Paradigm, No. 20 (July, 1996)

Following a recent suggestion in the pages of Paradigm that the contents of a school textbook ‘are indicative of mentalities and values existing in a society',¹ this article will explore the late-Victorian language primers of Henry Sweet from a similar viewpoint. Of particular interest is how Sweet made ‘science’ the touchstone for the relevance of his textbooks, both in the scientific method employed and in the actual content of the texts chosen. I will consider firstly the linguistic and pedagogic principles which Sweet intended his textbooks to embody and then look at the criteria for his selection of texts from various ‘popular works’ of his day, particularly Thomas Henry Huxley’s science textbook Physiography: An Introduction to the Study of Nature (1877).

During the heated debate on foreign language teaching methods that developed on the European Continent in the 1880s,² reformers such as the Norwegian linguist Johan Storm and the German educationalists Wilhelm Viëtor and Hermann Klinghardt argued for a return to the spoken language and a new emphasis on ‘connected texts’ rather than learning grammar rules.³ In England, an energetic supporter of reform was the linguist, phonetician, and scholar of mediaeval English, Henry Sweet (1845-1912). Developing the Continental reformers’ ideas, Sweet sketched his own language learning theory, along with a plan for a series of textbooks, to demonstrate how his principles should be put into practice. In the end, the textbooks published were the Elementarbuch des gesprochenen Englisch of 1885 (a primer for the German market) and its sister volume the Primer of Spoken English of 1890 (for the English market), both of which, to rephrase a comment by Onions in the DNB, ‘taught English to Europe’.

Sweet’s Elementarbuch of 1885 is essentially a short (130 page) manual of colloquial English for the German learner or student of English. One immediately striking feature is the use of a phonetic script for all the texts to be studied, with its abandonment of standard English spelling, punctuation, and word-boundaries. This was a daring innovation, which might have proved disastrous to sales of the primer: see Figures 1 and 2 which are reproductions of pp. 7 and 13 of the Elementarbuch.

By contrast, the actual contents of the text-book are, at first sight, far more straightforward; listed briefly, there are eight main sections:

• a brief methodological preface in German

• a grammar of English in German (with a particular emphasis on stress, intonation, and syntax, as well as more traditional grammatical features)

• descriptive texts (particularly descriptions of nature, anthropology, and mediaeval social history, extracted from books by Thomas Henry Huxley, Edward Burnett Tylor, and Thomas Wright respectively)

• colloquial sentences arranged functionally and thematically

• dialogues on a wide variety of topics

• a long narrative (based on a story by Thomas Hood)

• a poem (again Hood)

• an English-German glossary.

In the preface to the book, and in previous theoretical writings, three essential pedagogical principles emerge: a new emphasis on the ‘natural sentence’, a decidedly new approach to ‘phonetic notation’, and a reformist method based on ‘connected texts’.

The first of these, the natural sentence, is formulated as follows in some remarks on the need for a ‘thorough reform of the practical study of language’ in Sweet’s Presidential Address of 1877 to the London Philological Society:

Instead of a cumbrous analysis, the learner will begin with what is really the ultimate fact in language -- the natural sentence, which will of course be presented in a purely phonetic form.⁴

For Sweet, the sounds of the spoken language are a phenomenon of ‘Nature’ to be ‘investigated’ scientifically through close observation (the ethos lies behind much of his early writing). On the analogy of the natural sciences, therefore, he attacks the overemphasis of his contemporaries on the historical study of language ‘much as if zoology were to identify itself with palaeontology, and refuse to trouble itself with the investigation of living species, except when it promise to throw light on the structure of extinct ones’.⁵

In Sweet’s theory, a basic axiom is that ‘the living form of every language should be made the foundation of its study’.⁶ Exactly this is the purpose of Sweet’s textbook; the opening sentence of the preface (Vorwort) emphasises that the Elementarbuch is ‘intended to serve as an introduction to both the linguistic and also the practical study of spoken English’ [my translation]. In other words, Sweet’s primer had a dual purpose: as well as being a course-book of spoken English for the language learner or school pupil, it was also a work of scientific research for the use of the student or scholar, a socio-linguistic and phonetic record of a specific variety of modern (late-19th) spoken English. As Sweet made clear, this was his own English, ‘the London dialect as it is spoken in educated circles’.

Given his emphasis on speech, the first dozen pages of the grammar section of the Elementarbuch are inevitably concerned with phonetics: the science which in the preface to his Handbook of Phonetics (1877) Sweet had called the ‘indispensable foundation’ of all language study.⁷ The basic technique is to study pronunciation not by the inexact method of imitation, but by close observation of how the sounds are produced and by drilling in the articulatory motions of the speech organs through exercises, like a musician’s scales.⁸

To assist in these exercises, Sweet recommends a phonetic spelling giving a genuine representation of the ‘actual language’ rather than ‘an imaginary language, spoken by imaginary correct speakers.’ ⁹ Thus in Sweet’s notation for paragraph 26 of the Elementarbuch (see Figure 1) the word ‘house’ is written (haus) while the plural, with its voiced pronunciation, is given as (hauziz), a useful distinction for avoiding such potential mispronunciations as (hausis).

The phonetic spelling protects the foreign learner from the ‘disturbing associations’ of the conventional written symbols.lukik saitid\) for ‘you look excited’ (see Figure 2). Sweet’s notation assists the learning of stress, intonation and sentence melody, all features of natural connected speech.¹⁰ In brief, the script is an attempt to render visually on the page the ‘natural sentence’ of the spoken utterance, and thus provide an invaluable aid to the foreign user of his primer.

The phonetic script has an additional advantage, in Sweet’s opinion. It is useful also for overcoming the mental barrier some English-speakers have to foreign languages, showing them that accurate distinctions are necessary, and showing them moreover that knowing the sounds of one’s own language would help with those of the foreign tongue:

It is also certain that the wretched way in which English people speak foreign languages, often in such a style as to be completely unintelligible to the natives -- is mainly due to their persistently ignoring the phonetic peculiarities of their own language. When once we know that the supposed long vowels [of English] are all diphthongs, we are forced to acknowledge that the genuine ii’s and uu’s (long [i:] and [u:] of foreign languages are really strange sounds, which require to be learnt with an effort, in the same way as we acquire French u or German ch. ¹¹

In this sense, a phonetic study of the mother tongue belongs within the sphere of the practical study of languages; evidently Sweet’s Elementarbuch was intended also as a phonetic primer for the native speaker of English, a means of teaching linguistic and phonetic awareness to English people, as well as being a model for the teaching of English in Europe.

A third linguistic principle behind Sweet’s approach to the writing of language primers is the connected text. Unlike the exercises of the popular foreign language manuals of his day (here he specifically attacks the well-known methods of Franz Ahn and H. G. Ollendorff),¹² the texts of Sweet’s primers are intended to be ‘connected’ pieces, appropriate for global learning and retention in the memory. Such texts aim to cover the three basic types of language: description, narrative, and dialogues, and are taken, to begin with, from ‘descriptions of nature and natural phenomena, the different races of man, houses, food, dress, & c.’ in order to cover the main areas of basic vocabulary.¹³ Nature descriptions may seem an odd choice for a beginner’s text, and there were some dissenters (as we shall see), but Sweet was confident that descriptions, though monologues and not strictly colloquial, nevertheless ‘give the literary style simplified to the utmost degrees in the direction of the spoken language’. Later in the course, the student would study condensed treatises on subjects such as history, geography and science, and only later still would he or she tackle the literature. The context-based approach favours the practical acquisition of both grammar and lexis in that the learner meets real language in use. Rather than inundating the reader with grammar rules, the principle for a textbook is to ‘include nothing that is not required for the explanation of the texts.’ ¹⁴ Although traditional grammatical paradigms and conjugation tables are given in the grammar section, these merely sum up, as economically as possible, the instances of natural language use observed in the texts. The ‘fundamental principle’¹⁵ of repetition in different contexts and types of text ensures that the learner meets the common forms of the language, including the common irregularities and widely-used idioms, which will be learnt as separate lexical items rather than as exceptions to rules. The total vocabulary for the method is relatively small, at approximately 3000 words, but it is commanded with ease and certainty and will give the student a ‘better command of the language than is now available in ten years’.¹⁶

The intensely self-confident tone of this utterance is perhaps difficult to harmonise with the reality; nevertheless, there is no doubt that Sweet’s primers were successful, as the many reprints and new editions testify. In this respect, the unpublished Sweet correspondence is also informative, particularly his letters to the linguists Johan Storm and Otto Jespersen. Sweet himself regarded the ‘secret of the success’ of his primers as the fact that they were ‘elementary’ (and therefore adaptable to beginners with supplementing by the teacher), ‘condensed’, and ‘complete in themselves,’ with rigorously phonetic texts linked closely to the corresponding grammar and glossary (Sweet to Storm, 16 December 1886). No doubt part of their success lay also in the compact and portable format of these short, attractively laid-out booklets, along with the undoubted prestige of the Clarendon Press Series in which they were published. The Elementarbuch won many admirers in Europe: Klinghardt reported on its use in Silesian schools (1888), as Howatt has shown, and the textbook was allegedly imitated by Paul Passy (1893), and perhaps also by Viëtor (1899).¹⁷

One immediately contentious feature of Sweet’s Elementarbuch was the phonetic notation. In the late-19th century, without the benefits of easily usable phonograph recordings of the foreign language to be learnt, it was perhaps easier than it would be today for Sweet to argue the usefulness of a phonetic notation system for language textbooks, and he appears to have won over much of his European readership. The phonetic script did, however, meet strong criticism from some native speakers of English. Two years after the appearance of the book, the linguist Jespersen was staying in England with A. H. Keane, a professor of Hindustani, and author of a Handbook of the History of the English Language. ¹⁸ When Jespersen showed him the Elementarbuch, Keane was evidently shocked by the forms given in it. No examples are given, but, taking page 13 as a random example (see Figure 2), I imagine he objected to such expressions as, ‘what’s he like?’ transcribed (-whotsij laik\?) or ‘do you believe in ghosts?’ rendered (:djuwbi.lijvin gousts?).

Here the fact that in rapid educated speech ‘he’ becomes [ij] and ‘do you’ becomes [djuw] is hard for many native speakers to accept. Some are unaware of the differences between careful and rapid speech, while others deny that they ‘drop their aitches’, presumably because the visual form <he> is so fixed in their minds that they imagine they must say [h] whenever the word ‘he’ is spoken. In Jespersen’s anecdote about Keane, it seems that the professor considered such forms vulgar, and was even more shocked, to the point of denying it, when Jespersen demonstrated that Keane’s wife used these forms (it is not revealed exactly which) spontaneously in her normal conversation. Jespersen was amazed at the inability of educated people to recognise their own speech when they saw a written representation of it:

This was not the first time, nor the last, that I found that intelligent people did not know the speech habits of their nearest relations, and imagined that a form they saw written phonetically was vulgar, even though it belonged to natural educated speech. ¹⁹

Sweet tells a similar story, which he had from some of his German students, who listened to a scholar proscribing some of the forms in the Elementarbuch; whispering among themselves, the students decided to record every instance of these forms in the man’s speech and, for the rest of the lecture, there was periodic suppressed laughter as the hapless lecturer proceeded to use the very pronunciations he had rejected.

Another criticism levelled against the Elementarbuch was the use of nature descriptions, a traditional feature in many language textbooks from at least the time of Comenius onwards,²⁰ but one which is particularly emphasised by Sweet. On this question, Sweet later admitted in 1899, there were ‘divergences of taste’: he personally found them ‘soothing and pleasing even if a little commonplace’, but Paul Passy, a like-minded phonetician and fellow-member of the International Phonetic Association, thought that no French boys had the patience to go through them; while Storm claimed that most pupils had had enough of them at school. ²¹ Jespersen wrote later that ‘pieces which are merely descriptive of nature’ could be boring ‘unless written in such a masterly manner as Sweet’s Elementarbuch’. ²²

In 1888, Sweet gave a paper on ‘Shelley’s Nature Poetry’ to the Shelley Society (of which he had been a co-founder in 1886). In his discussion, he developed a thesis focusing on the affinities between the poet of ancient times and the modern scientific investigator, and the gradual re-emergence in the modern period of a deep interest in wild inanimate nature. In a true progressivist vein, he wrote:

Then after a long torpor, men awakened to the conviction that their future progress would depend mainly on their further advance in the knowledge of nature. Hence it is that the extremes meet, and that the modern lover of nature -- whether as poet or man of science -- feels himself in some respects nearer to the primitive barbarism of the Veda than to the scholars of Greece and Rome, or even his own Chaucer and Shakespeare. ²³

In this attitude to nature, Sweet’s taste is close to that of contemporary men of science such as J. S. Mill or Darwin, with whom he shared a liking for Wordsworth,²⁴ and to that of poets such as Tennyson, Browning, and Hopkins, ²⁵ who strove to make painstakingly accurate records of their observations of the natural world, for -- as Buckley comments -- ‘writing in an age of analytic science, the Victorian poet felt less free than Shakespeare to depart from the literal truths of inanimate nature’.²⁶ Interestingly, Sweet made a similar remark in 1888, pointing out that Shakespeare ‘saw no incongruity in making heaven "peep through the blanket of the dark", which to a modern reader has a downright ludicrous effect’.²⁷ This trend towards accurate observation in poetry was mirrored in the new popularity for the photography of nature, and it is perhaps no accident that Sweet regarded his primers of 1885 and 1890 as giving a kind of ‘linguistic’ photograph of the state of the colloquial language. ²⁸

As I have argued, Sweet’s own scientific interest was firmly grounded in phonetics, but he also felt part of a movement for the general furthering of progressive science. These general scientific interests developed above all through his early association with ‘an important new enterprise in the magazine world’.²⁹The Academy, ‘a record of literature, learning, science and art,’ was founded in 1869 with the express editorial purpose of writing from a ‘European and cosmopolitan point of view’ on ‘permanent works of taste and real additions to knowledge’ in order to be a journal ‘on which the general reader might rely for guidance through the waste of superficial and ephemeral literature’. ³⁰ Sweet became a regular contributor to this journal, and its progressive and didactic aims are clearly in tune with the aspirations expressed in the prefaces to his language primers.

A study of The Academy provides insights into the general intellectual culture in which Sweet participated as his ideas developed in the 1870s.³¹ Sweet’s first article for the journal, a review of Francis A. March’s Anglo-Saxon Grammar, was published in the issue of October 22,1870, along with review articles on Dickens’s Edwin Drood, political ballads of Germany, Alpine flowers, drawings by Michelangelo, the fourth Gospel, J. Lubbock’s and E. B. Tylor’s latest work on primitive culture, T. H. Huxley’s Lay Sermons and John Tyndall’s Scientific Use of the Imagination, D. B. Monro on’s comparative mythology and the Odyssey, and I. Bywater on Clement of Alexandria. ³² This was the range of reading available to Sweet, if he so much as glanced at the journal in which he had published the second article of his career, and many of these items reflect his later enthusiasms for speculation on the ‘mind of primitive man’, ‘the imaginative element in science’ and the ‘intellectual contemplation of nature’. ³³ Such interests are not of course peculiar to Sweet; indeed they constitute another example of what Dale has called (referring to Matthew Arnold and Friedrich Max Müller)’one particular mid-Victorian conjunction of science, language and literary theory’. ³⁴

In the pages of The Academy we detect the beginnings of Sweet’s interest in the work of the anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor, who began to influence him from at least as early as 1876, when he published his textbook An Anglo-Saxon Reader and the linguistic paper ‘Words, Logic, and Grammar’. These two works by Sweet contain occasional notes or comments on ‘poetry in its earliest form’ and ‘primitive man’, reminiscent of Tylorian anthropology. ³⁵ Tylor joined the Philological Society in 1871, and in 1877, after hearing Sweet read ‘Words, Logic, and Grammar’ to the Society, he invited Sweet to read a version of it to the London Anthropological Institute. ³⁶ The academic exchanges continued with Tylor’s use of Sweet’s writings in his Anthropology (1881) and Sweet’s use of whole passages from Tylor in his Elementarbuch of 1885. An instance is the following extract, which illustrates Tylor’s notion of’ survivals’ in modern life from the customs of the past, and at the same time reflects Sweet’s interest in the mediaeval world of the Anglo-Saxons, ideas which he draws from his own wide reading and from Wright’s Homes of Other Days:

The Old English houses before the Norman Conquest were only one storey high. The most important part of the house was the hall. The bedrooms and the kitchen were separate buildings close to the hall. Cooking was often done out of doors, in the open air. The whole group of buildings was surrounded by a wall with the gate in it, which was generally kept shut, especially if there was any danger of thieves or enemies getting in. The hall door was generally left open, and any stranger who liked might come in, and sit down to dinner with the family. This is why we still say of a hospitable man that he ‘keeps open house.’ ³⁷

As well as his contacts with Tylor, Sweet found further inspiration in the work of Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895), man of science, lecturer at the Royal School of Mines from 1854, member of the London School Board after the Education Act of 1870, and likewise a popular educator at the South London Working Men’s College and other institutes throughout the country. The following extract (published later in his Lay Sermons) from a lecture to the College on ‘A Liberal Education’³⁸ illustrates a similar preoccupation to that of Sweet:

The mental power which will be of most importance in your daily life will be the power of seeing things as they are without regard to authority; and of drawing accurate general conclusions from particular facts.

To achieve such aims, Huxley recommended the teaching of ‘modern geography, modern history, modern literature; the English language as a language; the whole circle of the sciences, physical, moral and social.’ ³⁹ Such a recommendation is reminiscent of Sweet’s plan in the teaching of foreign languages to use treatises on special subjects, such as history, geography or the natural sciences. Obviously Sweet would approve of teaching ‘the English language as a language,’ as we have seen already, for the teaching of linguistic awareness is one of the aims of his Elementarbuch and Primer.

In the preface to his Physiography, Huxley outlined his educational procedure:

It appeared to me to be plainly dictated by common sense that the teacher, who wishes to lead his pupil to form a clear mental picture of the order which pervades the endlessly shifting phenomena of nature, should commence with the familiar facts of the scholar’s daily experience; and that, from the firm ground of such experience, he should lead the beginner, step by step, to remoter objects and to the less readily comprehensible relations of things. ⁴⁰

Huxley’s principle of graded selection of text and material, coupled with the emphasis on observation, surely lies behind Sweet’s selection criteria for his own primers and readers of the 1880s. As was pointed out above, Sweet recommended in 1884 beginning the study of a language with ‘descriptions of nature and natural phenomena, the different races of man, houses, food, dress, & c.’ in order to ‘include the whole of the elementary vocabulary of material things, phenomena and actions.’ The Elementarbuch (1885) closely follows this scheme, beginning, in a large section entitled ‘Nature’, with a description of the earth and how an observer, by watching a ship sailing out to sea, can determine the curvature of the earth. Many of the other textbooks follow suit: A Primer of Spoken English (1890) begins with a text for children -- a description of the sun rising in the morning: ⁴¹

The sun says: My name’s Sun. I’m very bright. I rise in the east and when I rise it’s day. I look in at your window with my bright, golden eye and tell you when it’s time to get up’.

Similarly, the first text of Selected Homilies of Ælfric (1885) ⁴² gives us the Anglo-Saxon writer Ælfric on the creation; while the opening piece of First Steps in Anglo-Saxon (1897) is yet another description of the earth -- Sweet’s selective rewriting of an astronomical text by Ælfric: ‘the sun goes between heaven and earth; by day it is above the earth and by night below it’. ⁴³

If we now compare the first section of the Elementarbuch, the parallels will be obvious:

People used to think the earth was a kind of flat cake, with the sea all round it; but we know now that it’s really round, like a ball -- not quite round, but a little flattened, like an orange. We can easily see that the earth’s round by watching a ship sailing out to sea: as she gets further and further away, she seems to sink more and more into the water, till at last we can see nothing but the tops of the masts. ⁴⁴

The prose here is a model of the clear, simple, colloquial style that Sweet was urging language textbook writers to adopt. In accordance with his own criteria for a reading-book, Sweet is careful not to quote Huxley verbatim, but simplifies, selects, edits and re-orders. Huxley’s prose style, characterised in the following passage by its use of the subjunctive ‘be,’ and the nautical idiom ‘stand out to sea’, and, in general, its more leisurely descriptions and scholarly explanations, is in keeping with the gentleman of science, but not suited to Sweet’s purpose:

If a ship be watched, as she leaves port it will of course be seen that she gets smaller in size and fainter in outline the further she stands out to sea. But in addition to this change of size and distinctness, the figure of the ship suffers a change. In fact the hull of the ship seems gradually to sink into the sea, and at length disappears altogether. Yet it might be fairly supposed that the hull, being the largest part, would remain longest in view. After the hull has passed out of sight, the lower sails, in like manner, are lost to view; then, the upper sails appear to dip beneath the water; and last only the tops of the masts are to be seen peeping above sea-level.

Such evidence as that which has been adduced in this chapter, proves conclusively that the earth has a curved surface, and that the curvature is of a globular body. Very delicate operations have enabled men to determine the figure of the earth with the greatest accuracy, and have shown that this figure is not exactly that of a true sphere. The sphere is, in fact, a little flattened in the neighbourhood of the poles, so that, using a popular expression, it may be likened to the shape of an orange . . . ⁴⁵

Huxley begins his book with a description of the Thames at London Bridge, and Sweet does likewise on the first few pages of his Elementarbuch, and yet Sweet also introduces material from much later in Physiography, as can be seen from the above extracts, so that the Elementarbuch begins with a description of the earth, as in his Selected Homilies. It may seem a trivial difference, but Huxley specifically recommends not beginning in this way, for it contradicts his purpose of moving out from ‘the familiar facts of the scholar’s daily experience’ to wider and more complex issues. Sweet evidently finds it preferable, or more apposite, to begin in the manner of Bede or the Anglo-Saxon versions of Orosius and Lactantius with the macrocosm (a description of the earth). ⁴⁶

Why would Sweet (slightly) mediaevalise Huxley in this way? And why, as I noted above, did he slightly secularise the Anglo-Saxon writer Ælfric for his First Steps in Anglo-Saxon of 1897? In reply to these questions, I can offer no firm evidence, only a speculation. From an ideological point of view, Sweet was clearly Huxleyan, and hence he had no qualms about secularising Ælfric’s theology, at least when writing a primer for beginners. This Huxleyan ideology is implicit in the choice of texts for the Elementarbuch and explicit in his discussions of Shelley as an imaginative scientist-poet penetrating to the profundities of inanimate nature. Sweet clearly wished to proclaim to his readers the values of modern popular science. At the same time, however, there is a mediaevalist-colouring to his primers, and despite the rigorous linguistic reasons given for using nature descriptions, it may be that Sweet’s mediaeval literary interests also played a significant role in explaining the contents of his textbooks, the selection and ordering of the texts, and the agenda that to a certain extent lay behind them. ⁴⁷

A comment by Onions leads me to one final question on the covert philosophy behind Sweet’s textbooks. In an early article, Sweet admitted to having strong ‘prejudices against German linguistic mysticism’.⁴⁸ In his first academic paper, for instance, he complained that Grimm’s law ‘has been compared to a rolling wheel; it has been described as a primary and mysterious principle, like heat or electricity; but I am unable to see in it anything but an aggregation of purely physiological changes, not necessarily connected together’. ⁴⁹ Such quotations suggest a cool, pragmatic approach, but (it has been suggested) the public utterances may nevertheless conceal a private, more contemplative or even mystical side to his character. In the DNB (1912-1921),⁵⁰ Onions maintained that Sweet was interested in Swedenborg: perhaps a later interest, for there is a reference to Swedenborg in Sweet’s book of 1899.⁵¹ Since Sweet’s personal papers do not survive, this is all the extant evidence to go on, and it is perhaps unlikely that Sweet’s ‘intellectual contemplation of nature’ has much to do with Swedenborgian notions, such as the idea that ‘the spiritual world flows into the natural world’. ⁵² The question must be left open.

To conclude, the ‘science’ in Sweet’s Primer of Spoken English is of various kinds, all of which contribute to the success of this series of textbooks. Firstly, the Elementarbuch and its successors are designed with clear and well-argued linguistic principles of language learning behind them. Secondly, the phonetic script used by Sweet is an interesting experiment. Designed to raise linguistic awareness in his contemporaries, it certainly served to question and challenge many of his readers. (Interestingly, the notation system can still serve the same consciousness-raising function even today, as two phoneticians have recently observed. ⁵³) Thirdly, Sweet’s rigorous and (mostly) accurate transcriptions of one form of educated English must have made the textbook extremely useful as an aid to learning English as a foreign language, as well as increasing its prestige as a ‘scientific’ document and hence saleable textbook. On a different level, the scientific content and ideology of the texts themselves, extracted from popular works of science of the day, probably also added to the original attraction of the primer, and this supports our initial contention that a textbook will reflect the ‘mentalities and values’ of its day. On the other hand, Sweet was not constrained by writing for one particular readership, and his textbook reflects also his own more particular subjective interests. In the case of the Elementarbuch, there is a tension between Sweet the linguist, Sweet the poetic man of science, and Sweet the medievalist: an instance, and surely not the only one, of competing values in the process of textbook compilation in late-Victorian England. ⁵⁴

 1. Kyriakou, ‘Teaching history to the "Little Eagles:" the Greek past in the primer of the Resistance’ Paradigm (December, 1995), pp. 2-9.

2. Howatt, A History of English Language Teaching, pp. 169-191.

3. Storm, Englische Philologie [English Philology] (1880); Viëtor (pseudonym ‘Quousque Tandem’), Der Sprachunterricht muss umkehren [Language Teaching Must Start Afresh] (1992); Klinghardt, Reviews of ‘Quousque Tandem’ (1883) and of Karl Kühn’s Zur Methode des Französisch-Unterrichts (1884); Sweet, Review of Storm’s Englische Philologie (1881). On Sweet, see MacMahon, ‘Sweet, Europe and Phonetics’ (1991) and ‘Henry Sweet’s Linguistic Scholarship’ (1994); Darian, ‘Background of Modern Language Teaching’ (1969); Atherton, ‘Henry Sweet’s Idea of Totality’ (1994); and Howatt, A History, pp. 179-91.

4. Sweet, ‘Presidential address at the anniversary meeting of the Philological Society, May 18, 1877’ (1877) reprinted in Wyld, Collected Papers of Henry Sweet (1913), pp. 93-94.

5. Sweet, ‘Words, logic, and grammar’ (1876) in Collected Papers, p. 2.

6. Sweet, Elementarbuch (1885), p. iii.

7. Sweet, Handbook of Phonetics (1877), p. v.

8. Sweet, History of English Sounds (1874/1879), pp. 8 and 72; ‘Presidential address’ (1877) in Collected Papers, p. 94.

9. Sweet, ‘The practical study of language’ (1884) in Collected Papers, p. 39.

10. Sweet, ‘Words, logic, and grammar’ in, p. 3.

11. Sweet, History of English Sounds (1874/1879), p. 72.

12. Ahn, Nouvelle méthode (1846); Ollendorff, A New Method (1838); Howatt, History, pp. 138-145.

13. Sweet, ‘The Practical Study of Language’ (1884), in Collected Papers, p. 44.

14. Ibid. p. 39.

15. Sweet, Spelling Reform and the Practical Study of Language (1885), p. 13.

16. Sweet, ‘Presidential address’ (1877), in Collected Papers, pp. 93-94.

17. Klinghardt, Ein Jahr Erfahrungen mit der neuen Methode [A Year of Experiences with the New Method] (1888); Passy and Beyer, Elementarbuch des gesprochenen Französisch [Primer of Spoken French] (1893); Viëtor, Deutsches Lesebuch in Lautschrift [German Reader in Phonetic Script] (1899).

18. 1860, 1875.

19. Jespersen, En Sprogmands Levned [The Life of a Linguist] (1938), p. 51 (for the translation I am grateful to S. A. J. Bradley). I have not yet seen the recently published English translation of this autobiography.

20. Howatt, A History, pp. 40-44. On this point, I am grateful to Dr. Andrew Linn.

21. Sweet, The Practical Study of Languages (1899), p. 179.

22. Jespersen, How to Teach a Foreign Language (1904), p. 26.

23. Jespersen, How to Teach a Foreign Language (1904), p. 26.

24. Paradis, Darwin and landscape (1981); Levine, By knowledge possessed; Darwin, nature, and Victorian narrative (1993).

25. See Hopkins’s journal (1866-1874) in Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. Phillips (1986), pp. 191-222.

26. Buckley, ‘Victorian taste’ in Victorian Temper (1952), pp. 124-42.

27. Sweet, ‘Shelly’s nature poetry,’ Collected papers, p. 243.

28. Millard, ‘Images of nature: a photo-essay in Nature and the Victorian Imagination, ed. Knoepflmacher and Tennyson, pp. 3-26.

29. Boas, ‘Critics and criticism in the seventies' in The Eighteen-Seventies, ed. Boas, p. 209.

30. Frontispiece to The Academy, II (1870-1). See also Gross, The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters, pp. 65-66.

31. See Kent, ‘Victorian periodicals and the construing of Victorian reality’ in Victorian Periodicals, ed. Vann and D. Roll-Hansen, ‘The Academy,’ 1869-1879: Victorian Intellectuals in Revolt’ in Anglistica 8 (1957).

32. The Academy, II (1870-1), pp. 1-28.

33. Sweet, ‘Shelley’s nature poetry,’ Collected Papers, pp. 245 and 231.

34. Dale, ‘Poetry and the scientisation of language.’

35. Sweet, Anglo-Saxon Reader, notes preceding sections XXVI The Wanderer and XXVIII Gnomic Verses; see also ‘Words, logic, and grammar’, Collected Papers, p. 17.

36. Sweet, ‘Language and thought.’ J. Anthropological Inst 6 (1877), p. 457.

37. Sweet, Elementarbuch, p. 7; Wright, The Homes of Other Days (1871).

38. Huxley, ‘A liberal education and where to find it,’ Address to South London Working Men’s College (January 4, 1868) originally published in Macmillan’s Magazine, reprinted in Lay Sermons (1871), pp. 27-71.

39. Huxley, Lay Sermons, p. 40.

40. Huxley, Physiography, p. v.

41. Sweet, Primer of Spoken English (1890), p. 45 [my transcription].

42. Sweet, Selected Homilies of Ælfric (1885), p. 6.

43. Ælfric’s text reads: ‘The sun goes, by God’s command, between heaven and earth . . . .’ (my translation and emphasis); for the original Old English see Henel, Ælfric’s De Temporibus Anni, p. 8.

44. Sweet, Elementarbuch, p. 11 [my transcription of the phonetic script].

45. Huxley, Physiography, pp. 318 and 325.

46. See Miller, The Old English Version (1890), p. 24; Sweet, King Alfred’s Orosius (1883); Bately, The Old English Orosius (1980), p. 8; Sweet, ‘The Happy Land.’ From The Phoenix. Anglo-Saxon Reader (1876/1922), p. 151.

47. For more discussion of Sweet’s mediaevalism, see Atherton (1995), ‘Grasping sentences as wholes: Henry Sweet’s idea of language study in the early Middle Ages.’

48. Sweet, ‘Language and thought’ (1877), p. 457; for Tylor’s comments on the paper, see the end of Sweet’s article, p. 482.

49. Sweet, ‘The history of the "th" in English’ Tr Philological Soc. (1868-9), p. 279.

50. Onions, Henry Sweet. DNB, p. 520.

51. Sweet, The Practical Study of Languages (1899), p. 78.

52. Swedenborg, De Commercio Animae et Corporis (1875), p. 16.

53. Kelly and Local, ‘The modernity of Henry Sweet’ (1985).

54. I would like to thank Dr. Mike MacMahon for useful advice and information during the writing of this article.

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 [A spoken version of this paper was given at the York Colloquium. Ed.]

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