18 chapter 1
in pronunciation. Because their idea of proper speech was so ingrained, En-
field and Walker eschewed a system for measuring meter through quantity at
all, as a student of the classics would have, precisely because “quantity” would
have been associated with classical languages and literature, on the one hand
and, on the other, actually providing rules for quantity in English would mean
securing, standardizing, and fixing pronunciation in a concrete way that nei-
ther Enflield nor Walker was yet able to imagine. That is, the abstract notion
of “speech accent” (or emphasis, or just “accent”) is paramount to the proper
measure of an English verse line, quite beyond the rules for pronunciation that
nineteenth-century grammar books would establish. In fact, as if to preclude
any disagreement, Walker writes “it is accent, or emphasis, and these only, and
not any length of openness of the vowels, that forms English metre,”^6 Both
writers are invested in speech accent as the only ruling constituent of the Eng-
lish verse line. By erasing questions of English quantity, Enfield and Walker
effaced the very differentiation of speakers from different regions of the coun-
try. If accent is the only measure of English meter (rather than the time it
would take to pronounce the words, or the different ways the vowels might
sound), then all Englishmen (irrespective of their Scottish origin) can access
it. An idealized and yet-still-unestablished “English” accent, when properly
learned and performed, would not, according to these rules, differentiate
speakers; rather it would blend them into the “one mass” of the English
nation.
With the expansion of the franchise, the growth of the linguistic sciences,
and the rise of a state-controlled and somewhat regulated education system,
English would haltingly replace the classics as the language and literature of
the educated elite in Victorian England. But before the anxieties later in the
century about the adequacy of English literature’s role as a civilizing force, the
study and attainment of “proper” English pronunciation and usage was al-
ready associated with upward mobility and national stability. Within the nar-
rative of the “rise of English,” (which begins even before the eighteenth cen-
tury) we also find the “rise of meter” in popular pedagogical textbooks in
English history and grammar. English “meter” emerges as an important yet
still hotly contested and unstable medium for the transmission of English val-
ues.^7 Despite what Fussell argues are the widely held beliefs of the eighteenth
century, that “prosodic regularity forces the ordering of the perceiver’s mind so
that it may be in a condition to receive the ordered moral matter of the poem,”
the desire for a stable and regular prosody was often complicated by the un-
stable ways that these terms (“prosody,” “meter,” “versification”) circulated.
The apparently specialized terms “prosody,” “meter,” and “versification” en-
joyed a surprising prominence in English national life, in unexpected arenas.
“Syntax” and “prosody” circulated not only in grammar books, but also as car-
toon characters, even popular racehorse names. School stories (popular “boy’s
tales from school,” such as Tom Brown’s School Days [1857]) often included