If, as Christopher Cannon and Susan Koshy have observed, “we historicize the literary by naming the language a period comprises,” we might think of the “Age of Johnson” as comprising the printed Standard English that Samuel Johnson helped establish. This age was also one that aimed to map that standard onto the nation and a literary canon, also in formation at this time. The Age of Johnson, then, designates a founding moment in the entwinement of histories of English monolingualism and the disciplinary orientations of English literary studies. The standardization of English in grammars, dictionaries, and elocution lectures worked in tandem with the formation of a canon, sometimes in quite explicit ways, as in Johnson's assemblage in his Dictionary (1755) of what he called the “best writers”—none living—to illustrate the terms he defined, establishing a de facto canon. This is the era not only of popular print anthologies of “Great British Poets” but also of professional criticism, which surprisingly frequently judged the value of a work based on its adherence to Standard English. This is also the period of the first university courses teaching vernacular English (and not classical) literature. Adam Smith's and Hugh Blair's university lectures in “rhetoric and belles lettres” aimed to bring aspiring young Scotsmen into Standard English writing and speaking. Blair's lectures went through multiple editions in London, one of a host of examples of institutions of monolingualism originating not in London or England but from places brought into the British Empire (Sorensen).

That these first courses took place in Scotland starting in 1759, in the wake of the 1707 annexation of Scotland to England and during the Seven Years’ War, when the rivalry for imperial dominance with France brought Scotland and England closer together, exposes the deep connection of national formations of monolingual language and literature to the British Empire. In this essay I first track the relation of empire to the development of English monolingualism at a moment when the stakes were especially high, linked as it increasingly was to the idea of a single national culture and literary canon. Institutions of English monolingualism, from print grammars and dictionaries to university courses on English literature to popular lectures on speaking “proper” English, drew from often paradoxical imperial methods and rhetorics around language. They established a single authoritative version of the language as standard, dismissing other terms, usages, and pronunciations as the language of barbarous others while at the same time representing some elements of linguistic otherness as wondrous, worthy of collection in print. I then briefly explore how some writers inhabited the resulting new arena of English monolingualism by deploying the complex notions of otherness that that imperial rhetoric mobilized.

The Age of Johnson, with its standardization of print English and broad-reaching claims for English monolingualism, was also an age of Britain's increasing imperial dominance and accompanying efforts to promote English monolingualism throughout the empire. Religious schools, such as Moor's Indian Charity School, founded in 1754 in Connecticut (later Dartmouth College), and the schools for Gaelic-speaking Highlanders founded in 1709 by the Society in Scotland for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge, represent early instances of dual religious and monolingual language instruction, a coupling that was both a function and a facilitator of the British Empire. Yet what is particularly striking is the connection between the period's imperial warfare and efforts to promote English monolingualism within Britain at this time, a counterintuitive but vital connection between imperial mobility and attempts to fix the language of the territory of Britain.

We see this connection in publications advocating for instruments of monolingualism within Britain. Daniel Defoe published his Essay upon Several Projects—including a project for standardizing English—in 1697, during the Nine Years’ War, sometimes considered the first global war. This war encompassed the battles with France for imperial domination in India and North America, the Williamite Wars in Ireland, and the suppression of Jacobite uprisings in Scotland. In this context it is not surprising that among the projects Defoe proposes are an academy for military studies and a system of naval enlistment. And alongside these projects is a proposal for a language academy that would “refine the English Tongue . . . to establish purity of style . . . and to purge it from all the irregular additions that affectation and ignorance have introduced” (233). Crucially, for Defoe, what makes domestic language projects for the “correction of erroneous custom” possible is wide-sweeping maritime commerce (237). Defoe describes the basis of his project:

Far from being counterposed to maritime empire, it is empire's globe-traversing movement that makes possible the domestic project to “refine the English tongue” (233). Jonathan Swift, too, published his Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue (1712) in the midst of a global war, this one known as Queen Anne's War, the second intercolonial war with France in North America. He insists that efforts to “correct” the English tongue within Britain are in no way separate from those imperial efforts, and he writes to then prime minister, Robert Harley, “This work complains of a grievance [that our language is extremely imperfect], the redressing of which is your own work, as much as . . . opening a trade into the South Seas” (7).

Defoe and Swift propose a monolingualism within Britain, one that would “censure” (Swift 8) and “purge” (Defoe, Essay 233) the language of fellow English speakers. One person's perceived corruption of language is, of course, another person's language in Manchester or London. Such hierarchization of language at home mirrors the linguistic dominance of the British Empire in sites such as North America and the Scottish Highlands. As J. A. Hobson wrote, “It is, indeed, a nemesis of Imperialism that the arts and crafts of tyranny, acquired and exercised in our unfree Empire, should be turned against our liberties at home” (160)—and among these liberties at home we might count linguistic liberties. Johnson ties together empire and the “settling”—we might say monolingualizing—of English in Britain with especially vivid imagery of imperial conquest as he describes the value of efforts to “promote the improvement of” the “native tongue” through a dictionary (Plan 2). In his Plan of a Dictionary (1747), addressed to his then patron Lord Chesterfield, he writes,

Figurations of internal linguistic heterogeneity—including provincial and Scots languages, laboring jargons, vulgar terms, criminal argot—routinely drew from images of empire, particularly the characterization of the language of encountered others as barbarous. And while Johnson points not to contemporary colonial conquests but to a noble-because-distant Roman Empire to figure the “subjection” of the English language, the contemporary imperial context—both far (North America) and near (the Highlands of Scotland)—shaped this rhetoric of civilizing English and of reducing its noncivilized elements to subjection in Britain at this time.

The relation of empire and its rhetorics to English monolingualism, particularly at a key juncture in canon formation, profoundly troubles notions of an organic monolingual English language and national literature. I use the plural, “rhetorics,” however, because figurations of empire were, of course, multiform. Johnson might imagine the “inhabitants” of a “new world” as fractious subordinates. But a distinct (if dialectically related) rhetoric of empire had imagined actual inhabitants of places newly encountered by Europeans as objects of wonder. Such wonder was often the product of confrontations with difference removed from contexts that might make for coherence and meaning, encounters with the new and strange that were, as a result, rationally unbelievable but at the same time empirically experienced, as Stephen Greenblatt has noted (26). The resulting wonder was a various and ambiguous mix of affective responses, including fear and revulsion, but also pleasure (14). Greenblatt and Jonathan Sell have discussed the centrality of wonder to early modern writing on European experiences of otherness generated through maritime empire. Yet, as Greenblatt notes, the languages British mariners encountered often did not produce such wonder (91, 104). William Towrson represents and translates the language of Guinea, a language new to him in his first voyage to Guinea in 1555, with little sense of wonder:

Removed from any narrative of the negotiations of strangeness by which Towrson learned some of “their language” and void of any attempt to replicate the embodied sound of such language, his list of words presents the language as mundane. As Philip Edwards has noted, voyage narratives such as this one passed through multiple writers and editors—this version of Towrson's voyage appeared in Richard Hakluyt's Principal Navigations . . . of the English, first published in 1589 and expanded in 1599—suggesting a series of wonderless reimaginings of such linguistic encounters (7). The list, however, does present the terms as objects of value—the words themselves name objects to be traded, like “golde” and “knives”—and knowledge of the terms would facilitate valuable trade. Eager for exchange and the accumulation of gold and silver, English imperialists, as represented in these accounts, dispensed with any affect in relation to these languages, seeing their ready translation as a means to trading and acquisitive ends.

Consider too the matter-of-fact tone in William Dampier's New Voyage round the World (1697) when relaying how Jeoly—whom Dampier purchased as an enslaved person from the Philippine Islands to accompany him to England as “the painted prince”—

Dampier's depiction of linguistic heterogeneity is also not as something wondrous—linguistic difference here is noted, but there is no attempt to replicate embodied differences in sound, and Dampier casually speculates about whether “Bullawan” is the “proper Malayan word.” The humdrum tone is all the more interesting given that scholars who studied Malay at Oxford did not know how the language actually sounded (Barnes 43). Dampier's account too reduces what is to him a new and strange language to its instrumental value, noting in particular words indicating gold and where it might be found. Thomas Bowrey, in the preface to his A Dictionary, English and Malayo (1701), follows suit, referring to Malay as not wondrously strange but “of plain sound and easie pronunciation” and also a “profitable language to England . . . to those in particular who shall trade to the Malayo Countries.”

Conversely, and quite surprisingly, the wonder—the baffled pause reflecting mixed feelings of surprise or delight, or even fear and aversion—absent from encounters with words outside Britain often shows up in encounters with words inside Britain, rendering English itself strange and even multilingual. While the Age of Johnson expelled from Standard English Scots terms, regional terms, the “cant” language attributed to criminally mobile populations (sometimes called “vagrants” or “gypsies”), and laborers’ jargon, numerous dictionaries and glossaries collected these terms, and prose publications represented encounters with these languages of internal “others” as wondrous. While Dampier appears seamlessly to understand a Mindanoan speaker's version of Malay, Tobias Smollett depicts a Londoner's stumped silence and exasperated exclamation in the face of a question posed in Scots. In Smollett's novel The Adventures of Roderick Random (1748), Roderick describes how his fellow Scot “Strap . . . enquired of a carman, whom we met, whereabouts Mr. Cringer lived;—and was answered by a stare accompanied with the word, ‘Anan!’” (62). Smollett does not represent Strap's Scots language on the page, but does depict the startled and frustrated affective response of the London carman who hears him, stares at him, and exclaims, “Anan!”—roughly, What did you say? In his Wooden World Dissected, Ned Ward, a London pub owner, portrays the auditor of a sailor's jargon as “all wondering” when the sailor, limited to his nautical argot, explains what tooth needs to be pulled: “It's the aftmost Grinder aloft, on the Starboard Quarter, will he cry to the all-wondering Operator” (48). Ward's “all-wondering Operator” is unable to act, unable to remove the painful tooth of the sailor or even verbally respond to him, in a paralyzing incomprehension. Commenting on Squire Western's character from Henry Fielding's Tom Jones, Robert Goadby cites the squire's language in particular (Goadby offers an example of this language: “It's well vor un I could not get at un; I'd a lick'd un” [xix]) and describes it as “a Child born with two Heads and five legs, or any other monstrous birth” (xx), an affective response of surprise but also distaste and loathing. When Defoe remarks on the “country jargon” of Somersetshire residents, it is with stunned wonder, writing of one student whom he hears recite a passage from the Bible: “of his country jargon, I could not but admire” (Tour 216)—Johnson's Dictionary tells us that “admire” was a synonym for “wonder.” Alternatively, New Canting Dictionary describes the “peculiar dialect” of “canters” as serving to “amuse the Credulous.” Johnson defines “to amuse” as “to fill with thoughts and engage the mind” and “to keep in expectation.” Yet most readers would also know the phrase “to amuse” as meaning a trick in which criminals threw dust “into the Eyes of People they had a mind to rob”—associating such wonder with dangerous distraction and calling up a sensation of fear (New Canting Dictionary).

While linguistic difference confronted in various voyages was presented as routine, to be negotiated and clarified for exchange and wealth accumulation, these instances of linguistic difference within Britain were presented as variously wondrous, moments to be relished for the affects generated. Of course, like imperial rhetoric around otherness, these representations of domestic linguistic difference oscillate between scintillating strangeness and mere inferiority—Squire Western's language is both wondrous and monstrous; Defoe's student recites a language arousing wonder but is also a “dexterous dunce” (Tour 216). The vagrants who supposedly speak cant are mysterious but also mercenary criminals. It is, however, worth hanging on to the wondrous side of representations of Britain's “other” languages, wondrousness that suspended characterizations of them as inferior and instead elicited feelings of awe, curiosity, even fear, and sometimes a riddle-like frustration. For if national monolingualism was imbricated with rhetorics of empire, sometimes leading to efforts to suppress linguistic difference, such rhetorics also made particular domestic languages wondrous, thereby opening possibilities for provincial writers and inviting a variety of affective responses less given to notions of mastery, to which I now turn.

Writers sometimes recuperated linguistic strangeness within nationalist rhetoric, revaluing it under the sign of Englishness. As Daniel DeWispelare has noted, Defoe described England as “singular because plural” (87). Even Johnson, who had aimed in his Plan to “settle” the lexical “inhabitants” of Britain, ended up including in his Dictionary all sorts of “low” terms, Scots words, and even criminal cant terms attributed to vagrants. Viewing the promise of academies to fix language as folly, he explains in the preface to his Dictionary that he aims merely to “collect” and “register” the British linguistic landscape, complying with custom—and thereby resonating with the logic of the British constitution, which he also invokes. Glossaries and antiquarian studies recaptured Scots and regional languages by designating them as older versions of English. These revaluations of a range of strange languages as part of a supposedly temporally and spatially expansive national language posed a variety of dangers—hierarchizing English by establishing certain languages within it as inferior subsets or erasing real difference in a monolingualism that paid lip service to mere pluralism. But what if the charge of wondrousness attached to these languages—a series of affects cultivated in print representations and of which speakers of those language were well aware—was not simply folded back into national language and national literary rubrics but instead helped illuminate the profound fissures national ideology aims to occlude? Works like John Gay's Beggar's Opera (1728), or ballads about the folk hero Jack Sheppard, or even Francis Grose's Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785), precursor to Eric Partridge's perennially popular Dictionary of Slang (both Grose and Partridge, interestingly, composing their collections in military posts), for instance, all generate wonder around a range of other Englishes, so to speak, in ways that do not mitigate but amplify monolingualism's complexity.

The wondrous language of such texts invites questions regarding what social relations foster wonder, toward what languages and to what ends. More specifically, examining particular words that invited (and continue to invite) such wonder might reorient study away from a sense of the monolingual as an unchanging language of a unified nation. Take, for example, the word click. New Canting Dictionary defines “to click” merely as “to steal.” One trajectory of wonder here would consider notions of the group to whom this word was assigned; the conditions and meaning of vagrancy at this time; the quick move to label vagrants as a homogeneous group sharing a language, when that pointedly was not the case; and the relationship of vagrancy to emerging notions of the nation. This is thinking that Gay—himself a self-conscious provincial—prompts in his Beggar's Opera, with its use of cant terms, and in his other writings, such as The Shepherd's Week, with its representations of rural dialect. Another trajectory would look at the linguistic history of the term click, which started, as Peter Linebaugh has discovered, as a term for the customary practice by leather workers to clip some of the leather they received from their employer for their own use in what was once a legal form of remuneration but was criminalized in the move to wage labor (233). If wonder starts as a removal from contexts, these returns to contexts might themselves generate wonder that would speak to a riven social body, a nation differently divided over time.

Or consider the opacity of the language of regional writing at this time, such as Andrew Brice's Exmoor Scolding (1746), the opening lines of which read, “LOCK! Wilmot, vor why vore ded'st roily zo upon ma up to Challacomb Rowl? Ees de'nt thenk tha had'st a be’ zitch a Labb o'tha Tongue” (3). This is a print representation of language spoken in Exmoor, with phonetic representation of accent and regional terms that remain untranslated in early editions. First published in Exon, it later appeared in the London-based Gentleman's Magazine. Despite representing a language spoken within England, many readers would encounter the language as utterly foreign, perhaps familiarizing it by pronouncing it aloud in an imagined accent that might estrange, and even make wondrous, one's own speaking voice. Others might know some of the words but find the phonetic reproduction of their own Exmoor pronunciation on the printed page wondrous. Such texts generate wonder, as well as a wondering about what constitutes English and the monolingual at this moment.

Brice's Exmoor Scolding, his Mobiad, a heroic-comic poem describing an Exeter election, and similar works from Edward Chicken, John Collier (who published under the name Tim Bobbin), Ann Wheeler, and Mary Palmer all deploy the wondrous otherness attributed to their languages to illuminate the variegated character of English, and many of their works were popular enough to go through multiple editions. Far more popular was the poetry of Robert Burns, for example his “On Captain Grose's Present Peregrination through Scotland” (1789):

These lines are wondrous to readers today, but they were also wondrous to eighteenth-century English and Scots readers alike. Of course, such language goes to the heart of the illusion of a homogeneous monolingual English in Britain, its Scots language exposing fault lines within Britain. Yet in Burns's poems, alongside the duolingualism posed by Scots are a series of multilingualisms—local Ayreshire terms alongside neologisms, Aberdeen terms, Medieval Scots, and contemporary vernacular, among others, all undoing the claims of an alternative homogeneous monolingual Scots. Burns's lexicon includes terms unknown to readers then and now from Edinburgh or even Ayre (Burns's village)—Burns provided a glossary for the first Kilmarnock edition of Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, whose readers would largely have been from his own region. Some might know that “howlet” was a term for owl, extant since the sixteenth century. But Burns uses the older, fourteenth-century “houlet,” of which “howlet” was a later variation (and his use of different spelling for words pronounced the same is one of many instances where he plays with relations between speech and script). “Chaumer” was a term meaning “chamber” in the fourteenth century, which Burns explains in his glossary. Such moments produce linguistic encounters that compel readers to recognize that being in language has always been a matter of learning more, additional languages.

Burns and other writers of what are sometimes called “provincial languages” remind readers that while newly encountered languages in remote spaces harbor obscurity, so do languages closer to home, sometimes wondrously so. Burns and other regional writers seize that endemic obscurity to push beyond idiosyncratic regionalisms and archaisms to conjure wonder. They sometimes make up their own terms altogether, terms that look as if they were regional or old, as in Burns's “glaumour” (or, in “The Twa Dogs,” “whalpet” [57]). Brice fabricates “whelving” in his Mobiad (72). The resulting opacity creates wonder, but it does not create value through linguistic exchange—the terms of exchange are uncertain, and sometimes there is nothing to be exchanged, only strange appearance and sound. Such strategic opacity plays in the arena of monolingualism, remaking it as unstable and limitless. If one kind of monolingualism in eighteenth-century Britain aimed to contain linguistic multiplicity by representing it as wondrous and collecting and cataloging it, Burns and other regional writers offered a different multiplicity. They offered glossaries that remain incomplete—there is no translation for their invented words. And they disrupted the social relations on which such collecting depends. Bowrey had offered his English-Malay dictionary as a means of avoiding “prevaricating interpreters,” and many imperial translators, including William Jones, cited the same motivation (Jones 2: 795). Yet there will always be interpreters in a monolingualism that aims to incorporate heterogeneity. Grose, the figure Burns's poem addresses, sought interpreters throughout provincial England and in Scotland (Burns among them) as he collected and sold the wondrous words of internal others. Burns and other regional writers, responding to such cataloging of their languages, became, in a sense, “prevaricating interpreters” within Britain.

Whether in print collections foregrounding the strangeness of the languages of compatriots, novelistic representations highlighting the bewilderment of encounters with those languages, or poems and print dialogues cannily playing with assumptions about linguistic opacity, the print record of eighteenth-century Britain reveals surprising concomitants to the period's monolingualization. If these sometimes solicit an aesthetic response to monolingualization's estrangement of particular languages within Britain, it is not an aesthetics of detachment or neutralization. Rather, it is an aesthetics that, through obscurity, might develop a variety of attachments and even diverse communities. Crucially, as Daniel Tiffany explains, “obscurity's role in the formation of expressive communities . . . does not depend on the elimination of perplexity or incomprehension” (2). And the more extensive any particular monolingualism's reach, the more such incomprehension will be part of it. The Age of Johnson was a key moment in the history of English monolingualism, one shaped by imperial relations and, in turn, one that shaped ideas of a national language and literature. If this meant, at times, suppression of linguistic difference, with the promise of full comprehension, it also meant the making wondrous of internal difference and obscurity. Recognizing writers’ strategic opacity in response to an expansive monolingual English anticipates both the problems with and the possibilities of English in the Age of Johnson.