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Language Under the Microscope: Science and Philology in English Fiction 1850-1914

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Language Under the Microscope: Science and Philology in English Fiction 1850-1914 - 1 - Language under the Microscope: Science and Philology in English Fiction 1850-1914 Submitted by William Harrison Abberley to the University of Exeter as a thesis for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English In September 2012 This thesis is available for Library use on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement. I certify that all material in this thesis which is not my own work has been identified and that no material has previously been submitted and approved for the award of a degree by this or any other University. Signature: ………………………………………………………….. - 2 - Abstract This study explores how Anglophone fiction from the mid-Victorian period to the outbreak of the First World War acted as an imaginative testing-ground for theories of the evolution of language. Debates about the past development and the future of language ranged beyond the scope of empirical data and into speculative narrative. Fiction offered to realize such narratives in detail, building imaginative worlds out of different theories of language evolution. In the process, it also often tested these theories, exposing their contradictions. The lack of clear boundaries between nature and culture in language studies of the period enabled fictions of language evolution to explore questions to which contemporary researchers have returned. To what extent is communication instinctive or conventional? How do social and biological factors interact in the production of meaning? The study traces two opposing tendencies of thought on language evolution, naming them language ‗progressivism‘ and ‗vitalism‘. Progressivism imagined speakers evolving away from involuntary, instinctive vocalizations to extert rational control over their discourse with mechanical precision. By contrast, language vitalism posited a mysterious, natural power in words which had weakened and fragmented with the rise of writing and industrial society. Certain genres of fiction lent themselves to exploration of these ideas, with utopian tales seeking to envision the end-goals of progressive theory. Representations of primitive language in imperial and prehistoric romances also promoted progressivism by depicting the instinctive, irrational speech from which ‗civilization‘ was imagined as advancing away. Conversely, much historical and invasion fiction idealized a linguistic past when speech had expressed natural truth, and the authentic folk origins of its speakers. Both progressivism and vitalism were undermined through the late nineteenth century by developments in biology, which challenged claims of underlying stability in nature or purpose in change. Simultaneously, philologists increasingly argued that meaning was conventional, attacking models of semantic progress and degradation. In this context, a number of authors reconceptualized language in their fiction as a mixture of instinct and convention. These imaginative explorations of the borderlands between the social and biological in communication prefigured many of the concerns of twenty-first-century biosemiotics. - 3 - Contents Acknowledgements 4 Chapter One. Introduction: Dismantling the Microscope 5 Chapter Two. The Future of Language in Prophetic Fiction 30 Chapter Three. Primitive Language in Imperial, Prehistoric and Scientific Romances 71 Chapter Four. Language Nostalgia and the Organic Voice 112 Chapter Five. Instinctive Signs: Nature and Culture in Dialogue 156 Conclusion. Widening the Lens 201 Bibliography 220 - 4 - Acknowledgements First of all, I should thank Matthew Beaumont, who taught me Victorian and Modern literature during my undergraduate years at Oxford, and later advised me when I sought to return to academia. He put me in contact with Angelique Richardson, who would become my supervisor at Exeter. She helped me to turn my vague thoughts about the evolution of language in the Victorian imagination into a credible proposal. She has since been a constant support to this project, with thoughtful and sympathetic comments at every turn. I am also grateful to my second supervisor, Regenia Gagnier, who challenged and made me defend and refine my opinions on this topic. Exeter is a hotbed of Victorianists, and I am thankful to all of the staff in the university‘s Centre for Victorian Studies for creating an atmosphere of enthusiastic enquiry with regular events and guest speakers. I am grateful to Philipp Erchinger for many interesting conversations that have pushed this study in new directions. Serving as Postgraduate Representative for the Centre‘s committee, I was funded to attend the Dickens Project at The University of Santa Cruz, California. I must thank the Centre collectively for putting their trust in me to represent the university at this intellectually stimulating event. I have also benefitted greatly from my membership of the British Association for Victorian Studies, as a conference participant and committee member. In addition, I am indebted to Richard Nemesvari of St. Francis Xavier University, Nova Scotia, who helped to secure funding for me to attend the Hardy at Yale conference, 2011. Another person deserving of thanks is Sharon Ruston of the University of Salford, whose excellent series of AHRC- funded workshops ‗Theories and Methods: Literature, Science and Medicine‘ inspired new avenues of thought during my research. I am very grateful to Peter Faulkner for his untiring help with my research into William Morris and his ideas about language. I have lost count of the number of stimulating chats we have had over tea, and of the books he has lent me. I thank Isobel Armstrong and James Moore for giving me their time and advice. I am also thankful to Ruth Livesey and her colleagues at the Journal of Victorian Culture for rigorous constructive criticism of my work on Morris. I must thank my brother Joe and his partner Karah for putting me up in London during numerous visits to the British Library. I am eternally grateful to my mother, Tessa Abberley, who has always nurtured my interest in literature and helped me to believe in myself. I wish the same to my father, John Abberley, sadly no longer with us, whom I will always remember traipsing through the Staffordshire Moorlands loudly quoting Tennyson and Omar Khayyám to bemused ramblers. My final thanks go to Deni, for supporting me throughout this project, and teaching me to laugh and love in a foreign language. - 5 - Chapter One. Introduction: Dismantling the Microscope ‗Under the microscope of the etymologist every word almost discloses traces of its first metaphorical conception‘ – Friedrich Max Müller, Lectures on the Science of Language (II 354).1 ‗Astonished at the performances of the English plough, the Hindoos paint it, set it up, and worship it; thus turning a tool into an idol: linguists do the same with language‘ – Herbert Spencer, The Philosophy of Style (83). ‗I knew a woman who read French, and she ran away from her husband, and died of consumption. For it‘s in the language. My husband says it‘s rotten and corrupt, and he ought to know, being a chemist by examination‘ – John Davidson, A Full and True Account of the Wonderful Mission of Earl Lavender, which Lasted One Night and One Day (73). This study explores how English fiction of the mid-Victorian to Edwardian periods acted as a testing-ground for theories of the evolution of language. Imaginative fictional narrative, particularly, offered an ideal vehicle for exploring questions about the nature and history of language that ranged beyond empirical proof or testability. Gradual shifts towards modern, structural linguistics and anthropology from the late nineteenth century onwards would frame culture and nature as conceptual opposites. These changes rendered orthodox the assumption that the ‗nature‘ of language (if it even had one) was fixed and unchanging. Its possible evolution from prehuman communication, and the continuing role of instinct in semantics, became regarded as imponderables good for only idle speculation.2 This thesis argues, conversely, that the speculative two-way traffic between fiction and language studies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries enabled both to engage with issues to which mainstream science and linguistics have returned only relatively recently. The questions raised remain relevant today. Are words wholly arbitrary? Is there an 1 Multiple texts by single authors are differentiated here by the publication year of their specific editions, if not their titles. 2 In 1945 the American linguist George S. Lane hailed ‗mechanistic‘ linguistics for removing ‗the heritage of speculation‘ that had ‗burdened‘ earlier investigations (476). On the hardening of nature/culture binaries, see Stocking 1982, 196-233; Williams 1985, 89-91; Radick 2007, 189-96. - 6 - instinctive component in the production and reception of signs? Is language fundamentally different from animal communication or an anthropocentric construct? Similarly as language studies in the period often blurred with the physical sciences, theories of language blurred with narratives about it. Scholars and commentators searched for the nature of language through competing stories of its development. As this thesis will demonstrate, imaginative fiction did not merely passively reflect ideas in language studies about the origins and evolution of language but helped to create them. Through this argument, the study offers new readings of seminal and less well-known Victorian and Edwardian texts. The eighteenth-century
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