LINDA C. MITCHELL
Although seventeenth‐ and eighteenth‐century English grammarians claimed to be correcting errors in grammar and protecting the language from corruption, they were in fact positioning themselves on a cultural battlefield, using linguistics to protest social issues. As a result, English grammar affected, and was affected by, such factors as race and gender. Several major battles in these cultural wars will be described. The first battle regards the status of English vis‐à‐vis Latin. Grammarians debated how successfully Latin models could be used to teach, legitimate, or standardize English, resulting in long‐lived tensions between prescriptive and descriptive grammars. A second battle pitted “good grammar” against “good writing,” as some grammarians insisted that all writing be grammatically correct, while others emphasized style and eloquence. A prolonged third battle was over the nature of “universal grammar.” Seventeenth‐century grammarians could not agree on a language scheme, whereas eighteenth‐century grammarians tried instead to identify universal systems that could be applied to English. In a fourth battle, grammarians debated how grammar could regulate the speech and therefore power of such marginal groups as foreigners, women, and the middle class.
By the mid‐seventeenth century the status of English as the language of the educated centered on at least three issues: to learn Latin or English grammar first, to recognize the merits of English, and to use Latin to legitimize English.
Grammarians debated whether students should learn Latin or English grammar first. Thomas Farnaby (1641) makes a case in the preface of Systema grammaticum for Latin to be taught in Latin because the elements of English models are not transferable and because bilingual translations make schoolboys lazy.1 The case for teaching in the vernacular met with resistance by those still committed to classical learning, such as John Milton. Still, the number of grammarians focusing on the mother tongue first and Latin second grew in number. Pedagogues argued convincingly that the vernacular should be taught as a way to prepare students to learn Latin. Against the pedagogy of Farnaby, Charles Hoole (1651) sets up a bilingual text in Latine grammar with English models on the left side of the page and Latin models on the right side. John Wallis (1653) takes the position in Grammatica lingua Anglicanae that English should not be forced to conform to Latin. He claims that earlier grammarians (e.g. Alexander Gill 1619, Logonomia Anglica, and Ben Jonson 1640, English grammar) have sacrificed “understanding; for all of them have forced our tongue too much into the pattern of Latin” (Praefatio). Wallis asks, “Why should we introduce a fictitious and quite foolish collection of Cases, Genders, Moods and Tenses, without any need, and for which there is no reason in the basis of the language itself?” (Praefatio). Jeremiah Wharton (1654), in English grammar, maintains that a student who learns English grammar first and then transfers the knowledge to Latin will be accurate in both languages (Wharton 1654: A5v). The use of analogy, or the transfer of knowledge, form the basis of Elisha Coles’s Syncrisis (1675b) and A. Lane’s (1695) A rational and speedy method attaining to the Latin tongue. In the eighteenth century, grammarians like John Clarke and Richard Johnson are still complaining about the emphasis on Latin.
Although Latin was the language of the educated in the early part of the seventeenth century, grammarians continued to build the credibility of the vernacular, especially as national identity was increasingly being defined by the mother tongue. George Snell contends in The right teaching of useful knowledge (1649: 28) that knowing English will “bee a verie excellent and useful skil.” Even though Joseph Aickin acknowledges in English grammar (1693) that rules are not codified, he maintains that “in reality the English Tongue is far more copious than [Latin]” (A3v). In Tutor to true English, Henry Care disagrees with the assumption “that none can write true English, but such as have been taught Latine” (Care 1699: A1v). Care argues for learning English because when parents “take their sons out of Latin school and make them Apprentices to Mechanic Arts, Shop‐keeping, and the like, all their petty Acquirements vanish through dis‐use, and quickly forgot” (Care 1699: A1v). And the anonymous author of The pleasing instructor (1756) complains that grammarians are too dependent on Latin models to teach English.
Since Latin grammars had been available for centuries, textbook authors naturally copied the grammatical categories of Latin grammarians and applied them to English grammar in hopes of bringing consistency to the English language. Although Latin models of grammar did not always apply to English, grammarians forced them to fit English anyway. Moreover, the illogical practice of forcing models of Latin rules of grammar onto the non‐Latinate grammar of English has persisted into the twentieth century. A reasonable explanation for this logical and illogical use of models may lie in how rigorously they were applied to language. Grammarians in the seventeenth century, for instance, may have applied English models to Latin only when they fit. They were not enslaved to forcing rules of English grammar onto Latin because Latin was already a codified language, and English models were merely a teaching aid to explain Latin grammar. However, when grammarians wanted to standardize English, they looked to Latin models as a way to codify grammar rules. George Snell explains in The right teaching of useful knowledge (1649) that grammarians were responsible for getting language to a “fixed and immutable state,” one that would not go “out of date” (40). He agrees that Latin proves useful if one “can applie the Ruels of His Latine Grammar to maintain the rights of his English speech” (Snell 1649: 30).
By the early eighteenth century, Latin was no longer required to do business, and grammarians were rethinking their pedagogy for teaching both English and Latin grammar. Latin instruction did not necessarily mean classical studies, and subjects formerly required – like imitation and translation – might not be offered at all. English grammar was taught for the purpose of learning the vernacular, and Latin models were more frequently used to settle disputes over matters of usage. Even though the application of Latin models to English was often illogical, and even though the models forced a Germanic language into a Latin framework, pedagogues accepted the Latin models of grammar more readily than they did the English models.2 By using Latinate forms, George Fisher attempts to codify orthography in The new spelling book (1700). Fisher was characteristic of the grammarians who thought that if they could standardize spelling, they could fix the English language and its rules. However, he discovered that no one could control the many variations of spelling in spite of using the most polished of Latin models to arrive at the correct forms.3 Richard Brown (1701) made a similar attempt in English school reformed. Grammarians had yet to censure specific errors and to formulate rules for correctness; moreover, they still had not sorted problems of custom and usage. Anxiety over what seemed the uncertain state of English was expressed by Jonathan Swift in Proposal for correcting, improving, and ascertaining the English tongue (1712). Richard Johnson (1706) rigorously applied the models of Latin, whether they fit English or not, in his Grammatical commentaries.
By the second half of the eighteenth century, Latin models were supporting prescriptive English grammar. We do not have to search too far to find examples of the way Latin distorted English grammar. For instance, the centuries‐old double negative “I don’t want nothing” became stigmatized because it did not conform to the Latin pattern that would translate “I don’t want anything.” Grammarians declared the double negative incorrect and illiterate. In a Short introduction to English grammar (1762), prescriptive grammarian Bishop Lowth goes back to ancient Latin rules in an attempt to fix the English language. He cites the rule using a to be verb: “The Verb to Be has always a Nominative Case after it; as, it was I” (Lowth 1762: 111). Considered correct for centuries, It’s me was now considered incorrect since the Latin construction ego sum made use of the subject form of the pronoun, ego rather than the object form me. It is an issue still hotly debated today. Joseph Priestley, a descriptivist, believed that language cannot be fixed. In Rudiments of English grammar (1761) he writes that the “best forms of speech will, in time, establish themselves by their own superior excellence” (Priestley 1761: vii). Priestley followed a more liberal practice of rules and custom than did Lowth.
The two centuries were filled with controversy over how to codify and standardize the English language. The practice of using Latin models to decide rules in English is still influential today.
As school grammars began to include rhetoric in the seventeenth century, grammarians debated whether to privilege “correctness” or eloquence and style. Some grammars tried to emphasize both grammar and style, such as Ralph Johnson’s Scholars Guide (1665), Guy Miège’s English grammar (1688), and Charles Gildon’s Grammar of the English tongue (1712). In English grammar (1712) Michael Maittaire admits that “the work is yet but half done” by knowing grammar; writing is the other significant part (Maittaire 1712: 228). John Collyer, however, shocks fellow grammarians when he states in The general principles of grammar (1735) that it is acceptable to break rules of grammar for the sake of good writing: “Sometimes we are obliged to transgress, to avoid the concurrence of certain rough words, which will not admit of conjunction, and another disposition frequently renders them harmonious’ (Collyer 1735: 102). Grammarians complained frequently that school grammars had an excess of grammar rules and a shortage of writing instruction, but they did not succeed in remedying the problem. In A treatise on education (1743), James Barclay claims that writing will be improved with “rules concerning the justness of expression…the force and harmony of certain phrases, the proper meaning of words, their connection one with another, and the necessary skill of placing them all in regular order” (Barclay 1743: 66). Barclay, however, privileges grammar when he rules out I shall now proceed to examine in favor of I proceed to examine, and when he recommends getting rid of adverbs such as really, indeed, surely, perhaps, and at the same time (Barclay 1743: 69).
Grammarians tried to balance grammar and style. In Practical English grammar (1750), Ann Fisher contends that those who learn grammar from rote or custom will not so easily be able to transfer the knowledge with “Propriety or Elegance” (Fisher 1750: iv), yet someone “unacquainted with grammar will be unable to express himself properly” (Fisher 1750: vi). Following a philosophy similar to Fisher’s, Joseph Priestley in Rudiments of English grammar (1761) includes examples of composition “from our most celebrated writers, for the exemplification both of the rules of Grammar, and of the Observations on Style” (Priestley 1761: 65). He uses short sentences for “illustrating the fundamental rules of grammar,” and long, complex sentences for showing “particularly those in which the natural construction hath been made to give place to the harmony of style” (Priestley 1761: 65).
Since grammarians had long argued that learning Latin grammar improved composition, a bond between writing and grammar was already assumed. Edward Leedes’s More English examples turned into Latin (1726) is one of the first publications to include correction exercises in a grammar text. Another publication to follow the practice of bad exercises was Anne Fisher’s New grammar (1757). This illogical exercise could hardly have reinforced skills in grammar: “That no wimen can be handsom by the sorses of seaters alone, any more then she can be wittey Onley by the Help of speach” (Fisher 1757: 131). Bishop Lowth followed with “bad exercises” to correct in A short introduction to English grammar (1762). Daniel Fenning argues in A new grammar of the English language (1771) that “examples of bad English…may have a very bad effect. They are more likely to perplex a young Scholar, and to confirm an old one in error, than to direct the judgment of the one, or correct the bad habit of the other” (Fenning 1771: vi). Fenning suggests that schoolmasters turn to student writing for examples of bad grammar and “false Construction” because students will “frequently err against every rule of syntax” (Fenning 1771: vii). Fenning believes “a child will attend more carefully to the correction of an error made by himself, than to the correction of one made by another” (1771: vii). “Bad’ sentence exercises for Joshua Story in Introduction to English grammar (1783) support the view that if students saw an incorrect sentence, they would remember the correct version in both the written and spoken word. Grammarians have yet to prove whether correcting grammar in isolation will have a direct correlation to writing.
A variety of schemes for universal language and universal grammar were introduced in the seventeenth century. Promoters of the schemes argued that a common language would also fulfill the perceived need of restoring the human race to pre‐Babel times. Grammarians who supported a common language in the seventeenth century argued that it would help the spread of religion, promote commerce in foreign countries, and bring scientists together. Eighteenth‐century grammarians continued to use the term “universal grammar,” but the elaborate schemes of the seventeenth century became the rational, practical grammars of the eighteenth century.
At first, grammarians wanted to return to the language of Adam, as it is described in the eighth chapter of Genesis, when all the earth was “of one language and one speech.” Some grammarians argued for the merits of such languages as Latin, Hebrew, and Chinese, while others maintained that the answer to finding a universal grammar was to create an artificial one. In creating these languages, grammarians tried to construct what they thought would be the most functional system with the least ambiguity. Language planners insisted that a language be harmonious and that it signify the thing each word represented in the natural world. Each word was to incorporate the complex and abstract meanings of an idea. All these projects used the same grammatical principles, even though they built widely varying models of language.4 Some of these languages consisted of bizarre numerical combinations, difficult musical notes, or confusing symbols.5 Borrowing from Descartes’s theory of innatism, they argued that learning a new language would simply be a matter of knowledge recovery.
Francis Lodowyck, author of A common writing (1647), is credited with the first published project of universal character and language. In it, Lodowyck creates an artificial language made up of signs, which, he argues, is a hieroglyphical representation of words that people can learn and communicate universally. His artificial language attempts to be an “expression or outward presentation of the mind” (Lodowyck 1647: 21). As one would expect, Lodowyck’s language scheme was not adopted as an international language because his method proved to be awkward and impractical. In The universal character (1657), Cave Beck creates an artificial language, one that is mostly an application of Latinate grammar, but based on a numerical system he believed to be superior to other symbolic schemes. Beck claims that his scheme can be learned in “two Hours space,” “be Spoken as well as Written,” and will increase communication in commerce and religion (1657: A7r‐A7v). Beck rejected obtuse, confusing symbols presented by symbolic writing and hieroglyphs. He chose instead a system of numbers, hoping to bring order to his world, to simplify language by using symbols that are sequential and universal, and to improve defects in spoken languages (Beck 1657: A8r). He complains about the “evils” of learning Latin, but one notes that he has stayed with the Latin tradition in syntax and with the traditional rules of tenses, moods, and cases (Beck 1657: A7v). As was the case with other universal language proponents, Beck did not recognize the inadequacies of his system.
Some grammarians rejected artificial, nonsense language schemes and chose instead a system constructed from “real” character, that is, a system built from elements, symbols, and numbers of an existing language. Language planners envisioned grammar as an organic entity capable of remaining rational, sensible, and systemized. George Dalgarno and John Wilkins went beyond Beck’s and Lodowyk’s ideas of simply inventing symbols that stood for words. Dalgarno and Wilkins viewed language rationally and philosophically and promoted systems that would force order on reality by setting up formulas to show shades of meaning. They began by combining meaningful units of characters to create a universal language. Next, they set up categories to organize words by genera, species, and specific differences, using properties of the “real character” to form letters and words. Dalgarno and Wilkins shared with their contemporaries a conviction that, if they could symbolize the order of things and notions (how the world is organized) in a universal language, they would have a greater understanding of their world. In Ars signorum (1661) Dalgarno’s scheme may also be viewed as a philosophical language in that he sets up a system of classification as a rational means of ordering the universe, claiming that his “character and new Rational language” is superior to other systems of shorthand. Language planner John Wilkins approached his language scheme in a more scientific manner than his contemporaries. In Essay towards a real character (1668), Wilkins develops a universal character and philosophical language with more forethought as to the linguistic way it worked. He intended to devise a universal language that one could use to observe the world and make sense out of it in a theoretical context (Wilkins 1668: 289).6 Wilkins did not recognize that his system was difficult to use and that the rigidity of his system did not accommodate change with the passage of time. However, he eventually became known as the father of modern linguistics.
Although these grammarians were trying to invent a language that would visually represent the world, they instead created limited worlds. Dalgarno’s and Wilkins’s classifications, for instance, remained symbols of what they called reality and did not move beyond superficial categories. Both grammarians had intended for their universal language systems to be complete and functional, but that did not happen because their characters were not capable of breaking down the complex concepts into easily understandable units. Instead, these systems confused the listener and frustrated the speaker. Another failure in creating a universal language was Samuel Botley’s Maximo in minimo (1674), a system of symbolical characters that proposed to teach the art of memory and simplified syntax.7 Universal language schemes had appeared earlier, but the time was ripe in the seventeenth century for them to gain attention. It was also a time to prove their inadequacies in the practical use. Toward the end of the seventeenth century, universal grammar and universal language projects shifted in focus to that of comparing the similarities of languages and of looking at the rationale or philosophy of language. In Syncrisis (1675b), Elisha Coles has already recognized the approaching eighteenth‐century view of universal grammar, and his grammar text marks a shift from universal language of invented character to a universal language of similarities.
Eighteenth‐century grammarians continued to use the term “universal grammar,” but the more elaborate universal grammar schemes of the seventeenth century became the rational, practical grammars of the eighteenth century. Grammarians no longer used the term to describe speculative systems but rather to describe language itself. To these eighteenth‐century grammarians, universality meant combining the more traditional categories of the parts of speech, such as nouns and verbs, with the philosophical rationale to represent universal language constants. They thought of universal grammar in terms of analogies among languages, as a tool they would attempt to use to determine a doctrine of correctness. The vernacular did not have the voice of authority that Latin had carried, but if similar linguistic elements could be found in another language, then analogy could be used to determine what was correct. One of the earliest examples of the eighteenth‐century concept of a “rational” or “universal” grammar in England appears as early as 1695 in A. Lane’s Rational, speedy method of attaining the Latine tongue. This work is the first to put forward a system of grammar based on the vernacular rather than on Latin: an early interesting, but controversial, claim that English has the qualities of a universal tongue.
From about 1700 to 1750, activity in the field of universal grammar was no longer as much concerned with the creation of a new language as it was with the philosophical basis of language. Grammarians such as Richard Johnson, in Grammatical commentaries (1706), continued to argue the merits of Latin as “a Universal Language” because it is “common to Learned Men of all Countries” (Johnson 1706: A1v‐A2r). Universal language to him emphasized how different grammars were constructed with similar rules of logic, not based on the linguistic ontology of corresponding categories that we see in the seventeenth century (Johnson 1706: A2r). A major work on universal grammar is James Harris’s Hermes: A philosophical enquiry concerning universal grammar (1751). Harris takes each part of grammar from the basic word unit to the sentence and analyzes it in a philosophical way, explaining how each thing relates to its universe (1751: 2). Language follows a universal principle: “that Words must of necessity be Symbols” and consequently that “all Language is founded in compact, and not in Nature” (Harris 1751: 337). Harris sees “Language [as] a kind of Picture of the Universe” (1751: 330), where words symbolize general ideas (341). In Lingua Britannica reformata (1749), however, Benjamin Martin disagrees with the analogy principle and focuses on speech and linguistics, not so much on grammar and logic. He claims that as long as language is in a “mutable and fluctuating state,” it cannot be fixed to a standard “purity and perfection” (Martin 1749: 111). Martin was one of the few to recognize that using custom to dictate rules may produce some awkward, clumsy language. By the middle of the eighteenth century, grammarians were arguing for a doctrine of correctness based on analogy, or the common principles in a general system. In The royal universal British grammar (1754) Daniel Farro claims, a “doctrine of correctness” is reached through observing the elements of various grammars and then deciding what the consistent rule is. Farro writes, “If all languages share the same substantial Notion of Beings, Actions, and Passions,” then English is “universal” (Farro 1754: xv).
Priestley’s The rudiments of English grammar (1761) marks a shift in the emphasis of the universal language debate. In the second half of the eighteenth century, controversies over grammar came to a focus on the establishment of a codified, standardized grammar. Gone were the debates over finding Adam’s original language or converting the world to a newly devised language scheme. Priestley and his fellow grammarians were not tracing language to the original tongue, but methodically looking at the changes in language itself. Priestley did not believe in a “divine alphabet” and claimed instead that human speech comes about naturally. Priestley was, however, sympathetic to constructing a “philosophical language, which should be adequate to all the purposes of speech, and be without those superfluities, defects, and ambiguities, either in words or structure” (Priestley 1761: 297). The most rational plan for this project, according to Priestley, was that of John Wallis. But the universal languages of Dr. Wallis’s time, the mid‐seventeenth century, were no longer fashionable. Controversies over grammar in the eighteenth century centered on how the definition of universal grammar had changed, that is, on what elements grammarians thought most languages possess. Grammarians increasingly used universal grammar as a means of dealing with other language issues.
Lowth (1762), unlike earlier grammarians, focuses on accuracy or practice (words as words), not theory (words as ideas), as a way of repairing the state of grammar. As a prescriptivist, Lowth wanted to use universal grammar to establish a doctrine of correctness through the use of analogy (Lowth 1762: 1). Universal grammar, he explains, “must be done with reference to some language already known; in which the terms are to be explained, and the rules exemplified” (Lowth 1762: viii‐ix). The belief that analogy could establish rules of grammar gained the support of most grammarians by the end of the eighteenth century.
A surprising anomaly in the latter part of the eighteenth century is Rowland Jones’s attempt to revive an interest in a universal language that was characteristic of the seventeenth century. In Circles of Gomer (1771), Jones presents a type of system not seen since Wilkins and Lodowyck. In Hieroglyfic (1768), he experiments with a universal grammar of primitive or “original” language. Jones’s text should not be considered merely a creative endeavor or a late attempt to repair Babel, but should instead be viewed as a text following eighteenth‐century rational and philosophical principles. His effort at the universal language came too late to be taken seriously, but it is does demonstrate another attempt at a means of codifying the English language in the eighteenth century. Toward the end of the eighteenth century, many grammarians continued to examine universal grammar from philosophical and rational perspectives.
As the eighteenth century came to a close, the prevailing kind of universal grammar promoted by grammarians such as Lowth and Farro supported the codification of English and, consequently prescriptivism. Historians of the English language have long canonized Lowth as being a central, founding father of grammar books. This assertion is problematic because Lowth needs to be understood, not in isolation, but in the context of his period. He comes after a century of discussion about universal language, and reaps the benefits of his predecessors. His grammar book is a result of many decades of successes and failures, of experimentation and controversy by those who came before him.
Grammarians also had the power to create, assign, and reinforce identities for marginal social groups, such as foreigners, women and the middle class. When grammarians assigned identities to marginal groups, they reinforced their designated status.
To prove they accepted their new country and its customs, foreigners in Great Britain had to learn English properly before they could be assured of mobility. Requiring foreigners to learn to speak English properly, then, was a means by which the British imposed a moral and national identity on the new residents.8 Grammarians also insisted that foreigners acknowledge that English was a superior, global language. As early as 1582, Richard Mulcaster notes in The first part of the elementarie that foreigners should learn English because “Our tung doth serve to so manie uses, bycause it is conversant with so manie peple, and so well acquainted with so manie matters, in so sundrie kindes of dealing” (Mulcaster 1582: preface). In his posthumously published English Grammar (1640), Ben Jonson tells foreigners, “The profit of Grammar is great to Strangers, who are to live in communion and commerce with us.”
Throughout the seventeenth century, as foreigners were learning the “mother tongue,” grammarians worried that foreigners would corrupt the newly enfranchised English language. Jeremiah Wharton counsels foreigners to use his English grammar (1654) because it “will bee the most certain Guide, that ever yet was existant” (A6r‐A6v). Guy Miège, an immigrant himself, wrote English grammar (1688) because he wanted to preserve the purity of English and to help foreigners to speak correctly.9 Miège claims that foreigners who used to resist learning English as an “Insular Speech” with “groundless prejudice” are now admirers of the language, especially since he has provided help for them (Miège 1688: 6). However, Miège warns both native speakers and foreigners not to incorporate any more foreign words into English: “now the English is come to so great Perfection, now ’tis grown so very Copious and Significant, by the Accession of the Quintessence and Life of other Tongues, ’twere to be wished that a Stop were put to this unbounded Way of Naturalizing foreign Words” (Miège 1688: A9).
It was an unsettling idea that foreigners might not speak the language; worse yet that they might not accept all aspects of British culture. Some grammarians insisted that foreigners be able to read the Bible in English, as we see in John Wallis’s Grammatica linguae Anglicanae (1653: A6–A7). In a book designed for foreigners, A New English grammar, James Howell (1662) tells any new resident that he must know English if he is to live or work in England. Christopher Cooper is even more specific in his Grammatica linguae Anglicanae (1685) when he cites four reasons for foreigners to learn English: to practice their trades, to communicate, to understand the culture, and to be knowledgeable in art and science. Joseph Aickin complains in his English grammar (1693) that foreigners are slow to learn English, and “the true cause” is their not understanding grammar (A2v). Like Aickin, A. Lane makes the same complaint in Key to the Art of Letters (1700) that foreigners are slow to learn English, and he lays out the easiest methods for learning the vernacular. James Greenwood’s Essay Towards a Practical English Grammar (1722) is another example of a grammarian who specifically tries to assist foreigners in learning English (28). However, John Rice’s Introduction to the art of reading specifically recommends that someone learn the “Idiomatical Order of its Words in common Discourse and simple Narration” (1765: 358).
Insisting that foreigners learn English as part of accepting their new country is surprising for a time when the vernacular was just acquiring its own identity. English traders, after all, did not accord the same privilege to people in other countries, but instead demanded that foreigners abroad conduct business in English, even in their own countries.
Discussions in seventeenth‐ and eighteenth‐century grammar books tell us to what extent learning was considered appropriate for females. Women were thought to be mentally and physically incapable of taking on rigorous academic tasks. A woman’s responsibility in society was to be a good wife and mother. Sometimes authors even thought that women possessed no more than the same diminished intellectual capacity as children. Females were allowed to learn only enough to stay within their social spheres, and going beyond those limits was considered morally reprehensible. Since grammar was a subject partially within those limits, grammar books helped regulate the moral identity of women.
The widely held view expressed by authors in the introductions to their textbooks was that females did not have the strength or intellect to pursue advanced studies. Mulcaster claimed in The first part of the elementarie (1582) that because men govern, education “most properly belonged to them” (Mulcaster 1582: 18). He advises that women should be limited in what they learn, but vocational training of men was to be “without restriction either as regards subject‐matter or method” (Mulcaster 1582: 52–3). Mulcaster states that girls have a natural weakness: “their brains be not so charged as boys,” and “like [an] empty cask they make the greater noise.” The learned woman's proper place in society was thought to be where she would do the least harm. Samuel Hartlib cautions in The true and readie way to learne the Latine tongue (1653) that education might make women dangerously attractive, lest they become “objects of lust and snares unto young Gentlemen” (Hartlib 1653: 21). Their education should “fit them for the true end of their life in a Christian Commonwealth, to become modest, discreet, and industrious house‐keepers” (Hartlib 1653: 21). In The academy of eloquence (1654), Thomas Blount also weighs in on the subservient position of women: “Women, being of one and the self same substance with man, are what man is, only so much more imperfect, as they are created the weaker vessels” (Blount 1654: 101). He puts women in two categories: saints or evildoers (Blount 1654: 103). The evildoers “are Horseleeches, which draw blood from the veins of a House and State, where they exercise their power. They are Syrens of the earth, which cause shipwracks without water” (Blount 1654: 113).
Even reformer Johann Amos Comenius, in spite of his progressive plans for educational reform, assumed that a woman’s proper social role was to serve in a male‐dominated world. He argues in The reformed school (1642) that females should learn to become “carefull housewives, loving towards their husbands and their children when God shall call them to be married” (Comenius 1642: 38). Women, Comenius claims, do not need to satisfy “natural tendency to curiosity,” but should develop “sincerity and contentedness” in order to “accomplish womanly tasks” (Comenius 1642: 68). The pictures and language in Comenius’s Orbis sensualium pictus (1659) are male dominated, except for a few domestic scenes. For example, men are interacting at school, work, church, and social occasions, but women are limited to domestic scenes in the roles of wives, mothers, or other caretakers.
There were almost no female voices to support women except authors such as Bathsua Makin. In An essay to revive the antient education of gentlewomen (1674), she condemns the “barbarous custom to breed women low” and the belief that “women are not endued with such reason as men, nor capable of improvement by education” (Makin 1674: 3). Makin complains that “[a] learned woman is thought to be a comet that bodes mischief whenever it appears” (1674: 3). She reports that male authors believe that to offer women a liberal education is “to deface the image of God in man,” and that it will make women “so high and men so low, [that] like fire in the house top it will set the whole world in a flame.”
Grammarians remained steadfast in their vision of women as saints or sinners. William Mather sets restrictions for females in his Young man’s companion (1695). He sees a wife as one “Linked to us [husbands] by such Obligations of Love and Duty” and “wholly Assigned to her Husband, on whom she solely depends” (Mather 1695: 212). He even goes so far to say that “many Women are to blame” for leading men astray:
The Gorgeous Attire of Women do make Men more dissolute, careless, and bent to Lust, and other Evils … namely when they build wide Windows for their Breasts, and give their Eyes liberty to wander; the high Towers (or whorish Attire above their fore‐heads) the frizzled Hair, and especially the wanton Eye, and Lascivious or Shameless Countenance are the forerunners of Adultery.
(Mather 1695: 214–215).
“Lest [a wife] incur the name of a Harebrain,” Mather argues, she is one who “meddleth only with her Household Affairs, that loveth her Husbands Bed, and keepeth her Tongue quiet” (1695: 215).
And some grammarians, such as Lane in Key to the art of letters (1700), focus on perceived physical limitations so that young women have been discouraged from learning because of their “tender Constitution not being able to endure those rugged and thorny Difficulties in the Methods hitherto practiced” (Lane 1700: xvi). Michael Maittaire argues in English grammar (1712) that too “much effort is put into caring for females,” “in the variety of breeding, some for the feet, some for the hands, others for the voice” (Maittaire 1712: v). He, however, relents somewhat and admits that it is “cruelty or ignorance, to debar [females] from the accomplishments of speech and Understanding; as if that Sex was …weak and defective in its Head and Brains” (Maittaire 1712: v–vi). In The pleasing instructor (1756), the anonymous author complains that grammar is “too much out of Fashion, especially among the Ladies” (1756: vii), and they “feel an Entanglement” and are “blind to the Beauties and Idioms of Language” because they are “left lame in their Learning” (1756: ix). One of the obstacles is that “they are mostly put to Sewing or similar Articles, under the Care of some Mistress, who is perhaps either utterly incapable of assisting them in the Pursuit of Knowledge, or who, from a Crudity of Scholars, [has no] Time to point out or explain to them” (1756: ix). The author, however, does not “mean to recommend Reading at the Expence of Sewing” (1756: ix).
One of few defenses of women comes from James Buchanan. He laments in The British grammar (1761) that “the Fair Sex have been in general so shamefully neglected with regard to a proper English Education’ (Buchanan 1761: xxix). He wonders why “Many of them, by the unthinking Part of the Males, are considered and treated rather as Dolls, than as intelligent social Beings” (Buchanan 1761: xxix). Buchanan argues that women “are not inferior to the other Sex, yet due Care is not always taken to cultivate their Understandings, to impress their Minds with solid Principles, and replenish them with useful Knowledge” (Buchanan 1761: xxix). His statements about the education of females are surprisingly positive even for 1761. He asks why a female should “be cruelly deprived” of not being able to attain the “Capacity of expressing herself with Fluency and Accuracy in speaking or writing her Mother tongue” (Buchanan 1761: xxix). Fathers should, he states, “be embracing every Opportunity of enlarging their [females’] Minds, and improving those Talents which the God of Nature has conferred upon them” (Buchanan 1761: xxx). Still, Buchanan drifts back into what is appropriate for women when he states that if men take care of “these more beautiful Pledges,” they will “become dutiful Children, good Wives, good Mothers, good Friends, ornamental to their Sex, and, in their several Stations, useful Members to the Community” (Buchanan 1761: xxxi).
One woman who transcended the moral and emotional identity assigned to her was Anne Fisher. Authorship was a man’s territory, so much so that if a woman wrote a book, the gender of her name might be disguised in order to sell the text. Nevertheless, Fisher went against this convention when she wrote and published New grammar (1757).
Thus, grammar books prescribed what was appropriate for women to learn, what they were to do with that learning, and how they were to conduct themselves.
Foreigners and women had an identity imposed upon them, but the middle class generated its own identity through morals and literacy. The upper class already had its identity of being respectable and literate, but members of the middle class had to find learning situations where their children could acquire the necessary skills to advance. A logical place for the schoolmaster to teach middle‐class children language and religion was in grammar books, because all students had to take grammar.
Some educational reformers took the position that grammar and religion were inseparable in the classroom. In The reformed school (1642), Johann Amos Comenius lays out a plan where school children will be taught “Godliness, wherein every day they are to be exercised, by prayers, reading of the word, catecheticall Institutions, and other exercises subordinate unto the life of Christianity” (Comenius 1642: 41). George Snell leads “the learner to the sacred Scriptures, and to the Grammar for English” in The right teaching of useful knowledge (1649: 26). The idea that a man is as good as his word or that a person with good grammar is a good person takes root in texts such as those of Elisha Coles. He provides the opportunity to learn morals from reading selections in the Bible or translating Latin through reading Bible stories. Coles emphasizes Protestant doctrine through pictures of Biblical themes in Syncrisis…learning Latin: By comparing it with English together with the holy history of scripture‐war (1675b). In Nolens volens (1675a), Coles teaches grammar and scripture with “the Youths Visible Bible.”
Besides the connection of grammar and Protestant doctrine, grammarians also linked grammar and moral character. Edward Leedes, in More English examples turned into Latin (1685), maintains that good scholars make good men and provides exercises to reinforce that concept. In English examples of Latin syntaxis (1686) William Walker uses “smart Moral and Prudential Sentences’ because “Learning without Religion” may save time, but it makes men the “more desperately debauched, and the more mischievously wicked” (Walker 1686: preface A6r). To make a student a better Christian, Thomas Tryon includes proverbs, moral training essays, and a catechism in the Compleat school‐master (1700). Some grammarians ventured more radical opinions in their texts. Richard Johnson admonishes learned men in Grammatical Commentaries (1706) because they have not learned Latin and therefore missed their chance at furthering their religious crusade against Catholicism: “The eager Desire of converting Roman Catholicks, which has appear’d for so many Years, wou’d in all likelihood have been much more furthered by this means” (Johnson 1706: B1v–B2r). One of the strongest statements about religion in a grammar text appears in the English scholar compleat (1706: A4v). The unknown author blames any faults one has “chiefly upon the Papists” and plans “to expose their horrid, erroneous, ridiculous and base Religion, and to beget an early inbred Abhorrency and Aversion to it in the Children’ he teaches. Jonathan Swift also sees a connection between language and religion. He argues in Proposal for improving the English tongue (1712) that “if it were not for the Bible and Common Prayer Book in the vulgar Tongue, we should hardly be able to understand any Thing that was written among us an hundred Years ago” (Swift 1712: 32). For keeping standards, he claims, “those Books being perpetually read in Churches have proved a kind of Standard for Language, especially to the common People” (Swift 1712: 32). And he praises the “Translators of the Bible” because they were “Masters of an English Style much fitter for that Work, than any we see in our present Writings’” (Swift 1712: 33).
Grammarians continued to connect grammar and religion in the classroom well into the eighteenth century. In English exercises for school‐boys to translate into Latin (1719) John Garretson introduces “useful admonitions relating to the Duty of Children towards God, or Man, or themselves, because [children] can never have Principles of Virtue or Prudence suggested to them too soon” (Garretson 1719: A5r). Thomas Dilworth needs to be highlighted because of his even more aggressive attitude about using religion to teach grammar in A new guide to the English tongue (1751). He recognizes the concern for the “Salvation of Souls” in educating children and for saving “so many poor Creatures from the Slavery of Sin and Satan” (Dilworth 1751: iii). He attempts to “save these little Ones from utter Destruction” and through the “Protestant Religion [which] is herein gloriously discovered by those Principles of that best constituted Church, as professed in the Church of England, which You cause to be taught, and in grafted in the tender Age of Your Pupils” (Dilworth 1751: iii). In the preface, he claims that with the Reformation “Ignorance has gradually vanished at the increase of Learning amongst us, who take the Word of God for a Lantern to our Feet” (Dilworth 1751: iv). His religious position is deeply rooted in education: “Since the Sunshine of the Gospel of Jesus Christ has risen amongst us: since we are loosed from the Bands of Ignorance and Superstition; since every Protestant believes it to be his Duty to promote Christian Knowledge; certainly it will be confessed, that all Improvement in Learning ought to be in encouraged” (Dilworth 1751: iv). He reminds the reader of what Solomon said: “Train up a Child in the Way he should go, and he will not depart from it” (Dilworth 1751: iv).
Grammar and moral character played a large role in the self‐generated identity of the middle classes. A significant element of this moral identity was literacy, which was partially defined as the absence of corrupt language. One of the first ways of protecting themselves from deteriorating language was to empower the language police of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Grammarians such as A. Lane (1700) and Richard Johnson (1706) monitored changes in usage, while Jonathan Swift (1712) and Samuel Johnson (1747) tried to no avail to fix the English language. Lane even goes so far as to say in A key to the art of letters (1700) that grammar is a necessity because it “polishes and perfects those noble Faculties of Reason and Speech, by which Men are distinguished from Brutes” (Lane 1700: vii). The middle class was not secure with vague rules or changing usage; they wanted consistency so that they would not make mistakes. The upper‐class student, in contrast, came from a privileged background where he had learned rules and followed them when he chose to do so. A student from the lower ranks had to work at learning rules and acquiring refinement. He would be entering a world where knowledge of literature, elocution, and logic had little value and was seldom used. He learned to read and write among hordes of other students who were all struggling to learn practical skills they would use later as apprentices. For the working class, refinement remained a distant, rich relative on the educational family tree. The working class, instead, strove for literacy.
Members of the middle class also chose to define literacy and morality for themselves by battling colloquialism, incorrectness, and archaism. By determining the criteria by which refined speech was to be judged, they hoped to avoid the stigma of incorrect usage, outdated forms, and substandard language. For example, they rejected “power‐coding,” that is, indicating another person’s social status through speech. They adopted the use of the you of the mannered upper‐class people rather than the thou of working‐class people. The rejection of a term of inequality marked the desire of the rising classes to have a more democratic voice. What is interesting in this shift is that the middle classes did not designate any distance from the lower classes, perhaps reacting to an egalitarian ethic. The rejection of thou was also a safeguard against offending people. With the increasing material status of some middle‐class entrepreneurs, one did not want to risk using a lower‐status term of address to someone of higher socioeconomic standing.
In the eighteenth century, members of the middle class became more aggressive in creating criteria for what they perceived to be a literate person. Thomas Dilworth’s New guide to the English tongue (1740), for example, was intended “to enable such as are intended to rise no higher, to write their Mother‐Tongue intelligibly, and according to the Rules of Grammar” so they could read The Spectator and The Tatler, not “Grubstreet Papers, idle Pamphlets, lewd Plays, filthy Songs” (Dilworth 1740: 8–9). The rising classes did not want to be branded by using the kind of uneducated language that Moll Flanders spoke.
Other pedagogues reinforced the connection of grammar to morals and literacy. It became evident to the middle classes that knowing grammar and reading had some status attached to it. The ability to acquire books and to read them added a degree of status to the middle‐class home. Authors quickly realized the profit in such books as Isaac Watts’s Art of reading and writing (1721). John Clarke observes in Essay upon study (1731) that reading liberates or makes a person independent in thought and action “As their Business in the World, is to guide and govern their fellow‐Cityzens” (Clarke 1731: 228). In A treatise on education (1743) James Barclay claims that boys who learn the mother tongue will be able to “observe the beauty of the moral world and the whole rational creation’ (Barclay 1743: 219). Few grammarians stressed in their texts that being literate and moral also meant understanding the words and comprehending the meaning. John Rice argues in An introduction to the art of reading (1765) that it is possible that a person can look at a word and pronounce it correctly, yet he may have no comprehension of the meaning nor be able to read it.
Grammar texts communicated to foreigners that they had to learn the English vernacular in order to prove that they accepted their new country and its customs. Through the act of learning the English language, foreigners were allowed to assume the national identity. The texts also defined how much knowledge was appropriate for women so that they would not stray into territory reserved for men. If women went beyond the intellectual limits allowed them, they were learning too much and they risked being “immoral.” Moreover, grammar books instructed the aspiring classes in morals and literacy. Whereas the grammarians assigned an identity to foreigners and females, the aspiring classes generated its own. The middle classes used grammar books to teach the skills they thought were important in building a strong national identity: reading, writing, and speaking correctly. They also encoded other values like honesty, hard work, and morals. Within the context and purposes set by grammarians, grammar books served these many functions for marginal groups such as foreigners, women, and the lower classes.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, battles were fought in the name of grammar, but often they were really about other issues, such as correctness, gender, politics, religion, and class. Even today, grammar may be perceived to be a boring subject, yet an attack on one’s language is considered an attack on family, culture, and race. It is this element that makes grammar a challenging, yet exciting, subject.