Language most shews a man: Speak, that I may see thee. It springs out of the most retired and inmost parts of us, and is the image of the parent of it, the mind. No glass renders a man’s form or likeness so true as his speech.Footnote 1
In papers posthumously published in 1641, Ben Jonson likens language to a mirror. “Speak, that I may see thee,” he commands, for in his metaphor, language is capable of externalizing the internal contours of the hidden mind. By focusing on how language discloses a person’s unique mental “form or likeness,” Jonson prefigures his eighteenth-century intellectual descendants who, agreeing that language was an essential part of self-presentation, fixated on the things that language revealed about a speaker’s social conditions. As figures like Thomas Sheridan, John Walker, and others claimed in the second half of the eighteenth century, language was a public spectacle that immediately identified one’s class origins, vocational potential, and social standing, not to mention one’s national, regional, and ethnic derivation. Spoken language, they argued, was a profoundly evocative social signifier, one that articulated a great deal about a person irrespective of what the speaker was actually saying. Dismayed by nonstandard language’s ability to forestall occupational and social advancement, these writers popularized the discipline of elocution, which was framed as an educational regiment that would allow speakers to hide linguistic traits wrongly associated with ignorance, ill-breeding, and even criminality.Footnote 2
By teaching students to conceal nonstandard linguistic qualities, elocutionists like Sheridan and Walker altered public language practices in unprecedented ways. Not only did they help codify new rules of “proper” speech, they joined others in emphasizing that elocution was a teachable skill rather than an inborn attribute. John Mason’s An Essay on Elocution (1748) bluntly states his pedagogic objectives in terms that evoke education’s ability to facilitate social mobility and self-determination: “The Design of this Essay is to shew I. What a bad Pronunciation is, and how to avoid it. II. What a good Pronunciation is, and how to attain it.”Footnote 3 As the discipline of elocution developed in the decades after Mason’s text, it came to represent much more than “good” pronunciation. When later writers used the term, elocution referred to the performative coordination of pronunciation, diction, voice, and gesture—all of which elements could be broken into component parts, systematized, and disseminated. Elocution became a learnable code akin to proper dress, manners, and social comportment. Most importantly, it was a code students could use to manage how others saw them. People throughout the British empire could be trained to recognize the shortcomings of their native dialects, set courses of corrective action, and thus surmount pernicious shibboleths obstructing their social and vocational trajectories. In this way, the cultural capital that proper English speech indexed became at least nominally accessible; so too did the idea of imperial reconciliation through language. In short, whereas Jonson referred to language as a fixed trait that “springs out of the most retired and inmost parts of us,” late eighteenth-century elocutionists sold books, private lessons, and public lectures on the basis of the idea that language was a temporary and improvable condition.Footnote 4 Rather than disclosing one’s authentic inner self, language could be shaped to formulate the self one wanted to be. This article first describes these performative and aspirational dimensions of elocutionary education, including some surprising pedagogical tactics circulated by Sheridan and Walker. The article then suggests ways in which the theatrics of elocutionary education were picked up and exploited by actual theatrical performers in very different public spaces. This gradual transferal of elocution principles from earnest educational forums into comical and sometimes cynical stage farces serves as a way to track changing perceptions of anglophone diversity as it interacted with evolving ideas about British unity.
The history of the elocution movement is fairly well known, particularly as it pertains to rhetorical theory and the development of English literary studies in British universities.Footnote 5 In recent decades, the best research on elocution has reevaluated the movement within postcolonial and sociolinguistic frameworks.Footnote 6 The popularity of elocution has been shown to register economic obligations spawned by English hegemony within the imperial state.Footnote 7 Approached in these ways, elocution has appeared as one of several cultural discourses that compelled anglophones outside England to adopt metropolitan codes of behavior. These readings have been tremendously insightful, especially when it comes to fleshing out the complex linguistic dynamics that suffused British society. They have characterized elocution as a middle-class and largely peripheral counterpoint to entrenched sociopolitical hierarchies.Footnote 8 More importantly, critics have emphasized that using learned semiotic systems to inhabit aspirational identities reconfigured and even partially dismantled these same hierarchies. This article builds on these readings by confirming that the elocution movement was but one facet of widespread cultural fascination with the linguistic collisions of a population that featured new forms of economic and geographical mobility.Footnote 9 Beyond helping students qualify for upwardly mobile careers, elocution allowed them to climb out from under the pervasive stereotypes associated with dialects, ethnolects, sociolects, and other nonstandard forms. This was tremendously important because provincial and colonial subjects trying to make it in the metropole faced numerous frustrations. For example, as newspaper classifieds, advertisements for hunted criminals, and other textual ephemera show, linguistic characteristics were regularly used to profile and disparage anglophones from diverse geographic, ethnic, and class backgrounds.Footnote 10 Indeed, part of elocution’s popularity rested on a promise: it was possible to escape potentially damning social stereotypes via the “authentic” reproduction of linguistic habits associated with celebrated institutions—the court, bar, and university in particular.
Elocution circulated physical and mnemonic techniques for convincingly imitating a confected version of “proper” metropolitan English. Suddenly, valorized speech forms were learnable, rehearsable, and reproducible. One could enact a certain public identity if only one attained the skills. When elocution’s goals are characterized in this way—as imitation, reproduction, and enactment—we see that the discipline presents a series of unexamined yet stimulating questions about eighteenth-century linguistic performance in general: What did it mean to inhabit another subject position with purpose or intention? What techniques did one use to convey authenticity? And furthermore, what codes or stereotypes suggested that any given linguistic performance would be considered genuine or true-to-life? In an attempt to answer these and other questions, this article posits a productive relationship between elocution and contemporaneous developments in the theater, that preeminent discursive space in which authentically performing a character’s language habits could make or break one’s career.Footnote 11 As the article proceeds, it then traces elocution’s contributions to the emergence of speech as entertaining spectacle, even while acknowledging the very different goals of elocution and the theater—one of which helped people make their linguistic idiosyncrasies invisible, and the other of which transformed performed linguistic quirks into entertainment. Witnessing the discursive similarities between elocutionary education and dialect performance onstage—not to mention the theater’s ironic appropriations of specific elocutionary strategies—is to witness the emergence of a general interest in linguistic variety and cultural authenticity that would become essential to Romantic aesthetics during the early nineteenth century.
In the same way that historians have demonstrated elocution’s powerful hold over the public imagination, literary critics like Michael Ragussis have provocatively catalogued the ubiquity of performed dialects on the late eighteenth-century stage. Playwrights used diverse language forms to toy with viewers’ linguistic preconceptions. They included dialect as comedic element, essential plot point, deceptive smokescreen, or hilarious afterpiece. In many respects, the stage became a space for reveling in social inequities, the same inequities that elocutionists naively believed they could cure. Considered together, the divergence of elocutionary and theatrical objectives gives the impression of an inconsistency between sociopolitical and artistic regimes. Though dialect speakers who could afford it sought out elocutionary correction with great urgency, audiences lusted for performed linguistic difference onstage. That is to say that even while dialect speakers rushed toward elocution as a way into circles of sociopolitical power, those very same circles entertained themselves nightly with proliferating simulations of marginalized dialects and accents on both legitimate and illegitimate stages.Footnote 12 Complicating matters even further, it is likely that at some level elocutionary and theatrical audiences partially overlapped. After all, attending either spectacle required disposable income and leisure time. In terms of performance, the relationship between elocution as it was taught and stage accents as they were enacted is palpable. Like actors, students of elocution relied on proliferating stereotypes of how such and such a person sounded and moved in order to make their imitations seem authentic, or, to borrow the period’s most commonly occurring evaluative term, “unaffected.” Similarly, students and actors both approached language as a physical spectacle that was as much about bodily composure as it was sonic perfection. As I will suggest, because the theater and elocution were equally performative genres, these two discourses overlap and cannibalize one another in intricate ways. Their relationship is sometimes symbiotic, sometimes parasitic, but always mutually constitutive.
Contemporary assessments of these cultural phenomena evince a related type of complementarity. Studying provincial theater, for instance, Jane Moody has read the performance of dialect as a collective yearning for the vicarious experience of imperial citizenship.Footnote 13 Largely separated from theatrical studies, historians of language have seen elocution as a way to produce imperial unity through the erasure of linguistic difference. The first claim suggests performed dialect produced a feeling of imperial cohesion while the second suggests dialect’s invisibility did the same. Both might quite possibly be true, for each correctly registers the existence of complex linguistic codes as paradigms for organizing the messiness of lived language during a dynamic period. Whether sitting in a theater or an elocution auditorium, audiences experienced language performances in accordance with shared (though rarely accurate) cultural assumptions of how specific groups spoke English. Similarly, actors drew from a deep well of linguistic stereotypes just as elocutionists derived models of propriety from textual representations of how the privileged used language. Today, of course, the simultaneously visual and auditory codes they drew from are no longer easily accessible. Outside of elocution and the theater, they are largely unrecorded and untranscribed.Footnote 14 In order to penetrate such fugitive linguistic conventions and appreciate their full social and aesthetic importance, scholars can try to recover the combination of physical and sonic signs that unfolded in any performance of different British types. Doing so helps fill out our understanding of the late eighteenth century’s sociopolitical transformations while also providing new information about artistic developments associated with Romanticism. For instance, examining how language was performed sheds new light on phenomena like the “rustic” poetic idioms of Robert Burns and William Wordsworth and others as well as Maria Edgeworth and Walter Scott’s orthographies for transcribing Hiberno-English and Scots speech. Leading toward these and other aesthetic developments, this article’s discussions of Sheridan and Walker analyzes in detail the physical and textual methods for illustrating the gap between English’s “rustic” and standard forms. The final case study reveals these same methods in Charles Mathews’s ethnic “monopolylogue,” a popular genre of linguistic performance that is as startlingly dynamic as it is overlooked in academic studies of the era’s theatrical developments.
Speak Like an Illiterate: Thomas Sheridan and the Birth of the Elocutionary Spectacle
Any discussion of elocutionary and theatrical performances of language must begin with Thomas Sheridan. Sheridan was elocution’s pedagogical and promotional center and had deep roots in the theater. After failing as a stage manager, he reinvented himself as a successful lecturer and author by teaching students how marked speech would derail their chances for rising in polite society. Quite simply, bad elocution revealed one’s relative poverty, marginalization, and lack of inheritance, whether real (i.e., property) or abstract (i.e., cultural). As a solution, he offered proper elocutionary training to those who wished convincingly to counterfeit their linguistic backgrounds so as to make themselves appear courtly, worthy, and refined. In this fashion, one would avoid social discredit, since, in his words, “All other dialects, are sure marks, either of a provincial, rustic, pedantic, or mechanic education; and therefore have some degree of disgrace annexed to them.”Footnote 15 At its best, impeccable English elocution promised to facilitate the ascent to society’s upper levels. Notwithstanding these idyllic promises, erecting a widespread spoken standard was neither easy nor always appreciated.Footnote 16 Often provincials, “especially such natives of England as have any faults of this kind, who think they naturally pronounce their mother tongue right,” interpreted elocutionary aid as grave insult. While today we might see their reaction as both justified and just, Sheridan did not. For him, one crucial step in elocutionary training was accepting one’s own debasement, a moment wherein the speaker acknowledged deviations from polite norms and asserted a will to tame them. Sheridan writes, “The difficulties to those who endeavour to cure themselves of a provincial or vicious pronunciation are chiefly three. 1st, The want of knowing exactly where the fault lies. 2dly, Want of method in removing it, and of due application. 3dly, Want of consciousness of their defects in this point.”Footnote 17 Linguistic self-auditing became the first step in Sheridan’s course of lessons.
For those outside England who sought closer cultural and economic ties with the metropole, including Irish Anglicans like Sheridan and Anglo-Irish landowners like Maria Edgeworth, for instance, dialect’s existence seemed to imperil British unity while also reflecting poorly on the educational institutions of one’s nation, whether Ireland, Scotland, or Wales. In a 1757 Dublin lecture, Sheridan argued passionately for the establishment of Irish schools that would teach English as effectively as in England. He believed doing so would end absenteeism, stanch the slow bleed of talent from Ireland to England, and once and for all reverse the gradual “depopulation of the most excellent university of Dublin.”Footnote 18 In his opinion, young men from good families should no longer have to cross the Irish Sea to unlearn their “mother tongues.”Footnote 19 With elocution, they could do so just as effectively at home.Footnote 20 As Sheridan stated in his lectures, “An uniformity of pronunciation throughout Scotland, Wales, and Ireland … might in a great measure contribute to destroy those odious distinctions between subjects of the same king, and members of the same community, which are ever attended with ill consequences, and which are chiefly kept alive by difference of pronunciation, and dialects.”Footnote 21 In short, elocution could cure many crippling social diseases that afflicted the British colonial spaces most perniciously. If administered in proper doses, elocution would allow subjects born in Ireland, Wales, and Scotland to compete with Englishmen while also positively representing their own national institutions. As a result, the whole empire would improve.Footnote 22
Elocution gained a following because it promised what was nearly impossible: to disabuse people of their earliest and most elemental traits; to efface habits that had accrued over decades; and to allow the impersonation—and indeed improvisation—of more reputable linguistic characteristics. Between 1756 and 1761, Sheridan lectured in Oxford, Cambridge, London, Edinburgh, Bath, Bristol, and Belfast.Footnote 23 Whereas in most of these places he was an invited visitor, his London lectures continued with regularity through May of 1759.Footnote 24 They were reprised again in 1763 after successful trips to Scotland, Northern Ireland, and western England. Similarly, his Bath lectures were repeated in 1763 and 1770.Footnote 25 While no exact transcripts of these lectures exist, it can be assumed that much of the best of what Sheridan taught during his first five-year circuit was collected and published in 1762 as A Course of Lectures on Elocution.
Recovering the experience of attending one of these lectures and witnessing Sheridan’s caricatures requires relying on advertising material from London papers, on reports given by attendees, and on the paratextual material included in the printed edition of the lecture series. According to the advertisements, the London lectures took place at Mr. Cock’s Auction Room at Spring Gardens, a place Walter Sydney Sichel refers to as the Pewterers’ Hall.Footnote 26 For one series, ads placed in the London Chronicle and Public Advertiser noted that the course unfolded over four separate meetings held on Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Saturday. Admission to all four lectures in the week cost one guinea, a price that also entitled the viewer to one copy of the forthcoming print version of the series.Footnote 27 As Henry Hitchings calculates, “It would have cost a young clerk a quarter of his weekly salary to go one of Sheridan’s courses, and it was possible for there to be 1,600 students enrolled at any one time.”Footnote 28 This means that the course was accessible to a rising urban professional of limited means, but only if one were willing to give up a sizeable portion of his salary.
The attendance list coupled with Sheridan’s commentary does offer some revealing information about the lectures’ audience. Without active solicitation, Sheridan claims that he attracted “not less than seventeen hundred” spectators, but his attendance list records far fewer.Footnote 29 Only a smattering of noble names appear, identifiable by their customary pomp, as in “Right Hon. Lord Spenser” or “Hon. Lord Auchinlech,” who ordered “2 Copies” of Sheridan’s text. The largest discernible occupational groups were clergymen and doctors, whose various academic degrees followed the listing of their names. One member of the former group was “The Rev. Mr. Boote, A.M., Chaplain to her R. H. the Princess Amelia.” By far the most frequently occurring title is “Esquire,” an ambiguous signal of social worth probably used by members of the gentry lacking a hereditary title but still considering themselves worthy of an elevated degree of respect.Footnote 30 Barristers used this title, but others did too. Scanning the list, one also finds a very occasional “Capt.” or “Sir,” “Mrs.” and “Miss” scattered among the names at a rate of roughly one in ten, more frequently than one might suppose. Finally, certain names announce their geographical origins, as in “Mrs. Wauchop of Niddrie” (outside of Edinburgh), or their ethnicity, as in the case of “Isaac Mendes Belisario” (1719–91), who was a prominent rabbi at the Bevis Marks Synagogue in London. This name would have likely signified to an eighteenth-century reader Belisario’s connection to the small but very influential Sephardic community of London even though his religious title goes unmentioned. To Sheridan’s chagrin, the vast majority of the attendees were members of the urban middle class. In response, he castigates the nobility while attempting to apologize for their absence to readers: “Some may be surprised to find, so few names, of persons adorned with titles … Voluntary patronage amongst the great, has long been out of fashion.”Footnote 31
Surrounded by a relatively affluent, bourgeois audience—one that would have overlapped with regular attendees at the patent theaters—Sheridan held forth with his honed formula for elocutionary success.Footnote 32 Reading his opening comments offers the perfect place to start recharacterizing elocutionary lessons as language performance techniques. His first important point is perhaps surprising. All students, Sheridan noted, should speak as though illiterate, for “all men who are wholly illiterate, are in the same circumstances with regard to language, as they who are born blind.”Footnote 33 A dedicated student of elocution would have to reconfigure his relationship to spoken language, foregoing the eye and whetting the ear. In other words, neither the blind man nor the illiterate man has yet been inconvenienced by the artificiality of written signs, and therefore his body is the most appropriate model. The illiterate man, like the blind man, “who has no other ideas of language, but what he has obtained thro’ his ear, always uses a variety of tones in speaking, such as are customary in his country; according to the sense of the words, or the emotions of his mind.”Footnote 34 By contrast, the literate man speaks in an unendurable, machinelike monotone. Hence, the student would have to visualize a preliterate state, sloughing off inhibitions produced by written language in order to recapture the human voice’s immediacy. Sheridan’s commandment to forget writing and simulate the conditions of blindness or illiteracy reaches a fever pitch at one moment: “Let him forget that he ever learned to read; at least, let him wholly forget his reading tones. Let him speak entirely from his feelings; and they will find much truer signs to manifest themselves by, than he could find for them.”Footnote 35 Writing, so threatening in other eighteenth-century contexts for its capacity to spread dissent and moral degeneration, was suspicious to elocutionists because of the way it made natural men seem artificial.Footnote 36
However, an elocution student could not forget everything. Specifically, a student needed to recall great texts of the English “old canon” because these too provided clues as to how proper language should be embodied.Footnote 37 Notwithstanding the paradox inherent in reading while illiterate, the basic import was that students should strive to recover the prehistoric human authenticity that antedated civilization, its books, and its life-squelching artifice. Once recovered, this vitality would be synthesized with the spiritual elevation accessible through specific texts. Buried beneath the words of the Bible, Shakespeare, and Milton was a primordial vocal force, Sheridan suggested, and it was the student’s job to wipe blank his cluttered slate and then reinvigorate the poetic textual power that rote literacy had obscured. Just as numerous Romantic poets did a few decades later, elocutionary authors imbued the linguistic habits of common, untutored, and rural people with cultural authenticity. Recovering that authenticity—which was revealed by specific physical demeanors, emotional transportation, and emphatic directness—and combining it with a studied respect for the highest pillars of British literary heritage was the ideal of many elocutionary practices. Keeping in mind the poetic revolution that was sparked by Burns in the late 1780s, stoked by Baillie, Bloomfield, Coleridge, Southey, and Wordsworth, and nurtured by a variety of poets well into the 1820s and beyond, we see that through elocution eighteenth-century students were urged to cull literary lessons from the urbane and emotional ones from the rustic, taking the best of what both groups had to offer, while jettisoning each one’s easily caricatured excesses.
Perhaps the most important aspect of Sheridan’s method, however, was the way he actively performed examples of correct and incorrect speech. By regularly juxtaposing good and bad speech, and by associating each example with identifiable social groups, Sheridan’s lectures helped stabilize and elaborate the very code he was trying to disarm. Of course, the theater did something quite similar by offering a representational space where performed dialect could be paired with clothing, names, and skin color to reinforce regional, provincial, and ethnic stereotypes. While elocution did not use literal costuming, it did use vocal and verbal ventriloquism. To enact proper Englishness for those audience members with Irish-tinted speech, for instance, Sheridan first performed and then corrected aberrant Irish speech patterns: “The words patron, matron, are pronounced by them patron, matron, the “a” being sounded as it is in father; fever, sea, please are pronounced like favour, say, plays.”Footnote 38 Reading this quotation on paper cannot quite do justice to the information that would have been communicated by oral recitation.Footnote 39 The first pair “patron, matron” would have been pronounced with “English” vowels and cadences and the second with “Irish” ones, even though Sheridan’s text employs the same orthography. What contemporary linguistics would phrase non-normatively as a different realization of vowels, Sheridan puts normatively through enacted binary pairs: “fever”/“favor,” “sea”/“say,” and “please”/“plays.” Viewing these binary pairs on the page produces an instructive textual analogue of what an audience might have experienced and does so in a way that maligns Irish-English speech by making it appear to contain confusingly dangerous homophonies.
Taking Cockney dialect to task, Sheridan inhabited a very different linguistic identity. “Veal” would never be “weal” and “vinegar” never “winegar,” he proclaimed, if only Cockney populations could be shaken into recognizing and correcting their foolish mistakes. A reading of his Lectures suggests that Sheridan would have aped Cockney dialect one minute and performed Standard English acrolect the next, confirming the impoliteness of the first and the propriety of the second. In particular, his discussion of the Cockney failure to aspirate consonantal “h” attests to a wide performative range. In Sheridan’s scheme, the “h” carried weighty cultural importance; omitting it “would deprive our tongue of one great fund of force and expression.” Without the ejaculation of breath that characterized the correct pronunciation of “h,” “triumph” and “exultation” would wither. The audience witnessed both versions of an exemplary sentence: “Hail ye high ministers of Heav’n! how happy we are in hearing these your heavenly tydings!” just prior to the ventriloquizing of “Ail ye igh ministers of eaven! ow appy are we in earing these your eavenly tydings!”Footnote 40 Performing these speeches, Sheridan mimicked—and by that mimicry reinforced—the Cockney accent he very actively condemned. Listeners witnessed a proper linguistic performance while learning the dialectal features of various British groups. Even if they failed to absorb the lecture’s didactic goals, they still must have taken away an understanding of language’s performativity and regional diversity.
Moments of thespian self-consciousness allow us to glean how some of Sheridan’s strategies played out. “If I pronounce the word ‘ar-ti-cu-la-tion,’ in that manner without distinguishing any syllable from the rest, it is no longer a word, but a succession of syllables; but when I pronounce it articulation, laying an accent on the syllable ‘lá,’ that it is which constitutes a word.”Footnote 41 Imaging Sheridan at the podium reading this lecture aloud and exaggeratedly stressing the significant sonic differences helps understand his contrapuntal performance. The same is true concerning Sheridan’s recurrent juxtapositions of bad and good forms—“réfractory and refráctory,” Scottish “goold” and English “gold.” In his lessons, the correct example always followed an erroneous one, and the erroneous one unfailingly indexed a definite national group. One of these lectures’ accomplishments, then, would have been staging explicitly located examples of linguistic diversity in front of audiences who would have carried those examples out of the hall and into their experiences of everyday life. Even if Sheridan failed to bring about the harmonious reconciliatory future he aimed for, his lessons shed light on an important late eighteenth-century cultural trend: the stylized impersonation of national or ethnic types in front of paying audiences.
After crystallizing the differences between standard and nonstandard varieties of English, Sheridan’s lectures then suggested making and studying lists of words in which defective pronunciations might slip out. By this method of keen observation and regimented memorization the student would achieve spoken respectability. Specifically calling on the theater for an exemplar, Sheridan advised the audience, “Let anyone who has seen Mr. Garrick perform, consider how much he was indebted to the language of his eyes, and there will be no occasion to say more, to give him an idea of the extent and power of expression to which that language may be brought.”Footnote 42 For the elocutionary audience, Garrick required neither introduction nor authorizing commentary. His oratorical artifice was understood to be unmatched and eminently imitable. Moreover, the reference to Garrick’s eyes solidified Sheridan’s ongoing suggestion that linguistic impersonation was a coded physical affair. In addition to study, it required correct bearing, breathing, emphasis, accent, and pronunciation. Sheridan enumerated the most important gains effective elocution brings when all these elements were combined: they were social, vocational, and national.
John Walker: Elocution in the Body, Elocution in the Text
After Sheridan, the most frequently cited elocutionist is John Walker. Like Sheridan’s, Walker’s career began in the theater and only later turned toward education, a field in which he gained a wide following of dedicated students.Footnote 43 Walker’s mechanical school of elocution, as it has sometimes been called, shared Sheridan’s goal of managing problems arising from the use of dialect in public but differed in its specific coding of performative rules. In his written texts, Walker concocted a proto-scientific orthography of sound that was meant to teach elocution by making propriety visible in the written word. He used diacritics to mark emphasis and pitch, and vertical lines to stress meaningful pauses. Doing so, he was able to build a graphic typology of British accents: Irish-English looked like “èxercise and tèmperance strèngthen the constitution”; Scotch-English like “éxercise and témperance strénghten the constitution”; and Standard English like “èxercise and temperance strengthen the constitution.”Footnote 44 Walker’s presumption was that Irish-English and Scotch-English were inappropriate for business or social life. As proof his text found the graphical means to demonstrate their aberrance in comparison to Standard English. Moreover, even though the sentence Walker chose here pertains literally to a physical constitution, its three varying pronunciations conveniently echoed the diversity subsumed under the British imperial “constitution.” By measuring them, describing them, and imitating them on the page, he did the work of transmitting the dialects’ stable properties just as Sheridan had a decade before and in different terms.
Beyond his orthographical innovations, Walker’s coded approach to the speaking body is what makes him truly stand out. In his work, he stressed the reproducibility of physical and gestural positions even more meticulously than Sheridan. Like Sheridan, however, his books derived from decades of elocutionary lecturing and private lesson giving. In The Elements of Elocution (1781), The Melody of Speaking Delineated: or, Elocution Taught Like Music (1787), and The Academic Speaker (1796), Walker confirmed elocution’s debt to performance theory. Not only were musical education techniques the best way of teaching speech’s modulations, tried and tested acting methods were supremely applicable to nontheatrical life. In his discussions of proper vocal volume, for instance, actors provided the best examples: “This is exactly the manner in which actors speak the speeches that are spoken aside. The low tone conveys the idea of speaking to a person near us, and the loud tone enables us to convey this idea to a distance.”Footnote 45 When discussing proper vocal stress, Walker called upon the same performative field of reference, “On these principles we may account for the emphasis which a good actor always places on the first part of the antithesis.”Footnote 46 Walker’s use of theatrical comparisons supported his overriding premise. Proper language depended on a teachable social script. Extending Sheridan’s critique of the speaking body, Walker added to elocution a manual that defined precise, context-appropriate combinations of emotional and physical forms.
The Elements of Elocution’s section on gesture made the case that emotions drove the “Countenance, Tone of Voice, and Gesture of the Body.”Footnote 47 To argue this point, Walker stitched together a stunning chain of cultural linkages: proper elocution requires the theater, which requires poetry, which circles back to elocution, and so on. First, borrowing from James Burgh’s Art of Speaking (1761), he isolated fifty-six human passions and glossed them using poetic and theatrical excerpts from Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Gray, and other old canon authors. Next, he described the only movements and postures fit to accompany those passions by drawing explicitly on theatrical texts like Aaron Hill’s Essay on the Art of Acting (1753). Finally, he applied these theatrical passions back to the public sphere, arguing for their validity in the theater of public life. The Academic Speaker continued this project, but this time for “youth at school,” affixing an extended essay on the art of gesture (replete with engraved diagrams of bodily postures) alongside parliamentary speeches and venerable excerpts from the literary canon.Footnote 48 Walker’s textual presentation of elocution was decidedly synthetic. Theater, literature, politics, and music are inseparably intertwined and must appear so in any teaching text.
To understand the cultural syncretism at work, some examples are in order. In Walker’s catalogue of passions, for example, “Malice is an habitual malevolence long continued. … This hateful disposition sets the jaws, or gnashes the teeth, sends blasting flashes from the eyes, stretches the mouth horizontally, clinches both the fists, and bends the elbows in a straining manner to the body.”Footnote 49 The physicality of this description is astounding. Walker guided the reader step-by-step in the physical contortions necessary for communicating malice in combination with words. Most interestingly, he defined all the passions via literary excerpts. Students were encouraged to read the excerpts while practicing the physical positions. For instance, he drew the quintessential stage example of maliciousness from The Merchant of Venice, Act 1, Scene III, lines 33–39, in which Shylock announces, “How like a fawning publican he looks! / I hate him for he is a Christian; / … / If I can catch him once upon the hip, / I will feed fat the ancient grudge I bear him.” In the cultural complex that Walker wanted to erect, literature, passions, theater, and social existence were all interrelated. A reader wanting to understand malice would have to know the salient scenes in Shakespeare and the way those scenes were commonly performed onstage. Similarly, envy was a mixture of “joy, sorrow, and hatred,” related to malice but more subdued in tone and gesture.Footnote 50 Milton’s depiction of an envious Satan in Paradise Lost, book IV, line 502–11, became the original manifestation of envy while also providing a literary excerpt for practicing its enunciation. Again using Milton’s Satan as his model, Walker wrote, “Sneer is ironical approbation: where with a voice and countenance of mirth somewhat exaggerated, we can cast the severest censures; it is hypocritical mirth and good humour, and differs from the real by the fly, arch, satirical tone of voice, look, and gesture, that accompany it.”Footnote 51 A speaker seeking to cast a malicious or envious sneer would have to call upon memories of The Merchant of Venice and Paradise Lost to supply the requisite flourishes of physical authenticity.
In Walker’s symphony of entangled semiotic behaviors, the theatrical became natural. Rather than generating affectation, rehearsal produced naturalness. In addition, his theatrical examples were all high art, accessible to some but intractably inaccessible to many others. High literary precursors calibrated the public expression of emotions, and so “Calling to mind, therefore, such passages of our own lives as are similar to those we read or speak of, will, if I am not mistaken, considerably assist us in gaining that fervor and warmth of expression, which by a certain sympathy, is sure to affect those who hear us.”Footnote 52 To be natural in public meant to know how properly to execute physical signifiers rooted in textual models. For example, inhabiting modesty meant one “bends the body forward, has a placid, downcast countenance, levels the eyes to the breast, if not to the feet of the superior character: the voice is low, the tone submissive, and the words few.”Footnote 53 Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure and Much Ado About Nothing offered the most appropriate examples. With the equation of natural and theatrical, Walker updated Sheridan’s suggestion that simulating illiteracy was the best way to achieve physical naturalness. Instead of the illiterate man who needed only to marry proper pronunciation with his own artless way of being in the world, Walker’s archetype is the hyperliterate actor, the player who knew culture, performance history, and audience expectations.
Elocutionary Lectures, Elocutionary Entertainments
Advertisements in late eighteenth-century periodicals show elocution’s wider cultural reverberations. This section attempts to chart some of those reverberations, and as such it includes a wide array of elocutionary spectacles, some more closely related than others, but all of which share an interest in the performative value of linguistic difference. Examining the many advertisements for elocutionary performance makes one thing clear: the serious elocutionary principles propounded by Sheridan and Walker gradually became source material for entertainers, an overlap that is most evident when advertisements for elocution lessons appear on the same pages as advertisements for dialect performances scheduled to take place on both legitimate and illegitimate stages.
Before turning to specific examples of the theater’s repurposing of elocutionary forms, it is instructive to consider how lesser-known elocutionists were advertising their services. Combing through the classifieds, it becomes clear that between roughly 1750 and 1820, three discrete venues offered social spaces similar in tone and content to Sheridan’s lecture halls. All of them had prices and entry requirements pertaining to status. First, and most famously, large public lectures assembled audiences for moderate fees. As he was the most famous elocutionist of the time, Sheridan’s 1-guinea price was quite high and his lessons duly serious. Elsewhere, lessons cost less and seem to have been conducted more informally. “The public are respectfully informed, that the suite of rooms, No. 53, Great Marlborough Street … will be opened on Saturday the 18th under the title of The University of Rational Amusements, one part of which will be appropriated for Elocution, Oratory, and Exercise … Admittance 2 shillings 6 pence,” one school announced.Footnote 54 John Walker also regularly advertised for elocutionary training by subscription at an early stage of his career. His modest goal was a quorum of twelve gentlemen who, for 3 guineas each, would attend twelve lectures and be furnished with a book of practice readings.Footnote 55 One of his advertisements reads: “Mr. Walker, Teacher of Elocution, proposes opening by subscription a Colloquial Lecture on the Art of Reading and Speaking in which the principles of elocution will be explained.”Footnote 56 A group calling itself the New Westminster Forum, or School for Elocution, billed itself as an environment in which elocution would be taught via guided debate on charged topics like, “Do Ladies going to India, for the purpose of obtaining Husbands, deviate from their characteristic delicacy?”Footnote 57 The School for Elocution charged only 6 pence per attendee. Presumably, all of these debates would have contained pedagogical moments or interruptions during which the teacher would have interjected, modeled proper and improper pronunciation in succession, and by this means guided students toward performative accuracy.
In advertisements for private lessons, another important elocutionary training venue, a student’s elevated social status was not always required but was generally desired. According to one of his advertisements, John Rice, author of A Plan for Instructing Pupils in the Art of Elocution (1779), taught elocution six hours per week “at his house in Hanover Street” to young men envisioning careers in the pulpit, at the bar, or in the senate.Footnote 58 He did not openly state his price but instructed would-be pupils to inquire at his residence. Rice’s concentration on “gentleman” suggests sons of the wealthy, though aspirational gentlemen may have been welcome. For other elocution teachers, only the wealthiest needed apply. A very enterprising tutor who could be located at “Joe’s Coffee House, Matre Court, near the Temple,” advertised himself to an extremely restricted clientele when he wrote, “During a Part, or the Remainder of the summer, a Gentleman will be glad to retire into the country, or to the Continent, with a Nobleman or Gentleman desirous of perfecting himself in the principles and practices of the art of eloquence.”Footnote 59 This particular advertiser sought a position in a noble family, but much more frequently elocution teachers like Mr. Mortimer, “perceptor for the english language, modern history, and other Branches of the belles lettres,” made house calls and held regular lessons at a fixed West End address.
The unnamed author of another advertisement explicitly welcomed both native and foreign students provided they possessed a high social rank: “A Clergyman, of the Established Church, … proposes to dedicate some hours of the day, to instruct therein such Ladies and Gentlemen (Natives or Foreigners) as are desirous of reading, speaking, or reciting it [English], in a just, natural, and graceful manner.”Footnote 60 Dr. Digby was an aspiring elocution teacher in the post-Sheridan heyday of the 1770s and 1780s. After first mentioning his reputation for elevating students from boyhood to maturity, Digby promised that “to call forth their affections, united to an engaging affability of manners, as well as to enable them to attain an energetic, graceful, harmonious pronunciation, every human effort will be exerted.”Footnote 61 Further down the page, Digby’s ad stresses his welcoming acceptance of foreign students, though as in many other ads, it is unclear how the term “foreign” is intended. “Foreign” could refer to European travelers stopping in London, or, it could possibly signify people from Scotland, Wales, Ireland, or the British colonies who traveled to London with hopes of rising through the ranks. Regarding gender, some ads were painstakingly specific about who would be admitted. One of the more remarkable in this respect is an ad from 1780, in which an “Anonymous Lady” qualified her course of elocution lectures in the following terms: “As these Lectures are established principally for the instruction of Young Ladies, in order to remove every objection that parental prudence or female delicacy might suggest, no Gentleman will be admitted above the age of thirteen.”Footnote 62 Unlike the many advertisements that paired elocutionary training events with coeducational courtship activities like dancing and structured conversation, the Anonymous Lady limited her audience by offering a learning space specifically for women. Taken collectively, these advertisements bear witness to demand for venues in which one could simulate colloquy with perceived betters in order to prepare for actually experiencing such a colloquy in future social and career pursuits. Speech acts became but so many aspirational behaviors of performed public life.
At the very same time that these teachers were offering their services, classified ads of the period reveal a series of very different advertisements that satirized the burgeoning elocution industry’s assumptions and methods. Beginning in the mid-1770s and continuing into the 1780s and 1790s, sporadic ads regularly appeared for diverse spectacles best described under the umbrella terms “dialect entertainments” or “elocutionary entertainments.” In faux lectures, farces, dialogues, and exhibitions of mimicry, performers attempted to capture and caricature the breadth of the anglophone speaking public by displaying their imitative talents. None of these spectacles occurred in licensed theaters, but judging by the recurrence of certain advertisements, it seems likely they had some success drawing in audiences. These performances featured extensive use of dialect as a versatile and entertaining trope. Furthermore, they rooted themselves in known elocutionary forms. Unevenly and with lacunae, they chart reappropriations of elocution’s popular image, an image that was viciously caricatured by more than one performer. More than just this, however, they register the importance of language difference in public conversations about the British Imperial state’s attempt to build unity out of diversity.
In an ad for George Saville Carey’s 1775 smorgasbord of linguistic impersonations, for instance, a patterned response to elocution is visible:
A Lecture on Mimicry. … In which will be introduced a Dialogue between Small-cole and Fiddle-stick; Billy Bustle, Jerry Dowlas and Patent; with the Characters of Juno in her Cups, Momus in his Mugs, and a Scene between a Buck of the first Head and Lord Ogleby; Jerry Sneak in Richard the Third, Shylock in Macbeth, and the Warwickshire Lads. To conclude with Billy Buckram and Aristophanes. Aristophanes will introduce Nicky Nightingale, or the Whistler of the Woods (as he is shewn at the Theatre Royal) in the Character of a Crow. There will be a Concern between each Part; and the Room will be kept warm. … The above Lecture will be continued Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays until farther Notice.Footnote 63
Mixing comical commentary on the contemporary theater scene with cartoonish imitations of contemporary actors and types, Carey’s show, which is preserved in a version published in 1776, illuminates the uproarious ways language intersected with popular performance.Footnote 64 According to the printed version, for instance, in one scene Carey impersonated Macklin’s famous version of Shylock. Instead of lines from The Merchant of Venice, though, Carey’s Macklin spoke Macbeth’s lines from the beginning of Act 1, Scene VII, a ruse that played upon Macklin’s notorious Ulster accent. In another moment, Aristophanes (code for Samuel Foote) conversed with Billy Buckram (code for actor Thomas Weston). Buckram played servile to Aristophanes’ petulant artistic visions for a new harlequinade, spoke in a debased dialect, and suffered repeated abuses because of it. In the absurdist “Lecture on Lectures” appended to the end of the printed version, Carey created a short pantomime in which an ambitious shoemaker named Lancelot Last witnesses a lecture and decides to remake himself as a “Schollard.” He tests out numerous scholarly topics, eventually settling on “Oratory” because, significantly, he sees himself equally as qualified as any other lecturer on the topic. At this point Carey’s satire comes thick and fast, relying on linguistic mishaps and Cockney tongue gaffes to supply the punch lines, “And what are words?—I answer, letters put together, but there can be no word without a wowel;—because why; why do you see, because they can’t.”Footnote 65 Through linguistic feats and contortions, Carey created a spectacle as strange as it was popular. The elocution movement came out looking foolish and fruitless as dialect features like the Cockney “w”/“v” transposition turned into comedy.
Another example of elocutionary entertainment, an evening at the unlicensed Royalty Theatre on 7 July 1788, included among the suite of dances, pantomimes, and farces, “A Whimsical, Farcical, Oratorical Descant, on English Welch, Scotch, and Irish elocution.”Footnote 66 Though there is no record of this performance’s specific contents, we can speculate that it too would have satirized the occupation of the linguistic expert while caricaturing various national accents onstage. The long ad reveals a great deal about potential contents: “With Comic Speechifying in the various Provincial Dialects of the Three Kingdoms, To conclude with an original and new Song, called The Humors of the Town.” The diverse delivery platforms of “Speechifying” and song ensured that the audience received lighthearted entertainment, even though this segment followed directly upon proprietor John Palmer’s recitation of Gray’s “Elegy in a Country Church-Yard.” In August of 1788, the Royalty reprised this show in a slot just after Palmer’s recitation of a monody occasioned by Garrick’s death. The new show was advertised as, “The Elements of English, Irish, Welch, and Scottish elocution, and the Humors of the Town.”Footnote 67 Carey called his one-man show a “Lecture,” while the Royalty’s publicists used the terms “Descant” and “Speechifying.” Both cases betray cynical attitudes toward the expertise cavalierly assumed by self-styled elocution experts, and in both cases specific regional dialect details are shown to be alive and well.
One of the most successful late eighteenth-century elocutionary entertainers was a lackluster actor cum amateur elocutionist named Mr. [W.?] Creswick. Creswick had played various small parts at Drury Lane and Covent Garden in the 1750s and 1760s. According to The London Stage (1968), he appeared as Osric in Hamlet, Drunken Man in Lethe, and Mordecai in Love à-la-Mode, at which point he retooled his career as a small-time dialect entertainer and elocution teacher. Beginning in 1779 and continuing until his death in 1792, Creswick advertised for lectures and shows he was hosting. The early performances appear fashioned in Sheridan’s image, “At the Mitre in Fleet street, on Tuesday the 19th and the two following Tuesdays at half past seven in the evening, a lecture on elocution will be respectfully offered to the public approbation, by Mr. Cresswick [sic], encouraged by the favourable reception of his former undertakings of the same kind.”Footnote 68 That Creswick should have set himself up as a serious elocution teacher is surprising, especially given contemporary reports of his derhotacized speech: “He did not want a tolerable education, but was a bad speaker. He would read wold for world; for superfluous, supufluous, &c. … He was utterly deprived of pronouncing the letter ‘r’.”Footnote 69 However, he did adopt the role of entertaining educator, a phase of his career that culminated with the 1792 publication of The Lady’s Preceptor, an anthology of “Essays, Narratives, Dialogues, Letters, and other compositions which approach the nearest to the language of easy and elegant conversation; and upon such topics as may be most materially interesting to the Fair Sex.”Footnote 70
Creswick’s performances evolved over the course of the 1780s as he began foregoing strict elocutionary lectures in favor of recitations of celebrated poetry, essays, dramatic, and satiric scenes. By 1789, he was routinely delivering a mixed body of material that allowed him to inhabit diverse linguistic personae while still confirming the superiority of “proper” English. An advertisement from 1789 confirms this observation. Directly following listings for the night’s offerings at Haymarket, Drury Lane, Covent Garden, and the Lyceum appears an ad for “Mr. Creswick’s Readings and Recitals … [consisting of] … An Ode to Truth, from Mr. Mason’s Elfrida—Sterne’s Description of Liberty and Slavery, and Story of the Negro Girl—A humourous description of the Lamentations of a Despairing Lover—Pope’s Many of Ross—The Elocution of the Bar … the Orations of Brutus and Antony on the Death of Caesar, contrasted with the Oratory of a Debating Society.”Footnote 71 For 2 shillings 6 pence, an audience member received a dynamic mix of scenes. A “Conversation Scene in a Club-Room” directly followed Cowper’s poems. The varied spectacle included recitations of classical speeches directly juxtaposed with what we can suppose was a satirical send-up of contemporary debating societies. Creswick mingled proper English with impersonations of nonstandard speakers, as seen in his ad from March of 1789, an evening when the audience would be treated to “A Short introductory lecture on reading and speaking” followed by the display of some “Artistic Paintings, executed by an able Artist, and descanted upon with humor and sentiment; and intended as specimens of various Kinds of Elocution.”Footnote 72 The scanty textual references to Creswick memorialize him not as an actor or educator. Instead he is grouped as a “Monologist” and falls into a lineage of solo showmen who followed in the footsteps of Samuel Foote. Indeed, “monologist” as occupational title best captures the miscellaneous character of his spectacles. They were certainly not elocution lessons even though the bottom of every ad mentioned his availability to give private speaking lessons. Nor were his performances strictly theater even though they were advertised as such and borrowed liberally from stage staples. The term “monologist” encapsulates various cultural roles that have so far been at issue in this article’s discussion of language performance: entertainer and educator, actor and pedagogue, standardizer and mimic. As a “monologist,” Creswick exemplifies the range of purposes to which elocutionary techniques were put during the period. At one extreme was the normative demonstration of proper English, and at the other the performative exploration of a wide variety of Englishes.
Charles Mathews and the “Colloquial, Ventriloquial Monopolylogue”
The elocution movement established criteria for evaluating performances of language. The theater, by using elocutionary forms to subvert elocution’s obsession with a nonlocalized “proper” standard, grafted these criteria onto the evaluation of all linguistic varieties. Language of whatever stripe was entertaining, beautiful, and possibly even sublime, when dutifully mastered and naturally articulated. James Burgh, a contemporary of Sheridan, summarizes one prevailing understanding of naturalness circulating in the 1760s: “I know it is common for preachers to plead, in excuse of the frigidity of their manner, in addressing their audiences, their modesty, and fear of being accused of affectation. But are these any hindrance to the elocution of the actors, or even of the actresses? who, by study and practice, come to get the better of timidity, and to attain an elegant and correct utterance (and are indeed, the only speakers we have in England) without any appearance of affectation; which would render them insufferable.”Footnote 73 That Burgh conceived of actors and actresses as the most adept users of language in the country, over and above poets, parliamentarians, barristers, and clergymen, is surprising. In his opinion, actors deserve this preeminence because of their attentive study of linguistic delivery. Their willingness to repeat speech acts until they have eliminated affection wins them the prize. Burgh’s dichotomy between preachers and actors positions affectation as the greatest obstacle to authenticity in speech: whereas priests shy away, the best performers overcome it.
Leigh Hunt’s Critical Essays on the Performers of the London Theatres (1807), for instance, evaluates performers on the basis of their ability to naturally reproduce all dialects and registers encountered in ordinary life. An actor is only great if he can transcend ethnic typecasting and convince an audience his adopted dialects are native. Regarding Irish-born actor John Henry Johnstone, Hunt concludes there is no skill because no effort is used. “It is evident that the brogue of Mr. Johnstone has no more genius in it than a Frenchman’s broken English; both speak it because they cannot help it.”Footnote 74 In Hunt’s estimation, Johnstone’s stage Irish is unremarkable because it requires no real artifice, while Yorkshire actor John Emery never quite exerts enough effort to overcome fully his provincial speech. “I have been credibly informed that he has a touch of the country dialect off the stage,” Hunt reports. “It may certainly be presumed that it is the cause also of his theatrical deficiency in variety and of the obstinate contradiction which this dialect makes to the truth of all his characters but his countrymen.”Footnote 75 John Philip Kemble, on the other hand, strains too far in his production of language, so far that he violates conventional understanding of different dialects in a way that is unique but not natural. While Hunt admires Kemble for his emotional gravitas, he considers him “determined not only to render himself altogether unintelligible, but to introduce a new language on the stage, and make Shakspeare [sic] and Congreve as difficult of comprehension as if they had been written in Coptic or Hindostanee.”Footnote 76 In the theater of the early nineteenth century, mimicry alone was not enough.
Theatrical innovator and impresario Charles Mathews set a new bar for the flexible performance of linguistic authenticity that would have pleased even Hunt. Between 1818 and 1834, he staged fourteen different one-man shows in London, all of which deployed language difference as their central gimmick. Known as the At Home productions, Mathews’ shows capitalized on the legacies of both elocutionists and actors. In fact, a through line connects Mathews back to the elocutionary entertainers and even back to Sheridan himself. His shows were made up of a hodgepodge combination of monologues, dialogues, and songs over two acts, and he capped off each night with a final short farce.Footnote 77 Except for an 1829 partnership with Edmund Yeates, the master mimic played every character in every scene, adjusting his costume, language, and physical bearing to match the requisite social type. Audiences seemed to want natural-looking models of many languages, irrespective of the racist or humiliating ways in which they were depicted.Footnote 78
Surprisingly, Mathews is a figure who has largely been neglected in historical and literary studies. Jane Moody’s work on provincial theater has addressed his legacy as a provincial player turned metropolitan superstar. Dickensian scholars have made the monopolylogue an important optic for understanding that author’s style and reception.Footnote 79 At the confluence of American theater history and critical race studies, Mathews is remembered as a progenitor of blackface performance for his malicious caricature of James Hewlett’s portrayal of Hamlet at New York City’s African Grove Theater in 1821.Footnote 80 When sociolinguistic dynamics are at issue, however, as in the case of this article, Mathews gravitates toward the discussion’s center. Given the performer’s artistic investment in naturally embodying figures as diverse as an old Scotch woman and a London Jew, two Cockney hunters and a portly Welshman—to name just a few of Mathews’s many characters—Mathews’s oeuvre provokes questions about how his verbal calisthenics satisfied audience members’ desires for linguistic spectacles.
Though he had been doing impressions of famous actors since his early days in Surrey, a coach accident in 1814 left him with an unsightly limp, significantly limiting the roles he was offered at the Theatre Royale and Drury Lane. Looking back on Mathews’s retirement from the licensed stage in 1817, one writer strongly lamented his absence, and his being “driven from the public stage to make way for puppets and pageants, and compelled to exert his talents, so extraordinary for versatility and inexhaustible resource, in making his own fortune instead of enriching the patentees.”Footnote 81 According to reviews, the popularity of his one-man shows at the English Opera House rested on speedy transitions between true-to-life impersonations: “his faculty is so decidedly that of creating character, instead of merely aping tones, or gestures, or countenances of individuals—his changes of person are so complete, his transitions so rapid, and yet so easy.”Footnote 82 The actor who began performing in Surrey in 1793 and made his London debut at the Theater Royale in 1803 seemed to exude untarnished authenticity. Reviewers saw him as an unprecedented shape-shifter and an incomparable impressionist. Possibly this is attributable to Mathews’s chosen format. All his plays were structured around public spaces or social events. A mail coach, hot air balloon, London park, and boat cabin all became spaces in which his varied characters could enter, demonstrate their verbal idiosyncrasies, and then exit.
I wish to suggest that the cultural phenomenon of Mathews’s performances rested at least partially on his perpetuation of linguistic stereotypes that were couched in “natural” elocutionary terms. In a scene from one production called Christmas at Brighton and subtitled a “colloquial ventriloquial monopolylogue,” Mathews shifts rapidly between a finicky alderman, the alderman’s daughter, a kleptomaniac liveryman, a caricatured Italian singing instructor, and a gossiping Cockney barber.Footnote 83 The plot is complex but basically features the liveryman trying to squeeze money out of the alderman, his employer. In order to trick the alderman into producing the money, the liveryman impersonates both the singing instructor and the barber. Not only does this play thematize impersonation itself by creating a play within a play—or rather a monopolylogue within a monopolylogue—the fact that the liveryman was impersonating all the other characters remains undiscovered until the scene’s final line. That Mathews was playing every character, including the liveryman impersonating the singing instructor and the barber, is the big payoff. His characters had to be sonically discrete and physically identifiable, but his art had to leave space for the audience’s appreciation of the tremendous physical theatrics involved in so many elaborate costume changes.
The language details are what kept audiences coming back, so it is worth investigating them here. In Christmas at Brighton, Canzonetti, the Italian singing teacher, speaks English in a particularly cartoonish way. Objecting to his student’s choice of song, he protests, “Non, non, what is dat, nobody coming to marry me? You sal [shall] sing solo.”Footnote 84 Cultural insularity vies with linguistic pigeonholing for the brightest spot in the stage’s spotlight. Another character who captivated audiences for his supposed accuracy was Mathews’s virulent linguistic distortion of Mordecai the Jew. In the 1820s, it was certainly nothing new to represent British Jews onstage. Sheva, from Richard Cumberland’s 1794 drama The Jew, for instance, was a very popular character. Similarly, Hunt praised William Downton’s depiction of Abednego the Jew in Dibdin’s The Jew and the Doctor (1798) on the grounds of his “Israelitish dialect.”Footnote 85 Mathews’s Mordecai first appears onstage as a plaintiff in a legal case against another of Mathews’s characters, Goody Grim. Grim’s pig has escaped and created havoc throughout the town. Mordecai’s cross-examination paints him as barely anglophone. He fails to understand the questions he is asked and always responds in a caricatured dialect. “‘Well, Sir What are you?’ ‘I sells old clo’s, and sealing wax, and puckles.’ ‘I did not ask you what you sold, I ask you what you are?’ I am apout five and forty.’”Footnote 86 Keeping in mind that Mathews performed both the interrogator and his interlocutor, what the audience witnessed was a rapid toggling between standard and nonstandard, polite and debased. Mordecai repeatedly commits linguistic faults communicated by the transcription’s orthography: voiced consonants are exchanged for their unvoiced counterparts (/b/ becomes /p/, /d/ becomes /t/); the letter “w” is always enunciated as /v/; and letter “s” becomes “sh” as in “upshet.” Mordecai’s grammar is equally marred. In short, Mathews’s natural Jew is a cowardly, doddering, religious fanatic who speaks badly. “Pless ma heart,” Mordecai exclaims when the examiner has asked him to tell a linear story, “you frighten me out of my vits—as I was valking along, I seed de unclean animal coming towards me—and so says I—Oh! Father Abraham, says I.”Footnote 87 Nonetheless, he was one of the figures that earned Mathews critical acclaim for his linguistic dexterity. One critic put it like this: “His broad humor carried an air of so much truth and reality, that no prejudice against the species of exhibition as unsuitable to boards dedicated to the Drama could withstand the impression of the whole.”Footnote 88 In the writer’s opinion, the truthfulness of Mathews’s representations meant that no one could say farcical one-man spectacles were beneath legitimate drama.
Audiences perhaps most loved Mathews as an old Scottish woman. Judging from etchings that accompany publications of his songs, monologues, and monopolylogues, he performed the woman by donning a lace-trimmed shawl and hunching over a table with his face scrunched up and one eyebrow cocked. The Scottish woman’s function was to relate a “leetle Anecdote” about why her husband the minister stays home from church. The punchline of the joke is more or less underwhelming: he is lazy and hypocritically uses the rain as an excuse to avoid parishoners. Nevertheless, audiences latched onto the woman’s characteristic speech patterns: “I canno’ vary weel reseest adding my leetle migte to the conveeviality of the evening. Hem! hem! It’s no worth the telling; its merely a leetle Anecdote which really happened in our ain family, and to my puir dear honest husband, wha is now dead and gane.”Footnote 89 Her vowels are elongated and fronted, while her secretive intimacy draws the audience into sympathetic collusion. Even William Hazlitt was taken with the way Mathews seemed to transform himself into a realistic Scot. “It is a portrait of common nature, equal to Wilkie or Teniers—as faithful, as simple, as delicately humorous, and with a slight dash of pathos; but without one particle of caricature, of vulgarity, or ill-nature.”Footnote 90 No caricature, no vulgarity, and no ill nature, all qualities that Mathews’s impressions demonstrate in droves. Hazlitt’s assessment reveals that Mathews was fully meeting audience expectations of naturalness. A contemporary eye sees that this vision of nature has a decidedly political charge. It reconfirms linguistic difference as one of society’s governing hierarchies, for the Scottish woman is natural only insofar as her dialect is strongly marked and her personality is cleverly subversive. The question is not whether Mathews’s dialects made available actually existing linguistic forms, but to what degree they repackaged stereotypical images of nonstandard languages as genuine. Mathews captures a character named Zachary Flail’s Yorkshire dialect with, “Just up ‘t toon a bit,—and I’m so glad I ha’ found thee!—come thy ways mun, come thy ways: But bide a wee, I ha’ a letter I should ha’ gien thee before, but the foks told me as how you wur away ballooning.”Footnote 91 Flail’s speech is entertaining because it meets audience expectations of performed linguistic authenticity, not because it is authentically northern.
At the beginning of the 1821 At Home, subtitled Travels in Air, on Earth and Water, Mathews begins with a song about his upcoming hot air balloon journey. He glorifies the balloon’s incredible potential for speed and for perspective. It lifts one off the earth and provides a unique view of the teeming life below. The song emphasizes the way the eyes of people on the ground are drawn toward the balloon as spectacle. “At Charing Cross, or Grosvenor Gate— / Once in the air, they gape and stare / And much astound, for miles around, / The folks with air-ballooning.”Footnote 92 Before the song has ended, the audience realizes that Mathews is using the balloon as a metaphor for his own one-man show. Rather than symbolizing the attainment of an objective view of the varied British populace, the hot air balloon symbolizes the actor’s own public visibility. The actor rather than the audience is king.
This is how we should understand Mathews’s performances, not as nuanced portrayals of linguistic reality but as subjective exaggerations filtered through performative art. He speaks in all the empire’s tongues, and by so doing, he generates comedy from difference. In this respect, Mathews’s “At Homes” have a great deal in common with Sheridan and Walker’s elocutionary lectures. Both discourses feature self-styled linguistic experts who propagate false images of linguistic reality in both body and text. Sheridan and Walker may have championed the value of pristine prescriptive standards, but their works put on display a wide array of many different tongues. Mathews, whose performances also reconfirmed Britain’s linguistic diversity, grew out of the same cultural soil as the elocutionists who preceded him. He too recognized British imperial culture’s inherent composition, and he sold that composite culture through vivid contortions of his body and voice.
The unlikely lineage of spectacular speakers I have put forth in this article is meant to trace the contours of the late eighteenth-century’s progressive identification of linguistic form and cultural identity, an identification that intensified throughout the nineteenth century and that endures in anglophone culture even today. I have dwelled on the notion that language is a spectacle because late eighteenth-century elocutionary discourses—whether educational or entertaining—were critical sites for forming the idea that linguistic performance can both reveal and conceal one’s origins. One can interpret these materials not only as prescient indices of social fracturing along linguistic lines but also as evidence of prejudicial thinking that sutured dialect and transgression together. From a sociohistorical perspective, this means that elocution might possibly shed light on the development of those means of discernment that are so important to the origin of racial discourse, and from an aesthetic perspective, this means that linguistic difference has long been used to convey the patina of cultural authenticity. Though this article is far too limited in scope to provide a full accounting of the following claims, I have tried to gesture toward them throughout. Elocution is critical to later (especially Romantic) discourses of how difference and authenticity inform theatrical and literary artistry. Furthermore, elocution is critical to the more contemporary idea that the public self is a performed self, one cobbled together from the material of circulating social codes, codes whose origins are difficult to identify but whose transmission mechanisms can be traced in textual and performance histories.
