40 chapter 1
the caesura, and “tone,” which is increasingly associated with affect. By 1867,
the fifty-sixth edition of the Grammar, the editors erase “tone,” leaving only
“pause.”^57 As the science of linguistics was growing—indeed developing the
science of phonetics—the perceived “problems” of pronunciation in prosody
that may have required “tone” were, perhaps, no longer necessary.
The section “versification” that follows these revisions to “prosody” may, we
might expect, shift away from performance, voice, and affect and, like “pros-
ody” begin to sound more and more like a grammar with applicable and clear
rules. And yet if the student must master the proper pronunciation of words
(the former definition of prosody) before moving onto their measure (the lat-
ter definition, the laws), and if these rules of proper pronunciation are in flux,
it follows that the “laws” of versification are also malleable. But though editors
did revise the rules of versification from one edition to the next, they did not
do so in order to reflect disagreements and dynamism; rather, the history of
English versification in the grammar book is a history of repetition and reit-
eration—often without giving credit where credit is due. For instance, the
non-abridged versions of Murray’s Grammar gave a detailed definition of “ver-
sification” that reads, in many ways, identically to contemporary accounts of
English verse form. Yet Murray borrowed liberally from Thomas Sheridan’s
popular eighteenth-century elocutionary manual, The Art of Reading (1775).^58
Sheridan’s section, “Of Poetical Feet,” appeared first in the fourth edition
(1798) of Murray’s grammar and bore the traces of turn-of-the-century elocu-
tionary and prosodic discourse that was concerned with the rhetorical func-
tion of verse, specifically its performance. As if to anticipate a more advanced
pupil’s question (“why do we call these line divisions ‘feet?’”), the text explains:
“they are called feet because it is by their aid that the voice, as it were, steps
along, through the verse, in a measured pace; and it is necessary that the syl-
lables which mark this regular movement of the voice, should, in some man-
ner, be distinguished from the others.”^59
In a statement that could as easily refer to quantity (understood here as
the length of time it takes to say a syllable) as accent (often understood in
the grammars as emphasis), Sheridan’s definition in Murray’s popular gram-
mar allowed the student to believe that by vocal right-reading, the “poetical
feet” would distinguish themselves “in some manner.” Or, rather, the poetical
feet would be distinguished on or in the syllables by either quantity or accent
or both, and the voice would be able to “step along” toward a right reading.^60
The voice, here, already displaced onto the feet, is not certain; only “in some
manner,” not at all uniform, might the voice distinguish each syllable (a wob-
bly stone in a river), feeling shakily for the right way to get across the line.
Rather than providing his own definition, Murray reprints Sheridan’s abstract
definition, a practice I want to highlight as integral to the way that the idea of
“English feet” (both in opposition to, and as a natural progression from, classi-
cal feet) circulates in the nineteenth century: that is, via the repetition and re-