The Adventure of English (30 page)

One aspect of English which has been a recurring feature in its history is the way a word will be adapted from one age to another so that a “chip” can go from wood to silicon, include golf and a slight and feature as fifty percent of a British diet. In this boom time for words, the old were often and again recalled to do duty as the new. English had no pride in this. When stuck, it just grabbed what was handiest and let posterity sort out any resulting confusions. “Coach” is one of the simpler ones. It was part of a horse-drawn carriage in the sixteenth century, became part of a steam-drawn vehicle in the nineteenth century, a bus in the twentieth century, a description of your status on an aeroplane, besides, of course, being the name of a person who tells more talented people what to do, especially at sport. It seems to bear these meanings without showing too much strain.

A word can be a history. “Industry” has been part of recorded English since 1566. “Industrious,” meaning either skilful or assiduous, was also there in the sixteenth century, as was “industrial,” which meant the distinction between cultivated and natural fruits. It was not until the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that “industry” began to assume a modern meaning. In 1696, there was mention of a “College of Industry for all Useful Trades and Husbandry.” But the most widespread eighteenth-century use was in “House of Industry,” which meant the workhouse where forced application and useful work came together. Adam Smith wrote of “funds destined for the maintenance of industry” in 1776 and by the mid nineteenth century this use was common. Disraeli spoke of “our national industries” (1844); Carlyle talked of “Leaders of Industry” (1843). There were other developments from the root of the word. In the 1830s, Carlyle introduced “Industrialism” to indicate a new order of society; John Stuart Mill used “Industrial Revolution” in 1848. The word “industry” grew as industry itself flourished.

“Class” is another word whose passage is worth tracking into the Industrial Revolution and from there into the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, where it saturated the pages of so much that was written about society. The different point here is that it did not change its meaning all that much despite great changes around it.

It derives from “classis,” Latin, a division according to property of the people of Rome. Then it became a term used in Church organisation, which was extended to describe other divisions or groups. In the seventeenth century in England “class” acquired a special link with education, from “classroom” to “Second Class Honours.” Defoe, in 1705, seems the harbinger of what was to become something of an English (more than a British) obsession, when he writes: “ 'tis plain the dearness of wages forces our people into more classes than other nations can show.” Today we nod at Defoe but in fact he was before his time. Until well into the eighteenth century, still in the nineteenth and even in some manner in the twentieth century, the most common words were “rank” and “order”; “estate” and “degree” were more common than “class.” All those terms related to birth.

What we see as “class” relates to a group within society. It is a regression to the Latin to describe the way in which society now chose to describe itself. Placing by birth diminished in importance. Although it has not yet disappeared it is twilight to the noon blaze of Chaucer, Shakespeare and Dr. Johnson's day. There is a different sense of society, which the Industrial Revolution midwifed.

Like many words describing the complications of society itself, class as we know or knew it took its time to establish itself. “The Lower Classes” was used in 1772; “lowest classes” and “lowest class” were “common” from the 1790s. “Middle class” was recorded in 1756 and by the 1840s it was as widely used a term as “lower classes.” From the mid nineteenth century it was full industrial steam ahead to “lower middle class,” “upper middle class,” “lower working class,” “upper working class,” “skilled working class,” “upper class,” “middle middle class,” and those who would be unclassifiable, royalty, the aristocracy and the company of artists, vagabonds, thinkers and Celts who often escaped the bondage of these scalpelled classifications. Today “class” is losing its old certainty and its old sting.

Awareness of class brought accent and pronunciation on to the stage more acutely than ever before. Cockney is a useful example here, partly because by the end of the eighteenth century London was the biggest metropolis in England. Its population was to become four and a half million by the end of the nineteenth century. (In Elizabeth I's reign, the population of the entire country was less than that.) Also rates of literacy were higher in London than anywhere else: seventy percent of servants could sign their name by 1700; ninety-eight percent of all books printed in English were printed in London; over half the booksellers were established there. And the Cockney dialect has a fascinating history and in Charles Dickens a genius to give it lasting literary life.

It was, of course, despised by those who wanted to order English into line. In the eighteenth century it was totally discredited, thought of as the language of crime, poverty and ignorance, useful only as comic relief in the less distinguished dramas on the London stage.

In 1791, John Walker, in his
Critical Pronouncing Dictionary of the English Language,
pronounced on it very critically indeed. “Most [barbarous],” he wrote, “is the cockney speech of London.” He is very put out that the Cockneys have not learned from their betters in London; indeed they have made so little of this privileged proximity that their regional tongue is “a thousand times more offensive and disgusting” than differences in Cornwall, Lancashire and Yorkshire.

In
Piers Plowman
(1362) “cockeneys” means eggs, small and misshapen as if laid by a cock. In Chaucer, “cockney” is a mother's darling. By the early sixteenth century it meant people brought up in cities and ignorant of “real life.” By the early seventeenth century, this low value applied to only one region, “the Cockney of London” (1611) or the “Bow Bell Cockney” (1600) — noting that the true Cockney was one born within the sound of the Great Bell of Bow in the City of London. “Cockneys” soon became Bow Bell Cockneys with, it was said, no interest in anything not on their own patch of ground.

John Walker made them a target. He stated, with contempt, that Cockneys, “the lowest only,” pronounced words like “fists” and “posts” in two syllables — “fistiz” and “postiz.” The “v” did the service of the “w” and vice versa: “wine” and “veal” became “vine” and “weal.” The “h” was a culprit once again: no pronounced “h” in “while” meant it was indistinguishable from “wile”; and sinking the “h” was endemic — “'art” for “heart,” “ 'arm” for “harm.” “F” replaces “th” as in “firty” (for “thirty”), and “fahsn” (for “thousand”); and it's “bovver” not “bother,” “muvver” not “mother.” The charges pile up: “yewmour” for “humour,” “tewwim” for “tell him.” The grave crime of the double negative appears ineradicable. “There ain't nuffink te see.” Question tags litter the sentences: “That arright then?” “Ain't it?” which eventually becomes “Innit?”

Some writers seized on this with the enthusiasm of Mark Twain across the water. Henry Mayhew, for instance, in his
London Labour and the London Poor,
interviewed many of Walker's criminally tongued Cockneys and came out with phrases we now look on with nothing but perplexed pleasure. A tailor, for instance, who issues bills, tells him:

Mayhew is full of such meat. It is fortunate for Britain that London as well as claiming one of the greatest social historians in the mid nineteenth century also claimed one of England's finest writers — many think our greatest novelist. Charles Dickens was not the first to use speech as a sign of class but he did it so memorably! His genius in this area was to turn John Walker's discredited slum talk into literature. He could and did indicate illiteracy but did not withhold the generosity of his respect for and attention to his characters and their way of talking. An epigraph for Dickens' use of “lower class,” especially London and Cockney, speech can be found in
Our Mutual Friend:

That last sentence could stand as Dickens' credo. His phenomenal success — the penny edition of
Oliver Twist
sold 150,000 in three weeks — was helped by his experience as a journalist. He observed the London scene and perhaps his shorthand helped him catch its phrases. His mimicking skill honed in amateur dramatics meant that direct speech often carried characterisation and he loved the language of “the lowest classes.” He loved the speed and accuracy with which it “placed” people.

In
David Copperfield,
for instance, the linguistic scholar Lynda Mugglestone, who is a virtuoso on “h,” points out that Clara Peggotty's accent is conveyed by her dropping the letter “h”: this places her immediately as somebody inferior. “ ‘There's the sea; and the boats and ships; and the fishermen; and Am to play with' — Peggotty meant her nephew Ham — but she spoke of him as a morsel of English grammar.”

“H” dropping, according to Alexander Ellis in 1869, was “social suicide.” Yet Lynda Mugglestone picks out the most famous “h” dropper in all literature — Uriah Heep — and here Dickens uses the grammatical “error” as a way to alert us to the uncomfortable, hypocritical nature of the man. “ ‘I am well aware that I am the 'umblest person going,' said Uriah Heep modestly, ‘ . . . and my mother is likewise a very 'umble person. We live in a numble abode, Master Copperfield, but have much to be thankful for. My father's former calling was 'umble.' ”

Interestingly, again spotted by Lynda Mugglestone, when Heep reveals himself in his true arrogance, the “h,” the mark of superior class, the proof of social standing and authority, makes a miraculous recovery: “You had better not join that gang,” he says. “I have got some of you under the harrow.”

A lingering myth of English is that the rural poor and the largely rural aristocracy were brothers and sisters under the skin, and one piece of evidence is that the aristocrats drop the “g,” as in huntin', shootin' and fishin' as does, say, Mr. Peggotty in
David Copperfield:
“You're a-wonderin' what that's fur, sir . . . when I'm here at the hour as she's a comin' home, I puts the light in the winder.” What is overlooked in this cosy comparison is that the duke would recognise Peggotty's origins instantly and vice versa: accent would outclout the dropped “g.”

Dickens is excellent on phonetic spelling to give a clear indication of speech and so character. Mrs. Gamp says “minnit” not “minute,” “pizon” for “poison”: while Mrs. Crupp has “spazzums” not “spasms.” Sam Weller earned immortality with his “v”s and his “w”s. “And that was a wery partickler and uncommon circumstance vith me in those days.” But Dickens can be deliberately blind also when a potential genteel hero or heroine becomes involved: Kate Nickleby, a milliner, says “correctly” “oblige”; Mr. Peggotty used the old and by that time vulgar form “obleege.” But Kate is a gentleman's daughter and similarly Oliver Twist, though reared in a workhouse, also speaks like the son of a lady, which it transpires he is. Sentiment can outgun genius in Dickens any time he decides the story needs it; and also, he knew that his middle-class or aspiring middle-class readers still loved a lord and lady more dearly as the centre of the book than your common-or-garden creations, however lovingly portrayed. And he likes to confuse us: for despite largely holding to the view that speech portrays character, he will still have those of fine speech behaving badly and those of poor speech behaving nobly.

Dickens' mass of characters in their very number and variety express the massing of industry, population, achievement and invention in the nineteenth century. You can use him as a quarry for the speech of the time: equally he can be used to celebrate the fecundity of fictional invention as much as for his vocabulary. The streets and back yards are represented but so are the aspiring parlours and the would-be great houses. And for my generation and possibly others, Dickens was also known to be a writer who had swallowed a dictionary, your own copy of which had to be within reach on first encountering his “big words.”

It was also the time when slang refused to retreat any more, especially not in London, where there were many varieties, such as cant, flash, gibberish, patter pedlars French, slang lingo and St. Giles Greek. There was university slang from Oxford and Cambridge: “wooden spoon” arrived in the nineteenth century — the large spoon was lowered on to the shoulders of those at the bottom of the honours list as they were receiving their degrees; to “plough” (fail) a paper, to “floor” a paper (to answer every question), to “post” (to reject a candidate), to “spin” (to summon a candidate).