able to influence
others in several ways. For example, when Boswell lamented that he still had
little knowledge of books, Johnson mapped out a course of reading for him
(Martin 1999:133, 139, 349). In doing so, he sent Boswell, so to speak, in a
particular direction. Another example of Johnson’s influence may be found in
Clifford (1968:69), who reports that Johnson assisted Henry Thrale in the early
70s in making large-scale additions to his stock of reference works. Thrale
gave him carte blanche to spend large sums of money to set up a library at
Streatham, the Thrale residence, and to make it as comprehensive as possible.
In
literary studies social network analysis may be of use in tracing down a path
of literary influence by determining which individuals in a historical network
owned or read a particular book and, furthermore, if perhaps another network
member had brought it to their attention. Invaluable sources in any such
investigation are sale catalogues such as that of Johnson’s library (Fleeman
1975). One example of a route of possible literary influence is the following.
When Fanny Burney’s first novel Evelina was published in 1778, it was
the talk of the town. From her own journal we learn that the book had not
escaped the attention of the people belonging to the network of Mrs. Thrale and
Johnson, such as Mrs. Cholmondeley, who loved it (ed. Troide et al. 1994:35, n.
9), and the politician Edmund Burke, who “sat up all night reading it” (ed. Troide et al. 1994:142). But not everyone was charmed by Burney’s
novel. Mrs. Montagu, the central figure of the Bluestocking circle (Myers
1990), could not bear the book (ed. Chapman 1951 II:259), and when Mrs. Thrale
had read it, she wrote in her diary that it was “flimzy” (ed. Balderston
1951:329). This comment, however, dates from before she had heard Johnson’s
opinion of Evelina. When Johnson not only approved of the book but even
admired it, stating, as Mrs. Thrale reports, that “Harry Fielding never did any
thing equal to the 2d Vol: of evelina” (ed. Balderston 1951:329), she adopted
his opinion and began to champion Fanny Burney’s novel. In terms of social
network analysis, Mrs. Thrale was, therefore, a follower. Johnson was not an
innovator but an early adopter; others had read the book and approved of it
before him. When Johnson, central to the Streatham network, spoke highly of Evelina,
that was good enough reason for others to appreciate it, too. If Mrs. Montagu
had been the central figure in Mrs. Thrale’s social network, Mrs. Thrale might
perhaps not have promoted Fanny Burney’s novel but, instead, might have sided
with Montagu. Although this is, of course, pure speculation, it illustrates how
influence may go from one person to another, depending on the role each one
played in his or her social network.
It
may therefore be hypothesised that in her correspondence with Johnson Mrs.
Thrale was influenced by Johnson’s spelling system. The fact that he held a
central position in her circle, and was seen as an example to follow, must have
played an important role. Also Fanny Burney’s language was influenced by that
of Johnson (Tieken-Boon van Ostade 1987), and there were others, too, who were
influenced by him. As for Mrs. Thrale, the change in her spelling took place
halfway through the 1770s, some twenty years after Johnson’s Dictionary
was published. If his Dictionary was not the driving force behind the
change in Mrs. Thrale’s letters, the actual conversations they had about the
dictionary probably were. In her journal and commonplace book Thraliana,
Mrs. Thrale indicates that she had studied the dictionary - it may well have been one of the
reference works Johnson bought for Henry Thrale’s library - and writes that she and her husband in
the early 70s had discussed it with Johnson. In her own words, they had “put
him in Mind of four or five faults in his Dictionary, & express’d our
Wishes for a new Edition” (ed. Balderston 1951:165). The possibility that Mrs.
Thrale adopted Johnson’s spelling is therefore not very unlikely, given the fact
that his Dictionary dominated lexicography in the second half of the
century (McIntosh 1994:3), but it should be remembered that eighteenth-century
spelling was still, as Hyde (1972:14) puts it, “something of an individual
matter”, and that Mrs. Thrale was well-known for her idiosyncrasies. It is
significant, however, that by 1775 her acquaintance with Johnson had turned
into a close friendship, and that many letters were exchanged during this
period. This makes it unlikely that she accommodated to his spelling primarily
because of his status as a writer. He was her friend, and she may have done so
simply to please him. She knew that he appreciated a correct way of writing,
even insisting that she would date her letters to him ( ed. Chapman 1952 ii:
325), and it was typical of Mrs. Thrale to please whenever she could. Her
susceptibility to things fashionable on the one hand and Johnson’s friendship
on the other explains why she shifted to the older spelling in her letters to
Johnson but not in the ones to other members of her network.
There
is a final question that needs to be addressed briefly at this point: although
Johnson never used the -ic spelling in his letters, what about his
journals? It appears that he was not entirely consistent in applying his own
prescription, even though he was nearly so: the -ic spelling is found on
no more on three occasions: gothic, heroic, and physic,
while only the word physic occurs in both forms (ed. McAdam et al. 1958:234, 175, 85/106).
3. Lowth a linguistic
innovator
Apart from the
network around Dodsley, there does not appear to be any overlap between the
networks Lowth and Johnson belonged to: Johnson’s correspondence only contains
a single letter addressed to Lowth, written in 1780, which does not deal with
private matters (ed. Redford, 1992–1994:287). Lowth’s networks were
ecclesiastical rather than literary, as in Johnson’s case. His career was a
very mobile one: he rose from being an Archdeacon of Winchester all the way to
the Archbishopric of Canterbury (though he declined the nomination for reasons
of ill health; see Hepworth 1978:14). He was thus both socially and
geographically mobile, and therefore of interest from the perspective of social
network analysis as a possible linguistic innovator. This would be of even more
interest from the point of view of his grammar and the enormous influence it
had. To find out whether he was indeed a linguistic innovator, the network or
networks to which he belonged must be analysed, and one way to go about this is
to analyse his personal correspondence: who did he exchange letters with, and
what was his relationship with these people. Unfortunately, there is as yet no
published edition of his correspondence: only his letters to Dodsley, seventeen
of them altogether, have been published as part of Tierney’s edition (1988). So
the present section is mainly a description of the attempts to locate Lowth’s
letters, not with a view to publishing an edition of them but to write a study
of his language from the perspective of social network analysis (Tieken-Boon
van Ostade in prep.). What has been found so far is that there is a certain
amount of variation in all kinds of aspects of his language, spelling,
morphology, grammar, which correlates with the style of his letters (formal vs.
informal), and that the norm which he presents in his grammar is that of his
most formal letters. This norm appears to reflect the way in which he thought
his most elevated correspondents (the Duke of Newcastle, the first Earl of
Liverpool, Lord Carmarthen, the second Lord Hardwicke) spoke or wrote
(Tieken-Boon van Ostade forthc.). In other words, in this respect he would have
acted like a true innovator, creating a bridge between his own middle-class
social network and that of members the aristocracy with whom he was proud to be
in touch.
This idea is based on the letters that have been collected so far,
altogether some one hundred and twenty (including the ones to Robert Dodsley);
there may be a hundred more. The majority of these were written to his wife
(64), followed by seventeen to Robert Dodsley and twelve to his brother James.
The rest of the letters are addressed to a variety of correspondents, ten in
all. In addition, there are two letters of which the addressee is unknown,
written on 8 November 1763 (BL Add. MS 28,104, ff. 38-39) and on 20 December 1763 (BL Add. MS
32,954, f. 114). By analysing Lowth’s social network and assessing his
relationship with his addressees, it has been possible to identify the
addressee of one of these letters. So as a kind of by-product of the research
on the language of Lowth that has been carried out so far, it will be shown by
what linguistic means information about the identity of the two anonymous
correspondents was obtained.
In determining the precise nature of the relationship between two
people, Bax (2000:284-285) argues that there are various
degrees of reliability, ranging from a person’s own opinion expressed in their
private diary not intended to be read by others to the interpretation of a
scholar reporting on a third person’s opinion. So far, no diary from Lowth’s
hand has come to light, and it is uncertain if he kept one; his letters will
therefore have to do as a general source of information despite the fact that
they only come third in Bax’s range of reliability. But even in his letters he
doesn’t usually offer any information about his relationship with other people.
And if he does, his words may not be very reliable, as when he refers to “my
late excellent Friend Mr. Harris of Salisbury” (RL to the First Earl
of Liverpool, 11 December 1781; BL Add. MS. 38,217, ff. 175–176), which may
have been prompted by feelings of sentimentality rather than close friendship.
So we will have to have recourse to another method, a rather more indirect one,
that is by analysing his epistolary formulas, especially the opening and
closing formulas.
Baker (1980:48),
in his edition of the correspondence of
John Wesley (1703–1791), has
detected what he calls “a hierarchy of terms” in the opening formulas adopted
by Wesley. Baker arranged the terms according to degree of formality as
follows:
Sir/Madam
Dear
Sir/Dear Madam
My dear
Mr. X/Mrs. X/Miss X
My dear
brother/sister
Dear James/Jane, etc.
Dear
Jemmy/Jenny, etc.
Lowth’s letters show
a similar hierarchy of terms. The three anonymous letters by Lowth all read
“Dear Sr.”, so they do not come into the category of his most formal
ones. These read “My Lord”, as when he is addressing William Warburton, Bishop
of Gloucester (e.g. Bodleian Library MS Eng. Lett. C 572, f. 155r).
Nor do they belong to his most informal letters, such as the ones addressed to
his wife Mary Jackson, which usually read “My Dear Molly”. Lowth was evidently
more extreme in his opening formulas than Wesley. As far as the closing
formulas are concerned, the first of the anonymous letters contains the formula
“Your most Obedient/ humble Servt.”, while the second contains the
word affectionate, reading “You most Obliged & most Affectionate R.
Lowth”. And this is an important clue, because the only people he ever
addressed like that are his wife, Robert Dodsley, Thomas Chapman (1717-1760) and Bishop Percy (1729-1811), but not James Dodsley. And that
provides us with the identity of the first letter: the contents suggest that it
was either of the Dodsleys, as is confirmed by the phrase “With my best
Respects to Your Brother” in the conclusion. Lowth was never as close with
James as he was with Robert, with whom he developed such a close relationship
that from September 1757 he passes on his wife’s greetings to him (something
which he only does to Chapman besides). To James he even wrote notes in the
third person (in his own hand), such as “The Bp. of Oxford presents his
Compliments to Mr Dodsley. He sent him some time ago his Corrections to the
Choice of Hercules, which he hopes came in time …” (5 August 1774; BL Add. MSS
35,339, f. 41). The letter therefore must have been addressed to James Dodsley.
As for the second letter: the contents suggest neither of the Dodsleys, and
Chapman is ruled out as well because he had died in 1760. With Percy, Lowth was
at this stage not yet on such friendly terms as to conclude with the word affectionate
in the formula, which he first does in a letter from 1777 (BL Add. MS. 32,329,
f. 91). So the addressee must have been someone else, another close friend of
Lowth’s.
Apart from the word affectionate, Lowth uses another word which
apparently reflects a certain amount of intimacy with the addressee, i.e. esteem.
We find it for example in a letter to a man called John Rotherham, which
otherwise ends with “Your most Obedient/ humble Servt./ R. London”
(Pitts Theology Library, Coll. Lowth MSS 105). But the intimacy expressed by
this word cannot have been as close as in the case of his use of the word affectionate,
for in the Oxford English Dictionary the phrase “Esteem is the
commencement of affection” occurs (s.v. esteem, Thomas Cogan, A
Philosophical Treatise on the Passions, 1800). This suggests that Lowth
employed a system of expressing relative closeness to his correspondents which
ranged from “his faithful humble service”, through “esteem” and “affection” to
“affection” combined with greetings from his wife, a formula which is only
found in the letters to his closest friends. Rotherham, in other words, appears
to have been a friend of Lowth’s, but not a very intimate one, and this may be
reflected in the language of their letters.
What is of interest about the approach
suggested here for analysing a person’s social network is that it provides
detailed information about someone’s social relationships. Often this kind of
information is not available through conventional sources, such as biographies
or literary analyses. In the case of Lowth and Dodsley, for example, neither
biography of these men, Hepworth’s (1978) of Lowth and Solomon’s (1996) of
Dodsley, report on the existence of a close relationship between them, while a
close analysis of the language of their correspondence shows otherwise.
4. Conclusion
What does all this
mean in terms of language change and maintenance, issues in the study of which
social network analysis can play an important role (see Milroy & Milroy
1985)? Johnson as an early adopter set a norm to those around him: Mrs. Thrale
and Fanny Burney were only some of his followers. As for -ic/-ick,
it has been argued that the norm set by Johnson went against current usage, and
the same was the case for other usages such as periphrastic do
(Tieken-Boon van Ostade 1987). Lowth on the other hand was a linguistic
innovator, not because of the grammar he wrote but because of the fact that the
grammar contains a norm which he appears to have adopted from those who
occupied the highest positions in society. The grammar made this norm available
to all those who wished to improve themselves through their language. In this,
Lowth functioned as a bridge.
And what about Dodsley? As a former footman who became “the most
important bookseller of his age” (Solomon 1996:5), he was socially mobile, too,
so he would qualify as a potential innovator. And an innovator he was, for the
ideas for a dictionary and a grammar of the English language had been his to
begin with. But as in the case of most innovators, the credit for what became
the most important linguistic publications in the eighteenth century passed him
by and went to the people he helped to set up as their authors, and who
consequently got sole recognition for their achievements.
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