ABSTRACT
The attitudes to bad language developed in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries entrenched themselves ever deeper in English society to the extent that, by the Victorian era, the public representation of bad language was very rare indeed. Such was the potency of bad language, that, on occasion, it was banned from the courtroom, especially in blasphemy cases, where defendants would find themselves at times unable to even mention what they were being tried for lest they were summarily fined for using such language in court.365 Such was the suppression of the language of the courtroom that from the nineteenth century it was not possible to publish the proceedings of a trial verbatim where ‘a correct account of proceedings… contain[ed] matter of a seditious, blasphemous, or indecent nature’.366 Public scandal could be caused by certain words in print or the enunciation of a word on stage.
