Prescriptive Politeness: How Eighteenth-Century British and Dutch Periodicals Influenced Public Perceptions of Prescriptive Language Movements

Abstract

In this project, I argue that the eighteenth-century periodical is an early form of popular culture. Periodical critics envision their advice as a foundational part of a rising and evolving public because they view themselves as mediators of taste and politeness. Through this position and the popularity of their essays, periodicals both explicitly and implicitly shape perceptions of media, culture, behavior, and language. The periodical as imagined by Addison and Steele dispenses advice for an audience more general than it is academic, though the text presumes a level of cultural and textual literacy necessary to participate in the emerging public spaces of the early eighteenth century. Foremost for this project are the ways in which periodical essays use conversation as a medium to prescribe conventions of politeness and sociability, the ways they deploy fashion metaphors simultaneously to dismiss cultural and linguistic changes while still upholding the power of the critic to shape what is fashionable, and the ways they project a nationalistic desire to protect language and culture from foreign influence.Yet while scholars have analyzed the renown and influence of early periodicals, few critics have surveyed the relationship between the popularity of these texts and their depictions of the English language. I respond to this gap by examining the role that periodical essays played in the representation and understanding of English during this period. Periodicals draw together an emerging eighteenth-century popular culture with critiques and concerns about the state of language. Unlike traditional grammars, whose genre narrows their scope and audience, the periodical essay makes public conversations about language part of the national culture itself, akin to fashion, literature, music, and socializing. Consequently, I posit that periodical commentary on language marks the first time that language itself becomes an object of study for a popular, broad audience in that language becomes recognizable as its own part of popular culture. In emphasizing the popularity of the genre, I contend that periodicals both overtly and covertly influence language change throughout the period and that the cultural attitudes that gain traction from the popular press influence how individuals imagine themselves as part of a literate public.