anachronism watch

[Laurence Horn]

Just finished the aforementioned _Death Comes to Pemberley_, the recent (2011) Austenian pastiche by P. D. James in which the planning for an annual ball at the estate of Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Darcy née Bennet is rudely interrupted by a murder in the woods.  It's not _Pride and Prejudice and Zombies_, the slightly less recent best-seller, but it's not really Austen.  I found it interesting to see what James, who is an intelligent but not always careful writer, would get wrong, since the narration as well as the dialogue is clearly intended to be in the language of _Pride and Prejudice_ (plus 5 years), thus set in 1803 (Boney is on the march).  For example, she took what I assumed to be the trouble of referring to the Darcys "wedding journey" rather than "honeymoon"; the latter is attested for the relevant period in the OED, but just barely.  

With helpful input from Amy West, the use of a Victorian Literary Studies Archive (http://victorian.lang.nagoya-u.ac.jp/concordance/austen/) for which Austen is evidently an honorary Edwardian guest concordee, and of course the OED, I tracked down a couple of clear (and to me surprising) lapses on James's part, along with a couple of what I thought were lapses but turn out not to be, and a few marginal cases.  

Some obvious lapses:  
(1) "in touch", 2 occurrences, including 

"I was able to contact people in the neighbouring house who had befriended one of the girls and was still in touch with her."  (p. 269)
(2 instances) 
"(keep/get/be) in touch (with)" doesn't occur in Austen and isn't attested in the OED until 1884

(2) "contact" as a verb, as in the same passage above; this is a frequent bugaboo of prescriptivists, so it was especially surprising that it pops up here.  The OED entry not only fails to antedate 20th century uses, but makes it clear, with Wodehouse's help, that it was still seen as an Americanism as late as 1936, as well as being too colloquial for the language of the novel:
3. trans. To get into contact or in touch with (a person). orig. U.S. colloq.
1936   P. G. Wodehouse Laughing Gas ix. 95   The prospect whom I was planning to contact, as they call it in America, was leaning back in the arm-chair.

(3) "lifestyle", including this biosketch of Wickham:
"…a decline into wildness and dissolution, a natural result of exposing a young man to a lifestyle he never hope to achieve by his own efforts, and companions of a class to which he could never aspire to belong.  (p. 83)"OED has some cites from the earlyish 20th c., but the main vector was apparently Adlerian psychology, with a quote from 1929.  Not likely to be bandied about amongst the Edwardians.

A non-obvious (to me) lapse:
(4) "police":  several instances, but a couple of decades too early (Amy West, p.c.); this is one I wouldn't have thought to check on myself.

A marginal case:
(5) "sedative" (a doctor "administers a sedative" to the always obstreperous Lydia Wickham; at least it wasn't Valium): only off by a half-century or so; the first clear OED cite is from Brontë, 1853

A couple of items I thought might be anachronisms but weren't:
"an emergency"  [2 occurrences in Austen's own oeuvre]
"anxious to" ('desirous', 'eager') [many occurrences in Austen]

LH



 


 


 
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