Abstract
Early in the 1750s, Scotsmen Adam Smith and John Stevenson were lecturing on rhetoric and belles lettres, soon to be followed in this endeavor by the likes of Hugh Blair and Robert Watson. Smith’s and Blair’s profound effect on English letters is commonplace. These lectures were also well attended by a number of intellectuals who eventually emigrated to America. When Blair’s lectures were published in 1783, they were avidly consumed on both sides of the Atlantic. Having attended these lectures in Scotland, John Witherspoon taught Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres at what would become Princeton University; and many other American colleges followed suit. Thus, it is altogether possible that the whole idea that English was a national language and the basis for a national culture began in Scotland.1
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Notes
Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse, The Imaginary Puritan: Literature, Intellectual Labor, and the Origins of Personal Life (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1992), 47–50. For an extended discussion of the term “revolution” in eighteenth-and nineteenth-century historical writing
see R.C. Richardson, The Debate on the English Revolution Revisited (London: Routledge, 1988), 65–86.
David Simpson, The Politics of American English, 1776–1850 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1986), 46–7. Throughout this essay, I am indebted to Simpson’s groundbreaking study of the language debate in America.
James Carrol, The American Criterion of the English Language (New London: Samuel Green, 1795; rpt. Menston, Yorkshire: Scolar Press, 1970), iii.
Noah Webster, Dissertations on the English Language (Boston: Isaiah Thomas, 1789; rpt. Menston, Yorkshire: Scolar Press, 1967), 20. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as D.
Simpson discusses Webster’s oscillation between contending language models (Politics of American English, 52–90); see also Vincent P. Bynack, “Noah Webster and the Idea of a National Culture: The Pathologies of Episte-mology,” Journal of the History of Ideas 95 (1984): 99–114;
Dennis E. Baron, Grammar and Good Taste: Reforming the American Language (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1982), 41–67, especially 53–6, and 132–9.
Richard M. Rollins has discussed Webster’s evolving ideas on language and authority in “Words as Social Control: Noah Webster and the Creation of The American Dictionary,” American Quarterly 28 (1976): 415–30.
Joel Barlow, The Vision of Columbus: A Poem in Nine Books (Hartford: Hudson and Goodwin, 1787), 211.
Oliver Goldsmith, The Collected Works of Oliver Goldsmith, ed. Arthur Friedman, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), 4:287, 11. 1–4. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as CW.
Hugh Henry Brackenridge, Modern Chivalry; or, The Adventures of Captain John Farrago, and Teague O’Regan, His Servant, ed. Claude M. Newlin (1792–1805; rpt. New York: Hafner, 1968), 3. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as MC.
Thomas Gustafson, Representative Words: Politics, Literature, and the American Language 1776–1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992), 21–60, discusses the debate in America about the relationship between representative government and representation in language.
For accounts of the debates in England, in addition to those cited, I have drawn on Hans Aarsleff, The Study of Language in England, 1780–1860 (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1983)
and Murray Cohen, Sensible Words: Linguistic Practice in England, 1640–1785 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1977).
John Barrell, English Literature in History, 1730–80: An Equal, Wide Survey (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983), 179–82, quote on 179.
Samuel Johnson, Samuel Johnson, ed. Donald Greene (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1984), 11. 6–8. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as SJ.
Samuel Johnson, Lives of the English Poets, ed. Arthur Waugh, 2 vols. (1779–81; rpt. London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1961), 2:382–3.
Tobias Smollett, The Adventures of Roderick Random, ed. Paul-Gabriel Bouce (1748; rpt. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1981), 1.
William Wordsworth, William Wordsworth, ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1984), 591. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as WW.
Samuel Richardson, Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded (1740–2; rpt. New York: W.W. Norton, 1958), 245. For a discussion of Richardson’s creation of Pamela’s interiority
see Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987), 108–34.
Samuel Richardson, Clarissa; or, The History of a Young Lady, ed. Angus Ross (1747–8; rpt. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1985), 250. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as C.
For a discussion of the publication history of the editions of Richardson popular in America, see Leonard Tennenhouse, “The Americanization of Clarissa,” Yale Journal of Criticism 11 (1998): 177–96.
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Tennenhouse, L. (2002). A Language for the Nation: A Transatlantic Problematic. In: Verhoeven, W.M. (eds) Revolutionary Histories. Romanticism in Perspective: Texts, Cultures, Histories. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230597594_5
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