Why did Joseph Smith translate the Book of Mormon into Jacobean English, not in use in 1830? Victorian era (1830-1900)

1830 was the beginning of the Victorian era. This literary period was short and volatile, in terms of thought and style; daring use of words and letters, pressing the bounds of literary tradition. It is very distinct (victorian).  

Notable examples of the authors of this period would be;  Charles Dickens (1812-1870), Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930), Alfred Tennyson(Lord) (1809-1892), and many others whose works are as recognizable.

The only traces of Jacobean era English, at this time, were stylistic holdovers, like those seen in the poetic literature of Tennyson.  

Meanwhile, in American literature, writers such as Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), had no such stylistic relics in their poetry, that I have come across. That is not to say that they did not exist.  

Scriptural writings were, in their day, of necessity, written in the linguistic style of the translators; which to the reader of that day would appear non-stylistic, being, to them, of modern vernacular.  

Why then was the Book of Mormon stylized, to match Jacobean era literature?


  
  http://www.victorianweb.org/vn/index.html  web. retrieved 1/7/17  
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_literature web. retrieved 1/7/17
Joseph Smith did not just translate the Book of Mormon into Jacobean English, but into a very specific type of Jacobean English, as used in the King James Version of the Bible (KJV). W. H Stevenson (King James's Bible: A Selection, 'The Language of AV' - ebook) says King James was a virtual contemporary of William Shakespeare, but that the language is not the same as that of Shakespeare's plays. For example, he says "The formality of 'Forasmuch as ...'  (e.g. 2 Sam 19:30), was never 'ordinary' English." Presumably, Smith was at least influenced by his knowledge of the KJV to translate the Book of Mormon into the register of Jacobean English that had been used in the KJV, for example:


  2 Nephi 18:6: Forasmuch as this people refuseth the waters ...
  2 Nephi 27:25: Forasmuch as this people draw unto me ...   


Smith copied not only the Jacobean English of the KJV, but some other usages characteristic of the Bible. The phrase 'And it came to pass' occurs more than 200 times in the Old Testament and more than 50 times in the New Testament. Although these passages are sometimes translated in other ways in different English Bibles, what we see in  the KJV is a valid translation of the Masoretic and Greek texts.  I have not counted them, but there are said to be more than 1400 occurrences of 'and it came to pass' in the Book of Mormon. Another example is that Mark's Gospel is noted, more than any other book of the Bible, for beginning many sentences with 'And', which is as ungrammatical in Greek as in English. I point this out because Smith found many sentences in the Book of Mormon that he also translated in the same way. 

The KJV twice referred, incorrectly, to seraphims, where the Hebrew seraphim is already plural. The 1830 version of the Book of Mormon faithfully adopted this Jacobean spelling, although later versions of the Book of Mormon adopted the Hebrew 'seraphim'.

Stevenson (ibid) says that the language of the KJV has "become familiar as the prototype of a kind of religious dialect whose very archaism is one of its distinguishing features."  I propose that Smith adopted this biblical English in his translations because his contemporaries would not have accepted a Victorian English Book of Mormon as authentic scripture.