‘I expect that I prefer them horses considerable beyond the oxen’: American English in British fiction 1800–1836

This chapter explores the representation of the speech of white Americans in six novels published in Britain in the early nineteenth century in order to investigate the emergence of 'American English' as a distinctive fictional variety. These six novels include The Inheritance (1824), Life in India (1828), Arlington (1832), The Refugee in America (1832), Jefferson Whitelaw (1836) and Recollections of an Artillery Officer (1836). The chapter analyses these novels to show how they make use of an emerging repertoire of 'American' features, linking these features to characters who are typically vulgar, boastful and provincial. It argues that evidence from these novels suggests that the stereotype of 'the vulgar American' exists before the linguistic repertoire is fully established, but that once the repertoire has emerged, it is quickly naturalised as indexing a particular type of speaker. The chapter discusses the overall implications of methodology and findings for future studies in dialect and literature.