Fowler’s ‘Modern English Usage’

When the library of V. S. Pritchett was sold off after his death some years ago, I bought a few books as a mark of homage, among them H. W. Fowler’s A Dictionary of Modern English Usage. I’d possessed other copies, but this was a first edition, and while I was thumbing it idly one day I noticed that it was published in 1926. I then also noticed that The King’s English, which he wrote with his brother F. W. Fowler, was published in 1906, and these anniversaries seem to have passed unnoticed.

A hundred years on, and eighty years on, have there been more useful and influential books of their kind in our time? Fowler was a great lexicographer, but he was also the founding father of the language column, and patron saint to all of us who are concerned — sometimes to the point of obsession — with the wayward or faulty use of language. One of his most characteristic entries in Modern English Usage is didacticism. It may not have struck Fowler that there was an amusing contradiction when that tendency is condemned in a book which is by definition didactic, the work of a pedant and a pedagogue. In some ways an exemplary and learned one, but certainly opinionated and cantankerous.

Born a clergyman’s son in 1853, Henry Watson Fowler went to Rugby and Balliol, where after Jowett’s meiotic testimonial —‘quite a gentleman in manner and feeling’ with ‘a natural aptitude for the profession of Schoolmaster’ — he became one, first at Tonbridge and then Sedbergh until he conscientiously resigned rather than prepare boys for confirmation. He was in fact a characteristic Victorian type, a muscular agnostic or secular puritan, one of those ‘who don’t have the faith but won’t have the fun’. He swam in the open air every morning of the year all his life, and when he came to London to try his hand as a journalist he got by on a little inherited money while earning around £30 a year, which was not much even then.