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Grammars, Grammarians and Grammar-Writing
in Eighteenth-Century England

≥
Topics in English Linguistics
59

Editors
Bernd Kortmann
Elizabeth Closs Traugott

Mouton de Gruyter
Berlin · New York
Grammars, Grammarians
and Grammar-Writing
in Eighteenth-Century England

edited by
Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade

Mouton de Gruyter
Berlin · New York
Mouton de Gruyter (formerly Mouton, The Hague)
is a Division of Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin.

앪
앝 Printed on acid-free paper which falls within the guidelines
of the ANSI to ensure permanence and durability.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Grammars, grammarians, and grammar-writing in eighteenth-

century England / edited by Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade.
p. cm. ⫺ (Topics in English linguistics ; 59)
Includes bibliographical references and indexes.
ISBN 978-3-11-019627-6 (hardcover : acid-free paper)
1. English language ⫺ Grammar ⫺ History. 2. Grammarians ⫺
Great Britain ⫺ Biography. 3. English language ⫺ Textbooks ⫺
History ⫺ 18th century. 4. English language ⫺ History. I. Tieken-
Boon van Ostade, Ingrid.
PE1108.G73 2008
428.2⫺dc22
2008019269

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek

The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie;
detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.

ISBN 978-3-11-019627-6
ISSN 1434-3452

” Copyright 2008 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, 10785 Berlin
All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. No part of this
book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechan-
ical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publisher.
Cover design: Christopher Schneider, Berlin.
Typesetting: OLD-Media OHG, Neckarsteinach.
Printed in Germany.
Acknowledgements

The present volume originates in the first workshop called “Grammars, Gram-
marians and Grammar Writing” organised by the research project The Codi-
fiers and the English Language: Tracing the Norms of Standard English (Lei-
den, 9 December 2005). The project, of which I am the director, is a so-called
VICI-project, which runs at the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics from
2005 until 2010 and which is financed by NWO (Nederlandse Organisatie voor
Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek).1 During the workshop, the participants not only
discovered shared interests and common themes, but also identified specific
gaps in what was otherwise felt to be an extremely focused research topic. To
this end, a number of additional scholars were invited to contribute their exper-
tise to the present volume, which has therefore developed into much more than
merely the proceedings of a workshop.
As the editor of this collection, I am grateful for the comments received
from the workshop participants, and in particular for additional contributions
made by Victorina González-Díaz, Jane Hodson and Nuria Yañez-Bouza. I
should also like to acknowledge the editorial support received from Marjolein
Meindersma and Patricia Chaudron, the Codifiers project’s research assistants,
who helped getting the book ready for publication. I should, moreover, like to
express my thanks to the TiEL series editors for their warm response upon re-
ceiving the first draft of this book, to Richard Watts for suggesting Mouton de
Gruyter as a publisher to begin with, and to Mouton’s skilful editorial staff.
Working with the authors in the present volume has shown that we, too, form
a veritable community of practice in the sense defined by Richard Watts in his
paper below: we clearly and profitably display mutual engagement, are engaged
in a joint enterprise and constantly draw upon a shared repertoire. I hope that,
even after the publication of this collection, we will continue to do so.

Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade

Leiden

1 Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research.

Table of contents

Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . v
List of abbreviations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix

Grammars, grammarians and grammar writing: An introduction

Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Part 1. Background

Background: Introduction
Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
The eighteenth-century grammarians as language experts
Don Chapman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
Grammar writers in eighteenth-century Britain: A community of
practice or a discourse community?
Richard J. Watts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
Eighteenth-century grammars and book catalogues
Anita Auer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57

Part 2. Reception and the market for grammars

Reception and the market for grammars: Introduction

Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79
Bellum Grammaticale (1712) – A battle of books and a battle for
the market
Astrid Buschmann-Göbels. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81
The 1760s: Grammars, grammarians and the booksellers
Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101
Mid-century grammars and their reception in the Monthly Review
and the Critical Review
Carol Percy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125
viii Table of contents

Part 3. The grammarians

The grammarians: Introduction

Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145
Ann Fischer’s A New Grammar, or was it Daniel Fisher’s work?
María Rodríguez-Gil . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149
Joseph Priestley’s two Rudiments of English Grammar: 1761 and 1768
Jane Hodson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177
Eighteenth-century teacher-grammarians and the education of
“proper” women
Karen Cajka . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191
“Borrowing a few passages”: Lady Ellenor Fenn and her use of sources
Karlijn Navest . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 223

Part 4. The grammars

The grammars: Introduction

Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 247
Preposition stranding in the eighteenth century: Something to talk
about
Nuria Yañez-Bouza . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 251
Foolish, foolisher, foolishest: Eighteenth-century English grammars
and the comparison of adjectives and adverbs
Randy Cliffort Bax . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 279
On normative grammarians and the double marking of degree
Victorina González-Díaz . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 289

References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 311
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 349
List of abbreviations

BL British Library
BNC British National Corpus
Bodl. Libr. Bodleian Library
CofP Community of Practice
DC Discourse Community
ECCO Eighteenth Century Collections Online
EModE Early Modern English
LME Late Middle English
LModE Late Modern English
ME Middle English
ModE Modern English
MS Manuscript
ODNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
OE Old English
OED Oxford English Dictionary
PDE Present-Day English
Grammars, grammarians and grammar writing:
An introduction

Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade

In The Shape of English, Roger Lass writes that a “successful standard must be
widely comprehensible, socially highly valued, and ‘codified’ to some extent;
that is, if as is usual, control of the standard is a key to social advancement, a
mark of having arrived (or being there already), there must be some authorita-
tive consensus, preferably in written form, on what it consists of” (Lass 1987:
65). It is the codification process of the English language that we are concerned
with in the present volume, and particularly with how this process took shape
in the course of the eighteenth century in the context of the writing and pro-
duction of the grammars that were part of it. From a linguistic perspective
codification may be defined as the laying down of the “laws” of the language,
i.e. the rules of usage and the definitions and pronunciation of the items in the
lexicon, in grammars and dictionaries for the benefit of the common user (cf.
Nevalainen and Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2006: 283). Codification is described
by Milroy and Milroy (1985: 27) as one of the final stages in the standardisa-
tion process of a language, coming after the “elaboration of function” stage,
when English took over the role of Latin as the language of learning, and before
the “prescription” stage, when normative rules of language came to be imposed
on the general user. This volume focusses on grammars only; for a good survey
of the development of dictionaries and dictionary writing during the Late Mod-
ern English period, see Beal (2004: 35–65).
The codification of English grammar as such set off well before the eight-
eenth century, as according to Alston (1965), which is to this date still the
standard source of reference for the history of grammar production in England,
the first grammar of English, “William Bullokarz pamphlet for grammar”, was
published in 1586. At first, the production of grammars of English took off
rather hesitantly, as the graph in Figure 1 on page 2 illustrates, but in the course
of the seventeenth century there is a clear increase in publication, which be-
comes particularly evident when reprints of earlier grammars are included into
the account as well.
The first grammar ever to be reprinted, though no more than once, was
Gil’s Lognomia Anglica (1619, 1621). The most popular grammars of the pe-
riod were John Wallis’s Grammatica Linguae Anglicanae (Oxford, 1653),
2 Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade

which was reprinted five times before the end of the seventeenth century and
twice even as late as 1765,1 Ben Jonson’s English Grammar (London, 1640),
which was reprinted four times at regular intervals down to 1746, and Joshua
Poole’s The English Accidence (London, 1646) with three reprints down to
1670. Other grammars that were reprinted were Butler (Oxford, 1633; reprinted
1634), Cooper (London, 1685; reprinted 1685), Miège (London 1688; reprinted
1689[?] and 1691) and Aickin (London, 1693; reprinted 1693).2 Butler, Jonson,
Cooper, Miège and Aickin were already reprinted in the year that they first
came out or in the year after that, which suggests an immediate interest in
these grammars among the audience for which they were written. As far as the
two rather late reprints of Wallis’s grammar are concernced, both in 1765,3 it is
interesting to note that, accoding to Kemp (1972), Robert Lowth (1710–1787),
author of one of the most authoritative grammars of the eighteenth century,
had been consulted about reprinting it:4 “Lowth replied that in his opinion ‘the
reprinting of this grammar would be for the benefit of Natives as well as of
Foreigners’. However, when asked to write a preface to it he refused, without
giving any reason” (Kemp 1972: 72).

10

6
reprints
4
new titles
2

0
1580- 1600- 1620- 1640- 1660- 1680- 1700- 1720-
1589 1609 1629 1649 1669 1689 1709 1729

Figure 1. Number of English grammars (new titles + reprints) published before 1740
(based on Alston 1965).

1 According to Alston (1965: 8), one of them was published by Andrew Millar and
the other by “Io. [Ia.?] Dodslei” with “Casp. Moseri”.
2 For the full bibliographical details of the majority of the grammars listed here and
in the course of this introduction I would like to refer to Alston (1965).
3 The interest in Wallis in the eighteenth century may have been inspired by the fact
that large parts of his grammar were incorporated into the one by Greenwood (1711)
and into the grammar prefixed to Johnson’s Dictionary (1755). See Buschmann-
Göbels (this volume) and Sledd and Kolb (1955: 17–18).
4 I am grateful to Carol Percy for pointing out to me this link between Wallis and
Lowth.
 Grammars, grammarians and grammar writing: An introduction 3

This suggests that Lowth was evidently considered an expert on grammar at the
time, but it is perhaps not the case that he refused to write a preface to the reprint
of Wallis’s grammar, for the anonymous preface to the 1765 reprint published
by Millar contains a direct reference to Lowth’s grammar as the only grammar
mentioned aside from the one by Wallis itself, while it also praises its author
and describes in detail his status as a member of the Church and his authority
as a scholar: “Quod si pleniorem ejus indolem pernoscere cupiat, consulat libel-
lum, cui titulus A Short Introduction to English Grammar, with Critical Notes,
a viro ornatissimo Roberto Lowth, Canonico Dunelmensi, nuper editum, qui
studiorum suorum complexu res fere dissociabiles conjunxit, aususque veteris
poeseos orientalis fontes recludere, patrii sermonis rudimenta exquirere digna-
tus est” (Wallis, 1765 [1653]: vii).5 Lowth’s own grammar had been published
anonymously (Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2000a), so it is interesting that here the
authorship is made explicit. Millar had been one of the publishers of Lowth’s
grammar, along with the brothers Robert and James Dodsley.
Figure 1 demonstrates that the slow increase in the production of grammars
during the seventeenth century steadily continued into the next, showing a tem-
porary peak during the second decade of that century. During the second half
of the eighteenth century the writing of grammars of English was progressing
even more strongly, as appears from Figure 2 (see page 4), which provides data
down to the end of the nineteenth century, this time for new titles only. (For a
breakdown of these data into those for the eighteenth and for the nineteenth
century as well as the effect of taking into account the reprints produced dur-
ing the eighteenth century, see Figures 1−3 in my own paper below.) As I have
noted elsewhere (Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2000b: 877), compared to the entire
period preceding (1586–1750) the rate of grammar production increased from
one to four during the subsequent fifty years only. This remarkable development
is frequently commented upon by modern scholars (see e.g. Sundby et al. 1991:
14, Fitzmaurice 1998: 326, Lundskær-Nielsen 2000: 2, Beal 2004: 90), but was
also noticed at the time, as Percy shows below in her analysis of the reception
of the grammars from this period in the popular press. To a considerable extent

5 For this quotation, as well as for the quotations from all other grammars discussed
here, I made use of Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO). The Latin may
be translated as follows: “If anyone wishes to study its [i.e. of the English language]
fuller genius, let him consult the little book with the title A Short Introduction
to English Grammar, with Critical Notes, recently published by a most dignified
man called Robert Lowth, canon of Durham, who has combined within his studies
complex and well-nigh disparate subjects, and who after having had the audacity to
disclose the fountains of the ancient oriental poetry, took it upon himself to inves-
tigate the rudiments of his mother tongue” (with thanks to Chris Heesakkers).
4 Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade

120

100

80

60
grammars
40

20

0
1700- 1720- 1740- 1760- 1780- 1801- 1821- 1841- 1861- 1881-
1709 1729 1749 1769 1789 1810 1830 1850 1870 1890

Figure 2. Number of English grammars published between 1700 and 1900 (based on
Alston 1965 and Michael 1991).

this increase seems due to the fact that it finally became clear, after the death of
Queen Anne in 1714, that England would never have an Academy, despite recur-
rent pleas for one by men of letters such as Dryden in the early 1660s,6 Defoe in
1697, Addison in 1711 and Swift in 1712. One of the functions of such an acade-
my would have been to publish an authoritative grammar of English, alongside
a dictionary, as had been done previously by the Italian and French academies
and would be done similarly by the Spanish Academy which would be founded
in 1713. When various individuals decided that they themselves could attempt
to deal with what was commonly acknowledged to be an important desidera-
tum, calls for the need of an Academy finally dwindled. Beal (2004: 91–92)
refers to an attempt made by the poet David Mallett (1701/2?–1765) in 1747 to
try and interest Lord Chesterfield (1694–1773) in a revival of the project, by
which time it was already too late: since the death of Queen Anne, thirteen new
grammars had appeared in London alone, i.e. Jones (1724), Entick (1728), Dun-
can (1731), Dyche (1732), anon. (1733), Loughton (1734), Stirling (1735), anon.
(1736), Greenwood (1737), Lowe (1737), Turner (1739), Newbery (1745) and
Kirkby (1746), along with five outside of London, i.e. Wild (Nottingham, 1719),
Barker (York, 1733?), Collyer (Nottingham, 1735), Saxon (Reading, 1737) and
Corbet (Glasgow, 1743). Pleas for an English academy fell silent, and in 1761
Joseph Priestley openly declared himself against such an institution (Hodson
2006: 76; see also Chapman as well as Hodson, this volume):

6 According to Emerson (1921–1923: 46–47) Dryden was the first to do so in public

(see also Tieken-Boon van Ostade 1990a).
 Grammars, grammarians and grammar writing: An introduction 5

As to a publick Academy, invested with authority to ascertain the use of words,

which is a project that some persons are very sanguine in their expectations from, I
think it not only unsuitable to the genius of a free nation, but in itself ill calculated to
reform and fix a language. We need make no doubt but that the best forms of speech
will, in time, establish themselves by their own superior excellence (1761: vii).
By 1770 Robert Baker must therefore have been an exception, when he wrote
in the dedication to the King of his Reflections on the English Language as
follows:
My first Proposal is that your Majesty would at some leisure Hour take it into Con-
sideration whether it might not be proper to establish in London an Academy of the
Nature of that of the Belles Lettres at Paris, and of several in Italy. This seems to be
a Thing extremely wanted among us. Our Language, as has been often observed, is
manly and expressive; but our Writers abound with Incorrectnesses and Barba-
risms: for which such an Establishment might in a great measure be a Cure (1770:
i–ii; emphasis added).
This same point was, however, already being made by popular and influential
grammarians such as Lowth, who had noted in his own preface to A Short
Introduction to English Grammar (1762) that “the English Language as it is
spoken by the politest part of the nation, and as it stands in the writings of our
most approved authors, oftentimes offends against every part of Grammar”
(1762: iii; emphasis added). By this time it had come to be felt that the problem
could – should – be solved by learners themselves, not through imposition from
above such as in the form of an English Academy. Interestingly, Baker prided
himself on not having had access even to Johnson’s Dictionary (1755) – which
had a grammar prefixed to it – until a few days before he wrote his preface,
when, he noted, “observing it inserted in the Catalogue of a Circulating Li-
brary where I subscribe, I sent for it” (1770: v). Unlike some of his contempo-
raries, therefore, Baker was no expert on grammar, something which he seems
to have regarded as an asset rather than a disadvantage. His Reflections was,
moreover, not a grammar, but a “non-systematic collection of rules on diverse
aspects of the English lexicon and syntax, as gleaned from spoken and writ-
ten sources” (Vorlat 2001: 391), and it is among the first in line of comparable
popular modern publications as John Simon’s Paradigms Lost: Reflections on
Literacy and its Decline (1980). Strikingly, Simon also introduces himself as
being unqualified in the subject he is writing about (1980: x–xiii), and he deals
with many of the same issues as Baker did, such as the question of whether it
should be different to or different than (Baker 1770: 7–8; Simon 1980: 206) and
the improper use of apostrophes (Baker 1770: 25–26; Simon 1980: 42).
Figure 2 also shows that the true rise in grammar production set off in the
1760s (see my own contribution to this volume), and that this continued stead-
6 Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade

ily, though with a somewhat unexpected peak in the 1790s,7 during the rest of
the century, culminating in what Michael has referred to as “more than enough
English grammars” and a “hyperactive production of English grammars” for
the nineteenth century (see Michael 1991 and 1997, as well as Dekeyser 1975:
9 and Görlach 1998). The nineteenth century has been described as the period
in the history of the English language when prescriptivism was at its height
(e.g. Mugglestone 2006: 279), and this is born out by the large numbers of
grammars that were produced. By this time, the English language was thus
firmly entrenched in the final stage of its standardisation process as described
in Milroy and Milroy (1985: 27), i.e. the prescription stage, though according
to Dekeyser (1975: 266) “the trend looses momentum in the course of the
period”. The question is whether the beginning of this stage can be identified.
That it lies in the eighteenth century is beyond doubt, and that it was gaining
momentum during the second half of that century is also clear, for instance
from the fact that more “practical grammars” of English were published dur-
ing that period than ever before. With two such grammars having come out
during the early decades of the century, i.e. Greenwood (London, 1711) and
Loughton (London, 1734), the number increased to eight in the 1760s and 70s
alone: Gough (Dublin, 1760), Fisher (London, 1762b), Burn (Glasgow, 1766),
Ward (York, 1767), Hodgson (London, 1770), Crocker (Sherborne, 1772), Cart-
er (Leeds, 1773) and Smetham (London, 1774).8 According to Fitzmaurice
(1998) the second half of the eighteenth century is characterised by a “pur-
suit of politeness”, by people aiming to rise in society. Consequently, socially
ambitious people were confronted with different norms of language to which
they had to adapt if they wished to be successful in their aspirations. They
were thus in need of specific linguistic guidelines, of “self-help” guides as
Watts (2002: 157) refers to them, to assist them in the process, and the book-
seller Robert Dodsley (1704–1764) catered for this need by commissioning
and publishing Johnson’s Dictionary (1755), as well as by accepting Lowth’s
grammar for publication. This grammar had originally been conceived by
Lowth as a grammar for his own son, but it was adapted to the needs of the

7 In contrast to the columns before and after, the figure for this particular decade
includes all new grammars published between 1790 and 1800; this goes some way
towards explaining why it is much higher but not entirely so, as with the year 1800
excluded the figure would have amnounted to 59, and without the data for 1790 to
61, both of them being still considerably higher than the number of grammars pro-
duced previously or afterwards.
8 These figures are based on a search of ECCO, the search terms being “practical”
and “grammar”. It is striking that no hits were produced for practical English gram-
mars labelled as such that were published after 1774.
 Grammars, grammarians and grammar writing: An introduction 7

public at large as it became a publishers’ project (Tieken-Boon van Ostade

2000a, 2003). Grammars such as Lowth’s were therefore normative in nature,
and it is for this reason that Lowth pointed out in the preface to the first edi-
tion that he focused on “practice” as he called it, rather than on the system
of the language (Lowth 1762: vi; see also Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2006a).
Readers interested in the latter subject he referred to Harris’s Hermes (1751):
“Those, who would enter more deeply into this Subject, will find it fully and
accurately handled, with the greatest acuteness of investigation, perspicuity of
explication, and elegance of method, in a Treatise intitled Hermes, by James
Harris Esq; the most beautiful and perfect example of Analysis that has been
exhibited since the days of Aristotle” (Lowth 1762: xiv−xv). Modern scholars
such as Aitchison (1981 and later editions) frequently but mistakenly blame
Lowth for the approach he took, which is due to the fact that they fail to place
the grammar in the context in which it was written (Pullum 1974).
The precise point of transition from codification to prescription in the ap-
proach taken by the grammarians is impossible to identify. One important clue,
however, is the amount of attention paid in a particular grammar to syntax.
With English grammar writing being so firmly entrenched in the Latin tradi-
tion until well into the eighteenth century – though also, of course, to an impor-
tant extent down to the present day – it was, according to Michael (1970: 198),
“difficult for English to develop a grammar of its own”. And one of the main
differences between Latin and English was that Latin was rich in morphol-
ogy (or “etymology” as it was then called; see Michael 1970: 185) and poor in
syntax, while for English the opposite applied (see Michael 1970: 466–468).
Samuel Johnson (1709–1784), though following Wallis who has been hailed
as being the first to break away from the Latin model for English grammar
(Subbiondo 1992), still wrote his grammar along traditional lines, and he was
criticised by Lowth – who does not, however, identify Johnson by name – for
having neglected English syntax: “The last English Grammar that hath been
presented to the public, and by the Person best qualified to have given us a per-
fect one, comprises the whole Syntax in ten lines” (Lowth 1762: v). Lowth does
better himself, and his Syntax, or “Sentences” as the section is called, takes up
approximately one-third of the entire grammar. But he was by no means the
first to do so, for Michael (1970: 468) notes that before 1740, some sixty per
cent of the grammarians had paid attention to syntax, with this figure steadily
rising to 85 per cent for the grammars published between 1770 and 1800.
The increase in attention paid to English syntax has to do with the great-
er interest in actual usage as a guiding principle in codifying the language.
Johnson’s change of direction between the writing of his Plan of a Diction-
ary of the English Language (1747) and the dictionary itself is a case in point
8 Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade

(McDermott 2005). Another example is that of Priestley, who according to

Hodson (this volume) still “expressed restrained confidence about the reason-
ably ‘fixed’ nature of the English language” when he published his grammar in
1761 but had undergone a shift of opinion when he revised his grammar seven
years later. Earlier grammarians who showed an interest in usage were Kirkby
(1746) and Martin (1748); the former had, however, plagiarised Fisher’s gram-
mar ([1745]) for large parts of his section on syntax (Tieken-Boon van Ostade
1992). Though the first edition of Fisher’s New Grammar has not come down to
us, this suggests that this author, who was the first woman to write a grammar
of English (Rodíguez-Gil 2002), belongs to this same group of early gram-
marians who were overtly interested in actual usage. The 1740s thus appear
to have been an important period in this respect – though without showing a
significant increase in grammar production as yet. Though according to Vorlat
(1979: 137) the first prescriptive grammarian was Cooper (1685), it seems to
me that the years between 1745 and 1770 is the period when prescriptivism first
begins to play a major role in the approach taken by grammarians – as well as
others writing on the English language, such as Johnson and Baker – as a result
of their explicit interest in actual usage. Stages in a particular historical process
of development are rarely discrete, and this is also true for the two final stages
in the standardisation process of the English language. A good illustration of
this is the case of Priestley, who, as is shown by Hodson in her contribution to
the present volume, came to realise when he decided to revise his grammar that
much about the fundamental principles of English grammar was still unde-
cided. Lowth is usually branded as an icon of prescriptivism (McArthur 1992,
s.v. “Lowth”), but with him, too, we see both a lengthy section on syntax and a
struggle to come to terms with fundamental aspects of grammar (see Auer and
Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2007).
Interest in usage, and particularly incorrect usage, was also apparent in the
popular press, as Percy shows in her contribution below. Already during the
1750s, she notes, grammatical shibboleths are discussed in the Monthly Review
and the Critical Review, which is well before they appear in the grammars.
It appears from his correspondence that Lowth at least read the Monthly Re-
view, so it would be interesting to speculate that this may have been where he
adopted his critical footnotes from, in which he condemned grammatical er-
rors committed by well-known – if dead – writers (Percy 1997a; Tieken-Boon
van Ostade 2006b). The interest in usage leads to the birth of the new category
of grammatical text already referred to above as exemplified by Baker (1770).
Its moderate popularity is evident from the fact that it was reprinted in 1779.
The work is the direct ancestor of books like Fowler’s Modern English Usage
(1926) and Gowers’s Plain Words (1948).
 Grammars, grammarians and grammar writing: An introduction 9

After the 1770s pedagogical aspects increasingly come to play a role in the
grammarians’ approach to grammar, and we see an increased output of gram-
mars specifically aimed at young learners. An important forerunner in this
respect was John Ash, whose grammar of 1760 was as popular as Lowth’s.
Each of them in effect catered for a different audience, Lowth’s for more schol-
arly inclined readers and Ash for the young beginner. Both grammars were
extremely influential on grammarians coming after them, even if the extent
of their influence correlates with their respective audiences (cf. Navest, this
volume). Starting with the publication of Ellin Devis’s grammar in 1775 we
also see the rise of a new category of grammarian during this period, i.e. that
of female “teacher-grammarians” as Cajka (this volume) calls them. These
women stand out from their male colleagues in that they were not educated
along similar traditional lines, which for most male grammarians comprised
a thorough grounding in Latin, nor did they emerge from the clergy. With an
important forerunner in Ann Fisher (1719–1778), they showed an interest in
developing a native terminology for grammar (see the contributions below by
Cajka, Rodríguez-Gil and Navest). With Lowth and Ash, Fisher’s grammar
was the most popular eighteenth-century grammar. Figure 3, which renders the
editions and reprints listed in Alston (1965) supplemented by those in Rodrí-
guez-Gil (2002a), shows that the popularity of her grammar lasted well beyond
her own lifetime.9

10

4 editions/reprints
2

0
1740- 1760- 1780- 1800-
1749 1769 1789 1809

Figure 3. Editions and reprints of Fisher ([1745]), based on Alston (1965) and
Rodríguez-Gil (2002a).

Fisher left her trace on later grammarians primarily through her innovation
of adding exercises of bad English to her grammar. In her paper below, Rodrí-

9 The figures include what is referred to as “Fisher’s Grammar Improved” (see Al-
ston 1965: 29) and its later editions and reprints.
10 Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade

guez-Gil calls this one of the grammar’s “most important contributions … to

the English grammatical tradition”, and she quotes Michael (1987) saying that
this innovation was adopted in some eighty texts published during th seond half
of the eighteenth century. Fisher was also referred to, according to Rodríguez-
Gil, by later grammarians such as Hodgson (London, 1770) and Fogg (Stock-
port, 1792−1796). Her influence is also evident from the plagiarism of Kirkby
(London, 1746), though this grammar was never reprinted. Rodríguez-Gil (this
volume) reports on the critical reception of Fisher’s grammar by William Ward
“in the Newcastle and York Newspapers”, and Percy (this volume) comments
on the fact that the grammar was not reviewed in the Monthly Review or the
Critical Review, unlike for instance Ash or Lowth, whose grammars were re-
produced in equally large numbers of reprints. For all that, according to Beal
(2004: 98), “an abridged version of Ann Fisher’s A New Grammar (1754)”,
i.e. the fourth edition, was included in Thomas Spence’s Grand Repository of
the English Language (1775). As this pronouncing ditionary was published in
Newcastle and as Kirkby appears to have originated either from Cumberland
or Yorkshire (see ODNB, s.v. “John Kirkby”), this goes to show that Fisher’s
grammar did not go unnoticed, certainly not locally.

The eighteenth century was thus a crucial period in the history of English
grammar writing. On the one hand it shows an important increase in the output
of grammars of English, which can be related to the need for the codification of
the language in the absence of an Academy that would have taken this in hand,
as well as to the increased social mobility, particularly during the second half
of the century, and the concomitant need for grammars to provide linguistic
guidance in this. The latter aspect relates to what Lass, in the quotation cited
at the beginning of this introduction, refers to as the need for codification be-
ing “control of the standard [as] a key to social advancement”. Here, however,
as I have argued above, we no longer have to do with codification proper but
with the next stage in the standardisation process, i.e. prescription. Prescription
necessarily arises out of codification when, due to social advancement, there is
a need for linguistic guidelines to bring this social advancement about. During
the eighteenth century there was a period of at least twenty-five years when the
two stages in the standardisation process were in operation simultaneously; it
is of course only in retrospect that we can identify these stages as being more
or less discrete.
On the other hand, there were during the eighteenth century a number of sig-
nificant developments in the nature of grammars produced. There is the emer-
gence of “practical” grammars, while pedagogical notions begin to play a role as
well. Different types of audiences begin to be taken into account, not always suc-
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