Language Against Modernity

Abstract

The fifty years spanning 1875–1925 are generally taken by cultural historians as the period in which the familiar patterns of British working-class and middle-class living were first produced. Hobsbawm, for example, argues that, ‘in a word, between 1870 and 1900 the pattern of British working-class life which the writers, dramatists and T.V. producers of the 1950s thought of as “traditional” came into being’ (Hobsbawm, 1969, p.164). In the same vein Stedman-Jones recently proposed that a distinct working-class culture though formed earlier, first gained recognition at the beginning of the twentieth century (Stedman-Jones, 1983, p.183). Such historians perceive a fundamental shift in the British social formation as new patterns and new perceptions (new ways of experiencing and new ways of seeing experience) emerged in the structures of British culture. Significantly, these historians see new and important roles for the language, concepts and experiences of class in British society. Stevenson, for example, gives a clear account of the growing importance of class differences (Stevenson, 1984, pp.31–49), though the direction of his argument is countered by Waites’s contention that ‘there was a simple shift in emphasis in the language of class away from descriptions of an elaborately ranked society towards accounts of a more simply structured society’ (Waites, 1976, p.49).

The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words home, Christ, ale, master, on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words.

(Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 1916)