Abstract

Lowth’s Short Introduction to English Grammar (1762) is often regarded as having enforced a set of prescriptive rules on the English language. This is a view I have aimed to correct in my recently published book The Bishop’s Grammar. Robert Lowth and the Rise of Prescriptivism (OUP, 2011). In this paper I will focus on the approach I took in trying to do so. Having collected ca. 300 letters as part of Lowth’s private correspondence, I focussed on his communicative competence. Like any speaker and writer of English he was found to vary in his usage − spelling and grammar − depending on such variables as the nature of his relationship with the addressee of his letters, and in doing so he frequently offended (in eighteenth-century terms) against the rules in his own grammar. In reducing linguistic variation − not in fact as optional as sociolinguists tend to view it − Lowth’s grammar, and the increasingly prescriptive grammars coming after him, is simply part of the standardisation process the English language was undergoing at the time.