Dorothy or “Dolly” Pentreath, a woman who has been mythologized as the last native speaker of the Cornish language, is the subject of my third biographical interlude. I tell Pentreath’s story through the textual record of antiquarian Daines Barrington’s effort to locate and converse with her in the 1770s. The third chapter addresses eighteenth-century theories and methodologies of translation in order to show that discourses of standardization and translation are mutually constituted over the course of the period. As I show, the ambivalence that characterizes standardization’s negotiation of linguistic multiplicity also marks the period’s translation theory. Translation theorists of the eighteenth century engage with linguistic multiplicity internal and external to anglophony by focusing on the translator’s imperative to eschew “the servile path,” so as not to fall under the control of the source language’s characteristics. The regular injunction to pursue “free” or “liberal” translation coupled with the constant caution against “servile” or “slavish” translation amounts to a roundabout way of warning against unauthorized transportation of cultural material from other linguistic realms into anglophony. It also offers an additional, period-specific binary—free or slavish—within which to understand translation practice.
The primary conceit of popular outsider-looking-in texts like Oliver Goldsmith’ The Citizen of the World (1760), or, a generation later, Elizabeth Hamilton’ Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah (1796), is language’s ability to situate a subject, even in writing. The interlude that links Chapters 3 and 4 considers Joseph Emin, a polyglot traveler who, despite “not being very well versed in the English language,” wrote and published his own biography in 1792. Emin’s fear of being judged through his language offers a way to think about anglophony and “dialect,” a concept I purse in the fourth chapter. This chapters focuses on demotic “dialect dialogue” writing in Andrew Brice’s Exmoor Scolding In the Propriety and Decency of the Exmoor Language (composed ca. 1727; first extant print edition 1746), John Collier’s regularly reprinted A View of the Lancashire Dialect by way of Dialogue (1746), and, later, Maria and Richard Lovell Edgeworth’s Essay on Irish Bulls (1802). By reading the aesthetics of Brice and Collier’s work, as well as their Standard English translation histories, I frame these dialogues as deliberate critiques of the spread of Standard English literacy during the period.
Between Chapters 4 and 5 I discuss Ntiero Edem Efiom, a West African slave trader whose anglophone idiolect is a good model for the active rescripting of language and meaning through multilingualism that is discussed in the fifth chapter by way of interlingual translation. Whereas the fourth chapter focuses on intralingual translation, or, translation from one anglophone form to another, the fifth and final chapter positions interlingual translation in commercial terms. The works of Alexander Fraser Tytler, Sir William Jones, William Julius Mickle, and George Campbell show that interlingual translation of the period—like intralingual translation—stresses “free” and legible rather than “servile” translation. I intervene into analyses of imperial translation practice and aesthetics by suggesting that the effects of this ideology of translation are crucially related to the period’s ideas of the commodity value of particular languages.
This book closes by considering the life and inventions of Sequoyah, a man well known for his invention of the Cherokee syllabary in 1821. This rumination on Sequoyah’s desire to escape from and provincialize Standard English paves the way for the conclusion’s discussion of contemporary conversations about the past and future of the English language. I discuss popular and potentially hyperbolic accounts of English’s spread and influence in order to argue that the counterarchive of long eighteenth-century “dialect” writing, multilingual writing, and translation theory that the book has just surveyed offers a different view for the future of anglophony and the humanities more generally.
MULTILINGUAL LIVES
Peros, Jack, Neptune, and Cupid
On August 9, 1761, four male slaves escaped from Dogue Run farm in the Colony of Virginia. This event is remarkable for several reasons, the most notable of which is that Dogue Run farm made up part of the Mount Vernon plantation complex owned by George and Martha Washington, a couple who had married and combined their holdings two and a half years prior to the escape. In an effort to recapture those whom Washington viewed as his rightful property, he did like many other “victims” of this peculiar species of labor “theft.” He took to the literate public sphere of newspapers and narrated the men into brief but vivid existence for the regional community of readers.1 Specifically, Washington undertook the common act of purchasing a fugitive slave advertisement that described these four men in detail.2 His advertisement, dated two days after the escape, appeared in an edition of the Maryland Gazette that was printed in Annapolis on August 20, 1761.3
Washington’s roughly five-hundred-word advertisement, which has been usefully annotated by the editors of the Papers of George Washington, reads as follows:
Fairfax County (Virginia) August 11, 1761.
RAN away from a Plantation of the Subscriber’s, on Dogue-Run in Fairfax, on Sunday the 9th Instant, the following Negroes, viz.
Peros, 35 or 40 Years of Age, a well-set Fellow, of about 5 Feet 8 Inches high, yellowish Complexion, with a very full round Face, and full black Beard, his Speech is something slow and broken, but not in so great a Degree as to render him remarkable. He had on when he went away, a dark colour’d Cloth Coat, a white Linen Waistcoat, white Breeches, and white Stockings.
Jack, 30 Years (or thereabouts) old, a slim, black, well made Fellow, of near 6 Feet high, a small Face, with Cuts down each Cheek, being his Country Marks, his Feet are large (or long) for he requires a great Shoe: The Cloathing he went off in cannot be well ascertained, but it is thought in his common working Dress, such as Cotton Waistcoat (of which he had a new One) and Breeches, and Osnabrig Shirt.
Neptune, aged 25 or 30, well-set, and of about 5 Feet 8 or 9 Inches high, thin jaw’d, his Teeth stragling and fil’d sharp, his Back, if rightly remember’d, has many small Marks or Dots running from both Shoulders down to his Waistband, and his Head was close shaved: Had on a Cotton Waistcoat, black or dark colour’d Breeches, and an Osnabrig Shirt.
Cupid, 23 or 25 Years old, a black well made Fellow, 5 Feet 8 or 9 Inches high, round and full faced, with broad Teeth before, the Skin of his Face is coarse, and inclined to be pimpley, he had no other distinguishable Mark that can be recollected; he carried with him his common working Cloaths, and an old Osnabrigs Coat made of Frockwise.
The last two of these Negroes were bought from an African Ship in August 1759, and talk very broken and unintelligible English; the second one, Jack, is Countryman to those, and speaks pretty good English, having been several Years in the Country. The other, Peros, speaks much better than either, indeed has little of his Country Dialect left, and is esteemed a sensible and judicious Negro.
As they went off without the least Suspicion, Provocation, or Difference with any Body, or the least angry Word or Abuse from their Overseers, ’tis supposed they will hardly lurk about in the Neighbourhood, but steer some direct Course (which cannot even be guessed at) in Hopes of an Escape: Or, perhaps, as the Negro Peros has lived many Years about Williamsburg, and King William County, and Jack in Middlesex, they may possibly bend their Course to one of those Places.