PopePride and Prejudice and Punctuation
When Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice was published in 1813 our system of punctuation had developed to the stage where few further changes would be made.
But one patch of inconsistency lingered: the practice of not always treating question and exclamation marks as doing the job of full stops:
“And poor Mr Darcy! dear Lizzie, only consider what he must have suffered. Such a disappointment! and with the knowledge of your ill opinion too! and having to relate such a thing to his sister! It is really too distressing, I am sure you must feel it so.”
“What say you, Mary? for you are a lady of deep reflection, I know, and read great books …” “It is unaccountable! in every view it is unaccountable!”
Today, of course, question marks and exclamation marks are almost always followed by capitals.
Scree-e-e-eechh! The Full Stop.
Now we shrink from the paragraph to a minuscule dot: the full stop, stop, full point or period. Minuscule it may be but, like atoms and germs, it packs a potent power. The full stop is the most emphatic, abrupt and unambiguous of all the punctuation marks. Leave out a vital full stop and you’re really in trouble:
KING CHARLES I PRAYED HALF AN HOUR AFTER HE WAS BEHEADED.
The full stop is probably the most used mark, partly because we need it so much, and partly because virtually everyone knows how to use it. Unfortunately not everyone knows how to use it wisely.
“Punctuation,” The Times advises its journalists, “is … not a fireworks display to show off your dashes and gaspers. Remember the first rule: the best punctuation is the full stop.”
The full stop is used like a knife to cut off a sentence at the required length. The rule is that simple: where you place your stop is up to you, but as we saw in the chapter on the sentence it is generally at the point where a thought is complete. Master this principle and you can then move on to using full stops stylistically. Here’s a typical passage displaying a variety of punctuation marks; the full stop, though, is easily the most predominant:
With intense frustration, Giles grabbed the man, surprising him. ‘No you don’t!’ he yelled hoarsely. The stranger recovered, fighting back. Fiercely. Savagely. Hard breathing. Curses. Grunts. The wincing thud of fists. An alarming stream of crimson from Giles’s left eye. Pulses racing, they glared at one another, each daring the other to make a move. A car horn in the distance. Shouts.
That’s stylised prose and could be criticised for its overuse of sentence fragments rather than complete sentences. But here the heavy-handed application of the full stop is deliberate, for we can see what the writer is getting at – the brutal punch, punch, punch of a ferocious fist fight.
We can also see from that example just how important the full stop is, although there have been numerous attempts to do without it. One of the most famous examples is the Penelope chapter in James Joyce’s novel Ulysses:
‘… a quarter after what an earthly hour I suppose they’re just getting up in China now combing out their pigtails for the day well soon have the nuns ringing the angelus theyve nobody coming in to spoil their sleep except an odd priest or two for his night office the alarm clock next door …
[until about a thousand words later]
‘… and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.’
You did notice the full stop at the very end, didn’t you? At least James Joyce decided to observe the rule that every sentence, however long, must end with a full stop or some other ending device.
Of course that’s an extreme case, with Joyce chucking out all stops to achieve the effect of a stream of consciousness outpouring. At the other end of the scale is prose that goes full stop mad, such as this excerpt from Alain Arias-Misson’s Confessions. The style was considered highly novel in the 1970s:
Fischer shot a glance at me. Listen, Fischer, I said, is there any way out of here? You are not an initiate, he
