The little words”: The Close Reading of Really Small Things

Abstract

As rake-hero Robert Lovelace says in Richardson's Clarissa (1747-48): have often thought, that little words in republic of letters, like little folks in a nation, are most (Richardson 4:206). small to which my title refers are little, nameless, unremembered acts of prepositions and punctuation in works of Samuel Richardson, Ann Radcliffe, and Jane Austen.1 18th century witnessed significant changes in and typography, and it is worth paying as close attention to early novelists' use of really small things as one does to poets'. Up through 18th century, prepositions were sometimes treated as subclasses of particles, sometimes as their own part of speech, sometimes as cases, and for one 17th century grammarian, as a kind of noun.2 In general preposition was overlooked, hustled around, dismissed, and generally belittled or ignored. author of Compleat Guide to English Tongue (1708) says of adverbs, conjunctions, and prepositions: shall speak of three Parts of Speech under one Head, because I han't [sic] much to say of any of (77). seventh edition of Chambers's Cyclopoedia (1751) notes loftily: F. Buffier does not allow preposition to be a part of speech (Chambers 2:416). As Ian Michael explains in English Grammatical Categories and Tradition to 1800, The function of preposition was traditionally 'to be set before' another word; grammarian's eye was fastened not on preposition itself but on word it governed (454). But in second half of 18th century, so-called lesser parts of speech--along with various typographical forms--began to earn a wider respect for their agility in forming new combinations of rhetorical and visual patterns. Ian Michael analyzes rise of English grammar from 16th through 18th centuries, counting thirty-two in 17th century, and 231 in 18th--most of which appeared in second half of century. In 1765, James Elphinston referred to numberless elegancies of which every particular preposition must in its various senses and substitutions be susceptible (qtd. in Lundskaer-Nielsen 225). In 1795, Anne Fisher (the first woman to publish an English grammar) pointed out that composite prepositions give a peculiar Beauty, Fluency, and Elegance to our Language, by Help of which we do all that Greeks and Latins did (95n). But real powers of preposition were most beautifully articulated by William Chauncey Fowler in his 1850 English Grammar: Prepositions, although a secondary and less important part of speech, deserve more attention than is usually paid to them in our common grammars. They exhibit in a striking manner analogy of external or sensible world with internal or intellectual. [... They] express not substance, but form of our ideas [... As] mind supposes a close resemblance between physical and intellectual worlds, so prepositions denoting external relations are also employed to express internal. [...] These relations arrange themselves in antitheses, forming a beautiful system; as, In and out, only absolute relation of space. (Fowler 323) In all language grammars, nouns are defined first because A Noun absolute is name of a thing (Butler 33). Begin with 1708 Compleat Guide to English Tongue intones rather biblically (29). It concludes with the Use of PREPOSITIONS (80). 1740 edition of Thomas Dyche's New General English Dictionary reduces usual eight parts of to four, and calls these four Parts by received Names of a Noun Substantive, a Noun Adjective, a Verb, and an Article (A4v). This recalls School of Languages in Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726), working busily to shorten Discourse by cutting Polysyllables into one, and leaving out Verbs and Participles; because in reality all things imaginable are but Nouns (157). …