Everyday Words and the Character of Prose in Nineteenth-Century Britain by Jonathan Farina

Abstract

Reviewed by: Everyday Words and the Character of Prose in Nineteenth-Century Britain by Jonathan Farina Michael Hollington Jonathan Farina. Everyday Words and the Character of Prose in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2017. Pp. xxii + 286. £75. ISBN 9781107181632 Alighting on the phrase "a curate's egg" to characterize my overall reaction to this book, I decided (in the hope of gaining precision in the use of it) to satisfy a longstanding curiosity about its history, and so went online. What I found there was instructive: the phrase originates in an 1895 George du Maurier cartoon in Punch, which depicts a timid curate at table with a bishop. The latter regrets that the curate seems to have been given a bad egg. Anxious to please, the curate replies "'Oh no, my Lord, I assure you! Parts of it are excellent!'" From this, I learnt that the sense in which I want to use the phrase here (like that in which it is mostly used nowadays) is not that of the original joke. Parts of Farina's book are indeed excellent–unlike the curate's egg–but I found it less than thoroughly satisfactory as a whole. Dickens is a constant presence, as one would expect of a book devoted to "everyday words" in the nineteenth century, but to my mind the best chapter in the book is principally about Jane Austen. It pays attention to a cluster of words in the novels–"attentions," "particular" and "general"–from an epistemological point of view, one that distinguishes Farina's perspective throughout the book. Providing us with a valuable sketch of the progress of pragmatism in the eighteenth century (constituting a worthwhile contribution to the intellectual history of that period in relation to the rise of the novel), Farina offers acute commentary on Jane Austen's fine calibrations of the "particular" and the "general," going beyond Byron's Alexander "Suwarrow, who but saw things in the gross–/ Being much too gross to see them in detail" (Don Juan VII, 77) to achieve a razor edge of balance between these binaries. He convincingly proposes this as one source of her universal appeal as a novelist. Everything is right in this chapter–the choice of relatively unambiguous "everyday words" (at least, through their pairing in opposition), the firm grounding in scholarship, the close reading of the relevant texts. Alas, this [End Page 185] is not everywhere the case. The very first chapter, for instance, entitled "Darwin's View from Todgers's: 'A decided turn' for Character and Common Words," fails to convince. It seeks to establish a connection between the repeated use of the word "turn" in the enumeration of Todgers's lodgers–"a gentleman of a sporting turn," "of a debating turn," or of "a smoking turn," etc.–and Darwin's overtly quite different use of the word in expressions like "may well turn the nicely-balanced scale in the struggle of life," or "let us now turn to the nectar-feeding insects"–and, I believe, fails. Although Farina partly redeems himself at the epistemological level again–the comparison between Darwin and Dickens as classifiers and taxonomists of different species within a genus is apposite, for example–there is much vagueness and imprecision in this chapter. Paying attention to "everyday words" seems at times to imply a rejection of analytic close reading, and, concomitantly, something like tone deafness to Dickensian humor. The comparison he makes between the Todgers bachelors and Odysseus the "man of many turns" can surely only make sense as mock-epic, but he solemnly proclaims that they achieve the same "versatility and variety collectively." Nowhere does he seem to investigate the humorous primary meaning and connotation of Dickens's "turn" here–that these are wannabes who dabble in separate favorite hobby-horses (thoroughly traditional in its descent from Sterne etc.) and are very remote from Darwin in every respect except the purely formal resemblance between collections of species. A much better chapter on Dickens, belonging for the most part amongst the good parts of the egg, concerns the conditional analogy "as if." I have long looked forward to reading an in-depth discussion of this quintessential Dickensian phrase, and...