It is as welcome as undeniable that scholarly interest in Late Modern English has increased considerably over little more than a decade. Works by Bailey (1996), Görlach (Reference Görlach1999, Reference Görlach2001), Beal (Reference Beal2004) and Mugglestone (Reference Mugglestone and Mugglestone2006), followed by the launch of a new series of international conferences on this topic (see Dossena & Jones Reference Dossena and Jones2003, Pérez-Guerra et al. Reference Tieken-Boon van Ostade2007 and Tieken-Boon van Ostade & van der Wurff forthcoming), have highlighted the importance of this period in the history of English – a period which, until then, had only been considered as the time when language was codified more formally, and prescriptive trends had been very forceful. In fact, the situation is more complex, and the intricacies of sociolinguistically defined norms can only be studied in greater depth when a variety of documents are taken into consideration. Within this framework, the present collection (henceforth GGGW) challenges earlier monolithic views of eighteenth-century prescriptivism by shedding new light on what is perhaps the most emblematic and even symbolically important text of a supposedly prescriptive tradition: the grammar book.

The book derives from a workshop held in 2005 at the University of Leiden, where the editor leads a VICI research project, the title of which is ‘The Codifiers and the English Language’.Footnote ¹ The aim of this project, launched in 2004, is to trace linguistic influence, not only between individuals and within social networks, but also from grammars on other grammars and indeed on language users themselves – which is what traditional views of prescriptivism assumed to be the default case, though seldom comparing rules with actual data, if not somewhat sporadically, as until recently no fully fledged corpora were available for the study of Late Modern English.Footnote ² In addition to papers by researchers involved in the project, the book comprises other contributions by well-known scholars, which contributes to making the book much more than the proceedings of a one-off event.

The contents are presented in four parts, preceded by a general introduction by the editor and followed by an extensive list of references and a detailed, 12-page index including both names and subjects. The introduction provides a general overview of the topics under discussion and presents the contributions, not in conventional cut-and-dried summaries, but by pointing out their mutual relevance within the context of the research questions at hand. What is particularly interesting is the way in which the introduction thus becomes a valuable chapter in itself, as it provides an outline of research issues, methodological approaches and innovative findings in an extensive and coherent way. The titles of the other four parts are as follows: Part 1 – Background; Part 2 – Reception and the market for grammars; Part 3 – The grammarians; Part 4 – The grammars. All four parts comprise a short introduction by the editor, in which the main points of the contributions are presented; each part then includes three contributions, with the exception of Part 3, which includes four. In what follows I will provide a brief overview of the contents of each part, before outlining my impression of the book and its importance.

In Part 1, ‘Background’, the three contributions aim to set the context in which the object of investigation, i.e. grammars, their authors and their readers, should be analysed. The first paper, by Don Chapman, discusses the role of eighteenth-century grammarians as language experts: most of them, especially in the earlier part of the century, could hardly be described as linguists in the present-day sense of the word, but they were, or were assumed to be, usage experts, which granted them the authority to set down rules. With time, however, language study became more professionalized, and that brought about the division between the prescriptive and the descriptive approaches that still haunts current debates. The second paper, by Richard J. Watts, looks at the same subjects, but in a different light, as the author's aim is to assess whether their group could be described as a discourse community or a community of practice. The former definition is then presented as more appropriate, on account of the structural and conceptual similarity of grammars and dictionaries across time and space, and between authors, who did not necessarily interact with each other. Finally, Anita Auer analyses the place held by grammars in contemporary book catalogues,Footnote ³ in an attempt to assess their dissemination, popularity and, as a result, potential influence. The author's findings confirm the well-known popularity of Lowth's and Murray's grammars, and highlight the usefulness of book catalogues for the research question at hand, albeit with some reservations, on account of the varied results they offer: sale catalogues do not indicate which books were actually sold, but which were deemed to be saleable, in the same way as library catalogues do not say what books were actually borrowed, but what titles were in store. It is perhaps the case then that book catalogues should be interrogated for different research questions, for instance concerning what was expected to be saleable in different parts of the country, to different audiences, and at different points in time, as this may help us outline the kind of audience with whom booksellers were dealing.

As a matter of fact, the papers in Part 2 do focus on the audience of grammars – either people explicitly addressed as potential readers, or people who spontaneously sought linguistic reassurance in grammars, and thus created a market for them. After the editor's introduction, the section opens with a paper by Astrid Buschmann-Göbels on Bellum Grammaticale, an anonymous pamphlet published in 1712, in which the author (most likely a grammarian himself, probably Charles Gildon, as the contributor argues in her analysis) criticized three recent grammars: the Grammar of the English Tongue (1711, attributed to John Brightland and the same Charles Gildon), James Greenwood's Essay towards a Practical English Grammar (1711) and Michael Maittaire's English Grammar (Reference Tieken-Boon van Ostade1712).Footnote ⁴ The paper discusses the several purposes the pamphlet thus appears to serve: to stress the good qualities of one grammar as opposed to others (possibly not without vested interests), and to highlight how the function of grammars appeared to be changing, with an increase in the attention given to practical language learning. In the next paper Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade discusses the relationship between grammarians and booksellers in the 1760s, and the impact this had on grammar-writing itself. The role of publishers and booksellers appears to have been a very modern one, giving great attention to the market, and indeed to strategies meant to dominate it. The author analyses the statistical distribution of new editions and reprints, stressing the increase in activity observed in the 1760s, and highlighting what were probably consortia of publishers competing with one another. In the second part of the contribution the intricacies of publication histories are discussed, taking Lowth's grammar as a particularly interesting case. In addition to publishers, reviewers seem to have played a considerable role in the identification of the ‘best’ grammars, as shown in the contribution by Carol Percy which closes the section. The author outlines the reception of mid-century grammars as traceable in a specially designed corpusFootnote ⁵ of extracts from the Monthly Review (1749–1844) and the Critical Review (1756–1817); the aim is to see how the publishing phenomenon discussed in the papers by Auer and Tieken-Boon van Ostade was interpreted by the grammarians’ contemporaries: i.e. what kind of reception new publications appeared to have – not only on the market, but also in the scholarly community of the time. In this respect, the two periodicals taken into consideration provide paradigmatic examples of evaluations not necessarily on the part of other grammarians only, but also on the part of reviewers whose aim was to draw the attention of their readers also by means of controversial statements. It is of great interest and importance also that the author places the publication of grammars and their reviews in a more general and international historical context, i.e. that of the Seven Years’ War, in which judgements on, and pride in, the status of English as opposed to French and indeed Latin were not without political overtones.

Part 3 concentrates on three grammarians: Ann Fisher, Joseph Priestley and Lady Ellenor Fenn, discussed respectively by María Rodríguez-Gil, Jane Hodson and Karlijn Navest; the section also includes a paper by Karen Cajka on teacher-grammarians and the education of women. In fact, women as both authors and readers or users of grammars take centre stage in this section, but not on account of any overt gender bias on the part of the authors: the plurality of subjects involved in language study has always spanned both genders, but with varying degrees of visibility – male grammarians have traditionally elicited more interest, as society was largely male-dominated. In the first paper in this section, based on the author's unpublished PhD thesis, María Rodríguez-Gil discusses the authorship of Ann Fisher's grammar, as the name typically associated with it used to be that of Daniel Fisher; however, the latter was probably a relative who helped the actual author get in touch with publishers and booksellers in London and Newcastle. The work of another important grammarian, Joseph Priestley, is the object of Jane Hodson's investigation in the next contribution, the aim of which is to assess the changes made in the second edition (1768) of his Rudiments of English Grammar (1761), and the possible reasons that prompted them. The author compares the two editions (both Prefaces and Grammars), and reaches the conclusion that a shift in focus may be perceived: while the first edition was more interested in pedagogical aspects, the second edition appears to include reflections on the role of the grammarian in describing the complexities of language. The next paper, by Karen Cajka, deals with the discourse community of six teacher-grammarians: Ellin Devis, Mrs M. C. Edwards, Mrs Eves, Jane Gardiner (née Arden), Mrs Taylor and Blanch Mercy, whose respective schools were located in London, near Kew, Birmingham, Beverley, Manchester and probably Carlisle. This provides the author with a broad range of social and geographical contexts in which these teacher-grammarians operated, always addressing young women, and allows her to discuss their work against such varied backgrounds, identifying what methodologies they recommended, and what kind of academic, social and moral instruction they sought to give. In the next contribution Karlijn Navest analyses Lady Ellenor Fenn's use of her sources, in an attempt to assess the indebtedness of her work to those of other grammarians. The aim is of course not to see whether instances of plagiarism occur, as the attitude to unacknowledged copying was quite different in the eighteenth century from what it is today; instead, the author highlights the validity of Fenn's choices from the pedagogical point of view.

Part 4 closes the book with three papers in which the authors analyse the treatment of specific phenomena in eighteenth-century grammars. In the first contribution Nuria Yáñez-Bouza discusses preposition stranding, showing that the rules proscribing it, typically associated with Lowth's grammar, are in fact older and found in other normative text types beside grammars, but proscription of the form is not generalized at all. The morphological traits of the comparison of adjectives and adverbs is the object of Randy Cliffort Bax's investigation, an earlier version of which appeared in Reference Tieken-Boon van Ostade2000 in Meesterwerk. Berichten van het Peeter Heynsgenootschap. The author discusses the rules presented in a corpus of 27 eighteenth-century grammars, and – rather concisely, as the paper is shorter than the others – argues that such rules changed over time: while at first no guidance was given as to what form was supposed to be preferable, the current approach appears to have developed later in the century, when the production of grammars increased and began to cater for upwardly mobile readers. Interestingly, Victorina González-Díaz also analyses the double marking of degree in the last contribution in the book. Her study discusses the works of normative grammarians against the background of examples taken from corpora spanning the centuries from Middle English to Late Modern English, in order to identify what pathways different forms appear to have followed. The findings show that prescriptive grammars may have actually played a role in the development of the word lesser, the linguistic value of which changed in time; they also stress the importance of combining corpus-based investigations with the study of metalinguistic texts like grammars, dictionaries and letter-writing manuals.

Looking at the collection as a coherent whole, it is intriguing to observe that the sequence of topics in the four parts reverses the one in the title: grammars are discussed at the end, not at the beginning, but this does in fact make very good sense, as grammars could not be understood properly without in-depth knowledge of the social context in which they were written, the audience they addressed, and the people who wrote them. The three elements in the title thus seem to intertwine almost inextricably, and the sequence presented in the four parts allows the reader to follow a logical path of investigation from the more general sociohistorical picture to the specificities of the written page. Indeed, it is in the first two parts that the most exhaustive analyses are carried out by scholars who are leading experts in the field: while all the contributions are intrinsically valuable, I found the first half of the book to be of greater interest, as the earlier papers historicize the phenomenon of grammar-writing, setting it in its proper and much wider social context, instead of discussing (almost in vitro) what rules were set down and how. It is thus in the first six papers that previously under-recognized and under-represented actors, such as booksellers and reviewers, are given credit for the role they played in shaping the grammarians’ market; without their intervention, grammars in the modern sense of the word might never have developed.

The overall assessment of GGGW is that it offers extensive, in-depth discussions of a very important period in English linguistics, which are relevant not only to the Late Modern English period, but also have an interesting impact on views of correctness and appropriateness in Present-Day English. The crucial role played by grammars and grammarians in shaping the image of ‘good English’, at least in the minds of the public, if not necessarily in the actual usage of all social levels, has granted these texts an aura of respectability and authoritativeness which has long been difficult, if not impossible or indeed unthinkable, to challenge. The numerous reprints, new editions and actual (often lengthy, though not always acknowledged, or even properly understood) quotations from prestigious books, such as Lowth's, Murray's or Priestley's, prove that readers and other grammarians relied on their linguistic prestige.

The exhaustiveness of the editorial work also ensures that the book is highly cohesive, with numerous intratextual cross-references between contributions, and to several other works. However, the relative heterogeneity in the level of academic experience among contributors does occasionally emerge: Part 4 is, in this respect, somewhat distant from Parts 1 and 2. Especially in the chapters by Yáñez-Bouza and González-Díaz the influence of these authors’ respective PhD dissertations and other recent contributions on the very same topics can be glimpsed quite easily, and while it is only healthy that younger scholars should be encouraged to take part in important research projects, it is for this very reason that they should perhaps try and move on from what is by now comfortably familiar ground, in order to deal with topics that may fit in better with a more encompassing approach to the research questions, rather than provide case studies which are still interesting, but rather limited in scope.

It is also somewhat unfortunate that occasional typos should have escaped proofreaders in the very first pages of the book – the most striking one is Lognomia Anglica, instead of Logonomia Anglica, actually on p. 1, but readers should not be put off by these very minor details.Footnote ⁶ This is an important book, which will hopefully open up the road for further investigations in neighbouring areas of interest; for example, it would be extremely interesting to conduct parallel studies of grammars, their readers, grammarians and grammar-writing in Scotland and Ireland, as these areas were typically singled out as being the territory of ‘provincial’ usage, and therefore there was a distinct market for the kind of guidance that grammars could or were expected to provide. Indeed, GGGW does refer to the works of Hugh Blair, James Beattie and John Buchanan, but without highlighting their role in the prescriptive (and actually proscriptive) tradition of Scottish commentators. A final remark concerns what is certainly not a fault, but just an update on sources: a book announced as forthcoming in the contributions by Navest, Tieken-Boon van Ostade and Yáñez-Bouza (who, however, cites it in a slightly less accurate way), has now been published: see Beal, Nocera & Sturiale (Reference Beal, Nocera and Sturiale2008).

With GGGW scholars and indeed students interested in Late Modern English are provided with an accurate and useful tool by means of which both the internal and the external history of the language can be studied simultaneously. The sociohistorical approach shared by all the contributors allows readers to place certain ideas originating in the long eighteenth-century grammatical tradition in a clear perspective, going beyond well-established, but possibly less than reliable, and certainly reductive, views on the people who strove to codify the English language.