‘Let poor volk pass’: dialect and writing the south-west poor out of metropolitan political life in Hannah More’s Village Politics (1792)

Marks, C. (2014) ‘Let poor volk pass’: dialect and writing the south-west poor out of metropolitan political life in Hannah More’s Village Politics (1792). Romanticism, 20 (1). pp. 43-59. ISSN 1750-0192 doi: 10.3366/rom.2014.0156

Abstract/Summary

The article is in two sections. First I sketch a brief intellectual context outlining late eighteenth-century attempts to establish a received pronunciation modelled on the speech of the London elite. In doing so, I examine a selection of writers representative of prescriptive attitudes to pronunciation. This section provides an important context in which to situate a discussion of Village Politics. While Olivia Smith is right to emphasise the importance in written language of a universal grammar based on the classical tongues which sought to render eighteenth-century English more correct (5–9), her account does not explore the contemporaneous concern with dialect and pronunciation. Here British orthoepists looked not to the classical tongues, but to the practices of the elite professional men of the metropolis to demonstrate a correct mode of enunciation ensuring one's views were listened to and showing one's polish or politeness: that is, one's education, civility and class. In the second section of this essay, I draw on this context to examine how Village Politics exploits concerns with dialect and received pronunciation in order to write out of metropolitan political life not only the South-West poor but, by extension, all rural and urban labouring-class and poor Britons.