the history of meter 17
which (as the epigraph to this chapter states) “academic shades and learned
halls” will “fix the laws” of the English language and do their duty: “with
friendly union in one mass shall blend / And thus adorn the state, and that
defend.” Barbauld hints at the act of friendly union between England and
Scotland in 1707 in her imagined classroom, a classroom in which the poten-
tial differences in English pronunciation might blend into an English language
that “adorns” England with its greatness. By bringing together students to
practice reciting English literature and learning English grammar, education
would inspire all students subject to the English language to defend Britain.
In the late eighteenth century, this classroom community was limited. Dis-
senting academies (schools, colleges, and nonconforming seminaries) like
Warrington provided an education for those who did not agree with the ten-
ants of the Church of England,^4 which had a stronghold at Oxbridge. Those
who could pass the entrance exams to the old universities (Oxford and Cam-
bridge) were educated in grammar schools or by schoolmasters or schoolmis-
tresses in the ancient languages. Elocutionary guides, grammar books, and
other pedagogical literature rushed to fill the void created by England’s express
desire, after the publication of Johnson’s Dictionary in 1755, for a unified lin-
guistic and literary culture at a time when it lacked any organized national
school system to support it. Intended to provide a “proper course of instruc-
tion,” Enfield’s Speaker and John Walker’s Elements of Elocution (1781) were
two of the most popular guides to the proper performance of speech for those
aspiring to the upper classes as well as for those already in the upper classes
who wanted to supplement their classical educations with a working knowl-
edge of English literature. “By a steady attention to discipline,” Enfield’s
speaker promised the literate, who were willing to practice, the ability to pass
as aristocracy. Here was no course of study for the mere hedge school or church
school, though that was exactly the sort of community that would find these
lessons useful. For both Enfield and Walker, “accent” should follow the ab-
stract “laws of harmony,” “general custom,” and “a good ear.”^5 Though the Scots
dialect was everywhere present in eighteenth-century discussions of “proper”
English speech accent, the hope of these and other late eighteenth-century
textbooks was for a national unity that could be achieved through linguistic
unity. But linguistic unity, for these popular elocutionists, also meant a unified
approach to the measure of English speech in poems (ever popular for recita-
tion) and therefore a unified approach to English meter.
Though Fussell has argued that the idea of classical quantity in English was
practically irrelevant in eighteenth-century English verse, supplanted by “con-
servative” syllabic and stress regularity (the number of syllables and stresses per
line), the dream of establishing universal and standard pronunciation was
nonetheless evident in discussions of versification. Prior to phonetic science,
authors like Enfield and Walker often took for granted the ideal of sameness in
“English” quantity (the short “e” versus the long “e” for instance) and therefore