The Grammar of Empire in Eighteenth-Century British Writing (review)

Janet Sorensen considers the relationship between language and national identity in eighteenth-century Scotland by examining a wide range of materials dealing with the establishment of English, including glossaries and dictionaries, rhetoric manuals, and fiction. Her goal is to identify the schizophrenic vision of language established by the internal colonialism of the eighteenth century, which she sees as manifest in a tension between mutually informative views of imperial English and national culture. Scottish nationalists in particular saw imperial English as a way of linking local languages to an idealized common past, but S argues that no easy dichotomy is possible between an authentic native Scots/Scots Gaelic and an inauthentic ‘foreign’ English.

After a solid introductory chapter setting out her goals, S begins in Ch. 1, ‘Scripting identity?’, by examining the work of Alexander MacDonald, the Scot who compiled the first Gaelic/English glossary in 1741 and later published Gaelic poems fostering national identity. MacDonald’s work on literacy instruction, under the auspices of the Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge, sought to establish some political stability but also situated Gaelic as a devalued language in relation to English. The result set the stage for the revaluation of Gaelic in MacDonald’s later incendiary poetry and for the development of a Gaelic standard. Ch. 2, ‘A grammarian’s regard to the genius of our tongue’, discusses Samuel Johnson’s 1755 Dictionary of the English language as an exemplar of imperial grammar—part of the project of converting the British themselves to a standardized version of English. S sees the dictionary project as one of recasting class and gender differences as differences of culture, ethnicity, and region, that is, as particular rather than national.

Ch. 3, ‘Women, Celts, and hollow voices’, turns to literature, focusing on Tobias Smollett’s portrayal of linguistic identity in his 1772 novel The expedition of Humphrey Clinker. Smollett portrayed linguistic difference as involving class and gender rather than geography, which allowed him to maintain an association with a broader national British identity while simultaneously establishing himself as a Scottish voice. Ch. 4, ‘The figure of the nation’, examines the notion of polite language in Adam Smith’s and Hugh Blair’s lectures on rhetoric and letters. Like Johnson and Irish elocutionist Thomas Sheridan, Smith and Blair believed that there was once an ideal English spoken by ordinary folks which had been corrupted but which could be recaptured by efforts like those of the Select Society for promoting the Reading and Speaking of the English Language in Scotland. Ch. 5, ‘A translator without originals’, discusses William Shaw’s Scots Gaelic grammar (1778) and dictionary (1780), which reflected an emerging British Celtomania ‘marked by the eager reception of publications praising the ancientness and subliminality of the Highlands’ (173). The book concludes with an epilogue, entitled ‘Jane Austen’s language and the strangeness at home in the center’, which compares the pride in Englishness of Austen with the tentativeness of Scottish writers, noting that both show a bifurcation between private language and public standards. Pages 224–318 make up the book’s notes, references, and index.

Written with current postcolonial critical perspectives in mind, The grammar of empire is nonetheless clearly written, with a reasonable balance of history and theory. The attention to detail will make this a good supplementary text for advanced seminars in the history of English and language attitudes.