The ‘Evolving English’ exhibition, which ran from November 2010 to April 2011, was the British Library's most successful winter exhibition ever, attracting 147,419 visitors. This is a testimony to the level of interest in our subject held by the general public, as well as to the quality of the exhibition itself. David Crystal, who has done more than any other British academic to popularise English language and linguistics, was closely involved in the planning of this exhibition and has written what is essentially the exhibition guide. Evolving English is, as we might expect from the British Library, a beautiful book, drawing as it does on the treasure-house of the British Library's print and manuscript collections to provide Crystal with copyright access that most of us could only dream of. Although, for a historian of English, nothing in print can match the sheer thrill of, for instance, seeing the actual Beowulf manuscript at the exhibition, this volume is sumptuously illustrated with high-resolution colour images, allowing the reader to see English from all historical periods and a wide range of text types. Anybody with an interest in the English language would be glad to own this book, but we need to ask whether it has a life beyond the exhibition and a place other than the coffee table.

In the Introduction, Crystal makes an eloquent case for the potential impact of this book on undergraduates. Recalling his own experience of studying the history of English in the early 1960s, he describes ‘a profound sense of distance from the subject because I could not see the reality behind the edited texts’ and the ‘revelation’ when he finally gained access to the manuscripts (p. 8). Of course, the experience of today's undergraduates is often very different: the availability of electronic resources and the World Wide Web threaten to make textbooks redundant. For example, a Google search for ‘Beowulf manuscript’ takes us directly to the same image, on the Wikipedia site, as that on p. 18 of Evolving English, albeit at a vastly inferior resolution, whilst projects such as the Electronic Beowulf (http://ebeowulf.uky.edu/) provide resources which would have been the stuff of science fiction to Crystal's younger self. Many of the images reproduced in Evolving English are available via collections such as Early English Books Online and Eighteenth-Century Collections Online, so for scholars with access to well-resourced libraries and broadband, this book provides little that could not be found elsewhere. In evaluating Evolving English, we need to acknowledge that its target readership is extremely broad and includes many who would not have access to scholarly databases and/or would not know what to search for in Google in order to collate the material provided in this book. The claim made on the fly-leaf is that Evolving English is ‘essential reading for both students of the English language and anyone with an interest in where our language has come from’, so I shall evaluate it on that basis.

Evolving English is clearly designed for browsing: there is comparatively little continuous text, and most of this is designed to contextualise and explain the eye-catching illustrations. After a two-page introduction, each chapter begins with a one-page overview, followed by a series of illustrations and commentaries chosen to exemplify the themes of the chapter. The title of each manuscript or publication is displayed prominently at the top of the page, making it very easy for the reader to find and identify texts. Chapters are arranged chronologically in the first instance: chapter 1 takes the reader from the earliest records of ‘English’ to the early fifteenth century, whilst chapter 2 overlaps with this chronologically, starting as it does with Chaucer and Wycliffe and tracing the story of Standard English from early printed texts such as Caxton's editions of Chaucer, through the normative texts of the eighteenth century, to the usage guides of the twentieth century. Chapter 3, entitled ‘Everyday English’, acts as a counterbalance to the previous chapter, presenting examples of informal genres such as letters, literary attempts at representing informal speech, and extracts from slang and cant dictionaries. Chapter 4, ‘English at work’, demonstrates a range of occupational uses of English, from a tenth-century medical text to nineteenth-century periodicals and advertisements by way of technical and occupational dictionaries, whilst chapter 5, ‘Language at play’, deals with various ludic uses of language, from the Old English riddles of the Exeter Book to Norman Silver's poetic applications of internet language in Laugh Out Loud. The final chapters illustrate the diversity of English within the United Kingdom (chapter 6) and beyond (chapter 7), ending with John Agard's poem ‘Listen Mr Oxford Don’, a plea for the right of a ‘simple immigrant / from Clapham Common’ to use the language in his own way. In the commentary accompanying this poem, Crystal writes ‘anyone who has taken the trouble to learn English can be said to have a stake in it – and today that means around a third of the world's population’ (p. 156).

The overriding message of Evolving English is pluralistic: there is neither one ‘English’ nor one linear history of English, a point that has been made elsewhere by Crystal himself in Stories of English and by others such as the authors of the papers in Watts & Trudgill (Reference Watts and Trudgill2002). The somewhat eclectic nature of the texts chosen and their positioning in the book reflect the ‘many voices’ of the subtitle. The delightful illustrations from The Infant's Grammar (p. 109) and The Good Child's Book of Stops (p. 110) appear in chapter 5, ‘English at play’, but could equally have been used to illustrate the educational purposes of language in chapter 4, and the blurred division between ‘Everyday English’ (chapter 3) and ‘English at work’ (chapter 4) is exemplified by the inclusion of a recipe from A Book of Kokery in the former (p. 61) and a medical recipe in the latter (p. 78). The overall impression is of a gallimaufry of linguistic delights rather than a historical narrative, and Evolving English is none the worse for this. There is, however, a strong sense, hinted at in the title, that the language has ‘progressed’ from its obscure tribal origins recorded in archaeological finds such as the fifth-century Caistor astralgus (p. 12) to the world language described in chapter 7. Crystal flags this up in the Introduction as ‘an unprecedented achievement for a language’, introducing a note of triumphalism and essentialism with which some linguists, notably those such as Philipson (Reference Philipson2003), who sees the spread of English as a result of ‘linguistic imperialism’, might be uncomfortable.

It would be difficult to use Evolving English as a stand-alone textbook for even the most introductory course on the history of English, because there is very little in the way of linguistic commentary or exposition and, as the point about triumphalism above indicates, little acknowledgement of the range of theories and controversies concerning many of the issues raised. However, as a supplementary source book, it would enliven any class and catch the imagination of students. What this book provides, above all, is contextualisation of the history of English: a vivid reminder of the ‘Uniformitarian Principle’ (Labov Reference Labov1972: 161), that the mechanisms which operated to effect linguistic change in the past are the same as those operating today, or, to put it more simply, English at all historical stages was a language used by real people. Two examples should serve to illustrate this point, and how Evolving English might be used in class.

The first chapter of Evolving English presents the reader with images of what are, to date, the earliest records of runic inscription in England, the Caistor astralgus and the Undley bracteate. The images of these artefacts are reproduced clearly, and the runes transcribed, transliterated and translated in a text box. This is immediately eye-catching, and draws attention to the fact that our knowledge of early English relies as much on archaeology as on philology. The commentary raises the important issue of whether the language(s) represented on these artefacts can be called ‘English’: the Caistor astralgus has been dated to a period earlier than 449, which is that ‘usually given for the arrival of Anglo-Saxons in England’ (p. 12), yet the runes inscribed on it can be interpreted as spelling ‘raihan, an early form of the Old English noun raha meaning “roe deer”’ (p. 12). So is this ‘English’ and, if not, why is the inscription on the slightly later Undley bracteate accepted as providing ‘the earliest clear example of several words in Old English’ (p. 12)? Crystal does not attempt to provide answers to this puzzle, but flags up the question very well, allowing the teacher to use this page as a jumping-off point for a discussion or a research project on the topic of how we define and delimit ‘English’.

My second example is taken from a much later period, but also illustrates the importance of Crystal's contextualisation and the potential of Evolving English for sparking discussion. The pages from Thomas Sheridan's Lectures on Elocution (1762) reproduced on p. 50 are not as visually arresting as those taken from illuminated manuscripts, but the commentary provides a striking account of just how ‘modern’ Sheridan's world was. Crystal makes a point that has been made elsewhere (e.g. Mugglestone Reference Mugglestone1995), that ‘elocution was big business’ in the eighteenth century, but he brings this home vividly by translating the price of admission to Sheridan's lectures into today's value, concluding that ‘one of Sheridan's courses must have therefore earned him (in today's money) well over £150,000’, a figure likely to impress any entrepreneurial spirit in the class. More seriously, this could instigate a discussion about language as cultural capital and a comparison with the elocution industry today (often disguised as ‘business communication’ or ‘accent reduction’: see Beal Reference Beal, Beal, Nocera and Sturiale2008).

These two examples should suffice to illustrate the usefulness of Evolving English as a supplementary textbook for introductory undergraduate courses. At a recommended retail price of £16.95, it is within the usual price range of undergraduate textbooks and, considering the number and quality of illustrations, something of a bargain. It could also be used as a starting-point for student projects (enquiry-based learning), since only the most disengaged undergraduate would fail to find inspiration in its pages. The importance of such an attractive text as a marketing tool for undergraduate programmes in English language and linguistics should not be underestimated. The British Library exhibition was a godsend to teachers of AS and A2 level (senior high school) English Language, and Evolving English will continue to be so for years to come. As such, it has the potential to bridge the gap between high school and first-year undergraduate courses for students in England and Wales, and to attract students into English language and linguistics everywhere. The sheer attractiveness and accessibility of this book also make it an ideal present for friends and relatives who fail to grasp the importance of our subject and the fascination it holds for us.

It would be easy for advanced scholars of English historical linguistics to find points of disagreement, possibly even exasperation, in Evolving English, but to condemn it for these would be like judging an apple for not being an orange. The constraints of space and the need to maintain a high level of accessibility mean that Crystal often uses bald on-record statements such as ‘Scots English reached a literary peak in the eighteenth century in the work of Robert Burns’ (p. 130), which we might prefer to use as examination questions (‘discuss and illustrate’) rather than statements of fact. There is, of course, a danger that the general reader will take such statements at face value, and, in this regard, the ‘further reading’ on p. 157 is disappointingly thin (fifteen items) and general. However, used in the context of an undergraduate course with supplementary reading and guidance, Evolving English is a valuable addition to the English historical linguist's toolkit.