Preface
Arthur Blandy, PhD (Sometime Fellow in Genealogical Studies, and for many years Valet to the heir to His Grace the Duke of Mallard, if I may be permitted to remind the reader)
It is with the utmost deference to the reader’s intelligence—and a certain proprietary affection for the subject—that I embark upon this preface, though one must confess at the outset that the mind, like a well-polished shoe, occasionally slips upon its own lustre. The Duke of Mallard, that paragon of patrician poise, demands a volume of his own; yet as I set quill to paper—or rather, fingers to these modern keys—one finds the contours of his biography dissolving, most perplexingly, into the firmer outlines of my own monograph, “On the Speech of Gentlemen and Their Servants”. A trifling confusion, no doubt, born of long service; for what is the Duke, after all, if not the living embodiment of that subtle and inherited discourse which I have so meticulously charted?
Throughout the British Empire—or what remnants thereof persist in this regrettably democratic age—the Mallards have hovered at the edge of events, their influence as subtle and inherited as the very speech of gentlemen and their servants, which my monograph demonstrates with unassailable clarity. Subtle, one insists, for it is not the bombast of the parvenu but the understated inflection—the merest elevation of the bath-vowel, the discreet non-rhotic fade—that commands true authority. Inherited, moreover, passed down through nurseries and servants’ halls alike, from grandsire to grandson, valet to under-butler, unearned yet indispensable, as I prove in Chapter Four with appendices of phonetic transcriptions drawn from the Duke’s own table-talk. Unearned? Perish the thought—though one concedes it appears so to the untrained ear—yet constantly commented upon, as evidenced by the ceaseless chatter of linguists who, lacking my intimate observation, mistake its nuances for mere affectation.
Yet herein lies the paradox, which my work resolves with scholarly precision: the speech of gentlemen is at once the servant’s echo and the master’s mandate, subtle in its inheritance yet boldly asserted, inherited by the servant through osmosis yet bestowed by the gentleman through divine right—or so the Duke would aver, over his morning constitutional. To understand the Mallards is thus to grasp this verbal alchemy, hovering as they do at history’s periphery, their power wielded not through decrees but through the inherited subtlety of a well-turned phrase: “Blandy, the Times,” delivered with that inimitable drawl which my monograph dissects syllable by syllable. One might say—and indeed does, at exhaustive length in my Introduction—that the Duke’s every utterance exemplifies the thesis: subtle power, inherited speech, unearned legacy, endlessly analysed by those who serve or aspire to.
I trust, therefore, that no discerning reader will proceed without first consulting “On the Speech of Gentlemen and Their Servants,” for it alone unlocks the Mallard enigma. The present volume on His Grace—interchangeable, in essence, with my own—illuminates how this discourse endures, subtle yet overt, inherited yet innovated, binding Empire and eccentricity in phonetic fellowship. One bows, with due obeisance, to the task.
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