1978: A Disquisition upon the Lexical Dowries of the Mallard Women: or, On the Miscibility of Words and Fortune
Arthur Frederick Blandy, D.Phil. (Syd.), sometime Fellow in Genealogical Studies
It has been said—by a man whose name I can never quite locate in my index, though I am certain he was Danish—that language is the last estate of civilisation to be sold off piecemeal. The Mallard women, whose correspondence and journals I have endeavoured here to assemble, refrained from that vulgar commerce. They drew their substance, as others drew rents or dividends, from the replenishable property of words. Each phrase—unearthed in some letter written after a luncheon in Calcutta, or a schoolroom in Surbiton—represents, as I have elsewhere argued (see Transactions of the Society for Vernacular Conduct, Vol. IV, 1952), an accretionary economy: meaning multiplies by being used, not spent.
It is important to understand—though few do—that neither Mrs. Lavinia Mallard nor her sister-in-law, the formidable Dorcas of Bath, ever published a volume in their lifetimes. Yet they were discovered everywhere in fragmentary afterlives: lecture notes in women’s improvement societies, marginalia in copies of The Pilgrim’s Chrestomathy (1847 edition, with its curious interpolations about hygiene), even a lamentably inaccurate transcription by one F. G. Nott, a colonial magistrate in Rangoon, who referred to Lavinia as “Lady M.” and numbered her among “the provincial literati.”
Nott, of course, could not spell literati.
The historian of semantics faces here the perennial dilemma: whether to correct or to preserve error. I have opted, cautiously, for both. Where a deliberate misprision seemed likely to have been intended (for instance, Dorcas’ persistent substitution of piety for policy), I have restored her word without intrusive commentary. Where confusion appears accidental or illegible, I have clarified in the margins, though never erased her hand. Misunderstanding, properly catalogued, is itself a record of meaning.
The reader may object that I have, as it were, mislaid some biographical facts—her dates, her descendants, the duration of her residence in the Cape Colony (was it two months or twelve?). I shall deal with these in a later appendix, where I demonstrate that absence of evidence is not inconsistency, only a deficiency of enthusiasm among earlier cataloguers. (The staff at the Sydney repository, where I briefly supervised the word-forms collection before my regrettable departure, have since altered the filing schema in ways that make recomposition virtually impossible.)
Nevertheless, the letters endure. Consider Lavinia’s circular to her sister, October 1798—though it survives only in oral recollection by one Winifred Jute, an elderly servant examined by the Folklore Committee in 1903. “Words,” she recollected Lavinia as saying, “are heavier than coin, though they leave a lighter bruise.” That may not be verbatim; still, its authenticity exceeds transcription. Compare also Dorcas’ entry of 1821: “A woman may inherit a word as well as a house, if only the executors of language be just.” Neither quotation will satisfy the philological purist, but both enclose a rare sensibility—that to own words is to inhabit the limits of civilisation itself.
The Mallard women wrote across centuries and colonies. Their idiom is uncertain: cosmopolitan, clotted, occasionally French when it oughtn’t be. They addressed their remarks not so much to one another as to a posterity they despaired of instructing. In a lecture delivered in 1859 to the Ladies’ Eclectic Assembly of Madras (printed anonymously in The Household Clarion), Dorcas remarked, “We have imported the English mind as though it were linen, and found that laundering it discloses local stains.” My transcription retains her curious orthography—steynes—since the manuscript clearly confuses a and y throughout; perhaps an Indian clerk’s corrective zeal.
The contemporary critics—by whom I mean my predecessors in error—have dismissed such material as “domestic gossip of no linguistic standing.” One Mr. A. T. Clewson (whose article ‘Philology Among the Less Educated’ appeared in The Practical Linguist of 1936) assured his readers that women’s epistolary style lacked sufficient fixity to produce study-able results. Clewson later retracted the article under impertinent circumstances (a scandal involving the misdelivery of his own correspondence to a ladies’ weekly). Yet the damage was done. Whole laboratories of semantic evidence were left to mildew.
I, for my part, have retrieved what can still be read. My task has not been analytical so much as reconstructive—not to define what their words meant, but to reassemble the conditions under which meaning was thought possible. That, I believe, accords with the aims of modern philology, as presently pursued in the less secure institutions.
Of course, one must suppose—indeed I do—that these women’s facility with language derived in part from their husbands’ prosperities. Words were their currency because coin was not. They collected, exchanged, and safeguarded their vocabulary as others hoarded capitals. A Mallard diary may be likened to a ledger: entries of emotion carefully balanced with phrases borrowed from sermons, novels, or political pamphlets. Their value was both sentimental and domestic.
To illustrate, it is worth recalling the curious episode of what I call the Vocabulary Dowry. Sometime about 1807, Lavinia drafted a list of forty-eight words—among them “improve,” “retire,” and “temperate”—to be transferred to her daughter upon marriage. The document was filed among estate papers, later mislaid between two leases of farmland near Coventry. The meaning of this symbolic endowment has been disputed by better scholars than I (C. B. Puckle, On the Inheritances of Virtue, 1899), but none, I think, has noted that each word coincides with terms used in the valuation of property. That cannot be accident.
It is no small irony that I first encountered this list while searching for something else entirely—a misplaced map of Devon dialect patterns titled Regions of Excessive Adverb Use (undated, anonymous). There is a moral there, though I will suppress it, being opposed to morals as such.
These pages advance no revolutionary theory. They are merely an instance of recovery carried, perhaps, further than the evidence allows. I admit that certain attributions are conjectural; minor variances in ink or orthography have persuaded me of plural hands where perhaps only one existed. But that is the burden of archival truth—each correction a fresh error, each restoration an invention. I am not unaware of the irony. Some have even said (Dr. Hewlin, at my last viva) that my corrections correct nothing. Yet, if history may be described as the art of arranging misremembered events sequentially, then this book, too, belongs properly to history.
The Mallard words possess a quiet dynamism not easily reduced to definition. Their vocabulary contracts as the empire expands; it grows timid as public discourse becomes loud. Between them runs an understanding—half pity, half superiority—that speech itself may be a form of withdrawal. “We keep,” wrote Dorcas in what may be her final note, “a reserve of words no man suspects.” She meant, perhaps, a moral reserve. But I prefer to think she meant grammar.
It is fashionable, I am told, to deride the study of such trivialities—to demand of scholarship a social purpose. I have heard it said, even in reputable departments, that lexical antiquities are irrelevant to modern inquiry. Yet one cannot read these letters without sensing that their neglect mirrors our own impoverishment. We have become, if I may hazard the phrase, post-literate in the art of meaning. We own words much as we own property: for display, not for use. That the Mallard women understood otherwise condemns us more than it excuses them.
And so I dedicate this modest work not to their memory—for they need none—but to the continuance of their error. If they overvalued words, so may we. There are worse economies.
I have appended at the close a catalogue of the collections consulted, together with several hypotheses now, I fear, impossible to prove. Should subsequent scholars discover my misreadings (there will be many), they are invited to reproduce them as faithfully as I have theirs. The preservation of misunderstanding—when done with care—is still, I think, a scholarly act.
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