Crossing Currents: The Mother Tongue, Monolingualism, and Multilingualism in Household Words and All the Year Round

Abstract: The idea of the mother tongue is a current of thought that establishes monolingualism as a condition of true language. Developed in relation to pre-national German territories, the idea also had repercussions for debates about the linguistic identity of mid-Victorian Britain that were drawn out in the periodical press. This article examines how the journals Household Words (1850–59) and All the Year Round (1859–95), edited by Charles Dickens until 1870, align themselves with Johann Gottfried Herder’s view that only a native speaker can master a language. Focusing on a corpus known as “the language articles,” this essay considers how Dickens’s contributors worked towards implementing a prestige language as the national language, all the while disbelieving the possibility of such an enterprise.