That's the Ticket for Soup! Victorian Views on Vocabulary as Told in the Pages of "Punch" by David Crystal

David Crystal's That's the Ticket for Soup! chronicles the caprices of language lampooned by nineteenth-century Punch contributors, all for a nonacademic audience. After a brief introduction to the history of the London Charivari, Crystal tracks the magazine's evolving satire of linguistic invasions, including Americanisms, slang, profanity, and terms for new technologies. For each category, Crystal provides an overview of Punch's ironic critiques and lengthy excerpts from related Punch articles. Annotations and even glossaries sometimes accompany the excerpts so that the modern reader can appreciate the Victorian in-jokes and celebrity references. Crystal's curated excerpts demonstrate that Punch writers enjoyed the irony of identifying new phrases since such innovations sound incorrect until they become ubiquitous. According to Crystal, over 150,000 words entered the English language in the second half of the nineteenth century, so Punch contributors had a wealth of newfangled words and phrases to critique.

Crystal has a long and distinguished career celebrating vocabulary and explaining linguistics to a popular audience. His books include The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (1987); The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language (1995); Think on My Words (2008), an exploration of Shakespeare's vocabulary; Begat (2010), on the linguistic impact of the King James Bible; and dozens of other volumes on various nuances of language. He has written about his own life in linguistics in his unceremonious memoir, Just a Phrase I'm Going Through: My Life in Language (2009). The volume under review here is the companion to Crystal's earlier book, We Are Not Amused: Victorian Views on Pronunciation as Told in the Pages of "Punch" (2018), also published by the Bodleian Library.

The volume's title is explained in a section on slang. The pop phrase "that's the ticket for soup" originated from the habit of handing out soup kitchen tickets to beggars, and it meant "You've got what you came for, so now be off with you" (1). It eventually came to mean something closer to what it signifies to the modern ear, a form of "that's the ticket" (1).

Rather than track individual writers' voices, Crystal retains the "fiction" of a "composite" Mr. Punch throughout his monograph (viii). Readers will become reacquainted with the cantankerous, privileged voice of Mr. Punch as this disapproving persona repeatedly bemoans the downfall of the English language. Indeed, some of the nineteenth-century language harangues covered in this volume sound stuffy. The words or meanings that elicited the writer's sarcastic ire, like "Whatshisname," "reliable," and "to claim," have since been embraced by modern English speakers. Other faddish phrases that garnered attention have entirely disappeared from the English language. Punch articles mocking those terms now read like "The Jabberwocky."

Crystal's prose reveals his sprightly enthusiasm for language. He joyfully relates the exact meanings of archaic Victorian expressions. This voice contrasts sharply with the curmudgeonly notions of Mr. Punch expressed in the excerpts. Crystal brings a career's worth of linguistic savvy and an easy familiarity with the workings of the Oxford English Dictionary to bear on the Victorian references. Crystal proves again that he is a language adept, as able to track an obscure reference to Edmund Spencer as he is to concisely explain slang references to Victorian men's apparel. He notes that Google has made tracking the longevity of Victorian colloquialisms significantly easier.

Many Victorian Periodicals Review readers have spent days in a library, poring over the crumbling pages of Punch, or have learned from Richard Altick's distinguished book Punch: The Lively Youth of a British Institution, 1841–1851 (1997). In comparison to those experiences, this monograph is a coffee-table book, a niche item that fits well in a museum bookshop. The book is more exhibition than argument. The potential readership is limited to that audience already interested in Punch or Victorian linguistics, a readership invested in an intellectual exploration of the comic magazine but not seeking a scholarly treatise. In the United States, few readers outside of academia have any familiarity with Punch's legacy. In the UK, the volume has the benefit of nostalgia. After all, the periodical shut its doors for the final time in 2002 after subscriptions dwindled.

Critics searching for scholarship on the periodical darling of Victorian popular culture studies will prefer a more carefully footnoted study. The book's refusal to recognize the individual voices present in Punch, from the editors to the contributors, makes it less useful to Victorian scholars. Without acknowledging who contributed each excerpt, the arguments of Crystal's sections remain entertaining, but they do not offer data at the granular level. Moreover, while Crystal usually includes volume information for the excerpts, the reproductions of engravings rarely include their original volume or date.

Crystal limits his research to articles published between Punch's inception in 1841 and 1903. He gives no reason for this later bookended date. At times the book's structure also feels erratic. For example, after excerpting a diatribe about French words like "menu" and "filet," Crystal places an excerpt about the Lowther Arcade, only to follow it up with another piece lambasting the French influence on British dining vocabulary.

As Crystal observes in his memoir, broaching the topic of language has wide appeal since most people love to share their pet peeves about how language has changed (Just a Phrase [Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2018], 10). I tested this out by asking a classroom of English and journalism majors their opinions of the Oxford comma: the opinions flowed. Modern readers will sense similarities between our linguistic climate and the changing jargon of technology and speaking habits experienced by the Victorians. This volume amplifies the self-righteous, bourgeois Mr. Punch persona, one claiming to be an arbiter of language, as it appears within the pages of an always tongue-in-cheek periodical. The effect is instructive. Upon reflection, the modern reader may want to be more flexible about outgoing language rules. Who aspires to channel Mr. Punch's stuffy voice in debates about "impact" as a verb or other contemporary language disputes?