Strange Vernaculars by Sorensen Janet

Author:Sorensen, Janet
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2017-04-19T04:00:00+00:00

Provincial Language and Political Offense

Collier, however, particularly with his opening conversation between Tim Bobbin and his book, makes clear that this representation is conscious of the stakes involved in such representations. While the dialogues of A View seem to lampoon rude, provincial language and its speakers, Collier defends it from such accusations, writing, “I do not think our country exposed at all by my view of the lancashire [sic] dialect.”27 Both Brice and Collier held strong lifelong attachments to their birthplaces. Collier, brandishing his provincial status, proclaimed, “I do not like London, or any thing that is in it.”28 Brice described his deep affiliation to Exeter: “Born, brought up, and having always dwelt in this City, I have a natural inclination to love her, as my Mother.”29 His monumental Grand Gazetteer included an “extensive and lively account of Exeter” within its 1,400-plus pages.30 Far more than jokey sendups, Brice’s and Collier’s popular works are complex, self-conscious interventions into contemporary representations of provincial languages, produced, like Relph’s poem, out of the estranging and dispossessing dynamics of a modernizing Britain and contesting the instituting of a national vernacular that was a part of those dynamics.

Significantly, Brice and Collier were early figures in the provinces-based national opposition politics Kathleen Wilson has described.31 From his perch in Bristol, Brice saw himself as a defender of national liberties. He was summonsed for illegally printing proceedings of the House of Commons in his newspaper in the early eighteenth century and ran a campaign for national prison reform. His humorous Freedom, A Poem satirizes Prime Minister Robert Walpole while advocating on behalf of prisoners, whom he calls “slaves” and compares to the subjugated Israelites, a provocative move given the connections between the rhetoric of the freeborn Englishman and the vernacular that we traced in Chapter Two.32 Another long poem, The Mobiad, or the Battle of the Voice, written in 1737 but not published until 1770, depicts the rowdy hullabaloo of an election day, displaying the actions and languages of a range of “low life” provincial figures, as the poem calls them, from joiners and smiths to servants and street vendors, often in local expressions and provincial terms, sometimes with explanatory footnotes at the bottom of the page. As suggested by the title, the poem figures the mob as an aural and oral phenomenon, a raging “throat battle” as “The Babel Clamours, varying, around” (121). In presenting their tumultuous shouting on election day, the poem serves as a reminder of the literal role of provincial voices in national government. “Low life” provincials could not vote, but they could lend their shouting voices for candidates, raucously appealing to those who were entitled to a ballot:

Thus plainly, with confus’d Distinction, sound:

‘Blue!—Yellow!–Sound for HADDY!—Sound for HEATH!

‘H-a-h! Sh—sack! Sound for Yellow—Blue to Death!

‘The Church for ever!—Down with PERKIN’s Crew!

No Courtiers!–No Mock Patr’ots!—Sound for Blue!

And not a Mouth but what, expanded large,

Does thrice a Threescore Times its Load discharge (121)

With political differences reduced to party colors, fragments of slogans, and utter noise (“H-a-h!”),

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