Nineteenth-Century English. By Richard W. Bailey. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996. Pp. 372 + viii. $49.50 (hb); $19.95 (pb).

In the guise of a study of nineteenth-century English, Richard W. Bailey has written an engrossing cultural history of Victorian England and America. Concentrating on a limited set of linguistic issues—the book's six chapters deal with writing, sounds, words, slang, grammar, and voices—Bailey manages to shed genuinely new light upon a mass of nineteenth-century historical and literary materials that one might otherwise have thought the past fifty years of scholarship, criticism, and theory had long since made utterly familiar.

Consider, for instance, the well-known London street cries recorded by Henry Mayhew in London Labour and the London Poor (1851). As Bailey retells the story, we are permitted to see that, as print and mass literacy came increasingly to dominate ordinary experience, the shift from the half-spoken, half-sung calls of "Spar-row gra-ass," for instance, to printed advertising placards bearing the word Asparagus marked a momentous cultural transformation. In the same way, he gives a vivid picture of printed language as it invaded London on new terms during the nineteenth century—advertising signs trundled in carts through the streets by day, hoardings freshly plastered with bills by night, and, spreading everywhere, what Bailey portrays as the regime of silence and social separation enforced by reading.

Or consider that there is no literary controversy more familiar to students of nineteenth-century England than the attack on Keats and the "Cockney School of Poetry" by Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine. Yet in Bailey's retelling, even this well-known episode emerges in a striking new light. When Keats enraged the Blackwood's critics by rhyming "thorns" with "fawns," the hapless poet was in fact, as Bailey shows, reproducing a change in pronunciation (the loss of consonantal r after vowels and before consonants) which had already emerged to dominance in southern England, and especially in London, by the end of the eighteenth century. Because the intellectual classes in lowland Scotland, however, were consciously resisting London's cultural hegemony, they also resisted the shift from consonantal to vocalic r.

These Scots did so, moreover, with a tremendous cultural assertiveness. For, having compensated for their loss of sovereignty in the 1707 Union by that intellectual renaissance which transformed Edinburgh into "the Athens of the North," Scots thinkers and writers effectively completed their cultural revenge by making Edinburgh the capital of English rhetorical theory. When Scots reviewers like J. G. Lockhart and John Wilson damned Keats and Leigh Hunt, then, they did so on the authority not only of their own ear for pronunciation but of such classic Scottish Enlightenment works as Lord Kames's Elements of Criticism and Hugh Blair's Lectures on Rhetoric. Thus beneath all the insults and unfairness of the "Cockney school" episode, Bailey's account makes clear, there ran deep currents of regional resentment, and ultimately of questions about cultural leadership in an increasingly diverse Anglophone world.

Besides the purely intellectual pleasures it offers, Nineteenth-Century English is simply fun to read. Other scholars, writing about Victorian phrenology or fashion or politics, are condemned to a certain amount of routine exposition. But Bailey, to the unfailing entertainment of an intelligent reader, is always able to quote his examples, making them vivid on the page. Nineteenth-Century English is filled with the unremembered voices of Victorian philologists, grammarians, and pedants of all persuasions as well as with an abundance of unheard-of words—wowser (Australian slang for "excessively puritanical person"), hootchino (Canadian slang for "home-brewed whiskey"), Buckinger's boot (complicated but hilarious British slang for female genitalia; see p.179). The effect of this exhilarating cascade of racy and authentic Victorian language is to fully immerse readers—(I phrase it so to signalize Bailey's amusing account of the ferocious Victorian controversy over the split infinitive)—into the vanished lifeworld of Victorians as it was lived in two hemispheres from London to Los Angeles to Lahore.

Beyond this, Bailey's book bears in an interesting way upon the contemporary debate about "proper" language. One of the more significant recent developments in sociolinguistics has been the tendency to at last begin to take seriously the normative element in language—the entire complex set of procedures and attitudes through which members of a linguistic community "locate" each other in terms of usage or registers of pronunciation. This development has emerged against the background of nearly a hundred and fifty years of linguistic positivism—the grand attempt, which began with Victorian "scientific" philologists and culminated in the taxonomic grammar of Leonard Bloomfield, to pretend that language was just another natural object in a world of natural objects, the study of language a pursuit not essentially different from the study of plants or asteroids or geological strata. The attempt to be "scientific" or "descriptive" in the Bloomfieldian sense would always oppose itself, in turn, to the bogey of "prescriptivism": a supposed conspiracy among language pundits and schoolmarms to tell speakers of "substandard" or "irregular" dialects how they should speak. Perhaps the greatest virtue of Nineteenth-Century English is thus that it permits a modern reader to see in very clear terms where the battle against the bogey of prescriptivism came from—why it seemed so urgently necessary for so comparatively long a time to try to imagine that language was just another natural phenomenon among the rocks and stars and trees of the physical universe.

The growing stress on the prescriptive dimension of language among the Victorians, Bailey is able to show, arose from the expansion and deepening of literacy, thanks to the spread of "recreational literacy" in the 1840s and 1850s, and from the enormous success of English as a world language, thanks to British and American military and commercial penetration of the non-Anglophone world. The spread of this political and geographical hegemony imparted in turn a heightened resonance and gravity to the felt importance of a "standard" English during the period of colonial expansion. As the tolerance for linguistic deviation dwindled, however, deviant speakers and writers came to be viewed as "low" persons or linguistic pariahs. Even the respected Victorian descriptive phonetician Alexander Ellis, who thought the crushing social penalties imposed upon linguistic divergence from the London prestige dialect to be absurd and wholly unreasonable, felt compelled to agree that by 1869 it was "social suicide" for anyone to pronounce heart as eart.

Bailey's own sympathies, it must be said, are on the side of the older descriptive philology whose history he is writing. Though today William Safire's chatty suggestions for grammatical improvement pale beside the stern rebukes administered in works like Thomas Preston's Victorian Dictionary of Daily Blunders, Bailey tends to see the old bogey of prescriptivism even in Safire's amateurish linguistic divagations. "If there is one heritage of the nineteenth-century language that survives most vigorously," he laments, "it is the institutionalization of hierarchy among linguistic variants." And in Bailey's defense it should be said that in his view the modern legacy of nineteenth-century prescriptivism is serious business, having in our own time encouraged such pernicious developments as the demand for literacy tests in voting, the habit of hurtfully lampooning the "linguistically different" and more recently, regulation of university and professional admissions "by measurements designed to exclude people whose English was not regarded as worthy."

Nonetheless, some contemporary linguists have been disposed to take the normative element in language seriously, not least because the idea of using language in "right" and "wrong" ways is taken with such extreme seriousness within linguistic communities. We have long since come to understand, after all, that a great deal is to be gained by seeing cultures as symbolic systems in which apparently trivial details—a tattoo, a tweed jacket, a Hermès handbag—may carry an immense weight of social significance. To fail to see that the same logic is at work in speech or language is arguably to miss a great deal of what is there. Still, anti-prescriptivism is scarcely dead yet, which is why one may glimpse the attitudes of Bloomfieldian positivism in a work as otherwise thoroughly up-to-date as Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct (1995). This positivism, even as it gives way to a more complex view of how language actually operates in human communities, will retain its interest as an episode in the history of modern linguistics. No better account of that episode could be imagined than Richard Bailey's Nineteenth-Century English.