Eighteenth-Century English: The ‘Cinderella’ of English Historical Linguistics?

Abstract

Abstract The scholarly neglect of the Later Modern English (LNE) period has led Charles Jones (1989: 279) to describe the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as ‘the Cinderellas of English historical linguistic study”. A glance at the available textbooks for undergraduate courses alone would appear to confirm Jones’s judgement: Görlach (1988: 211) refers to the study of Early Modern English variation as ‘the Cinderella of English historical linguistics’ and notes ‘the neglect of the Early Modern English period’, but his own (1991) textbook, along with other useful works such as Ronberg (1992), have done much to remedy the situation. Where LNE is concerned, no such general textbook exists: Partridge (1969) pays much more attention to the Tudor than to the Augustan English of his title and, whilst Richard Bailey (1996) has provided a long-needed guide to the English of the nineteenth century, there is, at the time of writing, still not a single textbook suitable for an undergraduate course on eighteenth-century English.