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General Outline of the English Language Condition in the 18th century. It is now normal to divide the time since the end of the Middle English period into the Early Modern English period (1500–1700) and the Late Modern English period (1700–1900). The latter period starts with the Augustan Age – called after the reign Augustus (63 BC – AD 14), a period of peace and imperial grandeur – which begins after the Restoration period (1660–1690) and ends in the middle of the 18th century. Dates which can be mentioned for the end of the Augustan Age are the death of the poets Alexander Pope (1688–1744) and Jonathan Swift (1670–1745). The latter was particularly concerned with ‘ascertaining’ and ‘fixing’ the English language to prevent it from future change (a futile undertaking in the view of linguists).

Among other important authors of the Augustan Age are Joseph Addison (1672–1719), Richard Steele (1672–1729). The influential periodicals The Tatler (1709–1711) and The Spectator (1711–1712), which did much to establish the style of English in this period, are associated with these authors.

The uncertainties of the 16th and 17th centuries about the suitability of English as a language of science and learning led to quite massive borrowing from classical languages. It also engendered a frame of mind where people thought English was deficient and this in its turn gave rise to many musings in print about just what constitutes correct English. With this one has the birth of the prescriptive tradition which has lasted to this very day. Much of this was well-meaning: scholars of the time misunderstood the nature of language variation and sought to bring order into what they saw as chaos. Frequently this merged with the view that regional varieties of English were deserving of disdain, a view found with many eminent writers such as Jonathan Swift who was quite conservative in his opinions. The difficulty which present-day linguists see in the prescriptive recommendations of such authors is that they are entirely arbitrary.

The eighteenth century is also a period when grammars of English were written – by men and women. This tradition of grammar writing goes back at least to the 17th century in England. The playwright Ben Jonson was the author of a grammar and John Wallis published an influential Grammatica linguae Anglicanae in 1653. This led to a series of works offering guidelines for what was then deemed correct English. The eighteenth century saw more grammars in this vein such as Joseph Priestley’s The rudiments of English grammar (1761). Bishop Robert Lowth (1710–1787) who published his Short introduction to English grammar in 1762. This work was influential

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in school education and enjoyed several editions and reprints. It is held responsible for a series of do’s and don’ts in English such as using whom as the direct object form of who or not ending a sentence with a preposition as in The woman he shared a room with. Lowth also formulated a rule for future tense shall and will in English which has been reiterated since but which does not hold for many speakers (the reduced form ’ll [l] is normal and the full form will [wɪl] is used for emphasis while shall is often neglected). Other influential authors of grammars are Lindley Murray (1745–1826) who produced an English grammar in 1794 and William Cobbett whose English grammar appeared in 1829.

Prescriptive authors are responsible for perennial issues in English prescriptive grammar. Apart from the disapproval of prepositional-final sentences mentioned above one has the prohibition on the split infinitive, as in to angrily reply to a question. The list with time grew longer and longer and today includes many elements which stem from current changes in English, for instance the indecisiveness about the preposition with the adjective different (from, as or to depending on speaker) and the condemnation of less for fewer with plural nouns as in prescribed He has fewer books than she rather than He has less books than she. Another evergreen is the demand for I as first person pronoun. English usage today is that I only occurs in immediately pre-verbal position; in all other instances me occurs: I came but It’s me, Who’s there? Me. Prescriptivists often insist that

I be used on such occasions and even ask for it in phrases like between you and me, i.e. between you and I where it never occurred anyway as here the pronoun is in an oblique case whose form was never I.

One set of writers who most definitely were prescriptive in their condemnation of what they saw as ‘incorrect’ usage in their day are those who wrote pronouncing dictionaries and rhetorical grammars. Foremost among these are the Irishman Thomas Sheridan and the Londoner John Walker. The pronouncing dictionary of the latter was immensely popular and went through more than 100 editions, remaining in print until 1904.

Eighteenth-century prescriptive writers were self-appointed guardians and defenders of what they regarded as good style. They established a tradition which was to have considerable influence in English society and was continued by such authors as Henry Watson Fowler (1858–1933) who saw it as their task to combat the signs of decay and decline in the English language.

Apart from prescriptive grammar, another occupation of eighteenthcentury and later authors was criticising regional speakers of English for

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their incorrect pronunciation. Elocution, the art of successful public speaking, was regarded as a desirable accomplishment and demanded a standard prounciation of English, even though it was not always certain what this consisted of. Both John Walker and Thomas Sheridan (mentioned above) published work with the title Rhetorical Grammar of the English Language and both had an appendix in which they voiced their criticism of vernacular London, Dublin, Welsh or Scottish English, for example.

The legacy of Sheridan and Walker. Did the strictures of Walker or Sheridan influence the later pronunciation of non-local British English? The answer to this question must be ‘no’. In some cases Walker, as opposed to Sheridan, favoured a form which was later to become default in English, e.g. merchant for marchant. But this did not happen because of Walker’s opinion on the matter. In many respects, Walker was swimming against the tide of language change. His insistence on maintaining regular patterns of pronunciation across the language (his ‘analogy’) and, above all, his view that the spoken word should be close to the written word, meant that he favoured archaic pronunciations. His view that syllablefinal /r/ should be pronounced was already conservative in his day. In many of his statements he does, however, accept change although he might not have agreed with it.

The legacy of both Sheridan and Walker should be seen in more general terms. Even if their individual recommendations were not accepted by standard speakers of British English, both were responsible for furthering general notions of prescriptivism. And certainly both contributed in no small way to the perennial concern with pronunciation which characterises British society to this day.

Changes in Grammar. The nominal area. The demise in English morphology which one observes in the history of the language should not be interpreted as an abandonment of grammatical distinctions. Quite the opposite is the case. The introduction of northern, originally Scandinavian forms they, their, them (to replace OE hi, hir, hem) and the development and acceptance of she (from OE hēo) as a distinct form from he documents the maximisation of distinctions, although many redundant inflections, such as verbal suffixes, were dropped. In this connection one should mention the rise of its as the possessive form of it in the early 17th century. Previously the form was his but this was homophonous with the form for the third person singular masculine so the change was semantically motivated.

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There is just a two-way system in Modern English, but formerly a three-way system with a term for distant reference, yon(der) – of uncertain etymology – existed and is still found, in Scottish English for instance.

In modern English there is an exclusive use of which and who, whereby the latter refers to inanimate things and the latter to animate beings. Up to early modern English, however which could be used for persons as well and dialectally this is still found in English today: The nurse which gave him the injection. Similarly that is generally employed with defining relative clauses today as in The car that was stolen turned up again. However, earlier that was common in non-defining relative clauses as well, e.g. The girl that

(who) having failed her exam left college for good.

English, like German, frequently used an oblique case form of the personal pronoun with reflexive verbs; the ending -self was found only in cases of emphasis. But later the emphatic element became obligatory in all reflexive uses, so that a sentence like I washed me quickly came to be expressed as

I washed myself quickly.

A characteristic of Modern English is that it does not require a relative pronoun when the reference is an object in the main clause, e.g. This is the man she saw yesterday. Now in early modern English it was common for this to apply in cases with a subject as main clause referent and this is still typical of popular London English (Cockney): This is the man – went to town yesterday. It may well have been that the latter type was tabooed because it was present in popular London and not because of perceptual strategies; there is no greater difficulties in processing the second rather than the first of the following sentences.

The woman – he knows has come. The woman – lives here has come.

In present-day English the only auxiliary is have. But formerly English had be in this function with verbs expressing motion or change of state, much as does German to this day, e.g. He is come for He has come; She is turned back for She has turned back.

Semantically the subjunctive is used to refer to a situation which is uncertain, unreal or conjectural. From the early modern period onwards there was no inflection for the subjunctive so that it is recognisable by a simple verb form without -s (in the third person singular). The verb be has a special form were which is still used in if-clauses in modern English: If it were necessary we would go.

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One of the major changes of the later 16th and the 17th centuries concerns the disappearance of unstressed do with full verbs in declarative sentences of the type I do like poetry (non-emphatic). This use has been retained for negative, interrogative and emphatic sentences but otherwise it has been lost. There are many views about the mechanics of the change. In general there is agreement that the unstressed do was afunctional and dropped out because of its superfluousness. It was retained longest in the west and south-west of England as is evidenced by writers like Shakespeare. In many forms of English, particularly overseas, the unstressed do was refunctionalised, usually to express habitual aspect. In varieties as diverse as Irish English and Black English sentences like I do be working all the night have an habitual connotation.

The use of two negators was common to heighten the negation. However with prescriptive notions in the 17th and 18th centuries this came to be frowned upon. The application of an inappropriate form of logic allowed only one negator because two were regarded as neutralising the negation, i.e. they represented a positive statement (He doesn’t know nobody = He knows somebody). The same type of reasoning was used in German and led to the proscription of double negation here as well. However, many dialectal forms of English allow two or more negators, all of which serve to strengthen the negation, as in He don’t take no money from nobody.

Throughout the entire early modern period up to the present-day the use of both the perfect tense (with have as auxiliary) and the progressive with the suffix -ing in the present became increasingly more common. For instance the simple past could be used with questions where nowadays only the perfect is permissible, e.g. Told you him the story? for Have you told him the story?

The perfect in declarative sentences gained more and more what is termed ‘relevance’ to the present, i.e. it signals an action or state which began in the past and either still continues or is still relevant to the present. I have been to Hamburg (recently) but I was in China (years ago as a child).

The progressive is used to express a continuing action. This essential durative character has meant that it is not used with verbs which express a state, hence *I am knowing is ungrammatical.

One of the consequences of the demise of inflections in English is that the system of verb prefixes also declined. There are only a handful left today, such as for- in forget, forbear; with- in withstand, withdraw; be- in beget. But in the course of the early modern period, English developed a system

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whereby semantic distinctions and extensions are expressed by the use of particles after the verb, often more than one. There may even be verbs which take more than one particle in such cases. These verbs are termed collectively multi-word verbs (rather than the less satisfactory term ‘phrasal verbs’).

put s.o. up	‘to offer accomodation’
put up with	‘to tolerate’
put off	‘to postpone’
put s.o. off	‘to dissuade’
put over	‘to convey’
put on	‘to pretend’
put down	‘to kill an animal’
put through	‘to connect’
put out	‘to inconvenience’
put in	‘to apply for’

This is in keeping with the typological profile of English which functionalised prepositions to indicate sentence relationships: to up the prices; to down a few beers.

This is a process whereby a verb is derived from a noun, the reverse of the normal situation in English. The reason is nearly always because the noun appeared first in the language, usually through borrowing.

Verb	Source noun
to opt	option
to edit	editor
to enthuse	enthusiasm
to peddle	peddlar

Spoken English has always shown contracted forms of auxiliary verbs with particles indicating negation or with pronouns found in verb phrases. In the Old English period these forms were written in the standard koiné, e.g. nis ‘not is’ nolde ‘not wanted’.

In Modern English there is a precarious balance between contracted and full forms which is maintained by the force of the standard, particularly in the orthography. Hence one has forms like won’t, can’t, don’t but also the full forms will not, can not, do not, used above all in writing. Indeed in colloquial registers there can be even greater reduction as with I dunno [dʌnou] for ‘I do not know’. The restraining influence of the standard has meant, however, that such forms have not ousted the longer forms in the orthography.

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Summary. The next wave of innovation in English came with the Renaissance. The revival of classical scholarship brought many classical Latin and Greek words into the Language. These borrowings were deliberate and many bemoaned the adoption of these inkhorn terms, but many survive to this day. Shakespeare’s character Holofernes in Loves Labor Lost is a satire of an overenthusiastic schoolmaster who is too fond of Latinisms.

Many students having difficulty understanding Shakespeare would be surprised to learn that he wrote in modern English. But, as can be seen in the earlier example of the Lord’s Prayer, Elizabethan English has much more in common with our language today than it does with the language of Chaucer. Many familiar words and phrases were coined or first recorded by Shakespeare, some 2,000 words and countless catch-phrases are his. Newcomers to Shakespeare are often shocked at the number of cliches contained in his plays, until they realize that he coined them and they became cliches afterwards. One fell swoop, vanish into thin air, and flesh and blood are all Shakespeare’s. Words he bequeathed to the language include critical, leapfrog, majestic, dwindle, and pedant.

Two other major factors influenced the language and served to separate Middle and Modern English. The first was the Great Vowel Shift. This was a change in pronunciation that began around 1400. While modern English speakers can read Chaucer with some difficulty, Chaucer’s pronunciation would have been completely unintelligible to the modern ear. Shakespeare, on the other hand, would be accented, but understandable. Long vowel sounds began to be made higher in the mouth and the letter e at the end of words became silent. Chaucer’s Lyf (pronounced /leef/) became the modern word life. In Middle English name was pronounced /nam-a/, five was pronounced /feef/, and down was pronounced /doon/. In linguistic terms, the shift was rather sudden, the major changes occurring within a century. The shift is still not over, however, vowel sounds are still shortening, although the change has become considerably more gradual.

The last major factor in the development of Modern English was the advent of the printing press. William Caxton brought the printing press to England in 1476. Books became cheaper and as a result, literacy became more common. Publishing for the masses became a profitable enterprise, and works in English, as opposed to Latin, became more common. Finally, the printing press brought standardization to English. The dialect of London, where most publishing houses were located, became the standard.

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Spelling and grammar became fixed, and the first English dictionary was published in 1604.

§ 14. Literature in the 18th century.

John Dryden died in the year 1700. Samuel Johnson died in 1784. The date of Johnson’s first notable publication was 1738, a few years before the death of two of the most prominent literary figures of the previous period, Pope and Swift, the survivors of a literary circle which had once included Addison. Johnson’s own circle after 1761 included Burke and Goldsmith, and touched Sheridan. This list of names suggests the characteristics of the whole period; in the whole number there is only one, Edmund Burke, who was not essentially a man of his century – whose work was not an expression of its conventions. As concerns literary form, these were the men who themselves set the conventions which lesser men followed; but the literary form was itself the finished expression of the moral and intellectual spirit of the age. Within a few years of Johnson’s death an entirely new spirit had manifested itself, and the canons which had guided or had been laid down by the writers of the eighteenth century were entirely discarded.

The eighteenth century, however, if it was not a great age of poetry, was great in prose, and in other realms of prose than that of theatrical comedy. At its outset the short essay was almost perfected by Steele and Addison in the pages of the Toiler and the Spectator. Pamphleteering was elevated into a fine art by Defoe and Swift. Defoe, in a series of works unmatched in their realism from the Journal of the Plague to Robinson Crusoe, created the English Novel; and Swift made the travels of Gulliver to Lilliput and Brobdingnag almost as convincing as the adventures of Crusoe himself. Addison’s creation of Sir Roger de Coverley reveals an aspect of English life which shows that the general materialism was still far from being universal, and gives the first promise of the English novel of character.

About the time when Johnson was first shouldering his way into the London world of letters, the novel of sentimental respectability was given its vogue by Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, which helped at least to inspire Henry Fielding to the production of Joseph Andrews as a sort of antidote to Richardson’s mawkishness. Richardson wrote for ladies, Fielding did not. Richardson was a moralist and a sentimentalist, Fielding was neither. But it was Fielding who, like Defoe, held the mirror up to nature and painted life as he saw it in the middle of the eighteenth century, with the robust and

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virile humour and fidelity which made Scott and Thackeray regard him as the father of the novel.

Of the same school, though with an exaggerated coarseness, was Tobias Smollett; with these two names is associated that of Lawrence Sterne, whose exquisite humour was counterbalanced by a sort of refined indecency much more corrupting than the audacity of Fielding or the grossness of Smollett; and Goldsmith gave Sir Roger de Coverley a companion in the “Man in Black” of the Citizen of the World, and produced an exquisite novel of real life which was neither mawkish nor coarse in the Vicar of Wakefield.

Before 1760 Ireland and Scotland had taken their share in the production of English literature. Swift and Steele were both born in Dublin. Smollett was a Scot, and so were such minor lights as James Thomson, the authof of The Seasons, and John Home, whose tragedy of Douglas was received with enthusiastic if evanescent applause. Hardly recognised as yet, but destined to be far more influential, was the work of the Scotsman David Hume, whose importance in the history of moral and metaphysical speculation can hardly be over-estimated, while his History of England, though in many respects untrustworthy, gives him a place in the front rank of English historians. In the realm of philosophy Hume, himself an audacious and original thinker, was almost equalled in originality and importance by his predecessor, George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne.

Augustan literature (1700–1750). During the 18th century literature reflected the worldview of the Age of Reason: a rational and scientific approach to religious, social, political, and economic issues that promoted a secular view of the world and a general sense of progress and perfectibility. The philosophers of that time sought to discover and to act upon universally valid principles governing humanity, nature, and society. They variously attacked spiritual and scientific authority, dogmatism, intolerance, censorship, and economic and social restraints. They considered the state the proper and rational instrument of progress.

The term Augustan literature derives from authors of the 1720s and 1730s themselves, who responded to a term that George I of England preferred for himself. While George I meant the title to reflect his might, they instead saw in it a reflection of Ancient Rome’s transition from rough and ready literature to highly political and highly polished literature. The literature of the period is overtly political and thoroughly aware of critical dictates for literature.

It was during this time that poet James Thomson (1700–1748) produced his melancholy The Seasons and Edward Young (1681–1765) wrote

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his poem Night Thoughts. But the most outstanding poet of the age is Alexander Pope (1688–1744).

Alexander Pope. In the Spring of 1688, Alexander Pope was born an only child to Alexander and Edith Pope. The elder Pope, a linen-draper and recent convert to Catholicism, soon moved his family from London to Binfield, Berkshire in the face of repressive, anti-Catholic legislation from Parliament. Described by his biographer, John Spence, as “a child of a particularly sweet temper,” and with a voice so melodious as to be nicknamed the “Little Nightingale,” the child Pope bears little resemblance to the irascible and outspoken moralist of the later poems. Barred from attending public school or university because of his religion, Pope was largely self-educated. He taught himself French, Italian, Latin, and Greek, and read widely, discovering Homer at the age of six.

At twelve, Pope composed his earliest extant work, Ode to Solitude; the same year saw the onset of the debilitating bone deformity that would plague Pope until the end of his life. Originally attributed to the severity of his studies, the illness is now commonly accepted as Pott’s disease, a form of tuberculosis affecting the spine that stunted his growth – Pope’s height never exceeded four and a half feet – and rendered him hunchbacked, asthmatic, frail, and prone to violent headaches. His physical appearance would make him an easy target for his many literary enemies in later years, who would refer to the poet as a “hump-backed toad.”

Pope’s Pastorals, which he claimed to have written at sixteen, were published in Jacob Tonson’s Poetical Miscellanies of 1710 and brought him swift recognition. Essay on Criticism, published anonymously the year after, established the heroic couplet as Pope’s principal measure and attracted the attention of Jonathan Swift and John Gay, who would become Pope’s lifelong friends and collaborators. Together they formed the Scriblerus Club, a congregation of writers endeavoring to satirize ignorance and poor taste through the invented figure of Martinus Scriblerus, who would serve as a precursor to the dunces in Pope’s late masterpiece, the Dunciad.

1712 saw the first appearance of the The Rape of the Lock, Pope’s bestknown work and the one that secured his fame. Its mundane subject – the true account of a squabble between two prominent Catholic families over the theft of a lock of hair – is transformed by Pope into a mock-heroic send-up of classical epic poetry.

Turning from satire to scholarship, Pope in 1713 began work on his sixvolume translation of Homer’s Iliad. He arranged for the work to be available

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