The Bishop's Grammar: Robert Lowth and the rise of prescriptivism in English (review)

Whenever new words appear on the pages of dictionaries, the blogosphere resounds with predictions of the fall of civilization. OMG! the purists cry. Why aren't the lexicographers and grammarians manning the barricades? I confess: Split infinitives go unremarked in my classroom, and a student can ask about their assignment unchided. Yet with the academy in retreat, prescriptivism is still assumed to shape our lexicographical and educational systems, and students regretfully look back to the grammatical freedom of Shakespeare's day as to a fabulous Golden Age.

That Golden Age ended when Bishop Robert Lowth published A Short Introduction to English Grammar in 1762. As Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade recounts, "Lowth's grammar plays a pivotal role in the final stages of the [standardization] process, particularly in the change from codification to the prescription stage" (xii). Lowth decried preposition stranding and the double negative; he is also "blamed" (Tieken-Boon van Ostade's word) for inventing the rule against the split infinitive, in fact a bugbear of the 19th century. According to The Bishop's Grammar, Lowth's grammatical strictures were welcomed by an upwardly mobile middle class, readers "who, in their desire to climb the social ladder... needed guidance as to the norm of linguistic correctness—'polite' usage—that accompanied the new status they aspired to. Lowth's grammar had not originally been written for this purpose, but this was the function it came to have in the eyes of the general public" (2). It is not surprising that the Short Introduction proved a tool for self-improvement. Tieken-Boon van Ostade traces the book to Lowth's own ambitions, noting that "it was originally meant as a tool for his elder son to facilitate linguistic access to the social classes above those in which the Lowth family customarily moved..." (49).

Tieken-Boon van Ostade sees Lowth's grammar text as an unexpected response to Samuel Johnson's use of illustrative quotations in the Dictionary of the English Language. Rather than providing examples of correct grammar from the best authors, Lowth's footnotes cite "the grammatical errors of well-known writers...this feature about [sic] the grammar particularly appealed to its readers" (19). Lowth's illustrative use of negative examples, Tieken-Boon van Ostade argues, anticipates modern usage guides like Robert Burchfield's The Spoken Word, John Simon's Paradigms Lost and Lynne Truss's Eats, Shoots and Leaves.

Concentrating on the relationship between The Short Introduction and Lowth's own language use, Tieken-Boon van Ostade seeks to understand, in effect, whether Lowth practiced what he preached. To answer this question, The Bishop's Grammar traces Lowth's "social networks" through a study of his personal and professional correspondence, the presentation copies of his books, the books mentioned in his will, and editions of the grammar itself. Tieken-Boon van Ostade presents evidence that later editions of Lowth's grammar were increasingly prescriptive, and that quotations of grammatical mistakes by famous writers doubled in the second edition, perhaps in response to suggestions from readers.

The study of Lowth's letters prompts an instructive discussion of Lowth's register shifting; for instance, Lowth regularly employs the subjunctive in letters to his social superiors, while eschewing it in letters to his wife. Otherwise, however, The Bishop's Grammar is less than the sum of its parts. Despite its profusion of charts, tables and graphs, the book is repetitive and unconvincing—at best, the material should have yielded two substantial articles, not 340 pages of mostly vague speculation.

Grammatical infelicities also undermine the book's argument. It is disconcerting, when reading a book about prescriptivism in English grammar, to be unsure whether the author is deliberately committing provocative grammatical errors, or falling into mistakes common to non-native speakers. The Bishop's Grammar fails to distinguish between from among, is iconoclastic about subject-verb agreement and preposition stranding, and tolerates...