Historical Literature - Research

For one of my WIP that spans "a bit of time", I've come up with the following reading list to give me an idea of how they spoke and used language in the early-to-mid 18th Century:

• Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe
• Moll Flanders – Daniel Defoe
• Gulliver's Travels – Jonathan Swift
• Pamela – Samuel Richardson
• Shamela – Henry Fielding
• Clarissa – Samuel Richardson
• Fanny Hill – John Cleland
• The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling – Henry Fielding
• Love in Excess – Eliza Haywood
• Memoirs of Emma Courtney – Mary Hays
• The History of Sir Charles Grandison – Samuel Richardson

I figure that that list should give me a good grounding in written and spoken language, including from the more risque side (Fanny Hill) of life and a good indication of prevailing mores and attitudes towards the sexes (primarily the views that men held of women, which is relevant to one of the characters).

What I'm wanting is a comparable list of mid-to-late 19th Century - pre-turn-of-the-century Victorian British - literature that would cover a similar scope.

I'm thinking some of the earlier Sherlock Holmes, some Charles Dickens, Lewis Carroll and so forth.

Mark Twain's a great author but is American and therefore a significantly different culture to middle-class urban British Empire that I hope to cover.

What I'm wanting is a comparable spread to the aforementioned 1700s reading list, including epistolary works and some of the bawdier stuff, that gives a good indication of how they thought and spoke on various matters.

Suggestions?

Ones that I'm likely to be able to find free online would be preferable - I'm gretty sure I could get most of the 1700s list off Project Gutenburg or similar.

edited 17th Jul '13 3:22:54 PM by Wolf1066

I dont think you can do any better than Kipling.

Dracula by Bram Stoker; good for slightly archaic language, and you discover what actually occurs in the story everyone's heard of but no one has a clue about.

edited 17th Jul '13 7:57:33 PM by VincentQuill

Good suggestions. I've got Dracula in print format in one of my as-yet-unpacked boxes but I could without doubt d/l it off the web.

I did indeed manage to get everything on my 1700s list as free downloads as they're all out of copyright.

When I downloaded Fanny Hill there was this gem on the site:

Interesting backstory about Cleland's circumstances when he wrote this. If I build a time machine, I'm going to be heading back to the 1700s - it seems like a fun time.

Just remember to pass yourself off as an upper class white male.

edited 19th Jul '13 10:07:05 AM by DeMarquis

Or at least rich merchant. The white and male I can manage, not so sure about the nobility side - I'm as common as muck, me.

In danger of getting back on topic, I've already got some Kipling in etext format, so that saves me a google search

Any suggestions for a book/treatise that would cover the more slangy/obscene side of speech from the 1800s?

I'm hoping that Fanny Hill will help out in that respect for the 1700s (I'll be bitterly disappointed if the language used is tame and its ban-worthiness was entirely due to the goings-on rather than the vocabulary).

While we probably all know the scandalised reactions of Victorian audience's to Eliza Doolittle's line "not bloody likely, I'm taking a taxi" in Pygmalion, how were other words used? "Fuck" wasn't always the universal multipurpose swear-word that it is now, even though its use was (I've heard) recorded by Chaucer.

When did "fuck" become a noun rather than just a verb? When did it become a substitute for other "milder" words? (When did those formerly "bad" words become viewed as "mild" enough that we felt the need to substitute "fuck"?)

I've got Samuel Johnson's 1755 English Dictionary, Francis Grose's 1795 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, a link to an online copy of Nathan Bailey's Canting Dictionary and an excerpt from a 1778 Cumberland Magazine that shows Ambrose Bierce wasn't the first to do a cynical "Devil's Dictionary", so I figure I'm pretty much set for 18th Century slang that a "less-than gentlemanly" person might use in the company of fellows...