Language and Class in Victorian England by K. C. Phillipps (review)

110Rocky Mountain Review because they overlook the transaction between texts and readers. Bellow comes across as the representative humanist working in the realist tradition, still serving up plots and characters. Barthelme is the chief ironist. Newman's general yet incisive commentaries are flanked by the claims for "moral fiction" (Gardner), remarks on the alienation and reintegration of the artist in public life, the effect of television on reading, and disturbances of the "legacy of interiority" which kept fiction from being integrated into a general cultural economy. ("Intellectuals have never bothered to understand markets" [158].) The Post-ModemAura concludes by offering "Lit Laws" on the "commercial life of a novel" (152), describing literature as "a handmade art in a massproduction economy" (153), and suggesting alternative approaches to the economics of the publishing industry. This essay forges paths which more scholarly criticism — when it does not opt for the semiotic and deconstructionist turns — may do well to explore, at least so long as criticism accommodates the signifiers literary, art, and culture. STEVEN JEFFREY JONES Cleveland State University K. C. PHILLIPPS. Language and Class in Victorian England. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984. 190 p. In the introduction the author quotes George Eliot (Middlemarch, Chapter 23) speaking of certain old families who were "conscious of an inherent social superiority which was defined with great nicety in practice, though hardly expressible theoretically." The author then adds, "What was true of Middlemarch was true of Victorian society generally, and language was a principal, precise, pragmatic, and subtle way of defining one's position, or of having it defined by others. It is the aim of this book to illustrate these distinctions and definitions" (3). K.C. Phillipps' book attempts to do for Victorian English what A.S.C. Ross did for modern English in describing U (upper class) and non-U (lower class) speech. ("Linguistic Class-indicators in Present-day English," Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 55 [1954]: 20-56). Thus Phillipps' book is primarily a compendium of terms, phrases, and pronunciations that characterized U and non-U language in the Victorian period. Phillipps' task, however, is immeasurably more difficult — Ross could rely on his own sense of contemporary usage whereas PhilUpps must reconstruct past usages from Victorian documents which were rarely directly concerned with linguistic matters. The primary sources that Phillipps employs are (in order of importance) novels, autobiographies (and other personal reminiscences), etiquette books, contemporary social commentaries, and letters. Occasionally Phillipps draws on secondary sources such as the OED and the works of other scholars, but the main burden is carried by extensive reading in the period. Indeed, the success of this book is largely due to the copious quotation of period material which Phillipps uses to establish Victorian usage in a convincing and often witty manner. The first section, "The Upper Classes," is largely concerned with the codewords that distinguished U speakers from the rising tide of middle class non-U speakers. One identifying feature of the non-U speaker was over-refinement. For example, Lady Grove in her book The Social Fetich (1907) characterizes Book Reviews111 people of "middle-classdom" as being people who will "substitute the French chemise for the homely English sh ift, call that portion of the outer garment that covers the body a bodice, talk about a dress when they mean gown and being gowned when they mean dressed, and at meals make use of an unnecessary serviette, instead of an honest napkin" (57). The ability to use upper class slang effortlessly and appropriately was one of the hallmarks of those to the manor born. Woe betide the Victorian parvenu who inappropriately initiated these signals of intimacy. For example, Phillipps quotes an 1843 letter from Elizabeth Barrett describing a gathering at which a young man bandied about the overly familiar term fellow with his social betters . As a result, ' 'the good company, being far too good in an aristocratic sense, to be addressed as 'good fellows' showed their sense of insult by rising from the table in a body and walking out of the room!" (47). However fastidious Victorian U speakers were in their social relationships, they were not a prissy lot when it came to grammatical conventions. Fans of Dorothy L...