Literary Slumming: Slang and Class in Nineteenth-Century France by Eliza Jane Smith (review)

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• Literary Slumming: Slang and Class in Nineteenth-Century France by Eliza Jane Smith
• Carolyn Betensky

Eliza Jane Smith, Literary Slumming: Slang and Class in Nineteenth-Century France. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2021. 280pp.

Eliza Jane Smith's Literary Slumming: Slang and Class in Nineteenth-Century France takes a sociolinguistic approach to the cultural work of argot in texts by Eugène Vidocq, Honoré de Balzac, Eugène Sue, Victor Hugo, the brothers Goncourt, and Emile Zola, among others. Smith shows that the slang that these authors put in the mouths of their poor and criminal characters was not simply out there for the taking and reproducing; it was, rather, the product of what was effectively a collaboration between those who spoke elements of slang and the bourgeois writers who massaged it into a shorthand for an experience they portrayed as alien. Slang was not, in other words, an authentic language unto itself that intrepid literary adventurers stumbled upon and made available to their readership. It was an invention that packaged the fascination and anxieties of the bourgeoisie and projected them repeatedly onto the "dangerous" and "laboring" classes.

Smith divides her study into chapters on slang as criminal code, slang and embodiment, and slang and the politics of language, as well as separate chapters on slang as the language of misery, of Parisians, and of prostitutes. Each meticulously researched section explores a different way in which slang came self-evidently to articulate something about the population said to speak it.

One of the many virtues of Literary Slumming is that it explores lexical, social, and political change over the course of the period, which is to say that it does not present "the nineteenth century" as a monolith. Smith demonstrates, for instance, that it is not just the slang vocabulary itself deployed by Hugo in Les Misérables that worked differently from Sue's in Les Mystères de Paris; meanings of the use of slang in literature by bourgeois authors fluctuated as France underwent significant historical change. Hugo's slang-speakers in 1862 thus not only spoke a different slang from Sue's but signified differently themselves as slang-speakers. By the time Hugo wrote, slang conferred an honorable authenticity on its speaker that would have never occurred to Sue, for whom slang connoted criminality and poverty, some twenty years earlier. [End Page 115] Another example of Smith's careful practice of distinguishing literary uses of slang from period to period within the nineteenth century is her discussion of the way authors came to mobilize slang in the service of changing gender profiles. Slang does not sully the mouths of laboring-class heroines in the work of Sue or Balzac; when female characters do speak in slang, it betokens their criminality and strips them of their femininity. For Zola and the Goncourts, on the other hand, slang signifies the dangerous, autonomous female sexuality of the prostitute. While the power of slang does not redound, in the end, to the benefit of transgressive female characters, it does position a later generation of heroines to renegotiate the limits of their agency.

Another provocative argument Smith advances in Literary Slumming is that the slang that earlier bourgeois novelists of the nineteenth century ascribed to characters hailing from laboring and criminal classes ultimately became the idiom of actual working-class readers. As it shifted from being the marker of poverty and deviancy to being a marker of fashionable Parisians, slang came to feature in increasing numbers of publications. As the century progressed and as literacy rates soared among the poor and working classes, these newer readers began to learn and use the very terms that had been said to have originated in their neighborhoods.

Smith's chapter on slang and embodiment is one of the boldest in the book. Whereas it generally confines itself to charting the different deployments of verbal slang in dialogue, the study suggests that representations of suspect bodies and their movements in works by Vidocq, Sue, and Balzac amount to their own kind of adjacent shorthand language. The iconic facial and physical features of criminal characters partner in these texts with spoken slang to produce codes to cue...