Large books by single authors often arise from deep and broad questions, questions that profoundly affect a writer and her community. I would like to share with you the type of questions that led to this book.

The impetus of this anthology came from reviewers’ responses to a very different book manuscript that is still unpublished. Knowing what I now know, I would approach that book in a very different way. It was a book that described the rhetorical formation of approximately ten non-fiction prose writers across the British eighteenth century, from the 1690s to the early 1800s, from various parts of England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. These writers had published in genres such as essays, histories, biographies, conduct books, educational theory, letter collections, and devotional works, or didactic verse. These writers were obviously persuading and informing—they were using rhetoric. But here is the interesting fact that interested me in studying them: None of these writers had obtained a formal advanced education at a university or academy where rhetoric was taught as a school subject. Some of them had tutors paid by their families, but that did not count for much in their era. They were assumed to be unusually gifted people whom nature taught, or who had taught themselves by reflecting on practice, unaided by any rhetorical theory or pedagogy. In fact, this belief about being unschooled supported the writers’ fame. It enhanced the belief that they wrote in a free and genuine manner, without crafty designs on their audience.

I did not believe in the pure genius theory. The culture itself had widespread beliefs about natural, untaught eloquence, and the absence of instruction was often presumed to exist whenever there was a lack of formal education or the person’s vocabulary and style did not reek of schooling. Even the ancient rhetoricians had taught that oftentimes the most powerful rhetoric is one that does not announce itself as rhetorical. Showing one’s scholastic erudition can backfire not only in public oratory but in everyday life. In addition, we all know that deep learning is not restricted to formal instruction. My father was an incredibly intelligent and talented man who had been barred from advanced education, and his career was hindered by social beliefs about the necessity of high school diploma. My interest in education, therefore, has often been an inquiry into the informal and experiential aspects of learning and in discovering how they enliven the process of formal education.

The most eminent rhetors of history, like Cicero, had a community of rhetors that mentored and instructed them. When being mentored or instructed, one needs to employ theoretical terms to talk about language uses and strategies. Conceptual terms and theories about how things work are an aid to the mastery of any art. But we also know that when one is excluded from advanced formal education, perhaps based on one’s social rank, religion, sex, illness, region, or by the edict of a family authority, one can humbly diminish the power of one’s own informal education.

To write that book manuscript, I had pursued a research strategy by which I delved into the private correspondence, drafts, and diaries of selected writers of the era who were believed to be naturally eloquent, selecting those who had a substantial amount of such material in an archive at a library, or had already published correspondence and diaries. I examined the way they discussed their rhetorical processes and aims as they researched and wrote throughout their lives.

My main argument was that these writers had engaged in rhetorical thought if not theory, rhetorical criticism and rhetorical practice despite the fact that they lacked formal rhetorical instruction, did not employ an explicitly rhetorical terminology and did not use the term “rhetoric” to identify what they did.

The reviewers of this early book manuscript spotted the paradox at the core of my argument, the term “despite.” They raised the obvious question that even people in the historical culture would have asked me: “What makes you think that their processes and aims were rhetorical if they did not have formal rhetorical instruction, use rhetorical vocabulary, or cite rhetorical theorists and rhetorical texts? Are you not imposing your own modern understanding of rhetorical theory on them? Why could you not just study their formation as mere users of rhetoric without using rhetorical theory as a lens?” I paraphrase these questions from memory, since they became embedded as a voice in my mind; the questions drove my further research.

I understood the challenges posed by these questions, and they were rational and considerable questions, but the last one irked me the most. No, to give up my rhetorical lenses would entirely nullify the core purpose of my inquiry, which was to discover the processes of their rhetorical formation and to uncover it as genuinely rhetorical despite being informal. These writers’ practice and publications had already been studied in a more general sense; some had been examined as prominent writers of nonfiction prose, as historians, or essayists, or even as lay philosophers. Nobody had yet considered them rhetors or lay rhetoricians, and that mattered. I had just come out of ten years of formal post-secondary education, six years of which were spent in English departments where literature was the main inquiry, rhetoric the subordinate field. I had chosen to champion rhetoric as a field because it helped examine and teach the powerful genres that informed, moved, and persuaded. I was not going to give up on seeing these informally educated writers’ education, criticism and theorizing through a rhetorical lens.

As the researcher familiar with the raw data and the literature of the era, I was faced with the realization that I had built the top of a pyramid floating in the air without the bottom of the pyramid of data and presumptions that it needed to rest upon. In rhetorical terms, I needed to build up the data set supporting my chain of enthymemes, my epicheirema.¹

Part of the pyramid base I needed to construct consisted of a better knowledge of the English language’s rhetorical usages during the era. I was certain that the writers were talking about rhetorical strategies, but some of their language did not seem very rhetorical at all, especially to a twenty-first century reader. How did certain English words come to have rhetorical connotations and uses? How did these writers come to understand certain English words as conceptual tools to discuss invention, arrangement, style, memory, delivery, ethos, logos and pathos? Meanings have shifted, and even in the seventeenth or eighteenth century, a word that was useful for rhetorical instruction could also be used beyond those contexts.

To support this type of research, I could create a dictionary that highlighted the usages that I judged were rhetorical, and I have now shared a small part of this dictionary in this volume. But I faced a challenge when planning the dictionary. My own judgment and selection of such meanings would not be enough to establish a connection to a genuinely “rhetorical” meaning within the culture. I needed to make the connection between the vocabulary and the rhetorical instruction texts and writers that had employed them in a clearly rhetorical manner. Usage is only clarified by the subject matter and the situation. Proof of meaning had to come from a cultural authority speaking about rhetoric, not from a poet eloquently describing the sun rising. Quotations from known canonical texts can help. Just as Samuel Johnson had used quotations from great writers of his culture’s past to illustrate the various colors of words, I needed a canon of rhetoric from which to draw quotations that would support a dictionary of English rhetorical usage. The academic users of the dictionary would benefit from knowledge of the texts I was quoting, since a quotation out of context loses much of its meaning.

For various reasons, the rhetorical theory and instruction manuals written in English by British subjects (and some French subjects whose works were translated into English) were not very useful for this purpose of rhetorical dictionary-writing (lexicography). Most of the writers I studied did not cite British rhetorical theorists.² The writers I studied were born earlier in the era and had published their early work long before many of these texts had been published, and long before they were considered by later eras to be part of a canon of rhetorical theory. Such texts were often only available in one edition and therefore had limited circulation. In many cases, such texts as John Ward’s A System of Oratory (1759),³ had titles that announced them to be off-topic from the genres these writers were using, even though their contents addressed more than just public oratory. I wanted my research to support the study of informal rhetorical education, criticism and theory. Why would anyone in our modern era think it reasonable to assume an unschooled writer could have read any rhetorical theory texts of their era as an aid to writing essays or conduct books?

The writers I was studying did not know Latin or Greek, so they did not read the rhetorical Classics like Cicero’s in their original language. Aha, but they could have read Classical rhetoric in English translation! (You can see where this is going.) And would it be necessary to prove they had read them? No. Even if they did not read these Classical works in English, if those texts had been extremely well disseminated in their culture, they could have had a widespread influence on the rhetorical valences of English vocabulary the translators had employed. Why could such texts have not influenced the way English was used in the rhetorical criticism of nonfiction prose genres these people were writing?

This anthology, therefore, was born of a need to build the foundation of a general type argument that is worth making and a general type of research that is worth doing—the examination of vernacular rhetorical vocabularies and their use in both informal and formal rhetorical education. Such research could be pursued in many cultures and subcultures where “rhetorical” instruction seems to be absent but could not be truly absent. I hope that it provides rhetorical lenses for students and other researchers to see eighteenth century rhetorical culture and vocabulary in a new way, as built, in large part, on a huge foundation of Classical rhetorical thought in the English language.

May this compilation inspire others to construct, as much as possible, a combined emic and etic historical view of rhetorical and literary history. May it inspire similar projects to discover a Classical rhetorical canon in vernacular translation in other historical cultures and eras. We cannot help but see the past from our own point of view as much as we try to see it from within its literature. A deeper perspective is gained by seeing with both eyes.