The Select Society Dies Because of English

But, useful and active and celebrated as it was, the Select Society died after 10 years it started because of Charles Townshend’s sarcasm.

Townshend was brought to hear one of the wonderful debates, which were thought to reflect a new glory on Edinburgh.

He was even elected a member of the society.

He admitted the orators’ eloquence. But he was unable to understand a word, as they spoke in what to him was a foreign tongue.

He asked “Why can you not learn to speak English as you have already learned to write it?”[88]

This was to touch Scotchmen of that period who made any pretensions to education at one of their most sensitive parts.

Scotch was the broad dialect of Burns and Fergusson. It was still the common language in polite society.

It might be heard even from the pulpit or the bench, though English was flowing rapidly into fashion.

The younger and more ambitious people were trying their best to lose the native dialect.

Great writers like Hume and Robertson took pains to clear their English composition of Scotch idioms.

Wedderburn took greater but less successful pains to cure himself of his Scotch pronunciation.

• He reverted to it in his old age.

Townshend’s sarcasm created a little lingual reform movement.

Around this time, Thomas Sheridan had invented a method of imparting to foreigners a proper pronunciation of the English language through sounds borrowed from their own.

He had just been giving lessons to Wedderburn and probably practising the new method on him.

He was brought north in 1761 and delivered 16 lectures in St. Paul’s Chapel, Carrubber’s Close, to about 300 gentlemen.

They were “the most eminent in the country for rank and abilities.”

Immediately, the Select Society:

• organised a special association for promoting the writing and speaking of English in Scotland, and
• engaged a teacher of correct English pronunciation from London.

Robertson, Ferguson, and Blair, together with a number of peers, baronets, lords of Session, and leaders of the bar, were the directors of this new association.

Smith was not one of the directors.

It failed because it touched the national vanity.

It admitted a humiliating confession of inferiority to rival England when England was raging with abuse of the Scotch:

• Wilkes was publishing the North Briton
• Churchill was writing his lampoons

The Edinburgh newspapers published that the Select Society switched to English.

• It provoked such a storm of antipathy and ridicule that even the honourable society which furthered the scheme began to lose favour.

Its subscriptions and membership declined, and the organisation fell to pieces.

The society reached its culminating point in 1762.

After that, subscribers withdrew their names, or refused to pay their subscriptions.

In 1765, the society had no funds to offer more than six prizes and ceased to exist.

It said that it died of the loss of novelty.

“The arrears of subscriptions confirms that in Scotland every disinterested plan of public utility is slighted as soon as it loses the charm of novelty.”[89]

It remarks that the 2 obstacles to Scotland’s literary advancement had been her:

• deficiency in the art of printing and
  • This had been removed entirely
• her imperfect command of good English.

This could be surmounted, as shown by recent writers.