The Stories of English, page 56
I could name some gentlemen of Ireland to whom a slight proportion of the accent and recitative of that country is an advantage. The same observation will apply to the gentlemen of Scotland. I do not mean that we should speak as broad as a certain prosperous member of Parliament from that country [the Lord Advocate, Mr Dundas]; though it has been well observed that it has been of no small use to him, as it rouses the attention of the House by its uncommonness, and is equal to tropes and figures in a good English speaker. I would give as an instance of what I mean to recommend to my countrymen, the pronunciation of the late Sir Gilbert Elliot; and may I presume to add that of the present Earl of Marchmont, who told me, with great good humour, that the master of a shop in London, where he was not known, said to him, ‘I suppose, sir, you are an American!’ ‘Why so, sir?’ said his lordship. ‘Because, sir,’ replied the shopkeeper, ‘you speak neither English nor Scotch, but something different from both, which I conclude is the language of America.’
BOSWELL: It may be of use, sir, to have a Dictionary to ascertain pronunciation.
JOHNSON: Why, sir, my Dictionary shows you the accent of words, if you can but remember them.
BOSWELL: But, sir, we want marks to ascertain the pronunciation of the vowels. Sheridan, I believe, has finished such a work.
JOHNSON: Why, sir, consider how much easier it is to learn a language by the ear than by any marks. Sheridan’s Dictionary may do very well, but you cannot always carry it about with you; and when you want the word, you have not the Dictionary. It is like a man who has a sword that will not draw. It is an admirable sword, to be sure; but while your enemy is cutting your throat, you are unable to use it.
Besides, sir, what entitles Sheridan to fix the pronunciation of English? He has, in the first place, the disadvantage of being an Irishman; and if he says he will fix it after the example of the best company, why, they differ among themselves. I remember an instance: when I published the plan for my Dictionary, Lord Chesterfield told me that the word great should be pronounced so as to rhyme with state; and Sir William Yonge sent me word that it should be pronounced so as to rhyme with seat, and that none but an Irishman would pronounce it grait. Now here were two men of the highest rank, the one the best speaker in the House of Lords, the other the best speaker in the House of Commons, differing entirely.
Elocution was the watchword. The ‘Old Sheridan’ referred to by Boswell was Thomas Sheridan (1719–88), the father of the playwright, who was famous for his countrywide lectures on elocution, speaking to packed halls. John Watkins, the editor of Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s memoirs, reflects on the ‘incredible’ success of his courses – ‘upwards of sixteen hundred subscribers, at a guinea each, besides occasional visitors’,10 in addition to hardback copies selling at half-a-guinea a time (A Course of Lectures on Elocution, 1763). Translated into modern values, that is equivalent to a course fee per person of about £75. One of Sheridan’s courses must have brought him in (in today’s money) well over £150,000. Elocution was big business, and people were prepared to pay for it: it would have cost an up-and-coming clerk a quarter of his weekly salary to attend one of Sheridan’s courses. The book sold well in the United States, too, where anxiety over correct speech was just as marked.
Sheridan went on to compile a General Dictionary of the English Language (1780), which, with its systematic respelling of words, was a great influence on John Walker, who in due course would hugely exceed him in influence – just as, in the same decade, Murray would exceed Lowth in the field of grammar. Walker eventually earned his own sobriquet – ‘Elocution Walker’, following a tradition begun by Johnson, who by the 1760s had already acquired the nickname ‘Dictionary Johnson’.11 The book which earned Walker this accolade had been planned as early as 1774, when he published an idea for an English pronouncing dictionary, with the aim of doing for pronunciation what Johnson had done for vocabulary and Lowth for grammar. It finally appeared, in 1791, under the title:
A Critical Pronouncing Dictionary and Expositor of the English Language: to which are prefixed, Principles of English Pronunciation: Rules to be Observed by the Natives of Scotland, Ireland, and London, for Avoiding their Respective Peculiarities; and Directions to Foreigners for Acquiring a Knowledge of the Use of this Dictionary. The Whole Interspersed with Observations Etymological, Critical, and Grammatical.
‘Walker’ became a household word, both in Britain and the USA, where in the mid nineteenth century it influenced another bestselling textbook, by Lyman Cobb. Dickens, never one to miss a fashionable trick, picks it up. In Chapter 14 of Dombey and Son, Miss Blimber begins her ‘analysis of the character of P. Dombey’.
‘If my recollection serves me,’ said Miss Blimber breaking off, ‘the word analysis as opposed to synthesis, is thus defined by Walker. “The resolution of an object, whether of the senses or of the intellect, into its first elements.”’
Miss Blimber, we have earlier learned (Chapter 11), was ‘dry and sandy with working in the graves of deceased languages. None of your living languages for Miss Blimber. They must be dead – stone dead – and then Miss Blimber dug them up like a Ghoul.’ Another Dickensian dig at the prescriptive tradition, perhaps.
Dombey appeared in 1848. Walker would have been delighted to know his book had lasted so long, as he had been somewhat taken aback by the unexpected success of the early editions. He complains in the Advertisement to the fourth edition how the rapid sale of the third had made him take up his pen again ‘at a time of life, and in a state of health, little compatible with the drudgery and attention necessary for the execution of it’. Dictionary-writing as harmful drudgery, indeed. But he did it, and the book would see over a hundred subsequent editions, and do for pronunciation what Murray and Johnson had done for grammar and the lexicon: provide a polite public, hungry for prescriptions to guarantee the social safety of all aspects of their language, with a recognized authority.
Walker’s prescriptive temperament plainly reflects the mindset which we have seen to be a defining feature of the eighteenth century (p. 374). In the final analysis, his belief can be characterized quite simply: he did not believe in the relevance or desirability of linguistic change and variation. He cites two objections to attempting to write a pronouncing dictionary: pronunciation changes too rapidly for a dictionary to remain relevant for long, and there is too much variation among speakers to enable entries to remain under control. Both he dismisses. To the first point he answers:
the fluctuation of our Language, with respect to its pronunciation, seems to have been greatly exaggerated
he lists a few exceptions, such as the way people now pronounce the word merchant differently, but then adds:
the pronunciation of the Language is probably in the same state in which it was a century ago; and had the same attention been then paid to it as now, it is not likely that even that change would have happened.
This is the ‘fixing’ motif again (p. 381): a pronouncing dictionary would have stopped change in its tracks. And he displays the same attitude in relation to the second point. The availability of a controlling influence would also have reduced the amount of synchronic variation:
The same may be observed of those words which are differently pronounced by different speakers: if the analogies of the Language had been better understood, it is scarcely conceivable that so many words in polite usage would have a diversity of pronunciation, which is at once so ridiculous and so embarrassing.
Ridiculous and embarrassing. The words might have been Johnson’s or Boswell’s (p. 404). And Sheridan took the same line, in A Dissertation on the Causes of Difficulties, Which Occur, in Learning the English Tongue:
The consequence of teaching children by one method, and one uniform system of rules, would be an uniformity of pronunciation in all so instructed. Thus might the rising generation, born and bred in different Countries and Counties, no longer have a variety of dialects, but as subjects of one King, have one common tongue.12
Anything further away from the mindset of the present book, which gives admiring recognition to the centrality of language variation and change in human affairs, can hardly be imagined.
All prescriptivists have to highlight a model to act as an authority, and Walker is in no doubt where that model lies for pronunciation. It is the same as the one intimated by George Puttenham and others 200 years before: London. He says in his various Prefaces:
Accent and Quantity, the great efficients of pronunciation, are seldom mistaken by people of education in the Capital.
and he introduces an important word into the discussion:
though the pronunciation of London is certainly erroneous in many words, yet, upon being compared with that of any other place, it is undoubtedly the best; that is, not only the best by courtesy, and because it happens to be the pronunciation of the capital, but the best by a better title – that of being more generally received.
‘Received’ – an early use of a term which would become a dominant feature of later pronunciation studies (p. 468). He means ‘received among the learnèd and polite’ – the cultured society which made up the universities, the court, and their associated social structure.
Then we encounter the other side of the coin. What about everyone else? Walker sees them as inhabiting a phonological wilderness.
the great bulk of the nation, and those who form the most important part in it, are without these advantages, and therefore want such a guide to direct them as is here offered.
The further away they live, the worse their situation:
harsh as the sentence may seem, those at a considerable distance from the capital, do not only mispronounce many words taken separately, but they scarcely pronounce, with purity, a single word, syllable, or letter.
And that means the Scots and the Irish are in the worst danger of all, which is why they receive special mention in the subtitle to his book. He relies on Dublin-born Sheridan for his section on the quality of Irish pronunciation – something which, by all accounts (p. 405), would not have received the approval of Dr Johnson.
When Walker gets down to phonetic detail, his approach is unequivocally patronizing and stigmatizing. He begins his section on Ireland in an uncompromising tone:
The chief mistakes made by the Irish in pronouncing English, lie … for the most part in the sounds of the two first vowels, a and e …
and he works his way through a long list of faults. He then deals with Scotland in the same way. After noting that the Scots lengthen their accented vowels, he gives advice on ‘the best way … to correct this’, and then illustrates a series of ‘errors’ in vowel quality. With both the Scots and the Irish, he notices a distinct tone of voice:
an asperity in the Irish dialect, and a drawl in the Scotch, independent of the slides or inflections [intonation patterns] they make use of.
The Irish accent ‘abounds’ with a falling inflection, he says, and the Scottish accent with a rising. So how should a teacher ‘remedy the imperfection’? By getting people to practise talking using a tone which is the complete opposite of their natural manner of speech:
I would advise a native of Ireland, who has much of the accent, to pronounce almost all his words, and end all his sentences with the rising slide; and a Scotchman, in the same manner, to use the falling inflection: this will, in some measure, counteract the natural propensity, and bids fairer for bringing the pupil to that nearly equal mixture of both slides which distinguishes the English speaker, than endeavouring at first to catch the agreeable variety.
Although any of the regional dialects might be discussed in the same way, in the final part of his Preface Walker focuses on Cockney speakers in London. He gives a particular reason for this: Cockney is in an especially bad position, as it is so close to the court and the City. Because ‘people of education in London are generally free from the vices of the vulgar’, they notice Cockney more. It may have fewer faults than are found in provincial dialects, he says, but it is always to be heard, thrusting itself harshly into the ears of the polite. As a consequence:
the vulgar pronunciation of London, though not half so erroneous as that of Scotland, Ireland, or any of the provinces, is, to a person of correct taste, a thousand times more offensive and disgusting
In fact he identifies only four ‘faults’:
• pronouncing s indistinctly after st (as in posts)
• pronouncing w for v and vice versa (as in winegar, a feature of Dickens’ Sam Weller some years later)13
• not sounding h after w, so that the distinction between while and wile is lost
• not sounding h where it ought to be and vice versa
Looking back at this list from the standpoint of modern Received Pronunciation (p. 468), it is a curious mixture. The omission of a t in the consonant sequence sts is common in educated colloquial speech now, in such words as cyclists. And the loss of the wh vs w distinction eventually became part of the standard accent; RP speakers do not distinguish between Wales and whales. The v/w substitutions were already on their way out, in Walker’s time; by Dickens, they were no more than a literary stereotype; and they are no longer a Cockney feature.14 The only long-standing feature of London speech is the issue of h, so it is not surprising to see this cited as a special ‘vice’ (see panel 16.4). Curiously, no mention at all is made of the glottal stop (see further, Interlude 16).
It is all a matter of mindset once again. Walker is well aware of the variable nature of language: ‘a degree of versatility seems involved in the very nature of language’, he says, and he knows there is such a thing as ‘vernacular instinct’. He has a good ear, as shown by his detailed illustration of the way vowel quality changes between stressed and unstressed syllables – ‘the o in obedience shortened and obscured, as if written uh-be-di-ence’. Yet the climate of the age will not let him accept the normality, let alone the value, of variation. A few years earlier, Johnson had been much more tolerant. He was a Staffordshire man, with a recognizable accent: ‘Johnson himself never got entirely free of those provincial accents,’ says Boswell of Johnson in his sixties.15 As someone who believed that the inhabitants of his birthplace Lichfield ‘spoke the purest English’, we might expect Johnson to show some signs of accent appreciation – notwithstanding his castigation of Sheridan and others – and so he does (p.405). But there is no hint of this in Walker.
16.4 h-sinking and -sounding
John Walker, after identifying three ‘bad habits’ of London speech, leaves the worst fault till last:
A still worse habit than the last prevails, chiefly among the people of London, that of sinking the h at the beginning of words where it ought to be sounded, and of sounding it, either where it is not seen, or where it ought to be sunk.
This ‘vice’, he adds, is commonly heard among children, who pronounce heart as art and arm as harm. It is a feature which, along with the use of the glottal stop, continues to identify Cockney speech today.
Although h variation starts getting a bad press in London in the eighteenth century, there is evidence that it is a much older and more widespread process. The anonymous writer of an early fifteenth-century concordance (p. 227) happens to mention one of his problems in passing: Sum man writep sum word wip an h, which saame word anopir man writip wipouten an h.
A certain man writes a certain word with an h, which same word another man writes without an h. [and he continues] Thus it is with the English word which the Latin word heres signifies: some write that word with h thus, here, and some thus, eir, without h.
And throughout the Middle English period, from the early thirteenth century, we find texts from various parts of the country showing variation in the presence or absence of an initial h. Examples of an omitted h are aue ‘have’, ate ‘hate’, elles ‘hell’, and ail ‘hail’. Examples of an inserted h are hic ‘I’, ham ‘am’, herde ‘earth’, and hunkinde ‘unkind’.16 There are many more.
The conclusion is plain: h- variation is not specifically a London feature. Most people in England and Wales drop their h’s some of the time (p. 353) – an observation which supports the notion that the process has been around a long time. It did not start in the eighteenth century. It simply became noticed then, and labelled a vulgarism. It was Cockney’s bad luck to be in the firing line, when the polite revolution came.
But once a pronunciation feature is chosen as a class marker, its history becomes irrelevant. Within a few decades of Walker’s judgement, societies were being formed for the protection of the letter H, and people were paying their sixpences in droves to learn from such booklets as Poor Letter H, Its Use and Abuse. Addressed to its little vowels a, e, y, o, u, and the millions who use them. Poor Letter H appeared in 1854, and had sold 30,000 by the following year. Evidently, to drop an h was now a social disaster.
Punch writers and cartoonists had a field-day. Virtually all the jokes at the expense of ’Arry and ’is friends in the turn-of-the-century collection, Mr Punch’s Cockney Humour, involve the h. Says a doctor: ‘I can tell what you’re suffering from, my good fellow! You’re suffering from acne!’ ‘Ackney?’ replies the patient. ‘I only wish I’d never been near the place!’17
But even the Punch writers were aware that things weren’t so simple. At the very end of the collection we read:
COCKNEY HOBSERVATION. – Cockneys are not the only people who drop or exasperate the ‘h’s.’ It is done by common people in the provinces, and you may laugh at them for it. The deduction therefore is, that a peasant, with an ‘h’, is fair game.
