| This dissertation examines several key relationships developing between English writers and philologists in the nineteenth century as they sought to address deep social and political divisions through the field of language. By looking at conflicts between competing models of language, this study demonstrates that central figures of language study in England, such as F. D. Maurice, R. C. Trench, and James Murray, developed their theories in direct response to pressing social and political divisions made especially vivid by the controversies surrounding the century's series of Reform bills. At the same time, writers like Tennyson, Browning, Ruskin and Pater responded to the increased diversity of a dramatically expanding reading public by forging a more representative vocabulary, frequently looking to the work of English philologists for inspiration. With the publication of his Diversions of Purley in 1798, Radical pamphleteer and speculative etymologist John Horne Tooke raised the political stakes of English language study, while at the same time influencing many of the theories of language presented in Wordsworth's influential Preface. Largely in response to what conservative critics perceived as a moral relativism in Tooke's materialist approach to the study of language, figures like F. D. Maurice and R. C. Trench in the 1840's and 50's sought to challenge Tooke's legacy by infusing the study of language with a moral component, finding in the history of words a “moral barometer” of the nation. In portraying the evolution of the study of languages as a relatively unified, pan-European discourse, cultural historians have often obscured the competing and often divergent voices surrounding the study of languages in the nineteenth century. This dissertation demonstrates that there is no clear line dividing theorists of language from these poets and social critics who responded to their work, for Tooke, Maurice, Trench, Murray and many of the other figures associated with the New English Philology were themselves highly conscious prose stylists who conveyed their polemic in writing that embodies the many competing claims of the reading publics they addressed. |
