Tell us a little about you and your research.

I’m a historical sociolinguist and something of a philologist at the Department of Modern Languages in the University of Helsinki. I study the interrelatedness of language and society in historical texts, and my research has largely focused on the language and letters of the Bluestocking circle in eighteenth-century England. I’ve edited some 200 letters of Elizabeth Montagu (1718-1800) and some of her correspondents from manuscripts at the Henry E. Huntington Library, British Library, and Houghton Library, and compiled these letters into an electronic database that’s designed for linguistic research; I’ve had the good fortune to be able to visit wonderful libraries for this purpose. Editing is time-consuming work, but very rewarding – you make constant progress, and get to know your research material thoroughly. 

I’m interested in issues such as eighteenth-century spelling variation in private writing and how that variation is patterned in terms of e.g. gender and social rank, intertextuality in letters, social and linguistic prestige, and the relationship between 18^th-century linguistic prescriptivism and actual usage.  I’m currently working on a linguistic biography of Elizabeth Montagu, and some shorter projects dealing with social dimensions of page layout and orthography, verbal irony in letters, identity, and intertextuality.

Have you learned anything unusual/fascinating about Elizabeth Montagu?

I find it interesting (though perhaps not all that surprising) that Elizabeth Montagu reacted strongly to the increasing stigmatisation of preposition stranding between the 1730s and 1770s. Here’s an example of this severely criticized construction:
 

My Brother Morris & his family are going to Sandleford, which I am very glad of, for I think it is a Good air for ye sweet little man. [Elizabeth Montagu to Sarah Scott,1760, MO 5779]

 This feature all but disappears from Montagu’s letters as the years go by, and I think it happens because of her increasing awareness of her literary reputation and what was considered proper style and good language use. Montagu published the Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespear in 1769, albeit anonymously, and towards the end of the 1770s she had established herself as an influential social hostess and a patron of arts. Interestingly the initial decline of preposition stranding in Montagu’s letters precedes the influx of grammar writing which took off in the 1760s, so she must have been influenced by the earlier 16^th-century comments (particularly of John Dryden) which were more elite-oriented and less accessible to the common audience than grammars. This decline of preposition stranding could be considered as language change from above, initiated by the upper strata of society. Nuria Yáñez-Bouza has done interesting research on the history of preposition stranding. 

I’ve also been impressed by Montagu’s early letters to Lady Margaret Bentinck, the Duchess of Portland, written when they were in their twenties. Elizabeth is amazingly cheeky and satirical in these letters and openly makes fun of third parties. She was a sophisticated and skilled letter-writer from an early age, and elegantly weaved quotes from Shakespeare and other literary references in her texts.

When did you know you wanted to focus your career on the 18th century? 

I wrote my MA thesis on the letters of Queen Elizabeth I, so I jumped ahead a couple of centuries when I began to study the Bluestockings. My reason for focusing on this period is my background in the VARIENG research unit at the University of Helsinki in the early 2000s, and especially my membership in the Sociolinguistics and Language History project, which produced the Corpus of Early English Correspondence. For a couple of years I worked with compiling the eighteenth-century section of the corpus: a great part of my job consisted of finding letter editions, evaluating their editorial principles in terms of what kind of material historical linguists need to use (these would be editions which reproduce the original text as faithfully as possible), selecting letters for the corpus, and going through the actual process of including them in the corpus. I spent a lot of time reading letters, and over time I got to know the period fairly well. I’ve been as interested in the eighteenth-century people and their world as in their language use, and, for me, historical sociolinguistics is a rewarding field of research for that particular reason.

In 2011 I was very happy to join a project which aims to produce a digital edition of Elizabeth Montagu’s correspondence. I also want to do some work on the 19^th and early 20^th-century editions of her letters, so in a way I’m slowly creeping towards the 21^st century. 

In what ways does the 18th century inspire you?

I’m not sure if ‘inspire’ is the right word, but I’m intrigued by the advance of the normative tradition and grammar writing. It was a very innovative period. 

I have to say that I’m fascinated by the medical practices of the time (Fanny Burney’s early 19th-century mastectomy without anaesthesia, for example) and private discussions of illnesses and ailments. I’m also interested in print culture and how the 18^th century was the starting point of so many things – urbanisation, industrialisation, consumer culture, novel-writing…

This is a difficult question, but I think I’ll go with what was going on in the literary world at the time, the book publishing industry, the pen names and the anonymous publishing, the printed proceedings of divorce trials, and the scathing book reviews. I don’t know if ‘inspiring’ is the right word, but I’m very interested in all this. And the slightly dilettantish practice of grammar writing appeals to me. 

If you had an 18th century dinner party, who would be invited?

The lexicographer Samuel Johnson would be fascinating dinner company, and I would like to meet the two Bluestocking Elizabeths Carter and Montagu. I enjoy the dry humour and wit in Montagu’s letters. Elizabeth Carter has a reputation as one of the most learned women of her time, and her letters to Catherine Talbot are good-humoured, intelligent, and funny. She seems like an all-around decent person, even though I recall that Hester Thrale was not very impressed with her in the Thraliana (of course I cannot find a reference for it now, but Thrale gave points to her acquaintances based on their qualifications and accomplishments, and Carter scored very low points).

There’s a catch to this question, though: would I be myself (a 21st-century North European Bluestocking scholar) at that dinner party? What would be my role? How would I be able to connect with these people? It might be a fairly strange get-together. 

Thank you for the interview! It was a pleasure.