Blog post written by Anita Auer (28 September 2020)
The history of the English language is based on whatever documents researchers have had access to, be it manuscripts or printed texts. The production of written documents is inextricably linked to a certain level of literacy, i.e. one needed to be trained in writing. As access to education in England was a social prerogative until 1870, which is when elementary compulsory schooling (1st Education Act) was introduced, before that landmark date, many members of the lower layers of society did not receive training in writing. For this reason, the written documents available to historical linguists for the Late Modern English period (1700-1900) were necessarily produced by the upper layers of society. One could then argue that the history of the English language primarily describes the language of the educated and often privileged members of society. It needs to be pointed out that it was also the language of the latter strata of society that was codified in grammar books, spellers and dictionaries, which came to be known as ‘Standard English’, i.e. the written norms that are still being taught in schools today.
But what did the language of the unprivileged members of society look like in the Late Modern English period, and how does their written language use compare to the codified form of English? After all, the basic education of the labouring poor before 1870 was not categorical and varied greatly, i.e. they may have learned how to draw graphs and write words and simple sentences in Sunday schools, dame schools and workhouses, or they taught themselves at home. In order to shed light in the question raised above, we need to look for text types that capture the voices of the labouring poor. An obvious place to start looking are (social) novels like North and South (1854) by Elizabeth Gaskell or Nicholas Nickleby (1838 to 1839) by Charles Dickens, which include dialogues by different members of society. Apart from novels, court depositions, i.e. oral testimonies that are recorded by a scribe, similarly reflect the language of people from different social strata. While novels and depositions are very insightful concerning the matter, the written language is not produced by the labouring poor themselves, but created or mediated by a better educated person and it therefore reflects the latter person’s perception of the language of the labouring poor instead of actual language usage. To our knowledge, autograph documents by the labouring poor can only be found in the form of letters and diaries which are very difficult to unearth. Having said that, pauper petitions written under the Old Poor Law during the period c. 1795-1834, which allowed paupers to apply for out-relief, can be found in record offices all over England. These petitions have largely been written by the unprivileged themselves and therefore allow us to get a glimpse of the language of the labouring poor. It is precisely this kind of data that we are working with in our project. We are currently in the process of transcribing and checking pauper petitions from all English counties, which will ultimately be contained in a searchable database/corpus (to be made available to the academic community). Once our corpus is complete, we can systematically investigate and compare the pauper language to the codified language norm and the language use of different layers of society as well as reflections of the language of the labouring poor as reflected in novels and depositions.
Stay tuned for updates on the corpus creation and our linguistic investigations …
Selected relevant references:
Auer, Anita. 2014. Nineteenth-century English: Norms and usage. In Gijsbert Rutten, Rik Vosters & Wim Vandenbussche (eds.), Norms and Usage in Language History, 1600–1900. A Sociolinguistic and Comparative Perspective, pp. 151-170. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Auer, Anita & Tony Fairman. 2013. Letters of Artisans and the Labouring Poor (England, c. 1750-1835). In Paul Bennett, Martin Durrell, Silke Scheible & Richard J. Whitt (eds.) New Methods in Historical Corpus Linguistics, pp. 77-91. Narr: Tübingen.
Fairman, Tony. 2012. Letters in Mechanically-schooled English: Theories and Ideologies. In Marina Dossena & Gabriella Del Lungo Camiciotti (eds.), Letter Writing in Late Modern Europe, pp. 205-227. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Gunnel, Melchers. 2011. Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South and Wives and Daughters. A sociolinguistic study with special reference to the representation of nonstandard dialect. Sociolinguistic Studies 5(1).Fairman, Tony. 2007. Writing and the “Standard”: England, 1795-1834. Multilingua 26(2/3): 167-201.