34 chapter 1
did the English grammar book attempt to consolidate English usage in order
to organize an idea of the English empire of letters.^35
“Meter,” as we have seen, carried connotations of national and mental order,
hinting at a more technical and elite classical knowledge that might distract
some students from the process of becoming proper English subjects through
memorizing the historical facts of England’s origin. But what was this erudite,
elite knowledge of English verse form, and where could the non–classically
educated but still literate English person, looking to better him or herself, find
out about it? Prosody, as a subset of the evolving field of “English grammar” at
the turn of the nineteenth century, registered the broader expectations of
“grammar” as a prescriptive, unchanging system of rules at the same time that
it registered the resistance to these rules by approaching the study of versifica-
tion differently from one grammar book to the next.^36 The metrical discourses
one finds in early grammar books are haunted by the same aspirations toward
standard English pronunciation as the elocution manual, as well as the desire
for a stable system of grammar based on the authority of Latin. However much
English grammar books wanted to provide prescriptive rules, the “prosody”
sections of these books heralded the advent of a more descriptive linguistic
model. While providing external rules and conventional models for verse
form, many grammar books also hinted at the inherent freedoms of English
meter, so that English meter used what it wanted from the Latin model but
also surpassed it.
Even before the critical events of the 1830s and 1860s expanded the fran-
chise and slowly nationalized the education system, before the conception and
execution of the New English Dictionary, the idea of “standards” for English
usage was already influencing the study and understanding of English meter.
Looking at the late eighteenth century and Victorian grammar books reveals
the ways that the debates about accent, quantity, and the terms that make up
verse study were simplified or abstracted for the sake of an imagined grammar
student, a student whose need for a stable system of English prosody (as stan-
dardized pronunciation) and a stable explanation of English meter (as the rep-
resentation of English literature’s parallel greatness to the classics) expanded
with each expansion of the franchise.
In grammar books, “prosody” referred to both pronunciation and the study
of English versification. Over the course of the nineteenth century, uncer-
tainty about prosody and versification often mapped onto uncertainty about
standards for pronunciation and ideas about poetic form. For both standard-
ized pronunciation and poetic form, at stake was an appeal to a unified, broad
national public as well as an appeal to the preservation of individuality and
personal freedoms in dialect and metrical (or artistic) choice. While there
seemed to be a move to standardize both English meter and English gram-
mar, there was an equally strong desire to preserve the freedom of poetry to
be individual—at once appealing to the collective but also intensely personal.