I’ve been subscribing to Stanford University’s super-awesome Discovering Sherlock Holmes newsletter, in which facsimile reprints of the original Sherlock Holmes stories are sent to your house, looking just the way they did when they were first published in The Strand.
I noticed some interesting things about the way these stories were punctuated. For example, spaces appear before all “two-part” punctuation marks, such as exclamation points, question marks, colons, and semicolons. This is something I associate with modern French usage. Also, double quotes are used around quotation (the way we use them in modern American English) rather than the modern British single quotes.
This all started me wondering about when punctuation rules as we know them went into common use in the UK and the US. Was it only after the publication of some seminal style manual?
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