"Hester Lynch Piozzi's British Synonymy in Imperial France"

The first original synonymy of the English language is Hester Lynch Piozzi's British Synonymy, or An attempt at regulating the choice of words in familiar conversation (1794). Throughout her life, Piozzi had been interested in grammar, lexicography and semantics; as a young woman she studied the works of philologer James Harris, and during her marriage to Henry Thrale she was hostess, muse, amanuensis, and intimate friend of the lexicographer Samuel Johnson. After her marriage to Gabriel Piozzi, she was inspired to compile a synonymy when she found herself correcting her Italian husband's diction and witnessing the errors into which the complexity of English idiom betrayed him and their Italian friends.

Initially popular, widely reviewed, and published in a second edition in Dublin, British Synonymy ultimately proved less successful than Piozzi's previous works, including the Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson and her travel book Observations and Reflections. By the end of the century it had been forgotten. In 1804, however, the book reappeared in a heavily revised, unauthorized third edition, published by the Paris-based firm of Parsons and Galignani. The year marking the coronation of Napoleon and the resumption of hostilities between England and France might seem an odd moment for the resuscitation, in France, of a work associated with British nationalism. In this essay I will describe the circumstances surrounding the publication of this unexpected third edition and characterize the significant revisions made by the publisher. Most dramatically, I will argue, Parsons and Galignani transformed Piozzi's British Synonymy from a partisan defence of English as the discourse of a free people resisting imperialist tyranny into a sentimentalized celebration of the language of Shakespeare.

Although Piozzi had an excellent Latin education, was fluent in Italian and French, and spent her last decade teaching herself Hebrew, she disclaimed any qualification for her post as linguistic arbiter beyond that conveyed by presiding over the drawing room, and disavowed any end more ambitious than the regulation of "familiar talk," the province of any thoughtful society hostess. She writes in her Preface to British Synonymy:

If then to the selection of words in conversation and elegant colloquial language a book may give assistance, the Author, with that deference she so justly owes a generous public, modestly offers her's [sic]; persuaded that, while men teach to write with propriety, a woman may at worst be qualified — through long practice — to direct the choice of phrases in familiar talk.

(Piozzi 1794, 1:ii)

Piozzi's deferential amateurism repeats a conventional female apology for intruding on male lexicographical prerogative. Indeed, the Monthly Review, in a generally favorable assessment of her work, laments that a woman should have been first to publish an English synonymy:

We were glad to see that so useful and desirable a work was undertaken in our own country by a lady of a classical education, who has spent the chief part of her life in the study of literature and in conversations with the learned: but we could not help being a little envious and ashamed that the honour of this enterprise should have been usurped in England by a female, as that of translating Homer and Terence was in France by Mad. Dacier...

(MR 1794, 242)

Despite the Monthly Review's courtly complaints of female usurpation, and her own formulaic denials, however, Piozzi's domestic qualifications for the post of synonymist amount to more than conventional apologia. British Synonymy participates in a contemporary movement away from formal language study as a requirement for linguistic authority. As Murray Cohen notes in his book Sensible Words, by the later eighteenth century the linguist had become a cultural arbiter, and "this new role for the practical English linguist means that certain aspects of his preparation, once regarded as necessary, are no longer required, at least in principle." Cohen continues, "If the linguist is chiefly a compiler of contemporary (and approved) customs, then knowledge of other languages, even classical learning, is unimportant." (Cohen 1977, 96-97) Latin and Greek were (somewhat) devalued — in the passage quoted above, for example, the Monthly Review...