The pieces I have chosen to focus on are “Maggie: A Girl of the Streets” and Clockwork Angel. “Maggie: A Girl of the Streets” was written by Stephen Crane and published in 1893 under the pseudonym, Johnston Smith. Later, when Crane obtained success through The Red Badge of Courage, he was able to publish a revised version of the story under his own name in 1896 (sparks). With “Maggie”, Crane attempted to show American life in New York as he had experienced it personally. The piece tells the story of Maggie Johnson who falls for her brother’s friend.
When she is abandoned by him at the urging of a more experienced woman, she tries to return home only to be cast out onto the street. She dies sometime later wandering the streets as a prostitute. It is a story that shows how Maggie’s home life set her up to not only fall for the wrong guy, but fall into a life of prostitution that would ultimately lead to her death. She was a kind and gentle girl without the skills to survive in the world she was born into. Clockwork Angel is written by Cassandra Clare and was published in 2010.
The novel follows Tessa Gray as she travels to London from America in 1878 to live with her brother. Upon arriving, she is kidnapped by two warlocks and forced into the Shadow world due to her ability to shape change. She is rescued by some Shadowhunters, or nephilim, individuals with Angel blood in their veins and the ability and duty to kill demons and protect the rest of the world. With them, she must begin on a journey to discover not only the motive of her kidnappers, but also the truth behind her existence. The two pieces were chosen because they are set in similar time periods. Maggie” is set around the 1890’s when it was written, and Clockwork Angel is in the late 1870’s.
Because the two pieces are set during similar periods, the changes in the English language between the time of “Maggie” and 2010, can be seen more clearly than if there was nothing of similarity between the two pieces. Due to the length of the novel Clockwork Angel, I have decided to focus on chapters 3, 5, and 6. More specifically, I want to focus on scenes involving the character Jessamine as she is a character who attempts to live the normal life of a lady of her time despite being a Shadowhunter.
Her scenes often lend the most realistic look at the world during the late 1800’s, while many of the others are more ingrained in the fantasy world of the novel. Right from the start of “Maggie: A Girl of the Streets”, Stephen Crane uses language in a very specific way. In the first chapter, we are given a look at some children fighting. While the paragraphs are written quite eloquently, the dialog is quite different. Instead of writing words properly, Crane has chosen to write such sentences as, “Dey’ll get yehs” (Crane 1).
Dey’ll’ and ‘yehs’ are not actual words, but they also shouldn’t be dismissed as mistakes. An English speaker can determine that the word ‘dey’ll’ is meant to be ‘they’ll’ or ‘they will’, and ‘yehs’ is a less proper form of referring to someone, yous. The dialog is written by Crane in this manner to force the reader to read with the desired accent. Other times, Crane uses words that seem to be completely tied to the era in which the piece was written. One such example is “Cheese it, Jimmie, cheese it! Here comes yer fader,” (Crane 4).
While a reader today may not understand the use of the word ‘cheese’ as it isn’t commonly used, they can still infer what it means based on the context in which it is used. The individual speaking warns the character Jimmie that his father is coming and tells him to ‘cheese it’. In this sense, it is made quite clear that ‘cheese’ in this situation is used very similarly to the word stop. The character wants Jimmie to ‘stop it’, as in the fighting, because his father is coming. The way in which the word was used gave the necessary clues as to what it likely means without the need to look it up.
Clockwork Angel doesn’t feature any real similarities, as far as language use, to “Maggie: A Girl of the Streets”. This makes sense considering that the novel was published over 200 years later, and is consistent with the language of today. The writer doesn’t really try to mimic the English of the late 1870’s, and instead attempts to make the writing sound elegant to make up for it. This is specifically seen within the dialog of the characters Jessamine and Tessa. An example is, “Dear me, it sounds to me rather as if your special power is pickpocketing! ” (Clare 73).
Rather than writing the dialog hear as a typical individual of today, Clare has attempted to make the character sound more sophisticated by using the arrangement within the sentence. This sort of sound structuring is not found anywhere within Crane’s “Maggie” though, but it also isn’t something that would be commonly uttered today. Within Clockwork Angel, there was an instance when Clare did attempt to use a word that has little meaning to many individuals today. The word is ‘costermongers’ it is used in the sentence, “Carriages rolled side by side with costermongers’ carts piled high with fruits and vegetables… ” (Clare 117).
The choice of the word ‘costermongers’ here may be quite fitting for the period in which the book is written, but it doesn’t have any bearing in today’s language. It is possible to discern the meaning though as ‘monger’ typically means a dealer or trader in a specific commodity such as an ironmonger. Treating a word that may be strange to many viewers in such a way allows the reader to not only gain a slight understanding based on the suffix ‘monger’, but a more in depth understanding by cluing them in to the carts contents. Thus, a reader might be able to infer that a ‘costermonger’ is someone who sells fruits and vegetables.