Eighteenth-Century Linguistic Tastes as Exhibited in Sheridan's Edition of Swift

Abstract

1 N 1784 Thomas Sheridan, Lexicographer, orthoepist, and teacher of 1 oratory, brought out a 'revised and corrected' edition of the works of Jonathan Swift in seventeen volumes quarto.1 This edition purported to be authoritative and all-inclusive, and served as the basis of a later revision by John Nichols (1801). What makes it of particular interest to students of the English language is the wealth of comment it contains on Swifts linguistic usages, and the light it consequently throws on the progress of linguistic change since the beginning of the century. This interest in Swift's language is not new in the literature of the period. A critical examination of the language peculiarities of the writers of the Augustan age was one aspect of the general movement for regularity and standardization which characterized the last half of the century and which ultimately led to the adoption of rules of usage in vocabulary, pronunciation, spelling, and syntax. Of all the great figures of the period, however, whose peculiarities of style attracted the attention of writers on language, Addison, Pope, and Swift-particularly the last-named-were the most important. Their works were subjected to the closest scrutiny and regarded as almost inexhaustible mines of information on points of grammar and style.2 The criticism to which they were exposed was not always or entirel,y friendly. Bishop Lowth in his Short Introduction to English Grammar (1762) devotes several pages of notes in fine print to an examination of Swift's 'errors' in matters of language, concentrating especially on Swift's misuse of certain prepositions. Hugh Blair in his very popular Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783), dwells at length upon the 'solecisms' of Swift's style, using as his text-with a peculiar sense of appropriateness-Swift's essay on the necessity for correcting and improving the English language. Later grammarians and