‘To be avoided by every correct Writer’: George Harris’s Observations upon the English Language and the first English usage guide

ABSTRACT

Robert Baker is generally acknowledged to have written the first English usage guide in 1770, but in 1752, George Harris published a short pamphlet called Observations upon the English Language in a Letter to Friend that shares many features of a usage guide. Though smaller than Baker’s book, Harris’s pamphlet nonetheless collects some 66–126 usage items (depending on how one counts categories and instances) and pronounces his preference for one of the variants within each item. Harris’s Observations upon the English Language starts out mainly as a proposal for respelling several words in English, but ends up also prescribing variants for pronunciation, grammar, word meaning, and phrasing. Harris seems to have taken his impetus from an earlier pamphlet published in 1724 (The Many Advantages of a Good Language to Any Nation) that calls for just such codifying of usage issues. In many ways Harris’s Observations upon the English Language looks at least like a precursor to the English usage guide and may be a usage guide itself.

KEYWORDS:

• Usage guide
• eighteenth-century prescriptivism
• usage items
• codification
• Robert Baker
• George Harris
• prescriptive rules

Acknowledgment

We thank Kiersten Meyer and KaTrina Jackson for their contributions to this project, particularly their research into the background of the spelling and vocabulary issues treated in Observations upon the English Language.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ ‘mais quoy qu’il en soit, il est certain qu’il ne se peut guères proposer de doute, de difficulté, ou de question soit pour les mots, ou pour les phrases, ou pour la syntaxe, dont la décision ne soit fidellement rapportée dans ces Remarques’.

² ‘two types of usage: one good and one bad’.

³ The pamphlet does not list an author. Apparently the earliest attribution to George Harris was a 1796 obituary of Harris (Scrutator 1796, 715), which served as the basis for Nichols’ (1815) attribution, which in turn was the source for Halkett et al. (1928, 228). Until more reliable evidence contradicts this attribution, we will assume that Harris was the author.

⁴ A contemporary history claimed the author was Francis Hutchinson, Bishop of Downs and Connor (W. Harris 1739, 216). In 1928, Halkett et al. listed the author as Thomas Wilson, Bishop of Sodor and Man. Alston followed this attribution, but remarked that the author ‘has never been satisfactorily established’ (1969, front matter).

⁵ We cannot be sure which edition of Dryden was used in The Many Advantages, but we have compared three printings of Dryden (1679, 1695a, and 1695b) and they never diverge from each other. More likely, the author of The Many Advantages inadvertently changed Dryden, and Harris followed The Many Advantages. Harris also has 28 minor spelling and punctuation differences from both Dryden and The Many Advantages.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Don Chapman

Don Chapman is a Professor of Linguistics at Brigham Young University. He has published several articles on prescriptivism and co-edited a volume called Language Prescription: Values, Ideologies and Identity.

Alexander Christensen

Alexander Christensen graduated from Brigham Young University with a degree in English Language and is currently enrolled in a masters degree programme in Classics at Oxford University.