Orality, Literacy, Popular Culture: An Eighteenth-Century Case Study

distinctive and groundbreaking in many respects, Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (1755) is typical of eighteenth-century lexicons in its definition of “oral” as “delivered by mouth; not written” and “orally” as “by mouth; without writing.” Nathan Bailey, who compiled his Dictionarium Britannicum in 1730 and John Ash, whose New and Complete Dictionary of the English Language was published in 1775, draw the same attention to the physical production of sound by the body, and to the opposition of the oral to the literate arts: “delivered by the mouth or voice,” they assert, “not committed to writing.” The clarity and confidence of these definitions suggests that there was, from the early part of the eighteenth century, an awareness of a conceptual difference between spoken and written language. 1 Indeed, Nicholas Hudson (1996) has argued that extended and conscious differentiation of this kind arises for the first time in this period, as the work of the numerous lexicographers, grammarians, and conjectural historians who began to investigate the origins of languages, alphabetic script, and the development of modern civilizations drew new attention to the oral dimension of language. Prior to this, although it was acknowledged that the oral and literate differed as modes of transmission, accounts of linguistic structure and development were constructed primarily with reference to written modes. On the basis of this understanding, a series of narratives that seek to chart the contours of eighteenth-century attitudes towards these two communicative modes has been commonly accepted. The first posits that the work of enlightenment historians and antiquarians situates the relationship between oral and literate practices within a strongly progressivist account of the development of modern civilized society from primitive and barbarous origins. A series of related oppositions structures this account, cementing a connection between the character of a given culture and its primary mode of communication: orality and literacy, savagery and politeness, passion and reason, ignorance and knowledge, superstition and skepticism. The second narrative adds the coda that for a significant number of eighteenth-century thinkers, Jean Jacques Rousseau being the prime example, this trajectory was not one of progress but of decline, entailing the loss of an ideal state of natural genius, unfettered humanity, and pure