In the years from about 1710 to 1790,1 shall argue, English prose and prose style changed in important ways. Small wonder, in a century that experienced major political and social upheavals, including the American, French, and (the beginnings of the) industrial revolutions. The development of a mature print culture in Great Britain took place in those eighty or one hundred years, and coincided with a “feminization” of literary and other values; these two large historical trends make themselves felt in the evolution of prose.

By and large English prose in the last quarter of the eighteenth century is more polite, more gentrified, and more written than early eighteenth-century prose. Prose published around 1710 is characteristically more oral, more informal and colloquial, whereas late eighteenth-century prose became more bookish, more elegant, more precise, and more consciously rhetorical.

Chapter 1 presents these hypotheses concisely and orients them within standard histories of prose, of prose style, and of the English language. Scholars trained in linguistics approach such issues very differently from literary critics, but I suggest that the two approaches are not incompatible. Here also I summarize what eighteenth-century writers themselves thought about the evolution of English.

Chapter 2 presents a sharp contrast between early and late eighteenth-century prose, based on word-by-word analyses of selected short texts, their grammar, vocabulary, rhetoric, style. Here is my thesis in its simplest and most extreme form. In chapter 3, I test the model, applying it to writings by major authors from each end of the century, especially authors whose writings seem to be counterevidence to the general argument of this book.