A Cursory History of Swearing

by Julian Sharman

It is with no halting, staid, discriminative pen that he descants upon the pleasantries and follies, the very reference to which give life and colour to a weary argument. By the aid of these threads of human sentiment we fancy we come the closer to him in his musings and his wanderings, now hieing, as he does, to the pantiles or the playhouse, now to the Temple Stairs or Vauxhall Gardens. Posterity takes delight in reversing the footsteps of its favourites. It attempts to return with them to the scenes which they themselves have left for good so long ago. And so with Addison, we accustom ourselves to see him mixing in a crowd of masquers and dominos, or supping in upper chambers with ministers of state and tavern wits. The fancy is a harmless one, and not far removed from reality. Imagine, therefore, Mr. Joseph Addison at Hockley-in-the-Hole or at Cupar’s Gardens, but be sure that to-morrow’s sermon will want nothing of its grace and sparkle because inspired over-night in a mug-house parlour.

Addison has in fact conceived and transmitted to us some of the loftiest notions ever formed of a Deity, and of the unending trespass against divine law. Among surroundings possibly resonant with ribaldry, he could reflect, as few before him have so impartially and equably reflected, how much of vileness is to be set down to the score of thoughtlessness and inanity, how much to a high-handed defiance of the Master he owns. One number of the ‘Spectator,’ that of November 8th, 1711, sends forth the sternest challenge to the government of error. Few other secular works have made so moderate and at once so eloquent a protest. Adapting the notion of Locke that the unaided realisation of the Deity is formed by observation of the qualities we should desire to find in ourselves, but sublimated by the notion of infinity attaching to each of them, Addison proceeds to argue a state of veneration being the normal condition of the mental frame. The horror that is conceived by a child, or, as it may be, by a grown man, at the jarring dissonance of an oath is nothing else than a sense of injury dealt out to this deeply-rooted conviction. A condition of reverence being thus inherent, it follows that the images which reason has unconsciously reared must meet with some disturbing shock before they can be impaired or dismembered. But the blow once fairly delivered, the victim of the assault in too many cases passes out into the ranks of the assailants. The boundary line between the state of abhorrence and the succeeding one of aggression is so faint that it may almost imperceptibly be overpassed, and is apt to become the more obscure with growth of years.

The danger is so easily incurred by even right-thinking men, that Addison enjoins perfect abstinence from the passing mention of the name of the Deity, instancing the Jewish prohibition which forbad its use even in professedly religious discourses. And in this point of veneration, we shall find the practice of Judæa to have been more precise than anything that is recorded of a nation. Apart from the high deliberative swearing that was so severely visited by the Mosaic law, the use of most unmeaning and flippant particles was met with signal retribution. The man who standing in the Syrian market-place made mention of the holy name in reference to the common incidents of the day—to the lusciousness of the melons, the knavery of the merchants—a mere impatient whisper, perhaps, in all the hubbub of the fair, was instantly deprived of civil rights. He had lost all power of intercourse or conversation. He could not appear at a feast of three or a congregation of ten; he could not mourn for a brother or bury a child. The sentence was only removed after thirty days of expiation.

In the ‘Spectator’ of May 6th, in the same year, he recounts an experiment supposed to have been successfully practised in a company of hardened swearers. A host is presented as having invited to his table as many of his friends as were conspicuous for their proficiency in swearing. He takes the precaution to station a shorthand writer in a concealed part of the room. The repast, as may be supposed, was rendered terrific by the unceasing clatter of oaths, but as soon as it had ended, the Amphytrion ushered in the scribe, who proceeded to read aloud the faithful report he had taken down. The writer, it would seem, had filled many sheets with this animated conversation, but this was found to be so interspersed with swearing redundancies that the whole might have been summarised in a single page. The perusal of the document, we are informed, so far brought conviction to the minds of the swearers, that they forthwith began to work with a will to amend their lives and their vocabulary.

The indignation of our essayist is without doubt most powerfully aroused at the inadvertent use that was made of the sacred name. “What can we think,” he exclaims, “of those who make use of so tremendous a name in the ordinary expressions of their anger, mirth, and most impertinent passions? of those that admit it into the most familiar questions and assertions, ludicrous phrases and works of humour?” And then, as if recollecting that gentlemanly example was the one rule to which the squires and politicians at Button’s or the Kitcat would most readily submit, he instances a person of position, who, during a long life, was never known to omit a gesture of reverence at the mention of the Deity. It is a noticeable point in the gossiping moralist that he always carefully guards himself from passing upon his readers the affront, for such it would have been esteemed, of directing their attention to the qualities of persons in a presumably lesser position than themselves.

On the whole Mr. Spectator has perhaps done wisely in humouring as well as reprobating. The temper of the times required something less ponderous than the invective of the older school of moralists, and this was the very want that a man of Addison’s temperament was best able to supply. The confidence reposed in his readers was not misplaced. The banter and the satire of these graceful essays are acknowledged to be reflected in the mended morality of the whole body of subsequent literature.

If we mistake not, there is the same improvement soon to be witnessed in every department, in the national life of the nation as well as the private life of the citizen. In part attributable to the politic sway of the Walpole government, in part to the tincture of politeness and good breeding that these polished penmen had striven to disseminate, there is, for a time at least, a marked absence of rancour and strife of tongues.

The fires of the Puritan faction had smouldered out; those of the Jacobite frenzy had hardly had time to rekindle. That spirit of minute controversy which had never ceased to divide both court and city since the days of Martin Mar-prelate was at length at rest. In this somewhat remarkable lull we find very little giving or taking of abuse. So far as social records are a guide, there seems even to be a calm in the usual tempest of swearing.

But towards the middle of the eighteenth century comes the relapse. Jacobitism had blazed again. The factions were relit. Controversy wagged its tongue as before. Everywhere are evidences of want and misery, of low sedition and of strong drink. The tipsy Duke of Cumberland is the hero whose graces we are to admire. The ‘Guards’ march to Finchley’ is the picture which may be trusted to convey a portraiture of the manners of the times. It is precisely at this conjuncture that Parliament enacted the last and most stringent of the measures by which it sought to place an embargo upon swearing. In the use of coarse and violent language women competed with the men. In 1756 on the occasion of the memorable trial concerning the fair fame of the Countess of Grosvenor, the letters of this lady were produced and read in court. We have Horace Walpole’s authority for saying that the oaths with which they were plentifully besprinkled were far more masculine than they can be said to have been tender. The prince of the blood to whom they were addressed could swear volubly too, and his oaths we may feel assured were neither masculine nor tender.

We of this generation can scarcely have any adequate notion of what the swearing has been which has prevailed in this country at different periods, and more particularly in the latter part of the reign of George II. So popular and so ungovernable was the habit, that there is hardly any rational means to be found for accounting for it. At this time there lived in an obscure village in Sussex a decent, well-to-do tradesman, whose shop, well stocked with broadcloth and homespun, was a centre of commerce for miles around. He was known to be a thriving man, and seems to have taken a leading part in the administration of parish affairs. Business was not so burdensome but that he found time to attend at every festive gathering, and to keep a well-written chronicle of his own and his neighbours’ doings. This diary has of late years been unearthed, and a very pretty story it has to tell of the bourgeois manner of life towards the meridian of the century.[48] One entry will speak for many of the same character.