Radicalism and Linguistic Theory: Horne Tooke on Samuel Pegge

Abstract

In addition to being a radical political journalist and pamphleteer, twice prosecuted by the British government for treason,John Horne Tooke was by far the best-known philologist in the English-speaking world for more than fifty years after the French Revolution. The theory of language and the etymological 'proofs' advanced in support of it in his book, EHEA HTEPOENTA or the Diversions ofPurley, were to appeal not merely to radicals of such various hues as Godwin, Wordsworth, Erasmus Darwin, Bentham, Hazlitt, Peacock, Cobbett, Mackintosh, Brougham, and James Mill, but also to such distinctly un-revolutionary members of the establishment as Archbishop Trench. In America his theories were taken up by Ralph Waldo Emerson and by Noah Webster who was only one of a number of lexicographers fired by the idea of creating a true etymological dictionary on Tookeian principles. But for someone as widely-known and controversial as Tooke, there has been curiously little agreement among subsequent critics as to the relationship between his philology and his politics. Marilyn Butler, for instance, introduces Horne Tooke in a recent anthology on the French Revolution debate as follows: