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Henry Fowler and his eighteenth-century predecessors

Abstract Fowler's Modern English Usage (1926) is a typical product of the prescription age, the final stage in the standardisation process of the English language. With two further editions, one by Gowers (1965) and the other by Burchfield (1996) and a reprint planned by OUP for their World's Classics Series in 2009 with an introduction by David Crystal, the book attracts considerable interest, both for the purpose for which it was originally written, i.e. as a usage guide, and as a phenomenon in its own right. Burchfield, in his introduction, stresses “the isolation of Fowler from the mainstream of the linguistic scholarship of his day” (1996:vii), but if we look at the man and his work in the context of prescriptivism, we will be able to see that MEU fits into the tradition of the usage guide such as it originated in the latter half of the eighteenth century. Many of the linguistic strictures discussed by Fowler are part of a prescriptive canon that is some 250 years old, and for the origin of which the blame, rightly or wrongly, is usually put on Robert Lowth, whose Short introduction to English grammar was first published in 1762. What Lowth at one end of the tradition and Fowler at the other have in common is their focus on usage problems rather than on the system of the language. It is a failure to take this into account that is responsible for their poor repute among linguists today. But they have other features in common as well, one of which is their sense of humour, which is, again, a typical if no longer quite appreciated characteristic of their approach to language and which, in Fowler's case, is one of the things that has suffered from the different revisions in the course of the twentieth century.