Figures of Speech: Six Histories of Language and Identity in the Age of Revolutions by Tim Cassedy (review)

In Figures of Speech, Tim Cassedy examines the political, social, and cultural significance of the view, axiomatic in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, that languages shaped the minds and characters of their speakers. It is a cultural history, informed by the history of the book and media studies, that focuses on the lives of five men and one woman who "put language at the center of their identities and lived out the possibilities of their era's linguistic ideas" in an era of political upheaval (6).

The book's first chapter focuses on Nicholas Dufief, a young aristocrat who fled revolution in France and St.-Domingue. Taking refuge in Philadelphia, he established himself as a teacher of French and writer of pedagogical texts by inventing, publicizing, and selling a mode of instruction that aimed to replicate the way children learned language. Chapter 2 contrasts the orthographic reform efforts of Noah Webster and the Scot–Caribbean Duncan Mackintosh. Where the linguistic separatist Webster urged U.S. citizens to adopt spelling reforms to make American English distinct from that of the former mother country, Mackintosh, after the British invasion of Martinique in 1794, urged Anglophones across the world to standardize English pronunciation through use of his elaborate system of diacritical marks. While both projects failed, Cassedy shows that most Americans were more sympathetic to the "linguistic unionism" that animated the latter (72). English was a "technology of imperial assimilation" (88) for British subjects, but Americans rejected linguistic distinctness "to preserve a connection to values, thoughts, and feelings that they did not want to lose" (111).

The third chapter focuses on the East India Company employee John Gilchrist. Best known as the philologist who introduced the company and other Europeans to the most widely spoken vernaculars of the sub-continent (Hindi and Urdu), he spent several decades devising a universal character that could represent sounds in all languages, casting it in type, and designing a remarkable "abecedarian clock" that would have mechanically produced each sound when its hand struck the character that Gilchrist had assigned it. Gilchrist intended his inventions to achieve political reform in Britain through the "diffusion of rational liberty, commerce, morality, and religion" (132). Chapter 4 centers on the English typecaster Edmund Fry, who produced a collection of specimens of more than two hundred modes of writing. The effort, which Cassedy estimates entailed some 10,000 hours of skilled labor in carving and casting type, illustrated the proficiency and range of Fry's typecasting business, but Fry also pitched it as a philological tool (147). In severing "the shapes and sounds of language" from meaning, Cassedy argues, Pantographia (1799) pushed its audience to affirm pre-existing opinions about peoples (151). The final chapter focuses on Mary Willcocks, an abused Englishwoman who, for a time, successfully posed as Caraboo, a kidnapped and stranded Polynesian princess, by speaking and writing an invented language that fooled Bristol officials and the local gentry. Although eventually discovered, the ruse allowed her to avoid institutionalization, gained her a patron, and provided the basis for a brief but sensational stint as a celebrity in Philadelphia and New York.

These brief descriptions do not do justice to the textured accounts of lives and linguistic projects that Cassedy provides. Figures of Speech is a wonderfully written and deeply engaging study of linguistic lives in the Revolutionary-era United States and British Empire. The book is also well structured. Examining discrete lives in separate chapters provides the reader with rich, compelling accounts of how individuals used language toward idiosyncratic ends, and Cassedy frequently pauses to draw surprising connections between his subjects or to lead the reader through points of comparison and contrast. Cassedy, and University of Iowa Press, must also be commended for taking the effort to reproduce his subjects' several orthographies. The...