The King College Of London
Two new books from Ashgate explore the language politics of the 1790s from different perspectives
. While the title of Jane Hodson's explicitly links Language and Revolution, in this perceptive intellectual history Susan Manly links the Edgeworths' Practical Education with Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads by grounding both of these 'revolutionary' projects in the late seventeenth century, in the theories of language and society of the philosopher John Locke. Locke was a more obvious inspiration for John Home Tooke, their near-contemporary and the cornerstone of Manly's monograph. Successively imprisoned for his support of the American and French Revolutions and acquitted in 1794 of Lee Jeans high treason, this political radical was also the author of an expensive work of speculative philology, Epea Pteroenta, or, The Diversions of Purley.Constructing semantic histories for abstract terms like law and rights, Tooke linked verbal and political representation by drawing on Locke. Attesting to Tooke's topicality, some of his contemporaries deconstructed such terms as king and majesty to demonstrate that the current government did not represent the entire nation. Coleridge, in an Address to the People, against Ministerial Treason (1795), situated the true authority of majesty in 'the will of the majority'; in the same year the political reformer and lecturer John Thelwall found merely the concept of 'cunning' underlying the awful word king.
Because of associations between abstraction and reason, radical attacks on abstraction had social implications. The more conservative grammarian James Harris used Locke's genealogy of words as grounded in sensory impressions to associate only the higher orders with abstraction and the rationality that qualified them to participate in politics. Tooke undermined the importance of conventional abstractions by paying particular attention to the metaphorical complexity of little words like prepositions and conjunctions. By also asserting the obscurity of key abstract words, Tboke and others undermined the political legitimacy of their users as well as revealing that language was an instrument as well as a reflection of oppression.
Reflecting connections between linguistic education and British society, some of Manly's sources criticise seminal textbooks of grammar as well as political discourses. As represented by Edgeworth, a young Irish speaker directed to Harris's and Robert Lowth's grammatical rules for mil and shall find them both confusing and illogical. Indeed, grammars were valued primarily for their religious and moral content by the radicals' influential and conservative contemporary Sarah Trimmer. While the Edgeworths attacked the incomprehensibility of the traditional methods of grammar teaching, Manly keeps in the foreground more positive projects. Wordsworth and Edgeworth championed the eloquence of the people the rural poor and the Irish. The Edgeworths encouraged creative and rational conversation in children. Moreover, vividly contextualised in the politicised issue of agricultural 'improvement', as teachers Thelwall and the Edgeworths remind us that a reformed education system can transform society by cultivating the reason and eloquence common to all Britons. Manly emphasises the importance of education by Diesel Jeans linking and dignifying Thelwall's eventual career as an elocution teacher with his earlier radical activitism.
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