Just the
Word Robin Blake describes the challenges he faces as a historical novelist in getting the language right for the 1740s, the period in which his mystery series is set
Jonathan Swift’s advice in his essay ‘Letter to a Young Gentleman Lately Entered into Holy Orders’ (1721) was that ‘proper words in proper places, make the true definition of a style’ . Behind this succinct formula lies a more complicated truth. To be an effective writer it is necessary to grow the antennae of a grasshopper, acutely attuned not only to the aptness and music of words, but also to their potential dullness and clunkiness: the jargon noun, the cliché verb, the mixed metaphor and the unfeasible slang. But, if all writers have to keep their phraseology under surveillance, when you write in a historical voice the language must be policed with special strictness. I write historical fiction in the first person of Titus Cragg, a bookish lawyer and coroner in eighteenth-century provincial Lancashire. To make Cragg’s voice convincing and enjoyable for the modern reader I must walk a fine line between linguistic anachronism and the obstructively archaic – no one swooning, or saying ‘I would fain’ or ‘methinks’ , or exclaiming ‘Gadzooks!’ My choice of words has to stick to the lexicon of the period while being easy on the modern ear: words proper for the time in an order proper for any time. 14 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE
The Georgian period had its fair share of mandarin prose, littered with self-important Latinisms. But there was no shortage, either, of straight, pennyplain writing. Surprisingly useful models are pornographic writers such as John Cleland, author of Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748). Their books were written with less highly educated readers in mind – servants, for example – while the nature of the genre tends in any case to favour the use of a plain, direct style. It is also, incidentally, a useful source of terms for dress and fabric, the shedding of clothes being not infrequent in erotica. Anachronism is harder to suppress than archaism and I am constantly addressing such questions as whether
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Cragg would write that someone ‘giggles’ or alternatively ‘titters’ . Can he say ‘cock a snook’ or should he prefer ‘thumb his nose’? And what about the dialogue? In what period might a character ask another to lend him a ‘quid’ so he can ‘wet his whistle’? And at what point do people start greeting each other with a cheery ‘hello’? Fortunately, help is close at hand. My stories are set in the 1740s, the very decade that Samuel Johnson began work on the English language’s first great dictionary, which was finally published in 1755. It is a prime authority on permissible words for the period, as well as being, of course, a pleasure to use in its own right. Very occasionally the definitions can seem a bit loose – fart is defined ambiguously as
Johnson’s “mouse” may be inaccurate but
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it is delightful: “the smallest of all beasts; a little animal haunting houses and cornfields, destroyed by cats”
