the history of meter 19
stories about Latin exercises as punishment and bemoaned the rigors of scan-
sion, yet the bout-rimé was a popular pastime throughout the Victorian era.
Mnemonic jingles were used to teach a variety of different school subjects.
From the middle of the eighteenth century onward, the terms “prosody” and
“meter” mediated between elite and mass cultures, Latin and English, speech
and text, classical and “native” pasts, “En gland” and its others.
Nineteenth-century poetics developed via a vast, unruly array of hand-
books, manuals, periodical articles and reviews, memoirs, grammar books,
philological tracts, essays, letters, and histories, all with something to say
about English meter. Prosodic discourse extended into multiple disciplines,
each with different disciplinary practices, expectations and, importantly,
different audiences. These diverse methodologies and disciplines, however,
came together to lay the groundwork for English literary studies as we now
know it—a product of this cross-disciplinary project of nation making. To
illustrate the centrality of meter to this nation-making project, the first part
of this chapter studies nineteenth-century English history teaching, which
employed various concepts of English “meter” to solidify a stable concept of
En gland’s regal past. I then turn to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century gram-
mar books to show how, despite the hopes of grammarians to stabilize all as-
pects of “English grammar,” English meter continued to evolve and change,
playing a liminal and shifting role in the evolution of English grammatical
study. The delineation of English meter in Victorian grammar books exposes
many facets of the controversies that erupted in the later nineteenth-century
“prosody wars.” Grounded in Latin grammatical and metrical theory (about
which scholars disagreed), but grappling with broadening cultural and his-
torical contexts, grammar books reveal an oft-neglected ambivalence about
English meter as grammar. Late nineteenth-century conflicts about meter are
rooted in the disciplines of rhetoric and elocution, and even a subtle tension
between classical and Anglo-Saxon meters. Through the study and investiga-
tion of both Anglo-Saxon and classical meters—and also of Anglo-Saxonism
and classicism—historians, grammarians, and prosodists attempted to define
concepts of English national identity that were often redefined radically by the
century’s end. The final section of this chapter broadly outlines the contours of
prosody debates throughout the century, arguing that prosodic discourse was
founded on disagreement and discord, and that the dream of a system for En-
glish prosody was also a dream of a stable national identity that was, perhaps,
unattainable.
Though the use of versification to teach history might not seem all that
different from using versification to teach other subjects, “metricality” in his-
tory teaching sometimes called upon a “natural” and emphatic rhythm that
was distinct from subtly modulated rhythms of more “refined” poetry and the
technical vocabularies that were being developed for these. Simple rhythms,
called “meter,” made it easier for the student-subject to memorize historical