Megan Perigoe Stitt
Metaphors of Change in the Language of Nineteenth-Century Fiction: Scott, Gaskell, and Kingsley
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. Pp. 210. CAN $94.50
Reviewed by Holly E. Pike

This work sets out to explore the connections between nineteenth-century theories of progress and development as they appear in the scientific and linguistic discourse and the fiction of the period. Taking as a starting point the congruence of the method of literary realism (“representations of the present, in the form of social realism they were beginning to take in the early nineteenth century,” 36) and the method of the developing sciences of geology and linguistics (field work and induction), Stitt analyzes the various ways in which selected works of Scott, Kingsley, and Gaskell use the same metaphors to describe personal and social progress that scientists were using to describe the evolution of the planet and that linguists were using to describe the history of language. Stitt thus links particular cases and general theories. These three writers, she argues, depict dialectal differences in their fiction for different purposes: Scott to show the existence of a nation within the nation, Gaskell to show how personal bonds interplay with language, and Kingsley to show that national and racial heritage are linked.

The subject is one that should have broad appeal. Studies placing literature in conjunction with other cultural and intellectual activities have become increasingly important, and the knowledge of nineteenth-century scientific debate that forms a significant part of Stitt’s book has been widely disseminated thanks to the work of Stephen Jay Gould, whose Time’s Arrow/ Time’s Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time (1987) is among the works cited by Stitt. As well as attempting to represent the range of scientific and linguistic theories of the time, Stitt analyzes particular works in order to show how these theories appear in the fiction, and in doing so enriches previous readings of the works in question. Chapter 2, “Rocks and Living Tongues,” makes particularly fruitful connections between the use of fossils “as not only objects of study, but central to a methodology” (53) and the treatment of individual words in the study of dialects. The second section of the chapter applies this “methodology” to show how, in the fiction of Gaskell and Kingsley, “induction figures ...as a method of interwining realism and faith, while the dynamic of voices in their fiction gives a clearer view of how ...linguistic variations in the present determined readings of the past” (65). The chapter also deals with the most explicit depictions of scientific inquiry in the novels under discussion, notably Job Legh in Mary Barton, and with William Gaskell’s notes on the Lancashire dialect for the fifth edition of that novel, creating a clear and unified discussion.

However, the analyses are not always as clearly connected to the scientific- and linguistic-historical discourses that precede them in each chapter of Stitt’s book. That is, the nineteenth-century intellectual discussions that Stitt recapitulates, while interesting in themselves, are not well integrated into the discussions of the novels. The organization of Stitt’s chapters works against the development of connections, each being divided into three sections: one on the scientific and linguistic theory, one on the fiction, and a summary in which the argument of the book is carried forward. The looseness of connection caused by this structure is exacerbated by the lack of clarity sometimes present at the level of sentence and paragraph development. In places, it is impossible to tell whether an idea is the author’s or should be attributed to the source of the preceding or succeeding citation. As well, there are a few unreferenced quotations and cases of misnaming of characters, flaws that a careful editing should have caught. These mechanical flaws make the book more difficult to follow than it needs to be, given that the works under discussion are classics and that the context in which they are placed is reasonably well known. Despite these drawbacks, however, Stitt’s book is worth reading since it continues the task of examining the fiction of the nineteenth century as part of the culture of the times in the broad rather than the narrow sense. By showing the personal connections that existed between the novelists and scientists, Stitt’s analysis reveals just how narrow that culture may have been.