ARTICULATING CLASS: LANGUAGE AND CONFLICT IN ENGLISH LITERATURE FROM GASKELL TO TRESSELL Timothy John James University of Cape Town Thesis presented for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English UNIVERSITY OF CAPE TOWN JANUARY 1992 The copyright of this thesis vests in the author. No quotation from it or information derived from it is to be published without full acknowledgement of the source. The thesis is to be used for private study or non- commercial research purposes only. Published by the University of Cape Town (UCT) in terms of the non-exclusive license granted to UCT by the author. University of Cape Town ABSTRACT ARTICULATING CLASS: LANGUAGE AND CONFLICT IN ENGLISH LITERATURE, FROM GASKELL TO TRESSELL Concentrating on English literary texts written between the 1830s and 1914 and which have the working class as their central focus, the thesis examines various ways in which class conflict inheres within the textual language, particularly as far as the representation of working-class speech is concerned. The study is made largely within V. N. Voloshinov's understanding of language. Chapter 1 examines the social role of "standard English" (including accent) and its relationship to forms of English stigmatised as inadequate, and argues that the phoneticisation of working-class speech in novels like those of William Pett Ridge is to indicate its inadequacy within a situation where use of the "standard language" is regarded as a mark of all kinds of superiority, and where the language of narrative prose has, essentially, the "accent" of "standard English". The periodisation of the thesis is discussed: the "industrial reformist" novels of the Chartist years and the "slum literature" of the 1880s and '90s were bourgeois responses to working-class struggle. Chapter 2 argues that the frequent charges of "silence" and "inarticulateness" against the working-class in this literature should be understood as an ideological attempt to silence that class's voice (understood synechdocally to represent its socio-political claims). That "voice" is shown in, e.g., the writings of Thomas Carlyle, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Reade, Arthur Morrison, George Gissing, Edwin Pugh and Walter Besant as speaking revolutionary violence. Generally, the working-class is shown as safely silent and apathetic, with the articulateness of "agitators" shown as dangerous and contemptible. Censorship of swearing is considered in this context. Representation of the working-class as inarticulate or silent also acts as reassurance that only the bourgeois voice is proper to power, workers' language being fundamentally mangled, inadequate and invalid. Interpretations of proletarian silence in the writings of C.F.G. Masterman are discussed; their contradictions reveal that the perceived "silence" is reflective of an ideological inability to hear what is said, and silence is feared because it continues to represent a revolutionary threat. Chapter 3 glances at the history of the phoneticisation of working-class speech in literature, and shows that it became important in the late 19th century when a more "accurate" "knowledge" of the working class demanded a higher degree of naturalism. The influential work of Rudyard Kipling is discussed. His phoneticisation is shown to be not "accurate", but in accordance with a new set of conventions which was coming to replace the old. Inconsistency, a concern for linguistically meaningless display, and inaccuracy can be found in probably all of the slum fiction of the 1880s and '90s. G.B. Shaw is considered in this context, as a writer with some linguistic education and as supposedly sympathic to the working class. His work, however, reveals similar prejudices. Chapter 4 looks at the significance of "standard" English in relation to contemporary concerns with "culture" and "education", which were particularly relevant in debates over the extension of the franchise and in the self-definition of the petty bourgeoisie. Close analysis is made of writings by, particularly, Gissing, revealing the textual clash between the language of the working class and the consciously educated (frequently highly Latinate) language of the narrator. Chapter 5 considers the representation of workers as writers, and shows the tendency to represent their "written" speech as, rather, spoken. In works by Edith Ostlere, Annie Wakeman, Clarence Rook and Edwin Pugh, writing is reserved as a particular form of control over language and the author-narrator uses various means, including phoneticisation of workers' words to retain this control as part of bourgeois social power. Chapter 6 turns to Robert Tressell's Ragged Trousered Philanthropists and Henry Nevinson's Neighbours of Ours, to examine the implications of the use of established literary forms and conventions by socialist writers. Tressell maintains the convention of using phoneticised "dialect" to represent stupidity and political inadequacy while "standard" English remains the language of the narrator and of the hero: but now the class distribution of these languages is reversed. This is argued to be an inadequate, because temporary, response to the social disparagement of the language of the workers. Nevinson's narrator "speaks" phoneticised Cockney but this important innovation, too, leaves unchallenged the literary and social systems of class disparagement. Working-class language is still represented as divergent from the norm. Tim James, 14 Penrith Road, Wynberg, 7800, South Africa January 1992 CONTENTS page Preface and acknowledgements 1 Chapter 1 Introduction: standard languages in literature 7 Chapter 2 "Words that smell of blood and gunpowder": the silence and inarticulateness of the working class 48 Chapter 3 "The orthography of the uneducated", from Kipling to Shaw 103 Chapter 4 Culture, education and the representation of the working class: Gissing 165 Chapter 5 The narrated as narrator: workers represented as writers 222 Chapter 6 Dialogue within the working class: Tressell and Nevinson 252 Notes 290 List of works cited 304 PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The Formalist school represents an abortive idealism applied to the questions of art. The Formalists show a fast ripening religiousness. They are followers of St. John. They believe that "In the beginning was the word". But we believe that in the beginning was the deed. The word followed, as its phonetic shadow. - Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution In rematerialising the sign, we are in imminent danger of de-materialising the referent. - Terry Eagleton, "Aesthetics and Politics" An Essay Toward Proving that the Immorality, Ignorance and False Trust, which so Generally Prevail, are the Natural and Necessary Consequences of the Present Defective System of Education. With an Attempt to show that a Revival of the Art of Speaking and the Study of our Own Language might contribute in A Great Measure to the Cure of Those Evils. - Thomas Sheridan, British Education Why care for grammar as long as we are good? - Artemus Ward, Pyrotechny A piece of academic work which announces in its title a central concern with language is far from rare: in the fields of social history, sociology, political philosophy and literature -- to mention only those to which the present work has affiliations -- there is, it might be said, a fixation with language. The nature and origins (in theory and socially) of that fixation are such as to make my other indicated focus -- class, and class conflict -- increasingly rare. Linguistic structuralism, post-structuralism, discourse theory, striving to comprehend all aspects of social life 2 within language, have, typically, little use for Marxist categories like class. Although there is sometimes reference to Marxism, these philosophers could not live with Marx's thesis that the task is not merely one of understanding the world, but of changing it. For language constructs being and is a tyrant, it would seem, which cannot be challenged; and we cannot even understand fully, beyond understanding the linguistic limits of our understanding. The affiliation of so many of the French structuralists and their successors to the Communist Party which seems to find that capitalism cannot be challenged either, is not really surprising. The case of Althusser has made this clear: he presided over the theoreticisation of de-Stalinised Stalinism's finally definitive abandonment of the goal of a revolution leading to the dictatorship of the proletariat; he gave crucial theoretical impetus to that materialisation of the sign and dematerialisation of the referent against which Terry Eagleton warns. He adapted the concept of ideology, as Bryan Palmer points out, "to the dictates of reified language by stripping it of any relationship to the political practices of the working classu (p. 24). For the discourse-theorists there is no hope against language, and no hope against capitalism; their tendency to reify language, seeing it as immutably and dictatorially unmediated is, in fact, merely to theorise in accord with the reifying tendencies of bourgeois society. It will be clear that the investigation I pursue in this work will be susceptible to denunciation as "reductionistu, as "vulgar Marxismu from those I, in turn, call reformists, pessimists, idealists. The investigation itself is theorised, 3 though not theoretical; that is, there is no continuing attempt to theoreticise or to theoretically elaborate on, the positions and understandings after which I strive. It is for this reason that I wish to make clear, here,