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(Reynolds and Woolley 1911:xvii)
Such division was extremely clear when it came to cultural differences,
particularly those of language. As Galsworthy, president of the English
Society, put it, there is perhaps no greater divide of society than the
differences in viva-voce expression (Galsworthy 1924:8). Shaw, making
the same point, declared: it is impossible for an Englishman to open his
mouth without making some other Englishman despise him (Shaw
1941:5). And Sweet, building upon such sentiments, argues for universal
speech training on the grounds of social unity:
When a firm control of pronunciation has thus been acquired,
provincialisms and vulgarisms will at last be entirely eliminated and
some of the most important barriers between the different classes of
society will thus be abolished.
(Sweet 1877:196)
This was an argument which was eagerly taken up by the Newbolt report
itself, and was again proposed as a way of negating the particularly
dangerous class divisions which had appeared by 1921 in Britain. The
report asserts:
Two causes, both accidental and conventional rather than national, at
present distinguish and divide one class from another in England. The
first of these is a marked difference in their modes of speech. If the
teaching of the language were properly provided for, the difference
between educated and uneducated speech, which at present causes so
Science and silence 171
much prejudice and difficulty of intercourse on both sides, would
gradually disappear.
(Newbolt 1921:22 3)
The notion that there was such a simple bipartite division was a common
one; Graham, for example, rather blithely argues that there will always be
a refined and vulgar mode of speech (Graham 1869:159). It was,
however, an idea which could not be supported by the weight of the
material; for, rather than a single clear division, there were in fact many
divisions at the level of speech, which reflected those at the level of social
class. There was heteroglossia in the spoken language, but it was a system
of difference which was highly ordered according to particular social
assumptions. To return to Bourdieu s account of habitus, what we discover
in nineteenth-century England is the consequences of the linguistic warfare
which began in the eighteenth century. The public sphere had become
rigidly stratified and ordered in terms of both social identity and, as part
of that process, language.
We have noted earlier how standard spoken English became identified
as the prestige dialect, the class language of the educated and powerful. It
had become part of the process of self-identification of that class. The
rules of the game had, by the late nineteenth century, been set out clearly,
as the following extract from Besant demonstrates. It is an account of a
meeting in a street:
She stopped him and offered him her hand. He did not take it, but
made as if he would take off his hat. This habit, as has been already
remarked, is an indestructible proof of good breeding. Another sign is
the handling of the knife and fork. A third is the pronunciation of the
English language.
(Besant 1894:187)
One of the burgeoning group of novelists describing life amongst the
London poor makes a similar point when describing the precarious social
position of one of his characters: And ah, how little separates her in
essentials from the smartest and the best bred! the cockney aspirate, the
cockney vowel, a tendency to eat jam with a knife (Whiteing undated:
247). Language specifically had become a key factor in the logic of this
practice: all are not gentlemen by birth , Alford claimed, but they can
make themselves so by careful attention to their language. For it is in
this , he argues, in manner of speech and style , that we find the sure
mark of good taste and good breeding (Alford 1864:281). Taste and
breeding were of course central concepts in the construction of this
particular social identity, along with culture ; for, as Arnold asserted,
Culture says: Consider these people then, their way of life, their habits,
their manners, the very tones of their voice; look at them attentively;
172 Science and silence
observe the literature they read, the things which give them pleasure,
the words which come out of their mouths.
(Arnold 1965:97)
It was possible then, given the right financial circumstances, to set about
fashioning an identity to accompany them; and this is of course the central
theme of Pygmalion. But it was a dangerous task and one which demanded
rigid training. For, as Young pointed out in his account of the Victorian
scene,
The world is very evil. An unguarded look, a word, a gesture, a picture
or novel, might plant a seed of corruption in the most innocent heart
and the same word or gesture betray a lingering affinity with the class
below.
(Young 1936:2)
The self-made men , a significant and revealing phrase, were the Victorian
period s version of the character portrayed by Withers in the eighteenth
century as Alderman Leatherhead. They made themselves both financially
and culturally, but they were often rather more successful at the former
rather than the latter. This class, the vulgar rich , was indeed often caught
out by the unguarded word or gesture. Sweet remarked of the sugar
merchants of Liverpool, the core of the mercantile class, that when they
began to speak fine , they eagerly adopted the thin Cockney a in ask,
which many of their descendants keep, I believe, to the present day
long after this mincing pronunciation has been discarded in the
London dialect.
(Sweet 1890:vii)
The situation was so precarious that Kington-Oliphant proposed that
many a needy scholar might turn an honest penny by offering himself
as an instructor of the vulgar rich in pronunciation of the fatal letter.
Our public schools are often railed against as teaching but little; still it
is something that they enforce the right use of the h.
(Kington-Oliphant 1873:332 3)
The fatal letter was enough to destroy a carefully constructed identity;
the aspirate was the means by which social aspiration could be
extinguished:
The Cockney dialect seems very ugly to an educated Englishman or
woman because he and still more she lives in perpetual terror of being
Science and silence 173
taken for a Cockney, and a perpetual struggle to preserve that h which
has now been lost in most of the local dialects of England, both North
and South.
(Sweet 1890:vi vii)
The divisions between those who were born to their elevated social
position, and those who achieved it through financial success, was clear. It
was quite simply a matter of language and history. As one of the leading
scientific linguists of early twentieth-century Britain put it when writing of
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