England in the Eighteen-Eighties: Toward a Social Basis for Freedom. By Helen Merrell Lynd (review) (review)

REVIEWS 101 Bailey's second triumph, the Dictionarium ·Britannicum of 1730, is "the second milestone on the road that leads to Johnson and on to scholarly modern lexicography." The latter is said to have used an interleaved copy of Bailey's dictionary as a repository for his several articles. If the reader is tempted to regret that the same thorough analysis of Johnson's contribution has not been made, he must respect the authors' explanation that to have done so would have extended the study twofold. The book closes with a summary of the achievements of lexicographers up to 1755. By this time definitions were regarded as of prime importance, and etymology was taken seriously. Lexicography was no longer considered to be the interest of dilettantes but the work of scholars. The public valued good dictionaries, and a· "super-rac·e of critics" had sprung up. There were also deficiencies, notably in "synonymy and the phonetic treatment of pronunciation," in the inadequate and sometimes incorrect etymologies, and in the lack of grammatical annotations. Space does not permit more than a mention of the authors' sense of humour, evident in their choice of illustrations, and of their reserve fund of knowledge, revealed particularly in the excellent notes. Students of words will find this book stimulating and satisfying; librarians and students of lexicography will find it indispensable. SHORTER NOTICES England in the Eighteen-Eighties: Toward a Social Basis for Freedom. By HELEN MERRELL LYNJ:?. New Y01·k [Toronto]: Oxford University Press. 1945. Pp. ix, 508. ($5.50) THIS learned and admirably organized study will be of great utility to all who are interested in England in the second half of the nineteenth century, her social and political history, her thought and letters, or (in other words) in the more immediate origins of contemporary Britain. For Mrs. Lynd does not confine herself to the decade of the 'eighties but uses it as the central and focal point in an _investigation that looks before and after. The virtues of the book are those which one would expect from the joint author of Middletown, and its limitations (for it has some limitations) are not surprising. Its theme is the breakdown of the old liberalism as a working or workable creed, with its insistence on individual self-reliance and its sacrosanct principle of laissez-faire, the slow movement towards a more adequate conception of social democracy as the result of the political democracy established in 1867 and extended in 1884, the emergence of organized labour as a force in industry and in politics, arid the transformation not merely of attitudes but of the state itself; for the state which individualism had 102 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY W€J.tched with a jealous eye was still in effect aristocratic, while the state on. which collectivism came increasing~y to depe~d was at least potentially democratic. The catalyst in the change apparent in the eighteen-eighties was the great depression. It revealed the fact that England had lost the economic advantages over all competitors which she had enjoyed ever since she . initiated th,e Industrial Revolution and which had been tacitly assumed in all her social and political thought and action. "Because favoring factors · had so long obscured the discrepancy between social fact and social theory, the recognition of this discrepancy ... came relatively swiftly a·nd abruptly. Between the late 'seventies and the end of the 'eighties the gradual whittling away of economic individualism that had been going on in practice was suddenly recognized in theory, as was also the patent fact that this gradual adaptation was not enough. England in the eighteen-eighties found articulate expression for new norms, new crit~ria of social values, new conceptions of freedom.', Mrs. Lynd is perhaps too keenly conscious of the analogy of America in the nineteen-thirties. Her ·point of view as an historian is materialist and determinist, but so as still to leave a large field for inductive study. "Since economic liberalism was an ultimately untenable design for industrial society, one can say that ... this study is concerned simply with the inevitable adaptation of social mores to the demands of an increasingly complex society. But recognizing...