The Evolution of English Prose, 1700–1800: Style, Politeness, and Print Culture

At the beginning of the eighteenth century ordinary written English was close to speech; by 1800, people expressed themselves more formally, politely, and precisely. The new "writtenness" of prose coincided with the development of a mature print culture, the rise of women writers, the invention of prescriptive grammars, and a powerful new rhetoric. Carey McIntosh traces these changes and illustrates them with comparisons of work by Defoe and Paine, Swift and Burke, Addison and Johnson, Shaftesbury and Godwin, and Astell and Wollstonecraft.