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

Tim Cassedy’s Figures of Speech is one among a growing number of interesting titles offered in the University of Iowa Press series called Impressions: Studies in the Art, Culture, and Future of Books. Like other titles in this series, Cassedy’s book focuses on matters of alphabets and images, typeface, font, and printed script. Unlike other volumes in the series, however, Cassedy’s is a recovery project that emphasizes its own noncanonical efforts. Cassedy seeks to elucidate “a lost disciplinary moment when language served as a framework for understanding selves and a tool for re-fashioning selves” (5). Cassedy’s goal is to introduce readers to “forgotten individuals” who “put language at the center of their identities and lived out the possibilities of their era’s linguistic ideas” (17–18). Cassedy is exploring a time—prior to the great philological work of the Germans in the mid-nineteenth century—when it was conceived that “[a] people’s language . . . seemed ‘indexed’ to the contents of their minds, the way race was indexed to their bodies and nationality was indexed to their political circumstances” (18). The book offers six case studies meant to “illustrate how linguistic identity categories were useful to those dispossessed of other identity categories by empire, revolution, and globalization” (19).

Cassedy suggests that by looking at texts that have been ignored, we can engage “the possibility of new knowledge, different perspectives, unheard voices and ideas—especially when there is evidence that they seemed legible and meaningful to someone in the past” (19). Cassedy argues that during the era under analysis, people sought to have “a technology for stabilizing and unifying the English language across vast geographical and social distances” (22–23). The work is undergirded by study of the history of ideas about language and about print materiality. Cassedy acknowledges the importance of the Scottish Enlightenment to the standardization and rationalization of language use, but he also—rightly—attends to John Locke’s philosophy of language acquisition. Cassedy calls the work a cultural history, but it seems to fall more into line with what many of us associate with the histories of print technology and social and material texts. While Cassedy mentions some theorists in his work (for example, Walter Ong, Pierre Bourdieu, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and others), his method and ideas are grounded in a comprehensible, palpably jargon-free study of print and textual and personal performance.

In the context of eighteenth-century alphabet practitioners, Cassedy might have included a much richer discussion of Benjamin Franklin’s phonetic alphabet introduced to friends in London in 1768, when Franklin developed a novel approach to phonetics and exchanged letters using this alphabet with Polly Stevenson and, later, others. Franklin was fascinated with language and the ways in which typeface could be employed to convey meaning. And as a leader from the colonies, Franklin was acutely aware of how his not employing the dialectal sounds of London English worked against him in his role as negotiator for the colonies. Indeed, Franklin’s nemesis in the cockpit, Alexander Wedderburn, a Scot, took intensive elocution lessons when he first arrived in London so as to nearly completely eradicate Scottish speech patterns and pronunciation. Cassedy does mention Franklin’s phonetic efforts. But by not developing an analysis that places Franklin’s significant personal investment in a phonetic system in the deep context of his political efforts and the large amount of political writing he did for the London press, Cassedy misses an opportunity to show how his political life required of most Americans not trained in England a phonetic self-fashioning that embraced English pronunciation and rhetorical style. Franklin wanted to refine and share with others coming to London for the purposes of business or pleasure a means by which they could communicate more effectively with those who conceived colonial Britons to be, as Franklin framed it in one of his newspaper essays, subjects of...