ABSTRACT
In this chapter I survey fifty texts written between 1790 and 1800, each of which addresses some aspect of language. A list of these texts can be found in the appendix. Through them, I explore what standardization meant in practice in the 1790s. Did all of these writers share the same assumptions about language? Which models of a good style did they endorse? Did they allow for any exceptions to their general advice? Olivia Smith, as I outlined in the previous chapter, argues that there was a firmly established ‘hegemony of language’, which, during the course of the 1790s, came under attack from politically radical writers. As I have already shown, however, a close study of specific texts reveals that this narrative is unsatisfactory, and that the linguistic ideas of the period were more complex than Smith allows. In this chapter I further argue that the stylistic advice offered during this decade was contradictory and unstable, both between different writers and within individual texts.
