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Black English in Britain in the Eighteenth Century

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Black English in Britain in the Eighteenth Century Black English in Britain in the Eighteenth Century David Paisey for Ziggi Alexander and Audrey Dewjee Historians have added in various ways to our knowledge of the black presence in Britain during the eighteenth century, but one aspect has not figured largely in the accumulated evidence, namely records of how black people, a distinct underclass, spoke to each other and to all classes of the native white population. In a period long before sound recording, we are obviously dependent on written sources for indications of how lower-class groups spoke, that is to say their deviations in vocabulary, grammar, syntax and pronunciation from what we must call standard English, itself a construct from written sources. Accessible Court records from the period, of testimony by black defendants and witnesses, seem not to have been verbatim,1 and there is no key which might lead us to potential untapped sources in private manuscripts. It is also the case that works actually written and published by literate members of all ethnic groups generally aimed at the standard: this certainly applies to the published works of well- known black writers such as Ignatius Sancho (c. 1729-1780), Olaudah Equiano (c. 1745-1797), Ottobah Cugoano (c. 1757-after 1791) and the African-American Phyllis Wheatley (c. 1753- 1784). There are exceptions, however, in various works of imaginative literature by non-black writers, and these will provide all my evidence here. Amongst these, drama looms large, since the words given to some (though not all) of its black characters constitute an attempt to provide non-speakers of Black English (the actors of the day) with what must have been thought a believable likeness of the real thing. My earliest drama dates from 1768, and there may be earlier ones I have missed. There is no Black English in Polly (1729), a ballad opera by John Gay (1685-1732) set in the West Indies, which was a sequel to his immensely popular Beggars’ Opera (1728). Of the two most celebrated and influential literary subjects of the century with leading black characters, which appeared in various genres, including drama, to support the anti-slavery cause, Oroonoko2 always relied on standard English alone, while Inkle and Yarico3 included Black English only at a late stage (see below). It should also be noted that there are many literary records of other forms of non-standard English during the eighteenth century, notably Irish and Scots English, but also other English dialectal forms and the attempts of foreigners to speak the language. 1 We do have, in the Old Bailey records, the sole attempt during that century to render verbatim and phonetically a passage of non-standard English, in this case spoken by an Irishman in 1725. Old Bailey Proceedings online <http://www.oldbaileyonline.org> 7 April 1725, testimony of James Fitzgerald. 2 Oroonoko, based on a story of 1688 by Aphra Behn (1640?-1689) and originally set in Surinam and Africa. See Susan F. Iwanisziw, Oroonoko: Adaptations and Offshoots (Aldershot, 2006). 3 Inkle and Yarico, originally a brief anecdote in Richard Ligon’s A True and Exact History of the Islands of Barbadoes, 2nd edn (London, 1673), p. 55, developed into a more substantial story published by Richard Steele (1672-1729) in 1711 in the London Spectator. 1 eBLJ 2015, Article 12 Black English in Britain in the Eighteenth Century British Black English is largely a British West Indian creole, which will have developed from various pidgins as a lingua franca enabling communication between the three main ethnic groups there: the dominant English of the slave-owners, the many different African languages spoken by the imported slaves,4 and the Taino languages of the original islanders. Speakers in Britain will have included people from Jamaica and other parts of the West Indies, though the examples of the language provided by white writers of the eighteenth century in their works of imagination (while, I suggest, as faithful as possible to what they heard in everyday life) cannot be taken as providing evidence of particular local origins; indeed, as we shall see, some writers did not scruple to assign samples of this same language to invented members of foreign language groups such as American slaves and Native Americans. The Dictionary of Jamaican English, edited by F. G. Cassidy and R. B. Le Page,5 indexes ‘forms attested at any time between 1655 and the present day’, the earliest, including the eighteenth century, obviously from written sources, which do not include imaginative literature,6 but it must remain an open question how far Cassidy and Page’s Jamaican English also represents the West Indies in a general sense during this period. The dictionary provides a vocabulary, and my samples – always remembering that they were written down by a variety of members of the white British population not attempting to provide a historical record – nevertheless provide an insight into a living usage. That they are largely unsurprising in vocabulary may reflect both their conversational mode and the authors’ intention not to overtax the expectations of their white middle-class audience. It should be remembered that creoles are not standardized, or fixed in written form, and are dynamic by nature, so that changes will have continued to be made by speakers at various times and in various places. By the eighteenth century, there were large numbers of black people in Britain, who took the practice of this language (no doubt with many variant features) to several parts of the country where it served as a perfectly adequate means of communication, both within the group and externally. However, the spread of the black population cannot be inferred from this literature, because of the overall dominance of London in publishing and printing, though we can be sure that the largest numbers were in that city. Nigel File and Chris Power quote a claim in The Gentleman’s Magazine for 1764 that there were currently 20,000 black servants in London alone, but the article cited in that publication (from an unnamed newspaper) is very hostile in tone, and the figure surely a would-be alarming overestimate.7 American versions of Black English (sometimes called Ebonics) have been more studied than British ones, by linguists and others, for instance in J. G. Dillard’s Black English: History and Usage in the United States,8 and his findings were a valuable starting-point for me, with his major examples beginning with Daniel Defoe (c. 1660-1731) in England.9 While specifically 4 See Joseph T. Farquharson, The African Lexis in Jamaican: Its Linguistic and Sociohistorical Significance (2012). Available at <http://works.bepress.com/joseph_farquharson/1>. The earliest English examples of the languages of African slaves in Jamaica were written down by Sir Hans Sloane in his Voyage to the Islands of Madera, Barbados, Nieves, S. Christophers, and Jamaica, vol. i (London, 1707), pp. xlviii-xlix, in transcriptions of the music for African dancers from ‘Angola, Papa & Koromanti’, of which the first and third have words. For a detailed analysis of this record see Richard Cullen Rath, ‘African Music in Seventeenth-Century Jamaica: Cultural Transit and Transition’, The William and Mary Quarterly, l (Oct. 1993), pp. 700-26. Lorenzo Don Turner, Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect (Ann Arbor, 1973, originally 1949) has dealt in great detail with the dialect of slaves imported into coastal areas of South Carolina and Georgia during the eighteenth, and the first part of the nineteenth, century. 5 2nd edn (Cambridge, 1980). 6 Beryl Loftman Bailey, Jamaican Creole Syntax: A Transformational Approach (Cambridge, 1966) is almost entirely a detailed analysis of the present form of the language. 7 Nigel File and Chris Power, Black Settlers in Britain 1555-1958 (London, 1981); The Gentleman’s Magazine, xxxiv (1764), p. 495, rubric Short Notes from the Papers. I have not found the original text in any newspaper in the British Library’s Burney database of newspapers to 1800. 8 New York, 1972. 9 Before Defoe, Dillard has American examples of isolated words from sources such as the Salem witchcraft trials of 1692. I am also grateful to Sheila O’Connell and Peter Hogg for very useful suggestions. 2 eBLJ 2015, Article 12 Black English in Britain in the Eighteenth Century American sources have then to await the later eighteenth century,10 British literary history is somewhat more forthcoming, and my small selections of samples from strictly eighteenth- century sources follow, listed chronologically from a variety of genres, as an encouragement for others to search for more11 and to check the several passages of speech I have deliberately omitted to save space. The earliest examples are indeed generally supposed to be found in three works by Defoe, a prolific author who never travelled abroad, so that what he portrays as Black English must be what he had heard in England, despite his putting it in the mouths of individuals of three different origins. These are therefore the first examples of the use of Black English (which British people had heard spoken on the street) as a default also for other variant languages or creoles which they were not accustomed to hear (notably Native American English and the English of Black slaves in America). In the first and most famous of Defoe’s examples,Robinson Crusoe (1719), he invents a West-Indian islander (not an African) whom the shipwrecked Crusoe calls Friday and to whom he teaches English from scratch. In Friday’s very few examples of direct speech, Defoe has him using expressions no doubt taken from the creole already mentioned, whereas logically they should be in Crusoe’s own standard English.
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