American Language Supplement 2 (57 page)
Read American Language Supplement 2 Online
Authors: H.L. Mencken
AMERICAN SPELLING
384. [The influence of Webster’s Spelling Book was really stupendous. It took the place in the American schools of Dilworth’s “Aby-sel-pha,”
1
the favorite of the Revolution generation, and maintained its authority for nearly a century.] Dilworth’s book, the official title of which was “A New Guide to the English Tongue,” was published in London in 1740. Seven years later Benjamin Franklin reprinted it in Philadelphia, and thereafter it was constantly on the press in America until the Webster Speller, first published in 1783, began to overhaul it.
2
Webster himself had been nourished upon it in youth, and was sufficiently convinced of its merits to imitate it, even to the extent of lifting whole passages. Dilworth’s reading lessons, for example, began with a series of pious dithyrambs in monosyllables, more or less reminiscent of the Old Testament, and Webster’s began with a palpable paraphrase of them. Thus:
Dilworth
No man may put off the law of God,
The way of God is no ill way.
My joy is in God all the day.
A bad man is a foe to God.
Webster
No man may put off the law of God.
My joy is in his law all the day.
O may I not go in the way of sin!
Let me not go in the way of ill men.
Dilworth
To God do I cry all the day.
Who is God, but our God?
All men go out of the way of thy law.
In God do I put my joy, O let me not sin.
Pay to God his due.
Go not in the way of bad men.
No man can see God.
Our God is the God of all men.
Who can say he has no sin?
The way of man is ill, but not the way of God.
My son, go not in the way of bad men.
No man can do as God can do.
Webster
A bad man is a foe to the law.
It is his joy to do ill.
All men go out of the way.
Who can say he has no sin?
The way of man is ill.
My son, do as you are bid.
But if you are bid, do no ill.
See not my sin, and let me not go to the pit.
Rest in the Lord, and mind his word.
My son, hold fast in the law that is good.
You must not tell a lie, nor do hurt.
We must let no man hurt us.
Dilworth shut down after six stanzas of this dismal doggerel, but Noah went on to ten, and then followed with five more printed frankly as prose. The latter began in the tone of the dithyrambs, but quickly proceeded to more worldly matters, thus:
A good child will not lie, swear, nor steal. He will be good at home, and ask to read his book; when he gets up he will wash his hands and face clean; he will comb his hair, and make haste to school; he will not play by the way, as bad boys do.
Webster also borrowed the general arrangement of Dilworth, with lists of progressively more difficult words alternating with reading lessons, and not a few of his lists –
e.g., big, dig, fig, gig, jig, pig, wig
– he took over bodily.
1
He also levied upon Daniel Fenning’s “Universal Spelling Book,” first published in 1756, though he testified late in life that he had not studied from it in his boyhood. It was, he said, “in the country, but was not used in my neighborhood.”
2
But we have his own testimony that he sweated through Dilworth in the Hartford primary-school, along with the New England Primer, a Psalter and the Bible. “No geography,” he said in
his old age, “was studied before the publication of Dr. Morse’s small books on that subject, about the year 1786 or 1787.
1
No history was read, as far as my knowledge extends, for there was no abridged history of the United States.”
2
The Catechism at the end of the Primer, as Warfel points out, greatly influenced American pedagogical method until the Revolutionary era, and Webster showed that influence by casting some of his hortations in the form of questions and answers,
e.g.
, “Henry, tell me the number of days in a year,” “Charles, how is the year divided?” and “John, what are the seasons?” He was sufficiently homiletic, God knows, but now and then something almost akin to poetry crept into his lessons:
Emily, look at the flowers in the garden. What a charming sight. How the tulips adorn the borders of the alleys, dressing them with gayety. Soon the sweet pinks will deck the bed, and the fragrant roses perfume the air. Take care of the sweet williams, the jonquils and the artemisia. See the honeysuckle, how it winds about the column, and climbs along the margin of the windows. Now it is in bloom: how fragrant the air is around it; how sweet the perfume after a gentle shower or amidst the soft dews of the evening. Such are the charms of youth when robed in innocence; such is the bloom of life when decked with modesty and a sweet temper.
Webster’s Spelling-Book, even in its heyday, was by no means without rivals. It not only had to buck the entrenched Dilworth; it was also beset by innumerable imitations. There was no national copyright until 1790, and the States did not offer any protection to authors until 1782, when Webster himself began besieging their Legislatures. In his preface to his revised edition of 1803, he complained bitterly that his imitators “all constructed their works on a similar plan,” borrowing his lists of words (as he had borrowed some of Dilworth’s), or altering them “by additions, mutilations and subdivisions, numerous and perplexing.”
3
But he had a stout heart and was a relentless salesman, and he could boast in the same preface that the sales of the Spelling-Book to date had reached 3,000,000. He went on:
Its reputation has been gradually extended and established, until it has become the principal elementary book in the United States. In a great part of the northern States it is the only book of the kind used; it is much used in the middle and southern States, and its annual sales indicate a large and increasing demand.
How many copies were sold before it was at last displaced by more “scientific” texts is unknown, for it was republished, sometimes with the author’s license and sometimes as piracy, by dozens of enterprising Barabbases in all parts of the country. Mrs. Roswell Skeel, Jr., Noah’s great-granddaughter, tells me that she has heard estimates running to 400,000,000, but believes that 100,000,000 would be “very much nearer an accurate guess.”
1
It seems to have made its way in the South more slowly than in the North, probably because schools were much fewer there, but once it was established it became almost immovable. During the Civil War discreetly revised editions were brought out at Macon, Raleigh and Atlanta, and Warfel reported in 1936 that it was still to be found in an occasional southern school. From 1930 to 1942 the American Book Company, the present publisher, averaged a sale of 4000 a year. Within recent years peddlers hawking the book from door to door have been in operation in Texas.
2
Even more influential than the old blue-back speller was Webster’s series of dictionaries, and especially the “American Dictionary” of 1828. He began work on them in 1800, and six years later brought out a preliminary draft under the title of “A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language.” In 1807 he followed with “A Dictionary of the English Language Compiled for the Use of Common Schools in the United States.” Both sold fairly well, but they were belabored with ferocity by Webster’s numerous enemies,
3
and he spent a large part of his time during the next half dozen years in defending himself against their attack. Meanwhile, he continued to amass materials for the larger dictionary that he had in mind, and
in 1824 went to Europe to consult the philologians and libraries of England and France. The former apparently paid him little attention, but he seems to have found what he wanted in the libraries, and in January, 1825, he finished his manuscript at Cambridge. He had a publisher in waiting, to wit, Sherman Converse of New York, but when the time came to make a contract with the printer, Hezekiah Howe of New Haven, it turned out that Converse was short of the needed money, so Webster himself had to borrow enough to cover Howe’s bill. The first edition, in two volumes quarto, was of 2500 copies, selling at $20 a set. It went off quickly enough, but there was no profit in it, and in 1829 Webster employed Joseph E. Worcester (1784–1865) to prepare an abridgement in one volume. This abridgement sold very well, but Worcester followed it soon afterward with a dictionary of his own, and for years thereafter this dictionary and Webster’s fought for favor.
Worcester’s had one advantage: it was free from the attempts at reform in spelling and pronunciation that Webster had undertaken, and was thus preferred by the more conservative pedagogues of the time. But Webster’s, though its etymologies were often fanciful and most of its innovations in spelling
1
had to be dropped after his death, gradually made its way with the plain people, and by 1840 it was generally accepted as the American authority
par excellence
. In 1840, when he was past eighty and close to death, old Noah mortgaged his home in Hartford to bring out a second edition. When he died in 1843 George and Charles Merriam, of Springfield, Mass., bought the rights to the dictionary from his quarreling heirs, and employed one of his sons-in-law, Chauncey A. Goodrich,
2
to prepare a new edition. This appeared in 1847, in one volume selling at $6. Warfel says that it “took immediate hold” and that “the presence of a Webster dictionary in almost every literate household dates from this year.”
During the century since then Webster has had to meet some very stiff competition – from the Century Dictionary after 1891, from the Standard after 1895, and from the Concise Oxford after 1911 —, but it still holds its own, and four Americans out of five, when they think of a dictionary, think of it. The Merriams, who were smart business men, employed competent philologians to supervise
the revisions which stretched from 1859 to 1934, and those revisions gradually made the position of the work unassailable. Today it is accepted as authority by all American courts, is in almost universal use in the schools and colleges, is the official spelling guide of the Government Printing Office,
1
and has the same standing in the overwhelming majority of American newspaper, magazine and book publishing offices.
2
How many copies of it have been printed and circulated to date cannot be ascertained, for as the copyrights on the successive editions expired many other publishers entered into competition with the Merriams, and scores of different editions are still in circulation. That the total sales of all these editions – some of them for the vest-pocket and selling for as little as ten cents – have equalled the sales of the Webster Speller is certainly possible, if not exactly probable. Thus Webster lives in American literary history as the author of the two champion best-sellers of all time. Nor has his singular success been confined to his native land. Said the
Literary Supplement
of the London
Times
on May 29, 1943:
All the English-speaking nations can join this week in commemorating the centenary of the death on May 28, 1843, of that patriarchal dictionary-maker, Noah Webster. His actual dictionary, it is true, may now be out of date, just as Johnson’s is; but it lives on eponymously – “a Webster” having become almost a synonym for a dictionary – and spiritually in the American language itself, which, though English, is no longer that of England or of colonial New England, but of a great and independent nation. Webster, in fact, was in his own sphere as much a founder of his nation as Washington, and consciously so; for he had the vision to perceive that his country, which ceased to be a colony when he was a young man, must henceforward grow its own culture, look no more to London and Europe for its sanctions, and speak and write no longer as a provincial. In his own way Webster was as the Pericles of his country, who presented it with an enduring temple in which to enshrine its words; or as its Augustus, who found its spelling to be of rough-cast and left it of polished marble.
1
A corruption of
abisselfa
, itself a corruption of
a-by-itself-a
. Allen Walker Read explains in The Spelling Bee: a Linguistic Institution,
Publications of the Modern Language Association
, June, 1941, that at the old-time spelling-bees a vowel which was also a syllable “was noted by a formula such as
a by itself, a
, which was contracted into
abisselfa.”
The DAE’s first example is from Augustus Baldwin Longstreet’s Georgia Scenes, 1835, but Longstreet says that the term went back to “the good old days.” Bartlett says that it was still in use in Suffolk (England) in 1848. Read finds a reference to the
a-by-it-self-a
system of spelling in The Petit Schole, by F. Clement; London, 1587.
2
Charles Evans, in his American Bibliography; Chicago, 1903–14, lists 36 American editions between 1747 and 1792. I take this from Kennedy.
1
It is curious to note that both he and Dilworth put
cag
among the
-ag
words. This spelling and pronunciation of
keg
remained in favor until the end of the Eighteenth Century, though the NED traces
keg
(spelled
kegge
) to 1617. Webster stuck to
cag
to the end of his life. See AL4, p. 384.
2
Warfel, p. 11. Fenning, in 1741, published a Royal English Dictionary which lasted for many years.
1
Dr. Jedidiah Morse’s first geography was actually published in 1784.
2
Letter to Henry Barnard, March 10, 1840, printed in the
American Journal of Education
, March, 1863, pp. 123–24. See also Warfel, p. 11.
3
Webster always stipulated that authorized editions of his book should have blue covers, and his imitators usually adopted that color also. This was true, for example, of Thomas J. Lee’s Spelling-Book Containing the Rudiments of the English Language; Boston, 1821, and Elihu F. Marshall’s Spelling Book of the English Language; Bellows Falls (Vt.), 1819.
1
Mrs. Skeel has found records of six editions between 1783 and 1787 (while the Speller was still part of Webster’s Grammatical Institute), of 105 after 1787 and before 1804, of 110 between 1804 and 1818, and of 83 between 1818 and 1828. (Private communications, Sept. 25, 1943 and Sept. 11 and 22, 1946.) On the cover of an edition published by D. Appleton & Co. in 1880 appeared: “More than 1,000,000 copies of this work are sold annually.”
2
I am indebted here to Mr. William W. Livengood, of the American Book Company.
3
There is some account of these battles in AL4, pp. 9–12 and in Supplement I, pp. 21–33.
1
They are described at length in AL4, pp. 381–87.
2
See Supplement I, p. 166n.
1
Says the Style Manual of the G. P. O.; Washington, 1945, p. 47: “To avoid the confusion and uncertainty of various authorities on spelling, the Government Printing Office must of necessity adopt a single guide for the spelling of words the preferred forms of which are not otherwise listed or provided for in this manual. The guide is Webster’s New International Dictionary, which has been the accepted authority for Government printing for the past 80 years. Unless herein otherwise authorized, the Government Printing Office will continue to follow Webster’s spelling.”
2
It is followed in all the style-books that I am aware of save those of the American Medical Association Press and the Princeton University Press, which prefer the Standard.
