PII: 0024-3841(86)90073-2


Reviws 291 

Morley, M. and J. Fox, 1969. Disorders of articulation: theory and therapy. British Journal of 
Disorders of Communication 4, 15 1-165. 

Van Riper, C. and J.V. Irwin, 1958. Voice and articulation. London: Pitman Medical. (2nd 
edition.) 

K.C. Phillipps, Language and class in Victorian England. (The Languages Library.) 
Basil Blackwood, Oxford, 1984. x + 190 pp. 

Reviewed by: Martha Vicinus, Dept. of English, University of Michigan, Ann 
Arbor, MI 48109, USA. 

This book gathers together quotations from a wide range of Victorian realistic fiction 
(and a few diaries and autobiographies) illustrating the acute sense of social class found 
among middle-class novelists. Phillipps uses as his theoretical basis the famous work of 
A.S.C. Ross on linguistic indicators of social class during the mid-1950s in England. 
(Ross is best known for having coined the phrases U and non-U English to indicate 
acceptable upper-class usage.) Phillipps specifically focuses upon the subtle distinctions 
in speech which indicate whether a character in a novel is defined by other characters as 
U or non-U. In an age marked by considerable social climbing and consequent social 
insecurity, Phillipps is able to mine a rich horde of examples of the endemic snobbery 
and minute social distinctions of the English. 

Phillipps is concerned with both changing social mores and the accompanying 
linguistic changes. For example, he includes a most interesting section on the shifting 
time of the dinner hour. In the early nineteenth century, as Jane Austen indicates, the 
gentry followed the workday of the farmer, eating a large breakfast at around 10.00 
a.m., after several hours of work. Lunch (or luncheon, as it was then more correctly 
called) was a stand-up meal taken during work. Dinner was then at four or five, at the 
close of a winter working day, or before the final farm chores. Supper followed at 9.00, 
when all work ceased. Working people, including shopkeepers, %te their main meal at 
mid-day. When the upper classes began to dine in the evening, a late dinner hour came 
to symbolized gentility. As late as 1865 Mrs. Gaskell could mock the social pretensions 
of a doctor’s wife, when invited for lunch by Lord and Lady Cummor: 

‘In vain she piped out in her soft, high voice, “Oh, my lord! I never eat meat in the middle of the 
day; I can hardly eat anything at lunch!” Her voice was lost, and the duchess might go away 
with the idea that the Hollingford doctor’s wife dined early.’ (p. 26). 

Phillipps traces the subtle linguistic evolution of meals, forms,of address, slang and 
sport as increasing numbers of the upper middle-class mixed with the aristocracy. That 
billiant observer of upper-class life, Anthony Trollope, provides an especially rich 
source for Phillipps. For example, Trollope captures the linguistic freedom permitted 
very wealthy women in contrast to those who were less secure in their social position 
and wealth. Miss Dunstable, in Doctor Thorne, ‘was a little too fond of slang; but then, 



a lady with her fortune, and of her age, may be fond of almost whatever she pleases’ 
(p. 49). Men, of course, were expected to use slang among their friends, but writers 
such as Trollope showed how the excessive use of slang or its use in front of the ladies 
was a sure indication of low-breeding. 

Phillipps’ remarks about generational differences within the upper classes are particu- 
larly instructive. A close look at the older characters in Victorian novels reveals many 
linguistic carry-overs from the Regency period. The picture that emerges is one of 
Victorian dismay at both the looseness of manners and narrowness of behavior that 
seemed to characterize their parents and grandparents. The Victorians did not simply 
see their forebears as sexually profligate (after all, Bowdler first published his expur- 
gated version of Shakespeare during the Regency period). Rather, they also could see 
them as excessively pious and unable to deal with the growing wealth and social 
complexity of modern times. 

Phillipps is less interesting in his discussion of ‘the lower orders’, perhaps because 
Victorian middle-class novelists are themselves less reliable about the language of the 
working class. He is forced to turn rather too often to that notorious misanthrope, 
George Gissing. Perhaps the mixture of genres in Dickens’s novels has made Phillipps’ 
wary of quoting excessively from him. Certainly Dickens often uses linguistic quirks to 
place a character (we all remember Uriah Heep’s continual plea of being ‘umble), but 
he has as keen a sense of class distinctions among the lower middle class as Trollope 
had for the upper-classes. 

Phillipps appears to miss numerous opportunities to develop his argument more 
fully. For example, he does not mention that peculiarly upper-class idiom, ‘my people’. 
Just as upper-class English to this day often substitute the impersonal use of ‘one’ for 
‘I’ when speaking, so too do they refer to their families as ‘my people’, an expression 
dating back to the nineteenth century. Its use indicates a peculiar form of self- 
protection, of distancing outsiders, when speaking in public that is well worth exploring 
further. Equally, Phillipps mentions only briefly the lower-class habit of referring to 
family members with a first-person plural pronoun, such as ‘Our Bob’. The intimacy 
this implies contrasts sharply with the language of the upper-classes and is well worth 
investigating. People from northern England have always used this expression; they are 
also noted for their hospitality and warmth in contrast to the south. Phillipps has, 
unfortunately, ignored entirely the regional nature of language and manners. Perhaps 
he did not want to enter into the vexed area of dialect, but surely more could have been 
made of the differences between urban and rural, northern and southern speech. 

Language and class in Victorian England is a highly readable survey of well-known 
Victorian novels, but the author is hampered, I believe, by a rather limited and familiar 
theory. Most close readers of Victorian fiction will find little that is new here, while 
surely linguists do not need to be reminded that language reflects social class. I longed 
for the development of Phillipps’ own argument, moving beyond Ross’s insights of 
some twenty-five years ago. I am not surprised that novelists were especially acute 
observers of social nuance, and that they captured the inumerable ways in which the 



Resiews 293 

wealthy could snub those with pretensions beyond their God-given social place. But 
I suspect other issues are equally worth addressing in regard to the uses of language in 
fiction. For example, how is the language of women and men gendered? What 
differences do we see regionally, and what do they tell us about regional, as well as 
class, expectations? How does conversation differ from indirect discourse? When and 
how are women and men permitted to use metaphors? Do these differ according to 
class? What about the well-known device of addressing the reader? What kind of 
language does an author use in conversation with his or her readers? What are the class 
implications of this? These unanswered questions perhaps indicate the ways in which 
Phillipps has not made the most of his subject. There is certainly room for a book 
considering the language of Victorian fiction, but I would hope for one based upon a 
more complex theory about the relationship between language and society.