The Forgotten Founding Father- Noah Webster (11 page)

The Reverend Thomas Dilworth was the author of the eighteenth century’s most widely used speller. Until about 1700, English spelling was all a jumble, particularly in the New World. As late as 1716, “general” was spelled “jinerll” in official Hartford documents. But soon after the first standards began to be set, a series of spellers appeared. Dilworth’s
A New Guide to the English Tongue
was first published in London in 1740. Seven years later, Benjamin Franklin printed the first American edition. Focusing more on pronunciation than on orthography (correct spelling), Dilworth explained to children how to divide words into syllables. As noted in the preface, he sought to give “each letter its proper place, each syllable its right division and true accent and each word its natural sound.” This was the alphabet method of teaching reading. By 1782, Dilworth’s speller had reared the vast majority of English speakers on both sides of the Atlantic. As Joel Barlow once observed, Dilworth’s was “the nurse of us all.” Though the cleric had died in 1780, sales showed no signs of slowing down; a new edition consisting of tens of thousands of books continued to come out every year.

Having used Dilworth as a school instructor, Webster was keenly aware of its shortcomings and inconsistencies. But in revising Dilworth, Webster would grapple not only with pedagogy but also with cultural politics. During his sojourn in Goshen, the new nation’s identity remained a huge question mark. Just as Americans were debating what kind of ruler they should have, they were also debating what language they should speak. After all, the English of King George III was now the language of the oppressor. Some proposed replacing it with German, then the country’s unofficial second language, spoken by nearly ten percent of the population. Others advocated even more radical ideas. As the Marquis de Chastellux, a member of the French Academy and a major-general in the French army, reported on the chatter among some Bostonians in 1782, “They have gone even further, and have seriously proposed introducing a new language; and some people, for the convenience of the public, wanted Hebrew to take the place of English, it would have been taught in the schools and made use of for all public documents.” And if nothing else, perhaps a name change was in order. “Let our language . . . be called the Columbian language,” stated a letter that ran in newspapers across the country that year. “Let us make it as familiar to our ears to say that a foreigner speaks good Columbian, as it is to say that he speaks good English. The dignity and habits of independence can only be acquired by a total emancipation of our country from the fashions and manners of Great Britain.” A new speller, Webster realized, could quickly put an end to this debate, as it would be destined to shape the speech habits of Americans for generations to come. “A spelling book,” he would later write, “does more to form the language of a nation than all other books.” The emotionally fragile and often despondent Noah Webster, Jr., was compelled to think big. This project with its potentially vast repercussions could well meet his pressing need for both fame and silver dollars.

Dilworth’s
New Guide
contained five parts. The first part, which covered about half of the book, included syllabariums (lists of syllables) followed by tables of related words and short readings. Dilworth began by presenting columns of syllables such as “ma, me, mi, mo, mu” and “ab, eb, ib, ob, ub”; a few pages later, he provided various monosyllabic words such as “an,” “as,” “at,” “ax” and “ay.” And then to give children a chance to practice what they had learned, he featured “some early lessons on the foregoing tables.” Lesson I featured the following reading:

Adhering to the same format, Dilworth went on to teach the pronunciation of words containing more and more syllables. The second part of Dilworth consisted solely of “a large and useful table of words that are the same in sound, but different in signification.” While the third part contained a grammar, the last two parts were readers that featured fables and prayers, respectively.

Webster would eventually rework the five parts of Dilworth’s speller into three separate books—the three volumes of his
A Grammatical Institute, of the English Language, Comprising, an Early, Concise, and Systematic Method of Education, Designed for the Use of English Schools in America
. The first volume, his speller, roughly paralleled the first two parts of Dilworth—consisting largely of syllable lists and the tables of homonyms. Likewise, Webster’s second and third volumes—his grammar and reader—revised the third, fourth and fifth parts of Dilworth. Webster’s grammar, published in March 1784, never sold too well, and he abandoned it in 1804 (though he later wrote an academic treatise,
Philosophical and Practical Grammar of the English Language
). His reader, which first appeared in February 1785, fared better, and lasted until it was superseded by the McGuffey reader in the late 1830s. But Webster’s so-called blue-backed speller—the nickname derives from the thin blue paper that covered later editions—was a sensation that would stay on the market for more than a century. Its initial print run of five thousand copies was more than the total number of spellers sold in a year throughout the colonies back when Webster was a West Division schoolboy. In 1784, the second and third editions of the 120-page text were published. Nearly four dozen more editions—some with print runs as high as twenty-five thousand—would come out by the end of the eighteenth century. The tiny speller—it was about six and a quarter inches long and three and a half inches wide—was the cash cow that enabled Webster to devote the second half of his life to the dictionary. To use the nautical metaphor of his granddaughter Emily Ford, “it was the little steam tug that conveyed the large East Indiaman laden with spices and silk, or the man-of-war bristling with cannon.”

Webster was not the first person to revise Dilworth, nor the first to challenge its dominance in the American marketplace. In 1756, the British author Daniel Fenning published his
Universal Spelling-Book
. Its tenth edition—the first one printed on the other side of the pond—appeared in Boston in 1769. Modeled closely on Dilworth, the text by Fenning also contained five parts, including a grammar and reader. But it also featured some material not found in Dilworth, such as a dictionary of five thousand easy words and some historical information about the kings of England.

Upon the recommendation of Yale president
Ezra Stiles, Webster selected the long-winded
A Grammatical Institute of the English Language
as the
title for the first edition of his speller. (This was a nod
to the Protestant theologian John Calvin, whose
seminal work was
Institutes of the Christian Religion.
)
In 1787, Webster renamed it
The American Spelling
Book,
which was close to his original title,
The American Instructor
.

To compose his speller, Webster did some cutting and pasting from both Dilworth and Fenning, and then added his own American touches. But though Webster’s text was not entirely original, it was a seminal contribution to pedagogy. His method of instruction was the most user-friendly to date. Simple yet rigorous, Webster’s book spoke directly to children in a language they could easily understand. Soon after its publication, Timothy Pickering, then the quartermaster general based in Newburgh and later Washington’s secretary of state, stayed up all night reading it, reporting to his wife: “The author is ingenious, and writes from his own experience as a schoolmaster, as well as the best authorities; and the time will come when no authority as an English grammarian will be superior to his own.” But Webster had done more than just improve on the spelling books of his British predecessors. He had also helped give birth to a new language, which in turn would soon unite a fledgling nation. Though he didn’t yet use the term “American English,” his speller was a linguistic declaration of independence: “It is the business of
Americans
to select the wisdom of all nations, as the basis of her constitutions . . . . to prevent the introduction of foreign vices and corruptions and check the career of her own . . . . to diffuse an uniformity and purity of
language
—to add superiour dignity to this infant empire and to human nature.” Americans, Webster asserted, would speak English, but it would be an English of their own making.

Webster consistently improved on Dilworth by supplying a greater degree of clarity. For example, Dilworth’s definition of a syllable as “either one letter; as a; or more than one; as man” was confusing. In contrast, Webster’s left nothing in doubt: “one letter or so many letters as can be pronounced at one impulse of the voice, as a, hand.” Likewise, Webster, like Fenning before him, critiqued Dilworth’s method of dividing up words according to abstract principles borrowed from Latin grammar. Webster argued that it made more sense to divide them up according to their pronunciation. “The words,” he wrote in the preface, “
cluster, habit,
Mr. Dilworth divides
clu-ster ha-bit
; according to which, a child naturally pronounces the vowel in the first syllable, long. But the vowels are all short. . . . In order to obviate this difficulty, he has placed a double accent thus,
clu
"
ster, ha
"
bit
. . . . Let words be divided as they ought to be pronounced
clus-ter, hab-it. . . .
and the smallest child cannot mistake a just pronunciation.” Furthermore, Webster also objected to Dilworth’s insistence that “ti” before a vowel be considered a separate syllable. For words such as “na-ti-on” and “mo-ti-on,” Webster preferred “na-tion” and “mo-tion,” thus opting for two syllables rather than three. Besides these methodological tweaks, Webster also tailored his text for an American audience. Axing the dozen or so pages that Dilworth devoted to the spelling of English, Irish and Scottish towns, Webster inserted a list of all the states and principal towns and counties in the United States of America. In addition, for every Connecticut town, he included both its population as well as its distance in miles from the state capital, Hartford (then still the center of his own personal universe). Webster’s recent addresses also crept into the book as he stuck in entries such as “Litchfield, 1509, 32” and “Sharon, 1986, 59.” For towns throughout the other twelve states, he failed to feature any analogous statistical addenda.

Webster saw his rewriting of Dilworth as a necessary follow-up to the American Revolution. Just as the American military had taken on the tyrannical British government, the American literati, he felt, now had to strike out against the unwieldy English language. Their charge: to bring order to its underlying chaos. As Webster well understood, the sounds of English letters “are more capricious and irregular than those of any alphabet with which we are acquainted.” In English, as opposed to many other languages, while a given vowel or consonant can denote a variety of different sounds, the same sounds can be represented by a variety of different combinations of letters. Americans, Webster believed, could create a better form of English than the British. “This country,” he stressed, “must in some future time, be as distinguished by the superiority of her literary improvements, as she already is by the liberality of her civil and ecclesiastical constitutions.”

His overriding linguistic goal was that Americans should adopt “one standard of elegant pronunciation.” Though Webster now knew where he wanted to take the English language, he wasn’t yet sure how to get there. In that 1783 first edition of his speller, he proposed only some general guidelines. Citing the greatest man of letters of ancient Rome, Cicero, the icon upon whom Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Hamilton also drew inspiration, Webster argued that “
usus est norma loquendi
” [usage should determine the rules of speech]. But he didn’t specify whether the usage of one group—say, the highly educated—should take precedence over another—say, country folk. At this stage of his career, he identified the problems with regional dialects without discussing how to adjudicate between them: “I would observe that the inhabitants of New England and Virginia have a peculiar pronunciation which affords much diversion to their neighbors . . . . The dialect of one state is as ridiculous as that of another; each is authorised by local custom; and neither is supported by any superior excellence.”

Though Webster pled neutrality, that’s not what he felt. In fact, after a quick allusion to “a flat drawling pronunciation” among some New Englanders, he went on to describe several vulgar pronunciations commonly heard in the South, such as “reesins” for “raisins” and “woond” for “wound.” In later editions, Webster would make his preference for the New England way explicit.

In this first salvo on behalf of his native tongue, Webster didn’t include the spelling changes, which he would later insist on in his dictionary, and for which he became best known. Calling “Dr. Johnson’s dictionary my guide,” Webster here argued against expunging “superfluous letters” such as the “u” in “favour” and “honour.” He supplied the following rationale: “Our language is indeed pronounced very differently from the spelling; this is an inconvenience we regret, but cannot remedy. To attempt a progressive change is idle.” Webster would go back and forth on this point over the next few decades before settling on the need for limited spelling reform. But in his 1783 text, Webster did break a little new ground. For example, the speller is where Americans first learned to pronounce the twenty-sixth letter of the alphabet “zee” rather than “zed.”