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monologic effects. That monologism, however, was resisted in many
different ways, ranging from outright refusal to the carnivalesque practices
of the new city class as described by Masterman. For, as Shaw s comment
demonstrates, linguistic antagonism on class grounds was reciprocal.
Whenever any English person opened their mouth, someone would despise
Science and silence 181
them. It was not simply a case of patrician distaste for the lower orders,
for the lower orders had their own hatred too. And this was a legacy of
the class formation which had emerged from the eighteenth-century
settlement and the Industrial Revolution. Society itself was highly
stratified and codified along the line of cleavage and this was mirrored in
the language. Social difference and linguistic difference were barely under
control, although the centripetalising forces which were intended to effect
order were formidable. At times it appeared that they had lost.
A NATION AT PEACE WITHIN ITSELF?
It was argued earlier in the chapter that the influence of cultural
nationalism in both the linguistic and the political debates of our period
has often been underestimated. We have noted already the force of
particular strains of cultural nationalism in eighteenth-century Britain and
in nineteenth-century Ireland. Why then should it not have significance in
our later period in British history? One answer might be that it was not
necessary, since the British were not a people whose nationality was
determined at this particular conjuncture, unlike so many other nations in
nineteenth-century Europe. That task, it might be argued, had been
achieved in the eighteenth century. Nor were the British a people whose
identity was under threat from a foreign power, at least not since the
defeat of Napoleon; there was no independence struggle. Thus, it might be
argued, cultural nationalism was simply redundant. And yet when we
consider the evidence it is clear that, far from being redundant, cultural
nationalism was an important force in the linguistic and political debates
of the day. How are we to understand this apparent paradox? The answer
lies in the fact that national identity is not something which is fixed for
ever, an eternal set of values, but rather something which is often
proposed at particular times of crisis as a way of negating difficulties.
Which is to say that national identity is not something waiting to be
discovered, but something which is forged. It is a weapon in particular
types of discursive struggle, and though it is often represented
monologically, it is in fact the site of great contestation. Thus the fact that
national identity had been forged according to particular requirements in
the eighteenth century did not mean that it could serve the same purpose
in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By dint of the fact that
there was no longer an external threat, the representation of national
identity which had been made in the earlier period now needed to be
altered; because the new danger was internal rather than external. And it
is in the light of this new development that we have to understand the new
relations between language and national identity which are forged in this
period.
A key to this problem is given by Dover Wilson when he writes on the
182 Science and silence
close association between education and politics. He claims that it is no
great accident that 1832 and 1867, the dates of two great Acts of political
enfranchisement, coincide with dates equally important in the history of
education (Wilson 1928:22 3). If we extend this argument to include
1918 we find a significant pattern: at times of political crisis there is a
response at the level of education. There is also, importantly, a response in
the form of an assertion of cultural nationalism, which is of course
precisely a discursive form which yokes together politics (nationalism) and
education (culture). In this section then we will consider how the English
language gains particular importance in cultural-nationalist debates which
arise out of moments of historical crisis.
Max Müller commented on the political role that the study of language
had played in nineteenth-century Europe when he noted that in modern
times the science of language has been called in to settle some of the most
perplexing social and political questions . In such disputes, Müller asserts,
it had acted in favour of nations and languages against dynasties and
treaties (Müller 1862:12). But what if a nation were to be challenged not
from without, by another power, but from within, by dissident forces?
What role could language then play? The answer was that it could be
deployed by the forces of centripetalisation.
It was, as we have already noted, one of the commonplaces of cultural
nationalism to see language as reflective of the national character. Thus in
1869, Graham defined language as
the outward expression of the tendencies, turn of mind, and habits of
thought of some one nation, and the best criterion of their intellect and
feelings. If this explanation be admitted, it will naturally follow that the
connection between a people and their language is so close, that the one
may be judged of by the other; and that the language is a lasting
monument of the nature and character of the people.
(Graham 1869:ix)
Trench, archbishop of Dublin, but a strong English nationalist, viewed the
language in quasi-divine terms as the embodiment, the incarnation if I
may so speak, of the feelings and thoughts and experiences of a nation
(Trench 1851:21 2). Thus the English language, at the core of Trench s
concerns, was the site of national history and thus doubly instructive:
We could scarcely have a lesson on the growth of our English tongue,
we could scarcely follow upon one of its instructive words, without
having unawares a lesson in English history as well, without not merely
falling upon some curious fact illustrative of our national life, but
learning also how the great heart which is beating at the centre of that
life, was gradually being shaped and moulded.
(ibid.: 24)
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Teaching the history of the language amounted to teaching the history of
the nation, no more no less.
If this familiar trope of cultural nationalism was replayed in the period,
however, there were others no less familiar or significant. Both the
eighteenth-century English nationalists and the nineteenth-century Irish
nationalists had figured their respective languages as superior to all others.
We find this again in writings upon English as the language of a major
empire in the mid-nineteenth century. Higginson, for example, wrote:
for all the mixed uses of speech between man and man, and from man
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