Free Making a Point by David Crystal Page A

that make up the whole, and a semicolon links two sentences that are felt to be closely related in meaning. Some writers or printers would have gone even further than that, such as by separating the adverbs and writing ‘It will, sometimes, be found’ or ‘it is, then, to be understood’. But a lightly punctuated version, such as the following, is something we don’t see until the twentieth century:
It will sometimes be found that the accent is placed by the authour quoted on a different syllable from that marked in the alphabetical series. It is then to be understood that custom has varied or that the authour has in my opinion pronounced wrong.
    If you feel this is underpunctuated you may add commas to suit your taste; but few modern readers would insert as many as we see in Johnson.
    Grammarians and elocutionists may have had their differences, but they were united on one point: opposition to the printers, whose ‘negligence’ had been remarked on by Jonson, Sheridan, and others. Both groups were concernedwith establishing principles, and they didn’t see much principle in the way the printers worked. It was time for a change. The printers had had their own way for too long.
    Interlude: A punctuation heavyweight

    Joshua Steele’s An essay towards establishing the melody and measure of speech (1775) is a typical example of the heavy punctuation encountered in eighteenth-century texts. This is an extract from a letter, seen as a quotation, and thus marked by opening inverted commas at the beginning of each line – a normal convention of the time. Only one line lacks a punctuation mark; line 6 has four commas. Even the page number is set off by brackets.

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    The printer’s dilemma
    I imagine the state of mind of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century printers was similar to Caxton’s, 300 years before: ‘Lo! what should a man in these days now write?’ They were in a difficult position, as they had two diametrically opposed kinds of author to deal with. One kind – let’s call them Jonsonians – were scrupulous about punctuation, and insisted on checking every mark for printing accuracy, getting very annoyed if a printer dared to change anything. The other kind – let’s call them Wordsworthians – couldn’t have cared less, and were extremely grateful to get any help they could.
    I single out Wordsworth because, by his own admission, he was hopeless at punctuation and abdicated all responsibility for it. As he was preparing the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads , he wrote to the chemist Humphry Davy (28 July 1800) and asked him to check the text for punctuation:
You would greatly oblige me by looking over the enclosed poems, and correcting anything you find amiss in the punctuation, a business at which I am ashamed to say I am no adept.
    He had never even met Davy! The suggestion had come from Coleridge. And not only does he ask this total stranger to correct his work, but later in the letter he asks Davy to send the corrected manuscript directly on to the printer, without referring back to him. Which bits of the end product’spunctuation are due to Davy, the printer, or the author we shall never know.
    A roll-call of literary authors between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries would show them lining up under Jonson or Wordsworth. Among the Jonsonians is John Dryden, who in one of his letters (4 December 1697) complains to his publisher, Jacob Tonson, that ‘the Printer is a beast, and understands nothing I can say to him of correcting the press’, and in another insists that his work be printed ‘exactly after my Amendments: for a fault of that nature will disoblige me Eternally’. Although relationships later improved, he was not at all happy with Mr Tonson, whom he pilloried in an epigram (published in Faction Displayed , 1705):
With leering Looks, Bullfac’d, and Freckled fair,
    With two left Legs, and