In May 1794, three outspoken agitators for political reform—Thomas Hardy, John Horne Tooke, and John Thelwall—were arrested and charged with high treason by the government of William Pitt. Lacking convincing evidence, the prosecution resorted to a subtle interpretation of an obscure medieval statute, and demanded that the bemused jury, when the cases were finally heard in November 1794, as Susan Manly reconstructs in her compelling monograph, “imagine a sequence of actions that might have resulted from the actions of the reformers, extrapolating from these imagined consequences yet another imagined consequence, the death of the king” (20). The defendants’ counsel, along with those of other embattled reformists, railed against the government's nefarious manipulation of law and language. “All this profusion of fiction, hypothesis, and prejudication,” wrote William Godwin in an influential contribution to the debate, “is brought forward for the sole purpose, either of convincing us of the unparalleled ingenuity of the Lord Chief Justice … or to bewilder the imaginations, to throw dust in the eyes, and confound the understandings of the Grand Jury and the nation” (56). The 1794 State Trials, and the intriguing linguistic debates that they exposed and drew upon, are at the heart of Language, Custom and Nation in the 1790s. In essence, Manly argues that the literary and political ferment of the 1790s, more frequently aligned with developments in revolutionary America and France, also reflect—perhaps even more precisely—the culmination of a century of British philosophical debate on the origin, nature and function of language and its political implications.

Manly locates the empiricist philosopher John Locke as the founding figure of this intellectual tradition, focusing particularly on his analysis of language in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690). For Locke, language was “based on metaphorical leaps of the mind, propelled by the need to communicate, to strengthen social bonds and to increase the common fund of knowledge” (1). In his fundamentally democratic and pragmatic theory of language, clarity of expression and maintaining a reasonable steadiness of signification are vital. Locke warned, moreover, that “vague and insignificant Forms of Speech, and Abuse of Language” are “but the Covers of Ignorance, and hindrance of true knowledge” (23). A century later, the political implications of misusing language were evident in the State Trials, as the government prosecution construed “imagination” as “intention,” while the defendants argued that the “imaginary was that which had no basis in material evidence, could not be discovered through rational enquiry, and which therefore could not be invoked as a valid charge in a court of law” (24).

Locke's influential theories provided the philosophical backdrop and vocabulary for the debates that flourished in the latter half of the eighteenth century on the relationship between language, custom, political legitimacy, and the role of the masses in creating linguistic meaning and authority. The first two chapters of Manly's erudite study uncover this complex intellectual matrix, tracing Locke's shadow across the work of Edmund Burke, who “transformed semantic anxiety into a principle of literary creation” (29) and subsequently through what can broadly be discerned as two opposing factions, conservative and radical. While on the one hand, James Harris and Lord Monboddo argued that language was the artistic preserve of an educated elite and should be protected from the “unruly agitations of common usage” (47), Jeremy Bentham and John Horne Tooke stressed the need for a clear, direct language shared by all. Tooke's egalitarian theory of language proved particularly useful to reformers in the 1790s, offering “a scholarly basis for criticizing and demolishing government rhetoric, which relied on unquestioned abstractions for its effect,” as well as “an integral theory which proclaimed the equality of all speakers of English, regardless of their rank” (49).

The second half of the book is concerned with the literary dissemination of these language debates in a range of writings published between 1798 and 1802 by Wordsworth and Edgeworth. In a cogent analysis of the Lyrical Ballads (1798) that builds on a prominent critical thread of historicist inquiry to recover lost or elided political dimensions in Romantic poetry, Manly evaluates Wordsworth's determination to use “the real language of men” as being only superficially radical. Even in the Preface of 1800, she argues, “Wordsworth's attraction to egalitarianism and communitarianism is tempered by a more Burkean strain of thought,” and these “subtly represented conservative ideas of habit, immemorial usage and detachment from the common or commonplace” in the end neutralize the radical impulse of Locke and Tooke's “common creativity” (105).

The true successor to eighteenth-century linguistic radicalism, Manly asserts, is Edgeworth, to whom the last chapter of the book is devoted. Manly identifies intellectual continuities in Practical Education (1798) and An Essay on Irish Bulls (1802), both of which take as their subject “the free speech accorded to disenfranchised communities, those commonly thought of as natural subordinates—children and lower-class Irishmen and Irishwomen.” Contextualizing her argument within the political liberalism of Richard Lovell Edgeworth and the domestic life of the Edgeworth family, steeped in the culture and outlook of the Enlightenment, Manly argues that these texts demonstrate “a preoccupation with the idea of free inquiry and the acceptance of frankly expressed divergence from authoritarian or standardizing discourses as the precondition to social and political amelioration” (138). The focus on less familiar texts is salutary (though Letters for Literary Ladies, 1795, and the much-discussed Castle Rackrent, 1800, might have added more grist to the mill), and Manly's stimulating argument will further enliven the increasingly spirited critical debate on this writer. Some might quibble, for example, that the a priori prescription of English as the “real language of men” (the Irish language, though beginning to lose ground, was still widely spoken) carries in itself political and cultural presumptions that complicate the radicalism of Edgeworth's project in An Essay on Irish Bulls, though Manly persuasively contends that this Hiberno-English “is presented as one which [the Irish people] have appropriated to reflect the quick-thinking wit and invention, the spirit of enquiry, which Edgeworth associates with a progressive, modern society” (162).

Language, Custom and Nation in the 1790s contributes valuably across a range of adjoining fields: Romanticism, Irish studies, women's writing, eighteenth-century linguistic theory, as well as the interdisciplinary study of law and literature, and helps us reassess the nexus where demotic language, culture, and political power continue to beckon for critical scrutiny.