The TV series “Deadwood” told us that they did – that denizens of an 1870s gold camp used just as many profanities and obscenities as we do today. But I wonder. Deadwood was hardly a typical place, and the gold-seekers, saloonkeepers, prostitutes, etc., who congregated there weren’t polite society. Even in my lifetime, I’ve seen “bad” language expand as polite society has shrunk. It’s like tattoos. Formerly restricted to rugged, lower-class, mostly male enclaves – sailors, carnies, convicts – body ink is now sported by just about everyone. The difference is that tattooing may go out of fashion someday, whereas dirty talk is undoubtedly here to stay, no matter how stale and tiresome it gets.
In the 19th century, people self-censored themselves so thoroughly in writing – the only mass medium there was – that we don’t know whether or how often they cussed, though in all other respects it was a golden age of vernacular literature. Charles Dickens, Mark Twain and many other writers on both sides of the Atlantic positively reveled in regional dialects and the speech patterns of the rural and urban poor, immigrants and slaves. But there were two lines they didn’t cross.
First, the controlling voice of a literary work – the voice of the narrator or the omniscient author — remained elevated and grammatical, no matter how many rules the minor characters might flout. (George Orwell, in his essay on Dickens, remarked that in real life Pip, in Great Expectations, would speak like the Gargerys, the humble folk who brought him up, and that Oliver Twist would adopt the criminal argot of Fagin and his fellow pickpockets-in-training, but Dickens’ readers and publishers wouldn’t have stood for such a thing.) In this context, we must appreciate how radical Huckleberry Finn was – a whole, serious novel written in lower-class vernacular.
But even Twain didn’t cross the second line – the one that forbade cussing in print. I doubt he would have wanted to. He had too much fun playing with the taboo, suggesting that cussing was a noble art in its own right – too bad he couldn’t report the actual words. More typically, Victorian writers might say, “X uttered a foul oath,” and leave the reader to guess which oath it was – all that mattered was its foulness. Or they might reveal the nature of the oath without quite spelling it out: “I’ll be d—–d.” This taboo lasted a surprisingly long time. As late as the 1950s, Norman Mailer’s publishers insisted that his soldiers in “The Naked and the Dead” use the euphemism “fug,” to unintentionally comic effect.
In writing White Poison, fortunately, I didn’t have to worry about how 19th century people talked. I just had to imitate how they wrote. My narrator, Alexander Wells, is a Victorian, so he is fairly explicit about violence and reticent about sex. With only a couple of exceptions, when characters are in extremis, he uses no language stronger than “hell” or “damn,” assuring readers that although worse is being said, they are being spared the sight of it.
As for the question we began with – how did people talk back then? – I suspect that “Deadwood” was half right. Plenty of cussing went on, but there also were large numbers of people who took the Third Commandment seriously and didn’t cuss at all. The white picket fence around polite society still stood firm, especially for women and children.
What happened to that fence? The decline of religion is only part of the story. The insatiable hunger of literature, TV, movies and other media to represent reality has altered the very reality they try to represent. Art imitates life, which in turn imitates art, until the gentlest academics among us start to cuss like gangsters.