LITMIR.BIZ

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and nineteenth-century writing in which nonnormative subjects are literally on the run. I choose fugitive advertising rather than grammars, dictionaries, elocution texts, style guides, and translation manuals at this early moment of my argument because the politics of monolingualism is unconcealed and instructive in these ephemeral documents. In addition, the hot pursuits that these ads index can serve as so many symbols for the progressive policing of linguistic diversity that a politics of monolingualism seeks. In addition to a politics of monolingualism, equally evident in these ads is the multilingualism of the other, by which I mean the diversely formed bodies and identities of nonnormative linguistic subjects, people like Peros, Jack, Neptune, and Cupid, people whose bobs, feints, and flights metaphorize nonnormative models of being resistant, being in language, and being in the world. That a politics of monolingualism became a structural principle of anglophone culture during the eighteenth century—and through a variety of written forms including grammars, dictionaries, elocution texts, style guides, and translation manuals, but also through metalinguistic writing in commonplace organs like newspapers—is evident. And yet, the other’s multilingualism—however infelicitous the phrase and however imaginary the “other”—is often underinvestigated.

      Sound Opinions: Of Language and the Body

      Some instinct induced me to lay my hand upon a newspaper….

      I threw a languid glance at the first column that presented itself. The first words which I read, began with the offer of a reward of three hundred guineas for the apprehension of a convict under sentence of death, who had escaped from Newgate prison in Dublin. Good heaven! How every fibre of my frame tingled when I proceeded to read that the name of the criminal was Francis Carwin!

      The description of the person and address were minute. His stature, hair, complexion, the extraordinary position and arrangement of his features, his awkward and disproportionate form, his gesture and gait, corresponded perfectly with those of our mysterious visitant. He had been found guilty in two indictments. One for the murder of the Lady Jane Conway, and the other for a robbery committed on the person of the honorable Mr. Ludloe.²⁹

      The eighteenth century was a period when newspapers carried abundant advertisements for fugitive apprentices, servants, slaves, soldiers, and suspected criminals.³⁰ Anglophone papers disseminated thousands of notices over the course of the century in pages where fugitives were flanked by ads for theatricals, tutors, books, commercial products, and many other commodities.³¹ In fact, as Marcus Wood and others have noted, British fugitive ads blazed discursive trails for the nineteenth-century explosion of fugitive slave notices in North America, a genre of writing that became financially critical to the business model of some newspapers, including Benjamin Franklin’s.³² These ads reveal some of the linguistic, racial, gendered, and bodily intersectionalities that constituted public identity for enslaved, indentured, and free people who appeared as outlaws in papers from Britain to North America, from the Caribbean to South Asia.³³ Beyond being the transatlantic archive of the economic entanglement between slavery and the press, fugitive ads should be seen as informative textual products common to anglophone communities around the globe. Irrespective of place, anglophone communities used fugitive ads to invent and propagate ideas of human difference as they related to embodied social interaction. In many cases the politics of monolingualism is in the foreground while the creative productivity of multilingual lives lurks beneath the surface.

      If we view fugitive advertising as an important genre—and generator—of descriptive writing throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and across the diverse spaces of the anglophone world, as I believe we should, then metalinguistic descriptions at work in these ads enable analytical insights about the emergent politics of monolingualism that I have been describing. For one, we can acknowledge that linguistic practices were viewed as an aspect of embodiment, an aspect that the ads’ metalinguistic writing must find ways to represent or “capture.” This is important because—in spite of the productive attention that has been given to identity as a visual interpretive event—critics have yet to think through what spoken language means in conjunction with identity schemas based on visualizing the body.³⁴ More generally, appreciating the copresence of visual and auditory descriptors in these ads allows us to see that only by virtue of the patterned interweaving of all these descriptive vocabularies do fugitive identities take shape in text. This is not to say that linguistic qualifications or descriptions are present in all fugitive ads; they are not.³⁵ Rather, I merely mean to suggest that a subsection of these ads gives us the opportunity to eavesdrop on the linguistic dimensions of public identity. When we seize this opportunity, we come into contact with a wide variety of subjects, all of whom are ordered with respect to one another and with respect to a politics of anglophone monolingualism in complex ways.

      Furthermore, it is clear that eighteenth-century fugitive ads register the long development of our own enmeshed and misrepresentative racial, ethnic, sexual, gender, ability, and class (often occupational) categories. These ads refer regularly to these categories, just as they often luridly catalogue visible bodily differences and disabilities. I stress the linguistic components of these ads not because I want to deemphasize more familiar critical dimensions for analyzing the hierarchies of social reality, but rather because I want to build on the work others have done by thinking through linguistic embodiment as it reinforces and in some cases stands in for these other dimensions of public identity. Whereas features of identity like race are grafted onto bodies via an interpretive oscillation between visible somatic features and the discursive environment, an individual’s linguistic identity represents the interaction of that same discursive environment with the more ephemeral event of speaking, an event over which the speaker might have a certain control.³⁶ To reiterate, one theoretical opportunity that I see in these ads is the opportunity to think about linguistic identity in relation to other vectors of interpersonal difference, and more generally, to think about power and identity with and beyond the categories of ability, class, ethnicity, gender, race, and sex.

      Consider the following descriptive cues as they intersect with legal and moral prejudgments in a London ad announcing a hefty bounty placed on the head of Elizabeth Baker, a Bristol “spinster” suspected of abetting the forced elopement of a wealthy heiress “for the lucre thereof.” In this description of Baker, her linguistic profile is a vital clue. We see its significance in the ad’s narration of Baker: “The said Elizabeth Baker is about 22 years old, stout limbed, handsome face, and fresh colour, is rather tall, dark eyes, and has a great deal of the Somersetshire dialect in her speech.”³⁷ Motivated reward seekers would have to keep their ears to the ground for a woman speaking in nonnormative West Country sounds.³⁸ “Somersetshire dialect” works here in tandem with the term “spinster” in order to cast a gendered suspicion on the suspect, a potentially unmarried woman who, according to the allegations, helped dupe another woman into abduction and marriage.³⁹ The ad for Baker creates a sprawling mesh of mutually reinforcing censures, including, most obviously, her criminal designs on “lucre.” With lucre in mind, it is worth noting that the ad for Baker, like most others in the period, incentivizes the reader’s careful internalization of this mesh with the promise of financial windfall, “100 guineas” in Baker’s case. A reader would be paid to properly envision, intone, and identify outlaws narrated in the paper.

      Reaping the monetary rewards of reading fugitive ads like the one for Baker required readers to be familiar with anglophone life as it was structured around multiple, intersecting dimensions of embodied and vocalized difference. In British papers, language specifications register cultural, educational, and class divisions between province and capital, and it is around these core divisions that other aspects of identity tend to orbit. British ads also stress the linguistic abnormality and insularity of people from English provinces like Baker’s native Somerset. Implicit in the logic is the notion that suspects like Baker lack normative linguistic propriety to the same degree that they lack qualities that would permit them to be part of the imagined extension of a national community. In this vein, a 1771 advertisement in the Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser announces a search for John Anderson, a sixteen-year-old apprentice accused of unlawfully absconding from his shipmaster, Captain Robert Elder, a seemingly reputable factor of British maritime trade. Anderson, the ad reveals, “speaks thick and mumbling, and has something of the Yorkshire dialect.”⁴⁰

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