Language is the dress of thought: and as the noblest mien, or most graceful action, would be degraded and obscured by a garb appropriated to the gross employments of rustics or mechanics, so the most heroic sentiments will lose their efficacy, and the most splendid ideas will drop their magnificence, if they are conveyed by words used commonly upon low and trivial occasions, debased by vulgar mouths, and contaminated by inelegant applications.

-- Samuel Johnson, Life of Cowley

The metaphor "language is the dress of thought," which Johnson details so lovingly, dates back to antiquity. Quintilian, for one, observes that the "transparent and variegated style of some speakers, deprives their matter, when clothed in such a garb of words, of all force and spirit" (VIII.Pr.19). From classical times to the eighteenth century, the analogy is used as Johnson and Quintilian do: to address the fundamental disjunction between language and ideas and to insist that, given proper attention, words can properly convey thoughts. Pope's Essay on Criticism, for instance, explains that "Expression is the Dress of Thought, and still / Appears more decent as more suitable" (318-19). Pope's definition implicitly criticizes those who attend too exclusively to language, creating a dangerously skewed system of representation where signifieds have no necessary relation to signs. In such a world, it is impossible to distinguish virtue from vice, merit from meretriciousness. Thus when Pope scorns those individuals swayed by mere dress, he not only faults the vacuity of such superficial readings but exposes their intrinsic inconstancy: "Others for Language all their Care express, / And value Books, as Women Men, for Dress: / Their Praise is still--The Stile is excellent: / The Sense, they humbly take upon Content" (EoC 305-308).

Despite accusations of instability, however, style proved a popular category of analysis, periodically usurping language's place as the clother of ideas. Lord Chesterfield, for example, proposes that "Style is the dress of thoughts; and let them be ever so just, if your style is homely, coarse, and vulgar, they will appear to so much disadvantage, and be as ill received, as your person, though, ever so well proportioned, would, if dressed in rags, dirt, and tatters" (207). Where Pope deems those individuals who merely consider style to be intellectually and perhaps morally suspect, Chesterfield is more accepting. "It is not every understanding that can judge of matter," he states, "but every ear can and does judge, more or less, of style" (207). Chesterfield's formulation of style seems broader than Pope's, encompassing attire, demeanor, and manners in addition to language, but the two writers' concerns are similar. They see style as a valid category for analysis, a useful means of literary and social evaluation. For both, the choice, arrangement, and expression of words in print and conversation provides powerful insight into a writer's or speaker's character and intelligence.

Style becomes such a point of attention in the mid-eighteenth century for a number of related reasons including an increased interest in vernacular literacy, a growing group of professionals concerned to define a public presence, and a desire to formulate a national identity appropriate for Britain at home and abroad. This culture-wide conversation on style incorporates two powerful and related discourses, the desire for polite manners and the effort to standardize English. Both are essentially corrective actions, aimed at improving individuals and so society as a whole. Together they fabricate a form of what Pierre Bourdieu calls "cultural capital," a stock of accumulated habits and proficiencies ("habitus") that marks individuals as belonging to a particular group, in this case the middling ranks.

As a socially defining practice, style gains potency only because of the existence of two new public arenas, one a real and the other an imagined construction. Since the English translation in 1989 of Jürgen Habermas's Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit (1961) as The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, historians and critics of the eighteenth century have paid renewed attention to the period's relatively open gatherings which, Habermas argued, allowed citizens to participate politically in a way no longer supported by twentieth-century institutions. In the multiple public spheres of the eighteenth century--the coffeehouses, academic and professional societies, associations like the Freemasons, and many other gatherings designed to manage local governments, churches, and judicial systems--Habermas saw the potential for individuals to interact freely and so to define both their own identity and that of their society. If these defining acts occurred in public, however, they originated in private, in the intimate realm of the family. "The sphere of the public arose in the broader strata of the bourgeoisie as an expansion and at the same time completion of the intimate sphere of the conjugal family" (50). In what Habermas saw as a gloriously unified scheme, individuals were born and nurtured in the family, and with their identity formulated, entered the world to share themselves. His theories thus attempt both to distinguish and to join public and private and so provide a holistic vision of modern politics and subjectivity. His narrative of social and individual orders has proved widely compelling, attracting the scrutiny of a wide range of scholars, including Terry Eagleton, Rita Felski, Dena Goodman, Daniel Gordon, John Richetti, and James Van Horn Melton.

Recent work in eighteenth-century studies, however, has criticized Habermas for ignoring gender's informative role in naturalizing the public-private division and in constructing the male public subjectivity underlying his construction of ideal political activity. Feminists Nancy Armstrong, Michael McKeon, Kathryn Shevelow, and Cheryl Turner among others complicate Habermas' distinction of public and private by examining the role gender plays in constructing the two spheres. They propose a dialectical model of gender difference where masculinity and femininity are defined against each other, so that Habermas' independent male subject can emerge only through opposition to a dependent female subject. Consequently, no simple division between public and private can be established. If the developing ideology of separate spheres increasingly insists on men's public and women's private roles, these critics show that ostensibly private categories like domesticity are at least partially constructed in public areas open to both sexes. These include tourist attractions like health spas, the half-domestic gatherings of the salons, coteries, corresponding networks, as well as the much-ridiculed bluestocking clubs. The display here of what Armstrong calls "domestic womanhood" helped instantiate and perpetuate the correlative to female dependence, male self-governance. Negotiations of gendered identities were not restricted to actual public realms but occurred in imaginary ones as well, and the ever-changing literary realm, home to new faces like the novel and the weekly periodical, provided another place for consolidating purportedly innate feminine and masculine attributes.

For both Habermas and those in the eighteenth century, it was the relative openness of the real and fictional public spheres that sanctioned their existence. To enter a coffeehouse, one only had to pay a small fee, and other assemblies required some introduction but not the elaborate connections needed in a court-based society. Chesterfield writes, "You may possibly ask me, whether a man has it always in his power to get into the best company? and how?--I say, Yes, he has, by deserving it....Knowledge will introduce him, and good-breeding will endear him to the best companies" (102-3). If he saw society as relatively open, Chesterfield himself would be the first to insist that the genteel manners needed for polite interaction required both an informed education and the social experience needed to acquire civility. Still, such abilities could go a long way toward negating the powers of rank and providing a common ground upon which to interact. This common ground was a matter of pride, a sign that this group at least could renounce the over-attention to status and wealth that stifled aristocratic society and get on with more important pursuits. The mid-century publication The Student observes that "Nothing has more advanced the quick progress of knowledge than that harmony and benevolence, which have constantly united men in the pursuit of it. Hence societies have been formed, and academies instituted, with free admission to persons of all ranks and persuasions, where superior excellence intitles them to it" (January 31, 1750; 6-7).[1] Such "superior excellence" manifests itself in personal style: "The characteristic of a well-bred man," Chesterfield observes, "is to converse with his inferiors without insolence, and with his superiors with respect, and with ease" (123).

The precondition of this confident ease is a common means of representing oneself and one's ideas in language, a standard English to which all could refer. The quest for a standard dates back nine centuries, to the time of King Alfred, but only in the eighteenth century does our modern standard develop. It is established in an explosion of grammars, dictionaries, rhetorics, and philosophical works that appear after the mid-century, among them Robert Lowth's A Short Introduction to English Grammar which was published 35 times between 1762 and 1838. This outpouring dramatically illustrates the importance of correct English to an enlarging group with the time and impulse to refine their speech and writing. This group, what would become known as the middle class, was partially constituted through such commonly read books.[2] Thanks to a developing network of roads along which publishers could distribute their wares, books printed in the major publishing centers of London, Edinburgh, and Dublin could be read throughout the entire country. Indeed, Benedict Anderson argues convincingly, it is only through the development of such a print culture that a middle class was created: "Here was a class which, figuratively speaking, came into being as a class only in so many replications." Members of the middle class did not necessarily know each other but "did come to visualize in a general way the existence of thousands and thousands like themselves through print-language. For an illiterate bourgeoisie is scarcely imaginable" (74).

Because common literacies had such power--the power to create class-based as well as national unity--their formulation and preservation assumed paramount importance. The increasing number of publications concerned with syntax and diction illustrate both the rising value of the cultural good, correct English, and the heightening apprehensiveness about what the standard was and who could practice it. In Cultural Capital: the Problem of Literary Canon Formation, John Guillory reminds us that the "fact of increased upward mobility is at once the promise of 'bourgeois ideology'--that anyone can succeed--and its prime source of social anxiety" (95). Even while Chesterfield promises that merit will win social acceptance, a recognition that allows new individuals to enter polite society, those within that group worry about the new entrants and their potential to destroy that society's distinctive nature. The concern is a practical one: how is coherent identity possible if the group's membership is constantly changing? In such a case, social integrity can only be preserved through continual acts of self-definition, and specifically through a continuous process of distinction where middle-class habits and practices are opposed to those of the upper and lower ranks.

One of the major means by which this process of distinction occurs is through style, the encapsulation of particular values and interests in a cohesive performance. Necessarily, this performance constantly mutated. The Student notes that the "style that is in present use or fashion is followed by every body; but as the modes alter, and those who have invented them, upon their becoming common, invent new ones to distinguish themselves from the common, a perpetual change must ensue, and it thence happens, that every age has its particular modes" (October 12, 1750; 382). Every age also had its particular expressions. A writer for the Gray's Inn Journal (June 29, 1754) jokingly proposes that a "weekly Bill of Words would not be unentertaining to Men of Letters, and if there was a proper Register-Office for the Purpose, where their several Births and Burials might be recorded with Accuracy and Precision, I should imagine it would furnish no disagreeable History." Not only would such a list be entertaining, this writer considers, but also it would offer valuable insight into a word's heritage. He continues: if a "list should be furnished of the several Terms that are born, or that die away, with a short Account of the Life and Character of each Phrase, whether it be born of honest Parents in England or Ireland, what Company it kept, whether it be Whig or Tory, Popish or Protestant, it would in my Opinion be an agreeable Addition to this verbal History" (quoted in Tucker, 86). Although humourously expressed, the concern to determine a word's parentage, to delineate exactly the conditions of its birth and upbringing, reveals an uneasiness about language's fluidity. After all, to determine a word's exact origins is usually impracticable and to trace its path once in existence even more so, for unlike children words are born full-grown and independent. The metaphor provides an illusion of solidity nowhere present in reality.

Of course, words would provoke less wariness if their speakers' identities and intentions were always transparent, and this writer's concerns are probably less about the philosophical uncertainties of language use and more about the practical identification of language users. Such anxieties were only heightened by the increasingly conscious attention to manners practiced by the expanding middle class. Although Chesterfield was not a member of that group, his writings provided a model for polite conduct, a particularly worrisome development given that his own cultivated style was characterized by Boswell as "glossy duplicity" (76). If a veil of polite decorum could mask malice, then the openness so prized by a society predicated on recognizing worth rather than birth could prove its undoing.

As in Johnson's above formulation, the metaphor, "language is the dress of thought," is usually used to explore both the essential relation between words and ideas and the relationship between an individual's expression and his identity. Partly, the analogy appears frequently because of the increased interest in the relation of word to thing occasioned by Locke's recognition that language was merely a sign system. Two opposing points of view existed, one proclaiming that substance was independent of expression and the other that a change in expression in effect changed the substance. Representing the first view, James Harris reasons, "As every Sentiment must be exprest by Words; the Theory of Sentiment naturally leads to that of Diction. Indeed, the Connection between them is so intimate, that the same Sentiment, where the Diction differs, is as different in appearance, as the same person, drest like a Peasant, or drest like a Gentleman" (quoted in Tucker 184-5). The author of The Polite Student, however, firmly disagrees: "I think, 'tis as great an outrage against Common Sense to say, that the Manner of Expression alters the Subject, as that a Man becomes too distinct separate Souls in one individual Self, by appearing in an embroidered or plain coat" (38).

As the specific references to peasants and gentlemen indicate, the worry that language did not equal ideas had social as well as philosophical dimensions. If writers such as George Campbell grapple to provide a rational explanation for trusting that language did adequately represent ideas, many more are simply concerned to prevent social outsiders from becoming insiders. Some, like Lord Kames, insist that imitators are always recognizable: "Language may be considered as the dress of thought; and where the one is not suited to the other we are sensible of incongruity, in the same manner as where a judge is dressed like a fop, or a peasant like a man of quality" (238). Similarly, John Burton insists that mode of dress is intended to preserve a proper distinction amongst different ranks of society and that, "It would, therefore be absurd for the Tradesman to put on the habit of a Nobleman; or the Woman, whose fortune is small, to affect the appearance of a Lady of Rank" (153).

Absurd though it might be, tradesmen were aping the manners, dress and language of the ranks above with the result that identity was an unsteady proposition. The person one met at a coffeehouse who dressed and spoke like a gentleman might or might not be one. To a certain extent, that development was appropriate, for the middle class established its moral superiority to aristocratic corruption by insisting that its evaluations of people were based on the more ethical and accurate measure of personal merit as opposed to the arbitrary one of heritage. Thus, Pamela can possess equal and even superior moral capacities to her gentleborn employer, Mr. B. And as Pamela's rise to quality illustrates, such superiority should be rewarded. The ideal of improvement at the center of middle-class values meant individuals should better themselves and consequently, some social mobility had to be sanctioned. To prevent anarchy, however, social borders had to be delicately policed, and regulation based on style--the display of identity in language and conduct--proved an optimal means of doing so.

Advice on style abounds, appearing across a gamut of genres. Rhetorics, grammars, dictionaries, conduct books, and philosophical treatises all treat style, and their conclusions appear embodied in the period's fiction and poetry. This dissertation will consider a cross-section of such works and seek to identify how this discourse on style provides norms for both individual and national development. By advocating one style over others, this discourse helps to regulate the borders of middle-class society, allowing entrance to skilled practitioners of particular habits and barring others. It also defines who this society will be. Kenneth Cmiel observes that "Telling people to speak one way instead of another is a way of telling them to be a certain kind of person" (14). These individual practices in turn delineate a larger unity. In his Essay toward an English Grammar (1784), John Fell explains that "By the silent but general consent of a nation certain sounds and certain written signs, together with their inflections and combinations, come to be used as denoting certain ideas and their relations." National unity is preserved by the regulatory mechanisms of recognition and ridicule: Fell observes that the "man that chuses to deviate from the custom of his country in expressing his thoughts, is as ridiculous as though he were to walk the streets in a Spanish cloak, or a Roman toga" (xiii).

This discourse on style intersects with other discourses, ones on linguistic standardization and manners as well as on gender. My own work seeks to complement studies on language and literacies by John Barrell, Deborah Cameron, Tony Crowley, and James and Leslie Milroy in addition to analyses of British politeness by Lawrence Klein and Adam Potkay, along with the work of Dena Goodman and Dan Gordon on French sociability. In doing so, I hope to build on the scholarship on Nancy Armstrong, Michael McKeon, Laura Runge, Kathryn Shevelow, Cheryl Turner and others to broaden our understanding of the crucial role that the system of gender difference plays in the formation of modern subjectivity. At the same time that common stylistic desiderata establish a class- and nation-based unity, stylistic distinctions between genders help to regulate access to social authority.

In my first chapter, "The Importance of Speaking English," I begin with a historical overview of English education and the impulses for studying the vernacular, and consider how educational ideals are influenced by a discourse on civic humanism that provided a foundation for eighteenth-century polite manners. The next three chapters consider three sets of stylistic traits central to the nation's vision of itself. The second chapter, "Manly Strength and Feminine Delicacy," examines the way masculine and feminine style becomes polarized by essentialist gendered expectations and explores the way such constructions help divide society into public and private realms. Manly strength exercised in responsible ways sanctions male participation in public activities like politics and trade, while women's frailty, embodied in fashionable speech and dress, restricts them to the protected area of home. This division of public and private also appears in discussions of chapter three's topic, "Perspicuity: Envisioning English Simplicity," where the three components of perspicuity--propriety, purity, and precision--are conceptualized in such as way as to inhibit female perspicuity. As a result, while men's perspicuous speech confirms their right to assume public roles, women's delicate character and flawed rational abilities circumscribe them from perspicuous and hence authoritative public expression. Finally, the last chapter, "A Natural and National Ease," examines how a class- and nation-based sense of authority and right is created by an ethos of ease, where grace of delivery indicates an inner confidence so assured that it points not just to a rational claim to authority but to a natural one. The seamless and seemingly impenetrable quality of this poised performance makes it a particularly powerful tool for policing social habits and values.

In the end, the call for certain stylistic traits--strength, delicacy, perspicuity, and ease--helps to instantiate both an internal character and an external representation, both an essence and a performance, appropriate for British middle-class men and women. This discourse on style was part of a conversation on Britain as a developing civilization, a conversation which in turn responds to both domestic and foreign pressures to establish the nation as worthy of the economic and political gains being made during the same time period. If a national signature was crucial within Britain, it was even more so without, and the distinctive British style proved a chief means of exerting authority abroad.

Works Cited

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Barrell, John. English Literature in History, 1730-1780: An Equal, Wide Survey. London: Hutchinson, 1983.

Boswell, James. The Life of Samuel Johnson. NY: Modern Library, 1965.

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