Toward a Reassessment of Edward Eggleston's Literary Dialects

TOWARD A REASSESSMENT OF EDWARD EGGLESTON'S LITERARY DIALECTS Gary N. Underwood In the history of American language and literature Edward Eggleston has a secure reputation both as an important regional novelist of the nineteenth century and as a remarkably enlightened amateur linguist. Although none of Eggleston's novels have ever been widely acclaimed by elitist literary critics, his first novel, The Hoosier School-Master, was an instant popular success when it was first serialized in Hearth and Home magazine in 1871, it has had continuous popularity now for over a century,1 and it is regularly on the required reading lists of college courses devoted to the American novel.2 The popularity of the book stems in part from its regional realism, but without question the most important aspect of The Hoosier SchoolMaster is Eggleston's use of dialect. Writing in the preface to the 1892 library edition of die book, Eggleston correctly observed diat The Hoosier SchoolMaster was "the file-leader of die procession of American dialect novels" in the 1870's and 80's.3 Eggleston's chief critic and biographer, William Randel, also stressed the importance of the use of dialect in The Hoosier SchoolMaster : . . . the dialect is the one element of the book's early popularity that has survived all changes in literary standards and all critical deprecation.4 In addition to stressing that Eggleston's use of literary dialects is the primary reason for the continuous popularity of The Hoosier School-Master, Randel repeatedly asserts that besides dieir interest as literature, Eggleston's novels are valuable for their importance to students of linguistic history.5 Eggleston was more than a novelist who happened incidentally to represent dialect in his work, for he became a serious student of language history and variation. In addition to the dialect portrayed in the speech of characters 1 William Randel notes that the book "has almost never been out of print"; see William Randel, Edward Eggleston, Twayne's United States Authors Series, No. 45 (New York: Twayne, 1963), p. 97. 'My own introduction to Eggleston's work was through Professor Bernard Bowren's perennially-popular American novel course at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. 'The Hoosier School-Master, library edition (New York: Orange Judd, 1892), preface. * Edward Eggleston, p. 96. ' See, for example, Edward Eggleston, pp. 94 and 97. 109 UORMMLA BulletinDecember 1974 in his fiction, throughout his novels Eggleston scatters miscellaneous observations on language, many being put in the speech of his characters." Somewhat surprisingly, for someone so absorbed with language study, Eggleston published relatively little on the subject. In the 1892 edition of The Hoosier School-Master he appended 23 linguistic footnotes. His only other published works on language are two articles, "Wild Flowers of English Speech in America,"7 and "Folk Speech in America,"K and a chapter titled "Mother English, Folk-Lore, and Literature" in The Transit of Civilization from England to America in the Seventeenth Century!' Unpublished fragments also survive from a lecture he delivered a number of times entitled "The Hoosiers and the Hoosier Language.'"" While the slim list may not seem very impressive, John Haller, who first studied Eggleston's writings on language carefully, correctly concludes that their author held "advanced linguistic views in a day when to hold such views was a rarity and a distinction ."" In fact, Eggleston held views on dialectology so advanced that in 1945 even Haller was unaware of their significance. For example, in "Folk Speech in America" (1894) he wrote about the speech of the "middle belt" which separated Southern speech from the dialect of New England and western areas settled by New Englanders.'" This observation preceded by two years George Hempl's pioneering article "Grease and Greasy," in which Hempl suggested the first academic challenge to the popular notion of a linguistic Mason-Dixon line.13 Furthermore, in The Transit of Civilization Eggleston attributed this "middle belt" to the historical influence in Pennsylvania , the Ohio Valley, the Appalachian Mountains, and the up-country of Virginia and the Carolinas of the Scotch-Irish settlement history.11 In effect, Eggleston was proposing nothing less than the famous "Midland dialect hypothesis," which was first suggested in academic...