Oxford History of English by Mugglestone Lynda;

Author:Mugglestone, Lynda;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, UK
Published: 2006-07-27T16:00:00+00:00

SPOKEN ENGLISH

First-hand evidence of the way people spoke is very hard to come by. Sometimes, occasional spellings in diaries and journals indicate colloquial pronunciations, such as when Betsy Sheridan cursed her sister-in-law’s father Thomas Linley with the words ‘od rot un’ (‘may God rot him’), for not allowing her the use of the family’s theatre box, or Fanny Burney’s mocking of Richard Sheridan’s Irish accent in a letter to her sister dated 11 January 1779: ‘I assure you I took it quite koind in him [Sheridan] to give me this advice’. On the whole, however, there is no indication in the spelling of the letters and diaries of the more educated writers to show how their words were pronounced. The letters of the uneducated members of the Clift family are a different matter. When, on 3 December 1795, Elizabeth, William’s eldest sister, reported to him on their brother Robert’s recovery from a recent illness, she wrote: ‘whin I Left him he was abel Seet up an he Promisd me to writ to you the next day’, and ‘they ware All very well’. Her spelling of whin (‘when’), seet (‘sit’), writ (‘write’), and ware (‘were’) suggests a different pronunciation of the vowels in question. Generally, however, her letters show a skill in spelling that did not go much beyond high-frequency words of more than one syllable (and sometimes, as the examples above indicate, not even that). But the skills she did possess were exceptional for a woman of her background, and more than enough to keep the family together by corresponding with them.

There is more evidence of the use of spoken grammar and vocabulary, and not just in the letters of the barely literate. But in looking for such evidence, not all sources can be considered equally trustworthy; the language of drama, for instance, can be a dangerous source to use. Gay’s Beggar’s Opera (1728), which features thieves and other lower-class characters, does not contain a single instance of multiple negation. This is odd, because by this time this feature was already being avoided by more highly placed people (see further p. 262). Given the stratified nature of variation within English usage, we might therefore realistically have expected some occurrences of double negation in the play. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, in her play Simplicity (c 1734), puts the following words into the mouth of the servant girl Lucy in Act 1: ‘Says my Master, says he, ‘Lucy, your mistress loves you . . .’ ‘Yes, Sir,’ says I. What could a body say else?’ This sounds like the authentic speech of the lower orders, but it is the only time it occurs in the play. Lucy’s words function merely as an indication of her social class at the outset; the rest was presumably left to the theatrical skills of the actress in question. Better sources are the novels by writers like Tobias Smollett and Fanny Burney. In Evelina (1778), for instance, Fanny Burney renders the language of speech by using short

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