5 - Divided by a common language: North and South, 1750–1830

Summary

Chalk and cheese

In 1755, two years before Clive finally secured Bengal for the Crown and four years before Sir Edmund Halley perceived pattern in a comet, Dr Johnson published the ‘first’ English dictionary. It was a defining moment in every sense: not, of course, that it was simply a matter of words. The Dictionary of the English Language also contained an English Grammar together with a rudimentary History of the English Language and, taken together, they surely spoke of a wider intent. Johnson's project – which enjoyed significant patronage – was no less than an attempt to moderate a language and, through it, to establish a culture: a terminological pretext for a national biography (Winchester 1998). So, as soldiery and science reached out to place England in its widest context, lexicography reached in: to regulate Englishness and to calibrate its nature. Yet, even as Dr Johnson searched for this common key to a common history, obvious questions arose: by whom was this language spoken and (precisely) whose history did it express? Words and their pronunciation: standard, received, dialect, colloquial, foreign or archaic are indicative not of commonality, but of difference; of the specific not the generic; and once defined in their difference, different they remain: chalk is not cheese, just as sense is not sensibility [the latter is, of course, the title of Jane Austen's novel (1811). I use it precisely because linguistic sport of this kind was much enjoyed in the late-eighteenth century].