Is "The Blazing World" written in a standard style for Cavendish's time?

Question

I've been assigned The Blazing World by Margaret Cavendish to read in my literature class. The first thing that struck me about the writing is how long the sentences are. It takes a mental settling-in to get in the right headspace for understanding the clauses. Opening to a random page:

The Empress being thus persuaded by the Duchess to make an imaginary world of her own, followed her advice; and after she had quite finished it, and framed all kinds of creature proper and useful for it, strengthened it with good laws, and beautified it with arts and sciences; having nothing else to do, unless she did dissolve her imaginary world, or made some alterations in the Blazing World she lived in, which yet she could hardly do, by reason it was so well ordered that it could not be mended; for it was governed without secret and deceiving policy; neither was there any ambition, factions, malicious detractions, civil dissensions, or home-bred quarrels, divisions in religion, foreign wars, etc. but all the people lived in a peaceful society, united tranquility, and religious conformity; she was desirous to see the world the Duchess came from, and observe therein the several sovereign governments, laws, and customs of several nations.
_{The Blazing World and Other Writings (Penguin Classics), page 189}

That is a single sentence, with a single full-stop (not counting the . in "etc."). Granted, there are many semicolons, but that's also more semicolons in a row, without full stops, than I'm used to seeing. Flipping (again randomly) finds another example, this one with only a single semicolon but still a considerable number of commas:

But they told her Majesty, that Fortune was so inconstant, that although she would perhaps promise to hear their cause pleaded, yet it was a thousand to one, but she would never have the patience to do it: nevertheless, upon her Majesty's request, they tried their utmost, and at last prevailed with Fortune so far, that she chose Folly, and Rashness, for her friends, but they could not agree in choosing a judge; until at last, with much ado, they concluded, that Truth should hear, and decide the cause.
_{page 196}

Checking some online versions shows a similar habit. I'm interested in whether this was simply the accepted writing style for the time, or if it was a quirk of Cavendish in particular. However, I'm not quite sure how to look for this. Obviously it wouldn't make sense to compare with other categories of works - plays, poems, etc. have their own conventions - but I'm not sure what other works would be considered contemporaries. Looking at Wikipedia's list of 17th century works, I clicked on a 1667 text Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, whose Project Gutenberg copy has shorter sentences. But that's only one datapoint and I'm not sure it's a valid one: see previous doubts over what would be good comparisons.

Are these long, many-claused sentences an artifact of the time Cavendish was writing in, or are they more personal to her?

Answer 1

TL;DR: The length of Cavendish’s sentences is unremarkable for the seventeenth century.

I found several modern studies of variation in sentence length across time, but none that covered the relevant span of time, or which examined specifically works of literary prose. So this answer is based on data from Edwin Herbert Lewis. In his History of the English Paragraph (1894), Lewis sampled (typically) 100–200 paragraphs from about seventy works of literary prose from the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries, and computed the average sentence length for each. I did the same for The Blazing World, getting an average sentence length of 50.82 words.

The plot shows that not everyone in this corpus wrote longer sentences in the seventeenth century (for example Fuller’s Worthies of England (1662) has an average sentence length of 23.45), but rather, that there was a greater variation in average length in this period than in later centuries, with a few works having more than 70 words per sentence. The Blazing World is in the middle of the pack for the seventeenth century portion of Lewis’s corpus.

Lewis attributed the lengthy sentences common in the seventeenth century to

the Latin influence, which was rather towards disregarding paragraph mark or indentation as a sign of anything but emphasis [… and so] for a time we have the single-sentence paragraph of great length. The Latinists still think themselves bound to group many clauses in one sentence, but they feel the natural genius of the [English] language conflicting with their wish. They cannot discard their large unit of thought—that would be, to them, philosophic retrogression. They cannot—in the uninflected language—go on indefinitely prolonging the period. They determine to make long sentences still, and, when the periodic structure fails, to secure distinction and intelligibility for the long unit by paragraphing it. Hence arises the interminable paragraphed sentence, not strictly periodic, by any means, but articulated by all the points of the periodos—(: ; , .)

_{Edwin Herbert Lewis (1894). History of the English Paragraph, p. 44. University of Chicago Press.}

The data in the plot comes from a table in Lewis, pp. 35–36, which I have transcribed below, with a few minor corrections, and an approximate year for each work.

Year	Author	Title	Average
1449	Reginald Pecock	The Repressor of Over Much Blaming of the Clergy	61.00
1528	William Tyndale	The Obedience of a Christian Man	31.72
1545	Roger Ascham	Toxophilus	43.13
1555	Hugh Latimer	Sermons	20.45
1565	John Stow	Summarie of Englyshe Chronicles	57.00
1578	John Lyly	Euphues	36.83
1579	Philip Sidney	The Defense of Poesie	38.80
1579	Stephen Gosson	School of Abuse	60.00
1580	Thomas Cranmer	Answer to Stephen Gardiner	37.22
1585	Richard Hooker	Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity	41.23
1586	William Webbe	Discourse of English Poetrie	50.50
1605	Francis Bacon	The Advancement of Learning	60.03
1628	Robert Burton	Anatomy of Melancholy	40.14
1643	Edward Herbert	Autobiography	75.60
1644	John Milton	Areopagitica	50.70
1646	Jeremy Taylor	A Discourse of the Liberty of Prophesying	52.93
1651	Thomas Hobbes	Leviathan	39.26
1652	Fulke Greville	Life of Sidney	55.00
1658	Thomas Browne	Hydriotaphia, or Urn Burial	33.09
1660	John Dryden	Prefaces, Biographical and Critical, to the Works of the English Poets	38.44
1662	Thomas Fuller	Worthies of England	23.45
1665	Izaak Walton	The Life of Hooker	64.00
1666	Margaret Cavendish	The Blazing World	50.82
1668	Abraham Cowley	Essays	48.37
1678	John Bunyan	The Pilgrim’s Progress	31.61
1689	John Selden	Table Talk	33.58
1690	William Temple	On Heroic Virtue	53.40
1697	Daniel Defoe	An Essay Upon Projects	49.64
1702	Edward Hyde	The History of the Rebellion	74.94
1704	Jonathan Swift	A Tale of a Tub	40.74
1706	John Locke	Of the Conduct of the Understanding	49.80
1715	Joseph Addison	The Freeholder	38.58
1717	Henry St John	Letter to William Wyndham	34.86
1719	Daniel Defoe	Robinson Crusoe	78.68
1726	Jonathan Swift	Gulliver’s Travels	40.00
1727	Jonathan Swift	A Short View of the State of Ireland	49.80
1749	Henry Fielding	The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling	41.92
1759	Samuel Johnson	The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia	38.15
1762	David Hume	The History of England	39.81
1766	Oliver Goldsmith	The Vicar of Wakefield	26.94
1768	Laurence Sterne	A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy	36.50
1774	Edmund Burke	Speech on Moving Resolutions on Conciliation with America	26.09
1776	Edward Gibbon	The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire	31.21
1785	William Paley	The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy	37.68
1809	Samuel Coleridge	The Friend	37.60
1819	Walter Scott	Ivanhoe	32.14
1820	Washington Irving	The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent	26.73
1821	Thomas De Quincey	Confessions of an English Opium-Eater	38.81
1823	Charles Lamb	Essays of Elia	27.19
1827	Thomas Carlyle	Jean Paul Friedrich Richter	31.56
1829	Walter Landor	Imaginary Conversations	25.43
1833	Thomas Carlyle	Sartor Resartus	35.05
1837	Thomas Carlyle	The French Revolution: a History	23.89
1838	William Channing	Self-Culture	25.35
1841	Charles Dickens	The Old Curiosity Shop	23.78
1841	Emerson	Essays and Addresses	20.58
1843	Thomas Macaulay	Critical and Historical Essays	23.05
1844	Francis Jeffrey	Contributions to the Edinburgh Review	50.65
1848	Thomas Macaulay	The History of England from the Accession of James the Second	23.43
1850	Charles Kingsley	Alton Locke	23.74
1852	Herbert Spencer	The Philosophy of Style	30.38
1852	John Newman	The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated	41.44
1865	John Ruskin	Sesame and Lilies	33.31
1865	Matthew Arnold	Essays in Criticism	34.41
1866	James Lowell	Carlyle	31.45
1874	John Green	A Short History of the English People	29.04
1876	George Eliot	Daniel Deronda	22.39
1889	Walter Pater	An Essay on Style	38.54
1893	Barrett Wendell	English Composition	25.65

(A caution for anyone trying to reproduce Lewis’s data: you need to make sure you have an original edition, as later editions may have edited the text to suit modern conventions. For example, the 1719 edition of Robinson Crusoe starts with a 106-word sentence, but in this Project Gutenberg edition it has been split into two sentences of 33 and 72 words, and in this 1801 edition it has been split into three sentences of 13, 20 and 44 words.)