¹ Jonson, Ben, Timber; or, Discoveries Made Upon Men and Matter, As They Have Flowed Out of His Daily Readings, or Had Their Reflux to his Peculiar Notion of the Times in The Works of Ben Jonson, ed. Cornwall, Barry (1641; London, 1838), 759Google Scholar.

² The persistent alignment of dialect and criminality is too large a subject for this article. However, a few examples drawn from eighteenth-century periodicals will serve to confirm this point. For instance, an advertisement in the General Evening Post, 27–30 December 1794, issue 9555, describes corrupt bank clerk John Carwardine in the following way: “About twenty-four years of age, five feet nine inches high … the muscles of his face work very much when spoken to by a stranger; shews his upper teeth; which are large and yellow, and speaks the Herefordshire dialect.” Similarly, an ad for Derby jail escapee Anne Williamson in Evening Post, 6–8 March 1755, issue 4263, says that Williamson speaks “Yorkshire Dialect and belongs to a notorious Gang of Gamblers.”

³ Mason, John, An Essay on Elocution, or, Pronunciation (1748; London, 1757), 6Google Scholar.

⁴ Enfield, William’s The Speaker (London, 1774)Google Scholar and subsequently this book’s many imitators became some of the most widely sold books of the Romantic period. Clair, William St. writes, “William Enfield’s Speaker, Lindley Murray’s English Reader, and William Mavor’s Classical English Poetry for the Use of Schools and Young Persons, to mention only three among many rivals and imitators, were reprinted in large editions every year, and sold in hundreds of thousands of copies throughout the Romantic Period,” in The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge, 2004), 137Google Scholar.

⁵ See, e.g., Miller, Thomas, The Formation of College English: Rhetoric and Belles Lettres in the British Cultural Provinces (Pittsburgh, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Ulman, H. Lewis, Things, Thoughts, Words, and Actions: The Problem of Language in Late Eighteenth-Century British Rhetorical Theory (Carbondale, IL, 1994)Google Scholar.

⁶ The most important work in both postcolonial and sociolinguistic veins is Mugglestone, Lynda’s “Talking Proper”: The Rise of Accent as Social Symbol (Oxford, 2003)Google Scholar.

⁷ Two strong investigations of this problem are Sorenson, Janet, The Grammar of Empire in Eighteenth-Century British Writing (Cambridge, 2000)Google Scholar; and Crawford, Robert, Devolving English Literature (Oxford, 1992)Google Scholar.

⁸ H. Lewis Ulman has argued, “Standardization was not a democratic process aimed at choosing a common linguistic form that would facilitate communication among speakers of different dialects and encourage wide participation in public discourse” (Things, Thoughts, Words, and Actions, 26).

⁹ As many historians have noted, three forces drove the new social mobility: urbanization, internal migration, and colonialism. See, esp., Hilton, Boyd, A Mad, Bad, and Dangerous People? England 1783–1846 (Oxford, 2006), chap. 1Google Scholar.

¹⁰ See n. 2. Additionally, as Boyd Hilton points out, this was a period when increasing economic mobility made it such that older codes for identifying people were no longer as reliable; Boyd Hilton, A Mad, Bad, and Dangerous People?, 31–38.

¹¹ Charles Macklin and his protégé Samuel Foote, for instance, famously piqued audiences with their linguistic impressions. See discussion of Macklin and Foote in Ragussis, Michael, Theatrical Nation: Jews and Other Outlandish Englishmen in Georgian Britain (Philadelphia, 2010), 45, 60Google Scholar.

¹² This problematic intentionally recalls and reworks Olivia Smith’s distinction between polite and vulgar language in her important study The Politics of Language, 1789–1819 (Oxford, 1984)Google Scholar.

¹³ Moody, Jane, “Dictating to the Empire: Performance and Theatrical Geography in Eighteenth-Century Britain,” in The Cambridge Companion to British Theatre, 1730–1830 (Cambridge, 2007), 32CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁴ Though none include sound, the other main loci for the recording of dialect are of course the novel and poetry. Additionally, there is a minor genre of eighteenth-century writing called the dialect dialogue. These were often written to entertain readers with the local linguistic practices of particular English regions. Two good examples are Collier, John, A View of the Lancashire Dialect, or, Tummus and Mary (1745; Rockdale, 1775)Google Scholar and Wheeler, Ann, The Westmoreland Dialect in Three Familiar Dialogues (Kendal, 1790)Google Scholar. A great accounting of these and other dialect works can be found in Smith, John Russell, A Bibliographical List of the Works that Have Been Published Towards Illustrating the Provincial Dialects of England (London, 1839)Google Scholar.

¹⁵ Sheridan, Thomas, A Course of Lectures on Elocution: Together With Two Dissertations on Language and Some Other Tracts Relative to Those Subjects (London, 1762), 30Google Scholar.

¹⁶ H. Lewis Ulman has argued, “Standardization was not a democratic process aimed at choosing a common linguistic form that would facilitate communication among speakers of different dialects and encourage wide participation in public discourse.” Following Ulman, we can conclude that elocutionary training’s expansion and increasing rigidity, especially during the nineteenth century, did unquestionably sideline, displace, malign and even kill nonstandard dialects. As Thomas Miller points out, it also completely sidelined provincial oratorical traditions as embodied in figures like the Celtic bard. See Ulman, Things, Thoughts, Words, and Actions, 26; and Miller, The Formation of College English, 120, 140–41.

¹⁷ Sheridan, Lectures, 31.

¹⁸ Sheridan, Thomas, An Oration Pronounced before a Numerous Body of the Nobility and Gentry (Dublin, 1757), 9Google Scholar.

¹⁹ “Would it not then evidently be the Interest of the Gentlemen of Scotland and Wales, I mean such as would otherwise send their Sons to England for Education, to give this Country the Preference, where English and the Art of Speaking would be systematically taught, without which Experience shews it is impossible they can ever get the better of their first vitiated Pronunciation” (Sheridan, An Oration Pronounced before a Numerous Body of the Nobility and Gentry, 15).

²⁰ Requesting the patronage of the Earl of Northumberland in his dedication, Sheridan describes one possible future, “It is in your power, my Lord, to furnish an occasion for some future historian, to mark this aera out, as one of the most memorable in the whole English history. You may enable him to say, ‘That is was in the year 1762, that the first establishment was made in Great Britain, for the study of the English language and the art of speaking” (Sheridan, Lectures, 229). His overwrought fantasy begs the question of just what would compel future historians to look back so admiringly on 1762. The answer is nothing less than Sheridan believes he is laying the groundwork for a future utopia, one where the Anglican Church would hold sway because its sermons would be vigorous, where children “whether male or female” would be taught to cherish and nurture English instead of Latin, where politeness would reign amongst people, and where parliament and the legal system would directly answer people’s demands.

²¹ Ibid., 206.

²² For example, irrespective of priests’ national origins, religious institutions required elocutionary aid. “The Presbyterians are moved; the Methodists are moved; they go to their meetings, and tabernacles with delight. The very Quakers are moved. Fantastical, and extravagant as the language of their emotions is, yet still they are moved by it, and they love their form of worship for that reason” (ibid., 134). Anglicans, on the other hand, are either progressively alienated into dissent by the tedium of uninspired worship or they attend to their religious duties out of stale obligation. Their church service is “often so ill performed, that not only the beauty, and spirit of the service is lost, but the very meaning is obscured, concealed, or wholly perverted” (ibid., 59). As a marriage of old habits and new standards, elocution, when taught effectively, offered a wide range of possible social benefits, not least of which was that it could elevate the deserving while taming social threats. Anglican priests could do the work of social regulation better if and only if they recognized the battle they were losing and sought out better elocutionary training.

²³ Ulman, Things, Thoughts, Words, and Actions, 153.

²⁴ “Mr. Sheridan’s lectures are too enthusiastic,” Hume wrote. “He is to do everything by Oratory.” See Mossner, Ernest Campbell, The Life of David Hume (New York, 1980), quotation at 373Google Scholar.

²⁵ Benzie, William, The Dublin Orator: Thomas Sheridan’s Influence on Eighteenth Century Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (Leeds, 1972), 27–28Google Scholar.

²⁶ Sichel, Walter Sydney, Sheridan, from New and Original Material (London, 1909), 244Google Scholar.

²⁷ Public Advertiser, 30 March 1759, issue 7611; London Chronicle, 27 March 1759, issue 350.

²⁸ Hitchings, Henry, The Language Wars (London, 2011), 200Google Scholar.

²⁹ Sheridan explains this discrepancy in the following way: “Many of the Names in this List were hastily taken down at the door of the several places where the Lectures were delivered … There being likewise a deficiency of more than one third of the names of those who attended the Lectures, occasioned by the causal loss of some of the list”; Sheridan, Lectures, xv.

³⁰ In addition to tracing the Oxford English Dictionary definitions of “esquire,” see, e.g., Stone, Lawrence, “Social Mobility in England, 1500–1700,” Past and Present, no. 33 (April 1966): 16–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Leneman, Leah, “‘No Unsuitable Match’: Defining Rank in Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth-Century Scotland,” Journal of Social History 33, no. 3 (Spring 2000): 655–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³¹ Sheridan, Lectures, xv–xvi.

³² Sheridan worked in the lecture format but seems to have encouraged at least some interactivity. David Hume recalls, “These Lectures were delivered in St. Paul’s Chapel; and during their continuance the church was crowded with ladies and gentlemen, most of whom began to affect a nicety of pronunciation in their ordinary discourse,” in Thomas Ritchie, An Account of the Life and Writings of David Hume (London, 1807), quotation at 94.

³³ Sheridan, Lectures, 7.

³⁴ Ibid., 8.

³⁵ Ibid., 121.

³⁶ Warming up a Rousseauian primitivism that animates much of his work, Sheridan writes, “And we are told that amongst the savages of North America, the spokesmen who come down with what is called by them a Talk to our governours, deliver themselves with great energy, untutored by any school-mistress but nature” (Lectures, 175).

³⁷ By “old canon,” I am consciously referring to William St. Clair’s definition of the term via intellectual property law in The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period, 122–39.

³⁸ Sheridan, Lectures, 31.

³⁹ In this case, the italics are mine, meant to facilitate reading and reproduce implied oral differentiations.

⁴⁰ Sheridan, Lectures, 34.

⁴¹ Ibid., 45.

⁴² Ibid., 116.

⁴³ Beal, Joan C., “Walker, John (1732–1807),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (London, 2004)Google Scholar, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/28499, accessed 19 May 2012.

⁴⁴ Walker, John, Elements of Elocution (London, 1799), 188Google Scholar.

⁴⁵ Walker, Elements of Elocution, 301.

⁴⁶ Ibid., 206.

⁴⁷ Ibid., title page.

⁴⁸ Walker, John, The Academic Speaker: Or, A Selection of Parliamentary Debates, Orations, Odes, Scenes and Speeches, from the Best Writers, Proper to be Read and Recited by Youth at School; to which are Prefixed, Elements of Gesture (London, 1796; 1801)Google Scholar.

⁴⁹ Walker, Elements of Elocution, 370.

⁵⁰ Ibid., 370.

⁵¹ Ibid., 336.

⁵² Ibid., 324.

⁵³ Ibid., 374.

⁵⁴ London Courant and Westminster Chronicle, 16 March 1780.

⁵⁵ This works out to the same price per lesson that Sheridan advertised.

⁵⁶ Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser, 15 December 1787, issue 5803. On the same page of advertisements, a publication notice for Sheridan, ’s Dictionary of the English Language (London, 1787) also appearsGoogle Scholar.

⁵⁷ Morning Herald, 6 February 1786, issue 1648.

⁵⁸ Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser, 3 October 1778, issue 15488.

⁵⁹ Morning Herald and Daily Advertiser, 10 July 1783, issue 842.

⁶⁰ Diary, or Woodfalls Register, 11 May 1791, issue 666.

⁶¹ Morning Post and Daily Advertiser, 21 July 1786, issue 4198.

⁶² Morning Herald and Daily Advertiser, 30 December 1780, issue 52.

⁶³ Public Advertiser, 3 February 1775, issue 14148.

⁶⁴ Carey, George Saville, A Lecture on Mimicry: As it was Delivered with Great Applause, at the Theatres in Covent Garden (London, 1776)Google Scholar.

⁶⁵ Carey, A Lecture on Mimicry, 57.

⁶⁶ The World, 7 July 1788.

⁶⁷ World, 6 August 1788, issue 499.

⁶⁸ Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser, 16 December 1780, issue 3612.

⁶⁹ Wilkinson, Tate, quoted in Highfill, Philip H., Burnim, Kalman A., and Langhans, Edward A., eds., A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, and Other Stage Personnel in London, 1660 –1800, vol. 4: Corye to Dynion (Carbondale, IL, 1975), 45Google Scholar.

⁷⁰ Creswick, William, The Lady’s Preceptor (London: 1792), ivGoogle Scholar.

⁷¹ Morning Post and Daily Advertiser, 13 February 1789, issue 4955.

⁷² The World, 11 March 1789, issue 686.

⁷³ Burgh, James, The Art of Speaking (London, 1797), 34Google Scholar.

⁷⁴ Hunt, Leigh, Critical Essays on the Performers of the London Theatres (London, 1807), 119Google Scholar.

⁷⁵ Hunt, Critical Essays, 105.

⁷⁶ Ibid., appendix, 8; originally published in the newspaper News as “An Essay on Invention in Pronunciation.”

⁷⁷ Klepac, Richard, Mr. Mathews at Home (London, 1979), 23Google Scholar.

⁷⁸ Today, few tropes are more politically loaded than dialect performance, a genre whose descendents include minstrel shows, yellow face, and other shameful chapters in the history of human caricature. Without reductively resorting to indictments of playwrights and caricaturists long dead, however, my goal is to think of these performers as meeting the demands of a marketplace interested in hierarchical language difference as spectacle.

⁷⁹ See Ferguson, Susan, “Dickens’s Public Readings and the Victorian Author,” Studies in English Literature: 1500–1900 41, no. 4 (Autumn 2001): 731CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Andrews, Malcolm, Charles Dickens and His Performing Selves (Oxford, 2006), 109–11Google Scholar.

⁸⁰ Dewberry, Jonathan, “The African Grove Theatre and Company,” Black American Literature Forum 16, no. 4, Black Theatre Issue (Winter 1982): 130–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar; MacDonald, Joyce Green, “Acting Black: ‘Othello,’ ‘Othello’ Burlesques, and the Performance of Blackness,” Theatre Journal 46, no. 2, Early Modern Reenactments (May 1994): 234–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁸¹ “Life of John Philip Kembel,” The Quarterly Review, no. 34 (June and September 1826): 248.

⁸² “Mathews in America,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 15 (April 1824): 424. I am indebted for this citation and some other reviews to Richard Klepac’s useful if overly hagiographical volume Mr. Mathews at Home (1979).

⁸³ Mathews, Charles, Christmas at Brighton, or Four Times Five (New York, 1822)Google Scholar.

⁸⁴ Mathews, Christmas at Brighton, 14.

⁸⁵ Hunt, Critical Essays, 130.

⁸⁶ Mathews, Charles, Sketches from Mr. Mathews at Home! An Excellent Collection of Recitations, Anecdotes, Songs, &c. &c. In the Popular Entertainments of Air, Earth, and Water!—Country Cousins!—Mail Coach Adventure, &c. &c. As Delivered With Unprecedented Success By Mr. Mathews, At the Theatre Royal English Opera-House, London (London: 1822), 35Google Scholar.

⁸⁷ Mathews, Sketches from Mr. Mathews, 36.

⁸⁸ The Philadelphia National Gazette, 22 March 1823. As quoted in Klepac, Mr. Mathews at Home, 60.

⁸⁹ Mathews, Sketches from Mr. Mathews, 23.

⁹⁰ Hazlitt, William, Hazlitt on Theatre, ed. Archer, William and Lowe, Robert (New York, 1957), 167Google Scholar.

⁹¹ Mathews, Sketches from Mr. Mathews, 27–28.

⁹² Mathews, Charles, Sketches from Mr. Mathews; or, Travels in Air, on Earth, and on Water. With all the Comic Songs, Consisting of Air Ballooning, the Steamboat, First of September, Margate Library, and the Dejeune—Embellished with Six Copperplate Engravings, Representing him in the Several Characters he Assumes in the Piece. Corrected from the Last London Edition, with Additions (New York, 1822), 2Google Scholar.