The Forgotten Founding Father- Noah Webster (35 page)

Webster was quite right to pounce on Johnson for ignoring the history of words. In contrast to Webster, Johnson had little patience for etymology, which he considered the path not to the truth, but to the ludicrous. But Webster’s own grasp of Anglo-Saxon was shaky. Though he began studying it after returning to New Haven, he never proceeded very far. (In contrast, Thomas Jefferson, then residing in the White House, who had first encountered Anglo-Saxon as a teenage law student in 1762, happened to be the country’s reigning expert.) As one scholar who examined the marginalia of Webster’s Anglo-Saxon book collection a half century ago concluded, “to assume that Webster was more than a mediocre student of Anglo-Saxon is to accept his professions too credulously.” In the preface to his “compend,” Webster noted that anyone with “the smallest acquaintance” of Anglo-Saxon could track down Johnson’s errors; and the sum total of his knowledge may not have been much greater than that.

Despite the deficiencies in Webster’s Anglo-Saxon, the new course he charted for orthography was, with a few notable exceptions, eminently reasonable. He advocated a middle ground between extremes. While he described English spelling as “extremely irregular,” he now critiqued the development of a new phonetic alphabet—the position that he had taken in 1790—as “impractical” and “not at all necessary.” But Webster also opposed no reform at all, arguing that “gradual changes to accommodate the written to the spoken language when they occasion none of these evils, and especially when they purify words from corruptions . . . illustrate etymology [and] are not only proper, but indispensable.” This was the theoretical justification for Webster’s most famous tweaks to British English such as eliminating the “u” in “favour” and the “k” in “musick.” “The practice,” he wrote, “in . . . [Johnson’s] time of closing all words with k after c . . . was a Norman innovation,” thus suggesting that he was also liberating Americans from the unscrupulous practices of the French. Grounding all his changes in such historical investigations, Webster also identified a few other classes “of outlaws in orthography,” including, for example, words ending in “re” (“theatre” thus became “theater”) and those ending in “ce” (“defence” thus became “defense”).

But the study of Anglo-Saxon also led Webster to make the case for other spellings that we now consider eccentric. He repeatedly removed the final “e” in words such as “doctrine,” “determine” and “discipline.” His other idiosyncratic preferences included “tung” (“tongue”), “wimmen” (“women”), “ake” (“ache”) and “wether” (“weather”). In these instances, where he knew that he would be facing fierce opposition, he listed what he considered the etymologically correct spelling merely as an alternative. He eventually gave in to the majority opinion, albeit grudgingly. In his 1828 dictionary, under the definition “women,” he still felt compelled to add, “But it is supposed the word we pronounce is from Sax . . . and therefore should be written wimen [
sic
].”

Webster concluded the preface by stepping up his attacks on Johnson. While praising his predecessor as “one of the brightest luminaries of English literature,” Webster stressed that “no original work of high reputation in our language . . . contains so many errors and imperfections.” He then launched into an aside on biography: “To assign the causes of these defects is by no means difficult. We are told in the accounts given of Johnson’s life that he was almost always depressed by disease and poverty; that he was naturally indolent and seldom wrote until he was urged by want. . . . Hence it happened, that he often received the money for his writings before his manuscripts were prepared. Then, when called upon for copy, he was compelled to prepare his manuscripts in haste.”

Webster was keenly aware of how he stacked up against his rival. As he aptly noted, he was the more methodical and industrious, a difference in temperament which was indeed an asset. However, Webster’s allusion to Johnson’s book advances was gratuitous. Johnson’s manic intensity was an essential part of his character; it was not dependent on the timing of his payments. Webster was teeming with envy because he had no patron, not even an unappreciative Lord Chesterfield. In contrast to Johnson, he would have to bear most of the financial risk himself. As Webster knew, in his case, the dictionary could well mean not an escape from but a descent into poverty.

The reaction to the publication of Webster’s first dictionary was mostly indifference. No review appeared for three months; and the first one, published in May 1806, in the
Panoplist,
a new Christian periodical founded by his friend Jedidiah Morse, was brief and not particularly glowing. Expressing concern about some “errors in the execution,” the
Panoplist
offered only a tepid endorsement: “On the whole, we are highly gratified in seeing a literary work which bears such strong marks of deep research. . . . we wish it may find a place not only on the toilette [then a synonym for cloth covering], but in the printing office and counting house. We hope also it will be introduced into our schools.”

But sales of the seven thousand copies never did take off. A year later, Webster printed only four thousand copies of a school dictionary, for which he reduced the price to a dollar. At the last minute, he tried to expand the market for this abridgement to the yeomanry as well as to students by removing the scientific terms. As the ads stated, “It contains a selection of more than thirty thousand words, comprehending all which are necessary or useful for farmers and mechanics.” But while his school dictionary, unlike his “compend,” would eventually go into a second printing, this wouldn’t happen until 1817.

“DARKNESS AT NOON!”

“The Great Eclipse of the Sun!”

So exclaimed the headlines of America’s leading newspapers in the weeks leading up to Monday, June 16, 1806.

Webster the amateur meteorologist was caught up in the national excitement about this once-in-a-lifetime event. He began giving daily lectures to his wife and children about the meaning of this remarkable phenomenon, thoughts which later worked their way into his 1828 definition of eclipse: “Literally, a defect or failure; hence in
astronomy,
an interception or obscuration of the light of the sun, moon or other luminous body.”

On the morning of the sixteenth, Webster equipped each of his three girls—Julia, Harriet and Mary—with a piece of smoked glass as they headed off to school. (Emily, the eldest, then sixteen, had completed her education and was visiting her uncle Thomas Dawes in Boston.) He wanted to make sure that they could keep peering into the sky as the moon began to cover the sun that afternoon.

Webster’s girls attended the Union School on Crown Street, which their father had been instrumental in launching in 1801. Pedagogy was Webster’s passion, and when he found out that New Haven lacked an adequate school for ladies, he organized the town’s parents. Within just a couple of years, nearly seventy girls had signed up. At the Union School, the girls learned the three Rs as well as sewing. As chairman of the trustees, Webster himself signed the hundred shares that had been sold to raise money for its founding.

As noon approached, Webster’s daughters were eager with anticipation. But suddenly, much to their surprise and consternation, their teacher, Miss Eunice Hall, took away their optical safeguards. Picking up a piece of smoked glass, she held it to her eye and declared, “Oh, I would not have you see it for the world.” Wedded to superstition, Miss Hall had no interest in science instruction. Closing the windows and shutters, the teacher transformed the classroom into a den of darkness. Though study was nearly impossible, Miss Hall did not dismiss the students early. By the time Webster’s daughters arrived back at the Arnold House, it was too late to see even a glimpse of what one paper called “one of the most sublime spectacles this age has produced.” During the eclipse, the particular cast of light shrouded America in a deathlike gloom.

Until that day, Eunice Hall had been highly regarded in and around New Haven. A month earlier, the
Connecticut Journal
praised her “genius and industry” during the school’s two-day annual exhibition held in the assembly room of the state house. Rebecca, who had attended to watch her girls, was also impressed by Miss Hall’s pedagogical skills. As a result of the teacher’s direction, Rebecca reported to a traveling Webster, “The young ladies performed extremely well.”

But Webster was aghast by Miss Hall’s actions on the afternoon of the sixteenth. “A teacher who shows herself so ignorant and tyrannical,” he told his family, “is not fit to instruct children.”

Webster’s second eldest, Julia, the school’s reigning wit, was equally outraged. Indulging her taste for doggerel, she wrote a poem about a cauldron of comestibles to which each student contributed something. The last line featured the person who had ruined her day:

According to the family’s account contained in the biography by his granddaughter, Webster immediately withdrew his daughters from the school. But in fact, it was Miss Hall who ended up having to change venues. A month later, the teacher put the following notice in the
Connecticut Journal,
“Miss Hall . . . shall discontinue keeping the Union School for young ladies and misses. . . . she intends opening a similar school in New Haven on her own account, where she hopes by an assiduous attention to her school, to merit the approbation of the public and her employers.”

But Miss Hall soon left Connecticut and opened a school and boarding house in Elizabethtown, New Jersey. A disgruntled Webster, her onetime employer, had run her out of town.

 

 

LATER THAT SUMMER, the “compend” finally got some of the attention Webster had been craving. But nearly all the feedback was negative. The coverage in the popular press was brutal, and even some family members expressed uneasiness. Webster’s brother-in-law Thomas Dawes, though reluctant to make a judgment in a field outside his expertise, quipped, “I ain’t quite ripe for your orthography.”

In July, Webster’s foe, William Coleman, wrote a series of six vicious articles in
The New York Evening Post
. Noting that the English nation “felt an interest and a pride” upon the publication of Johnson’s dictionary, Coleman gleefully reported, “Webster’s Dictionary has now been several months in print . . . excepting a meager article in the
Panoplist,
none of our numerous writers have condescended to bestow a word upon it.”

In his comprehensive review, Coleman lashed out at Webster from every possible angle. Chief among his complaints was that Webster had unfairly slammed Johnson: “The appearance of attempting to depreciate the labours of others to exalt our own ought always to be shunned as most invidious.” But Webster had been taking heat from Coleman ever since the birth of the
Evening Post,
and he wasn’t expecting anything enlightened. On July 30, he aired his reaction to his friend Jedidiah Morse, “You will see his [Coleman’s] criticisms are . . . misrepresentations from beginning to end . . . indeed it requires the exercise of great charity to believe him
honest
in his statements.”

Webster tried to take his case to the public by submitting a long letter to the
Evening Post
. Though Coleman printed Webster’s response, he made sure that he got the last word; throughout Webster’s prose, the editor interspersed his own running commentary, which he set in a larger type. Webster stressed that Coleman’s aim was “to destroy the reputation of the book.” Despite Coleman’s protestations to the contrary (“I certainly believe that I have dealt very gently by him”), Webster was correct in asserting that he had not gotten a fair hearing.

That month, a writer identified only as “C” published another negative review in the
Albany Centinel
. Webster found his piece more troubling than Coleman’s because he had more respect for the source, telling Morse in that same July 30 letter, “The
Albany Centinel
is a paper better written than Coleman’s.” “C” rehashed the argument that his dictionary would cause linguistic chaos. While acknowledging Webster’s “rare erudition,” “C” wished his book would simply disappear: “Such is Mr. Webster’s disposition to revolutionize and disorganize the English language . . . that sober and judicious men who are disposed to . . . preserve the uniformity and stability of the English tongue will lament that learning and talents so respectable should be the auxiliaries of a taste so false and a judgement so perverse. Is it not madness to endeavour to establish . . . an American or United States dialect . . . ?”

In his response to “C,” published in the
Connecticut Herald
in August, Webster countered that the growth of the English language was inevitable: “But the question is whether new words, and new application of words, introduced by new ideas, arising from objects natural and moral, which are peculiar and appropriate to our country and state of society, shall all be condemned and proscribed as ‘corruptions and perversions’ of the language.” On the future course of the English language, Webster would repeatedly demonstrate remarkable prescience.