Abstract
When Oliver Cromwell, the Protector, died in 1658 the country entered a period of political instability even though his son Richard succeeded him as Protector. This instability led in 1660 to the re-establishment of the monarchy with the recall of Charles II from his exile in France. The Convention Parliament invited Charles to return and he was restored to the throne of England on 29 May 1660. The Restoration had important implications for the language and its development.
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Notes
See Eric Partridge, Swift’s Polite Conversation (London, 1963). In fact Swift’s attack is here mostly against fashionable words and idioms which are peculiar to the upper classes. He writes ‘I HAVE rejected all Provincial, or Country Turns of Wit, and Fancy, because I am acquainted with a very few; but indeed, chiefly, because I found them so very inferior to those at Court, especially among Gentlemen Ushers, the Ladies of the Bed-Chamber, and the Maids of Honour. I must also add the hither end of our noble Metropolis’ (p. 36).
Samuel Johnson The Rambler, ed. W. J. Bate and A. B. Strauss, vol. 3 (New Haven, Conn. and London, 1969) p.126.
‘On the Death of Dr Swift’, in Jonathan Swift, ed. Angus Ross and David Woolley (Oxford, 1984) p. 526.
I. Tieken-Boon van Ostade, The Auxiliary Do in Eighteenth-century English: A Sociohistorical-linguistic Approach (Dordrecht, 1987) p. 228.
They are discussed fully in S. A. Leonard, The Doctrine of Correctness in English Usage 1700–1800. University of Wisconsin Studies in Language and Literature 25 (Madison, Wis., 1929; repr. 1962).
See I. Tieken-Boon van Ostade, ‘Double Negation and Eighteenth-century English Grammars’, Neophilologus, vol. 66 (1982) 278–85.
See Susie I. Tucker, Protean Shape: A Study in Eighteenth-century Vocabulary and Usage (London, 1967).
For this period, see John Barrell, ‘The Language Properly So-called: The Authority Of Common Usage’, in his English Literature in History 1730–80: An Equal, Wide Survey (London, 1983) pp.110–75;
and Dieter Stein, The Semantics of Syntactic Change: Aspects of the Evolution of ‘do’ in English (Berlin, 1990).
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© 1996 N. F. Blake
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Blake, N.F. (1996). Establishing the Standard within Social Norms. In: A History of the English Language. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-24954-1_9
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