A Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue

Summary

Headnote

Published 1712; copy text 1712a (see Textual Account). The title from the title page runs as follows: ‘A PROPOSAL FOR Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining THE English Tongue; IN A LETTER To the Most Honourable ROBERT[,] Earl of Oxford and Mortimer, LordHigh Treasurer OF GREAT BRITAIN.’

The view of the state of the language outlined in the Proposal, and the instances brought in evidence, overlap to a considerable degree with Tatler 230. The Proposal is Swift's most formal public statement on contemporary language use and its relation to the national culture under Queen Anne, advocating ‘a Society’ to be set up under Lord Oxford's patronage to determine questions of usage. Swift envisages an academy comparable to those that had served similar purposes in France and Italy; but although he uses the term elsewhere, it does not occur in the Proposal itself. Cf. the widerranging project, in the Preface to the Tale, for a ‘large Academy … capable of containing nine thousand seven hundred forty and three Persons; which by modest Computation is reckoned to be pretty near the current Number of Wits in this Island’, and the author's appeal in Section IV to ‘the worthy Members of the several Academies abroad, especially those of France and Italy’. Cf. also the Grand Academy of Lagado. Addison had in Spectator 135 (4 August 1711) mentioned the need for ‘something like an Academy’ in an essay approving and amplifying points made by Swift in Tatler 230.

Voltaire, who would meet Swift in 1727, fifteen years after the publication of the Proposal, would in his Letters Concerning the English Nation (1733) compare Swift's projected academy with the Académie çaise, to the latter's disadvantage. Voltaire's account is strikingly detailed, though not necessarily accurate, as to the individuals involved, giving prominence to Bolingbroke rather than to Oxford, and writing as if Dryden, who had died in 1700, had still been alive at the time of Swift's Proposal:

The celebrated Dean Swift form’d a design, in the latter End of the late Queen's Reign, to found an Academy for the English Tongue upon the Model of that of the French.