<i>Language and Revolution in Burke, Wollstonecraft, Paine and Godwin</i> (review)

Abstract

LANGUAGE AND REVOLUTION IN BURKE, WOLLSTONECRAFT, PAINE AND GODWIN. By Jane Hodson. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007. Pp. ix + 216. ISBN 978 0 7546 5403 2. £50.00. Jane Hodson's methodology consists of a survey of fifty writers of the 1790s on language followed by a series of comparative studies. Burke's Reflections is compared first with his Thoughts Occasioned (for the former's comparative looseness of organisation) and then with his antagonists, Wollstonecraft being represented by the Vindication of the Rights of Men. In each case a conspectus of contemporary and modern reactions to style and language is followed by detailed comparisons, isolating linguistic features associated with the characteristics most mentioned, and an account of the writers' philosophy of language. Hodson uses a software package to count such things as conjunctions, exclamation-marks, terms and collocations in comparable stretches of each text. More contextual examinations and judgements are invariably necessary, especially when counting tropes, but this provides some objective basis for correcting common critical estimates or making them more precise in terms of linguistic usage. Hodson finds fault in the customary comparisons of Paine and Burke, modern studies such as those by James Boulton and Olivia Smith seeming to follow contemporary reactions. Rights of Man actually exceeds Reflections in numbers of rhetorical tropes, Paine's vaunted 'plainness' being established mostly by his own attacks on Burke's ornamental style. There is, however, a 'plainness' in his metaphors, usually derived from everyday experience. His most extravagant flights, including the 'dying bird' passage, are negatively descriptive of Burke's own extravagance. Burke's exceptionally wide range of metaphor, much criticised by contemporaries, often appeals to the specialised experience of an educated elite. Hodson herself might not appreciate the full range of allusions, reading an extended metaphor for the inherited French constitution as one trope referring only to a ruined castle when the legal terms 'waste' and 'dilapidation' refer to inherited estates and ecclesiastical livings. Echoing Coleridge, she demonstrates how Burke uses metaphor positively to construct his thought, not merely illustrate it. Chemistry and trade, she observes, provide only negative tropes, consonant with the atomistic and instrumental thinking he attacks. She here neglects Burke's use of a trade metaphor in the positive fashion of Paine when he insists that members of the 'partnership' of society have unequal rights according to their investments. Neither can be accused of vulgarity according to contemporary standards, whatever their opponents charged, and Paine, with his attacks on vague definitions and showy rhetoric, is not Olivia Smith's vernacular revolutionary but entirely in tune with current linguistic opinions (and prejudices). …