Victorian Literary Languages

This network will bring together researchers interested in the relations between literature, the history of language, and national and regional identities in the Victorian period. Linguistic history and literary history are both essential parts of the study of any language, yet they are rarely studied in conjunction with one another. By acting as a dedicated forum for collaboration between literary critics, linguists, and historians, this network will generate new insights into how large-scale changes in the English language influenced, and were influenced by, the writings of Victorian poets, dramatists, and novelists.

But Victorian society was not monolingual, and Victorian literature was not exclusively English literature. One of this network's key objectives is to consider how the nineteenth-century histories of other languages (Welsh, Irish, and Scottish Gaelic), and their relationships with English, were manifested in Victorian writing. Building on important recent work on the language politics and literary cultures of Victorian Scotland, Ireland, and Wales, the network will forge new interdisciplinary connections to highlight the linguistic diversity of Victorian literature.

It will explore how changing attitudes to different languages over the course of the nineteenth century affected the writing and reading of literary texts in Victorian Britain and Ireland.

The Victorian period was a particularly dynamic phase in the history of literary languages, as numerous developments transformed how languages were used and understood, and how literature was defined, produced, and consumed. New technologies and infrastructures - the rail and postal networks, the telegraph, and the telephone - enabled more regular exchange between languages, but also promoted the spread of English at the expense of other languages and dialects.

The first publication of the Oxford English Dictionary in the 1880s exemplified a widespread Victorian determination to explain and classify contemporary language usage through the study of the linguistic past. And growing literacy rates created new audiences for writing of all kinds. These trends were reflected, promoted, and examined in the diverse forms of Victorian literature, written in standard English, regional dialects, and other languages.

The rapidly expanding periodical press aimed, through its heterogeneous contents and writing styles, to cater to newly diverse readerships from different class and educational backgrounds. The realist novel and the dramatic monologue tried to record the idioms and rhythms of everyday speech in literary prose and verse. And epic poems and historical novels reimagined the histories of England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland in ways that celebrated some languages and identities while marginalising others.

This network will investigate the complex history of Victorian literary languages in three workshops, each focusing on a specific aspect of that history: the classification of languages in grammars and dictionaries; the rise of compulsory state education and its effect on literacy; and the spread of new communication and transport technologies. The discussions at these workshops will be geared toward the development of new methods for studying the connections between linguistic history and literary history.

They will also consider how existing tools, especially from the digital humanities, and greater integration between usually separate academic fields can enhance research on literary language. The network's findings will be communicated through regular blog posts and through articles published in a special issue of an academic journal. The network will also build on existing educational initiatives to host two outreach events that address how engagement with the issues surrounding Victorian literary languages can benefit school teachers, pupils, and adult learners grappling with the connections between literature and language in the twenty-first century.