[en] Reflecting the advancements made in the burgeoning disciplines of philology and linguistics, the mid-Victorian press hosted an abundant discourse about the origins, legitimation, and standards of language. These reflections on language were often intensely polemical and political. According to Barry Thatcher, the language debate—as this phenomenon has been called—was “one of the major concerns of the nineteenth century.” The debate took on particular urgency in periodicals during the 1850s, following the publication of works on language by eminent thinkers including the evolutionist Charles Darwin (1809–82), the anti-evolutionist mythologist Friedrich Max Müller (1823–1900), and the comparative philologist William Dwight Whitney (1827–94). These works circulated in journals and were discussed frequently by critics. Editors routinely juxtaposed perspectives from various disciplines, such as historical linguistics, language didactics, the history of populations, folklore, biblical studies, biology, and philosophy. In this search for the origins of language and the ideal shape of standardised linguistic systems, Victorian periodicals brought together currents of thought circulating within the British Empire, across Europe, and around the world. Although some of these ideas on language were grounded in cultural contexts disparate from Britain, they could have repercussions for arguments about English—or rather, the many Englishes spoken within Britain. In the present article, I examine how Johann Gottfried Herder’s (1744–1803) ideology of the mother tongue, a current of thought instrumental in German nation-building, influenced contributions to the language debate published in Charles Dickens’s weekly periodicals, Household Words (1850–59) and All the Year Round (1859–95).
Disciplines :
Literature
Author, co-author :
MILLIM, Anne-Marie ; University of Luxembourg > Faculty of Humanities, Education and Social Sciences (FHSE) > Department of Humanities (DHUM) > English Studies
External co-authors :
yes
Language :
English
Title :
Crossing Currents: The Mother Tongue, Monolingualism, and Multilingualism in the Midcentury Victorian Periodical Press
Publication date :
08 July 2025
Journal title :
Victorian Periodicals Review
ISSN :
0709-4698
eISSN :
1712-526X
Publisher :
Research Society for Victorian Periodicals, Canada
Special issue title :
Currents and Currencies in the Victorian Periodical Press
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