What! A book have no merit, and yet be called for at the rate of sixty thousand copies a year! What a slander is this upon the public taste! What an insult to the understanding and discrimination of the good people of these United States! According to this reasoning, all the inhabitants of our land must be fools, except one man, and that man is GOOLD BROWN!
Brown bit back, pointing out that Lord Byron got paid a lot more for Childe Harold than Milton did for Paradise Lost; but would anyone say Byron was the greater literary genius?
Brown and Kirkham may have pitted themselves against one another,§ but they (along with their contemporaries) agreed on one thing: grammar was to be viewed not as a mere matter of personal taste or style, but now as a coherent system of knowledge. Accordingly, they termed grammar a ‘science’. In the middle of the nineteenth century, however, a new wave of grammarians began to argue that grammar wasn’t just a science in this broad sense of schematic knowledge, but a science in the narrower sense in which we use the word nowadays. To these new grammarians, their field was analogous to the natural sciences.
In staking this claim, the new grammarian-scientists were almost certainly reacting to protests from parents of schoolchildren and school officials, who claimed that the study of grammar was boring and ineffectual; pupils’ time was better spent studying the natural sciences, which were exciting and taught real skills. Complaints about the mind-numbing uselessness of grammar surfaced as early as 1827, came to a boil by 1850, and persisted through the rest of the nineteenth century. If grammarians wanted to stay relevant and sell those lucrative grammar books to schools and their pupils, they needed to answer to carping parents and officials. In a few cases, grammarians peddled their wares with novelty methods and titles that smacked of circus-barker enthusiasm: British grammarian George Mudie perhaps epitomised this trend with his 1841 book, The Grammar of the English Language truly made Easy by the Invention of Three Hundred Moveable Parts of Speech. Truly, what could be easier or more fun than 300 moveable parts of speech?¶
More often, however, grammarians answered to complaints about grammar’s relative dullness and uselessness with rather ingenious rhetoric: grammar, they proposed, was a method of teaching students the art of scientific observation without requiring expensive or complex scientific apparatus. In service of this goal of teaching scientific skills, grammarians resolved to employ careful observation of English, because this gave them a way to use the methods of science to refine grammar; and they imported into their grammars some of the conventions of science textbooks, such as diagrams.
Isaiah J. Morris, ‘offensive’ from the very first page.
Rebel American grammarian Isaiah J. Morris emphasised the first approach – careful observation of English – in his 1858 Morris’s grammar: A philosophical and practical grammar of the English language, dialogically and progressively arranged; in which every word is parsed according to its use.** Morris came out swinging from the start, distancing himself from reigning champions of grammar like the bestselling Samuel Kirkham. Kirkham and his ilk had relied on Greek and Latin grammar to come up with rules for English, and as a result, Morris fumed, they had littered the true ‘laws of language’ with ‘errors’ and ‘absurdities’, which Morris was now left to ‘expose and explode’. Correcting these mistakes was a moral obligation: ‘Shall we roll sin under our tongues as a sweet morsel?’ Morris demanded. ‘It must be sin to teach what we know to be error.’ In order to cleanse English grammars of these corruptions, Morris devoted the preface of his grammar to eviscerating the stale precepts of his predecessors. He knew that shredding such venerable grammarians would shock his readers: ‘If the truth be disagreeable,’ he shrugged, ‘I choose to be offensive.’††
Morris offered a way to get beyond the deference to Latin and Greek that he believed had made earlier grammarians so error-prone: he advocated observing English carefully, and then making rules based on those observations, rather than trying to squeeze English grammar into frameworks designed for dead languages.‡‡ Grammar rules would then arise directly from scrutinising English in action – and conveniently enough, the study of grammar would thus acquire for itself some of the virtues of the natural sciences that were being championed in the press, where commentators regularly argued that students were inherently inclined towards the observation and study of natural phenomena.
Grammarians had a second strategy to advance against critics who complained about the inferiority of grammar when compared to the natural sciences: the sentence diagram. Any good science textbook had diagrams, and if grammar was to be a science, it surely needed a system of schematic illustrations as well. And so in 1847, a grammarian named Stephen Clark introduced a system of diagrams designed to relate to the ‘Science of Language’ as maps did to geography, and figures to geometry and arithmetic. (It might sound odd to the modern reader to think of geography and geometry as natural sciences like physics and chemistry, but plenty of people back in Clark’s days thought of them that way, and even people who didn’t categorise those areas of study as ‘sciences’ believed the two disciplines were essential for the study of both the natural sciences and other respected fields like philosophy. And, unlike grammar, the mathematical sciences were considered ‘perfect’ and ‘useful’.)
Clark’s diagrams often made use of Bible verses: might as well pack in a few fearsome reminders about the powers of the Almighty for those schoolchildren misbehaving in the back of the class, after all.
The diagrams were a popular addition to grammar books, and held on for a long time. Although they’ve fallen out of pedagogical fashion these days, some readers may remember grammar classes from their childhoods that relied heavily on diagramming sentences on the blackboard. I certainly do, although I don’t recall ever having to produce anything quite so comically elaborate as this humdinger.
Clark, who invented the sentence-diagramming technique to visualise language, did his best to make the rest of his grammar follow the definitive-sounding, principle- and fact-heavy aesthetic of the natural sciences in other ways, too. Clark’s rules were set up in an outline form, which Clark borrowed from his contemporary Peter Bullions. Bullions had used outlines to show his readers ‘leading principles, definitions, and rules’. Those rules were to be displayed ‘in larger type’ to emphasise their importance; and exceptions to the rules were printed in type that got smaller and smaller the further away from an ironclad principle they crept.
In Bullions’s nesting-doll fonts a fundamental tension is writ large: the conflicting demands of rules and taste. Bullions wrote that the purpose of punctuation was ‘to convey to the reader an exact sense, and assist him in the proper delivery’. He warned, however, in a font two points smaller, that ‘the duration of the pauses must be left to the taste of the reader or speaker’. Nevertheless, he then provided twenty-five rules and exceptions for the comma alone. These rules were then followed by yet another disclaimer in even tinier font than the first: ‘The foregoing rules will, it is hoped, be found comprehensive; yet there may be some cases in which the student must rely on his own judgment.’ Bullions seems to be equivocating, vacillating between committing to rules on the one hand, and capitulating to taste on the other.
Bullions and the tension between rules and taste.
Bullions’s dilemma was every nineteenth-century grammarian’s nightmare: how could it be possible to give useful rules for punctuation, while at the same time acknowledging that those rules couldn’t describe every valid approach to punctuating a text? Whether a grammarian tried to police English with the laws of ancient Latin and Greek, or instead