ABSTRACT
When Percival Leigh offered an example of what he deemed “comic orthography” in his humorous grammar text of the 1840s, he chose to confi gure the semiliterate, immodest letter writer as female maidservant. Leigh’s letter, offered in his preface bearing the title “Address to Young Students and Young Gentlemen,” is an intriguing example of how servant literacy could be represented in Victorian culture. Despite the sly, ironic allusion to Queen Victoria and her “unmaidenly” proposal to Prince Albert (a topic of much mirth in the periodical press at the time), Leigh’s sample of “bad writing” implicitly suggests a profounder impropriety of form. The shameless inscription of a servant girl’s desire, signifi ed in her disregard for the niceties of spelling and grammar, is an indelicate violation of epistolary form, a crude exercise in grammatical and cultural illiteracy. Leigh’s implied reader, by contrast, is young, male, upper-class, and well-educated. Such a reader is supremely capable of recognizing grammatical deviancy and participating in the condescension that is the privilege of his class and gender. “Bad English,” for Leigh’s reader, is associated with a serving class, specifi cally engendered here as female, and marked by a pronounced waywardness in sexuality, despite her avowed aspirations to married respectability.
