Abstract
When Gilbert White examined the ‘language of birds’ in The Natural History of Selborne (1789), he qualified his use of the term. He distinguished his own approach from that of the seers and ‘viziers’ of old. White’s comments on the ‘viziers’ of ancient fables may be said to inform Wordsworth and Coleridge’s shared concern with the poet’s tendency to make the sounds of nature, in Coleridge’s phrase, ‘tell back the tale/Of his own sorrows’ (‘The Nightingale’, 1798). But White also set out an alternative, and controversial, approach to interpreting what he termed ‘the language of birds’. This chapter places Wordsworth and Coleridge’s poetry in a heated debate regarding non-human animal and particularly avian ‘language’: it explores White’s influence on the early writings of both poets, and argues that the debate foregrounds the fervid dispute which arose between the two poets regarding ‘the best part of human language, properly so called’ (Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 1817).
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Notes
- 1.
Gilbert White, The Natural History of Selborne, ed. Richard Mabey (London: Penguin, 1977), 216.
- 2.
Joseph Addison, The Spectator, no. 512 (17 October 1712).
- 3.
Daniel Karlin, The Figure of the Singer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 59. For a full account of the ways in which human beings have attempted to interpret, represent, and understand the sounds of birds, see David Rothenberg, Why Birds Sing (London: Penguin, 2005), and Jeremy Mynott, Birdscapes: Birds in our Imagination and Experience (Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2009), esp. 145–81.
- 4.
John Clare, The Natural History Prose Writings of John Clare, ed. Margaret Grainger (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 312.
- 5.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘The Nightingale’ in Lyrical Ballads, ed. R. L. Brett and A. R. Jones (London: Routledge, 2005), 20–1.
- 6.
William Wordsworth, 1800 Preface to Lyrical Ballads, 290; Coleridge, Biographia Literaria in The Major Works, ed. H. J. Jackson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 342.
- 7.
J. M. Bechstein, The Natural History of Cage Birds, trans. unknown, new edn. (London: 1837), 24.
- 8.
Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, 4 vols (London: 1861), III, 14–15. Black’s ‘hedge warbler’ is the dunnock while his ‘willow wren’ is the willow warbler. The ‘petty chat’ is most likely the chiffchaff.
- 9.
Clare, ‘Birds Nesting’ in Poems of the Middle Period 1822–37, ed. Eric Robinson, David Powell and P. M. S. Dawson, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996–2003), II, 15–16.
- 10.
Wordsworth, ‘There Was a Boy’, Lyrical Ballads, 10; see Wordsworth’s note to the poem in The Fenwick Notes of William Wordsworth, ed. Jared Curtis (London: Bristol Classical Press, 1993), 60.
- 11.
Coleridge, The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 4 double vols [Text and Notes], ed. Kathleen Coburn and Merten Christensen (London: Princeton University Press, 1957–90), III, 3959.
- 12.
Dorothy Wordsworth, The Grasmere and Alfoxden Journals, ed. Pamela Woof (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 115.
- 13.
Lucretius, Titus Lucretius Carus. The Epicurean Philosopher, His Six Books De Natura Rerum Done into English Verse with Notes, trans. Thomas Creech (Oxford: 1682), V.1379–1412.
- 14.
Johann Gottfriend Herder, Treatise on the Origin of Language in Two Essays on the Origin of Language, trans. John H. Moran and Alexander Gode (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 136.
- 15.
James Burnett Lord Monboddo, On the Origin and Progress of Language, 8 vols, 2nd edn. (Edinburgh: 1774–92), I, 469–70.
- 16.
Jean Jacques Rousseau, Essay on the Origins of Languages in Two Essays on the Origins of Language, ibid, 12.
- 17.
Lindley Murray, An English Grammar, 2 vols (London: 1808), I, 23, 347–8.
- 18.
Hans Aarsleff, The Study of Language in England, 1780–1860 (Connecticut: Greenswood, 1967), 3.
- 19.
Olivia Smith, The Politics of Language: 1791–1819 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986), 22.
- 20.
James Harris, Hermes; Or, A Philosophical Inquiry Concerning Language and Universal Grammar (London: 1751), 113.
- 21.
Coleridge, ‘Answer to a Child’s Question’ in Poetical Works, ed. J. C. C. Mays, 6 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), II, 694.
- 22.
Wordsworth, An Evening Walk, ed. James Averill (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984), 127–8.
- 23.
Alan Bewell, ‘Wordsworth’s Primal Scene: Retrospective Tales of Idiots, Wild Children, and Savages’ in ELH 50/2 (Summer, 1983), 321–46 (325), Alan Richardson, British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 164–70. Also see Avital Ronnel, Stupidity (Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 2003), esp. 246–64. For a detailed analysis of the figure of the idiot in eighteenth-century thought and literature, and its influence on Wordsworth’s representation of Johnny Foy, see Patrick McDonagh, Idiocy: A Cultural History (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008), esp. 24–49.
- 24.
Alexander von Humboldt, quoted in W. Tecumseh Fitch, ‘Musical Protolanguage: Darwin’s Theory of Language Evolution Revisited’ in Birdsong, Speech and Language: Exploring the Evolution of Mind and Brain, ed. Johan J. Bolhuis and Martin Everaert (Cambridge: MIT, 2013), 489–504 (495).
- 25.
See Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 339. In his review of Lyrical Ballads, Robert Southey objected to the poet’s choice of subject matter in ‘The Idiot Boy’ and concluded that ‘No tale less deserved the labour that appears to have been bestowed on it’; qtd. in Lyrical Ballads, 337. The critic John Wilson similarly criticised Wordsworth for choosing to delineate feelings which ‘though natural, do not please, but which create a certain disgust or contempt’; qtd. in Lyrical Ballads, 394.
- 26.
For example, see versions of this stanza in ‘The Idiot Boy’ in The Miscellaneous Poems of William Wordsworth, 4 vols (London: 1820), I, 250, The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, 5 vols (London: 1827), I, 232, and The Poems of William Wordsworth (London: 1845), 9. I have given page numbers, as opposed to line numbers, in accordance with the editions’ own conventions. For Wordsworth’s obsessive tendencies in revising his poems, see Stephen Gill, William Wordsworth: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 366–7, 388–9.
Bibliography
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Addison, Joseph. The Spectator, no. 512 (17 October 1712).
Bechstein, J. M. The Natural History of Cage Birds. Translator unknown. New edition. London: 1837.
Bewell, Alan. ‘Wordsworth’s Primal Scene: Retrospective Tales of Idiots, Wild Children, and Savages’ in ELH 50/2 (Summer, 1983), 321–46.
Bolhuis, Johan J. and Martin Everaert, eds. Birdsong, Speech and Language: Exploring the Evolution of Mind and Brain. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2013.
Clare, John. The Natural History Prose Writings of John Clare. Edited by Margaret Grainger. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983.
Clare, John. Poems of the Middle Period 1822–37. Edited by Eric Robinson, David Powell, and P. M. S. Dawson. 5 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996–2003.
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Wordsworth, William. The Poems of William Wordsworth. London: 1845.
Wordsworth, William and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Lyrical Ballads. Edited by R. L. Brett and A. R. Jones. London: Routledge, 2005.
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Mackenney, F. (2020). The Language of Birds and the Language of Real Men: Wordsworth, Coleridge and the ‘Best Part’ of Language. In: Carey, B., Greenfield, S., Milne, A. (eds) Birds in Eighteenth-Century Literature. Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32792-7_7
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