The Forgotten Founding Father- Noah Webster (42 page)

“So tanned that I look like a Spaniard,” wrote Webster, still in good spirits as the ship arrived in Le Havre on Saturday, July 10. The following Saturday at ten in the evening, father and son reached Paris. The tall, slender Webster, wearing his typical outfit of black trousers, a black coat and black silk stockings, stood out. Spotting him in a hotel lobby the following week, a fellow New Englander, Samuel Goodrich, who later achieved fame as an author of children’s books, described the lexicographer as “a curious quaint, Connecticut looking apparition strangely in contrast to the prevailing forms and aspects in this gay metropolis.” While Webster complained about the seventy dollars a month that he had to pay for the rooms at Madame Rivière’s at No. 19 Rue Bergère, the Royal Library left him nearly speechless. He reported to Rebecca, “I cannot give you a description of my feelings. To have an adequate idea of this collection of books, you must imagine rows of shelves 30 feet high from the corner of my house to the Green, or public square.” But the rhythms of Parisian life alienated him. After two weeks, his calm had turned to agitation: “Little regard is had to the Sabbath. . . . The theaters are open every night, & one of the greatest inconveniences I experience is the noise of carriages at the breaking up of plays, about 12 at night. I must submit to be thus annoyed at present in every way imaginable, but I think these things may shorten my stay in France.” Indeed, he would be gone by mid-September, a month earlier than originally planned.

Not particularly eager to explore the city—“I came here not for the gratification of curiosity”—Webster buried himself in his work. He got up at six, and wrote for a couple of hours before breakfast. He spent two days a week at the library, where he pored over the first edition of
The Dictionary of the French Academy,
published in 1694. In contrast to England, continental Europe had always seen dictionary-making as a group enterprise—Florence’s Accademia della Crusca produced the first modern dictionary in 1612—and Webster sought to familiarize himself with this tradition. To hunt for scientific terms missing in Johnson, Webster also consulted the work of the French encyclopedists as well as the recent
Dictionary of Natural History
by Georges Cuvier. In his occasional outings around town, Webster tended to be unimpressed by what he saw. “But the Palais Royal,” he wrote to his daughter Emily, “and the palace of the Tuilleries where the King now resides, are so tarnished by time & weather that they are the color of an old barn.” Unlike his father, William, who studied French with the help of a native tutor and would do some sightseeing on his own, he took a liking to what he called “the land of the frogs.” On September 13, their final day in Paris, Webster’s son wrote, “If man were not an accountable being, I know of no spot under Heaven where one could pass an earthly existence with more delight.”

Sailing from Dieppe, the Websters made brief stopovers in Brighton and London before heading to Cambridge. On September 22, they settled into a suite of rooms at the university, courtesy of Dr. Samuel Lee, a professor of Arabic. With his letter of introduction to Lee, Webster also gained access to the books at Trinity College’s Wren Library. Webster was eager to turn his attention to “business.” On September 24, he wrote Rebecca, “I want certainly the comfort & happiness of the presence of my dear consort & children. This thought sometimes chills me for a moment, but I am not distressed or unhappy. . . . And it is a pleasant thing to get among people that look & dress & eat & talk like our own people.” A few months later, he tried to set in motion his grand scheme of uniting America and England in a common tongue. On December 20, he wrote to Dr. Lee, proposing a summit on the future of the English language. The three parties—members of the Oxford and Cambridge faculty, along with him representing American literati—would attempt to bring about agreement on “unsettled points in pronunciation and grammatical construction.” The expert salesman clearly intended to turn the resolutions of these academics into publicity for his new book. However, in his letter to Lee, Webster claimed that his motives were purely scholarly: “But the gentlemen would disavow any intention of imposing their opinions on the public as authoritative; they would offer simply their opinions, and the public would still be at liberty to receive or reject them.” While Dr. Lee and his Cambridge colleagues were intrigued, Oxford never responded. But Webster continued defining, and in late January 1825, with his right thumb “almost exhausted” from overuse, he finished his manuscript. It was a moment Webster would never forget. He later recalled, “When I had come to the last word, I was seized with trembling which made it somewhat difficult to hold my pen steady for the writing. . . . But I summoned strength to finish the last word, and then walking about the room a few minutes I recovered.” Webster attributed the intense anxiety to the thought that he might not live to finish the work. But he was perhaps more worried about what was to happen next. After all, for nearly thirty years, finishing the dictionary had been the organizing force of his life.

Though his proposed academic conference never got off the ground, Webster still pressed ahead with his plan to publish his dictionary of a unified English. Leaving Cambridge in February, he moved to London to shop the idea. He sent part of the manuscript to John Murray, but the distinguished publisher of Jane Austen and Lord Byron turned him down. In his memoir, Webster offered the following account of this episode: “The booksellers declined publishing
The American Dictionary
; the great publishers being engaged in a new edition of Todd’s
Johnson,
and in the works of Richardson.” While the competition posed by the lexicographers Henry John Todd, who was about to release a revised edition of Johnson’s dictionary, and Charles Richardson, then composing his
New Dictionary of the English Language,
did drown out interest in Webster’s complete dictionary, Webster’s explanation did involve some revisionist history. That’s because in 1825, Webster was not trying to sell
The American Dictionary
; distinguishing American English from British English was then the furthest thing from his mind. In fact, while in Cambridge, Webster wrote to his cousin Daniel, requesting that the Massachusetts representative push through Congress a bill enabling him to import his forthcoming British book,
A Dictionary of the English Language,
to America duty-free. But with the negotiations in London going nowhere, this legislation, which was passed on March 3, 1825, never did him any good. By April, a dejected Webster was eager to be reunited with his family. On April 14, “Weby”—as William was known to his peers—confided to his friend Artemas Thompson, then a student at Amherst College:

As he sailed back to New York with William aboard the
Hudson
in May, Webster reverted to his original plan, which was to publish his
American Dictionary
in America. If Webster’s year-long trip to Europe had ended successfully, Americans and Britons might today be speaking the same version of English.

 

 

GIVEN A HERO’S WELCOME in New Haven—both by the Yale faculty and Rebecca and the children—Webster soon regained his stamina. Several months later, he found an American publisher, Sherman Converse, then also the editor of the New Haven paper,
The Connecticut Journal
. Converse prepared a specimen of a few pages, which he circulated among prominent people in the hope of accumulating endorsements for the dictionary. One of the first came from Webster’s old friend John Trumbull, who noted, “I do not hesitate to recommend it to all who wish to acquire a correct knowledge of the English language, as a valuable addition to the science of philology and an honor to the literature of our country.” Converse also reached out to two former presidents. On February 20, 1826, Thomas Jefferson politely declined: “Sir, I have duly recieved [
sic
] your favor the 6th asking my examination and opinion of the plan of Mr. Webster’s dictionary, of which you inclosed me a sample, but worn down with age, infirmity and pain, my mind is no longer in a tone for such services. I can only therefore express my respect and best wishes for its success.” Jefferson may not have wanted to help his onetime Federalist critic; however, he was indeed frail and would die just a few months later. But James Madison, whom Webster had also once vilified, did come through. “The plan embraces so many commendable objects,” wrote Jefferson’s successor in the White House to Converse from his retirement home in Montpelier, Virginia, “beyond the ordinary scope of such works that its successful execution must be a substantial improvement on them.” By May, Converse had racked up a total of fourteen recommendations, including one from Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story and one from the philologist John Pickering, who had criticized the first dictionary so harshly a decade earlier.

While Converse worked out an arrangement with Hezekiah Howe of New Haven to print the book, Webster began preparing his manuscript for publication. This last round of editing would take two years. The conscientious Webster did whatever he could to remove errors from his definitions. On March 3, 1826, he wrote the French linguist Peter Du Ponceau, who worked as an attorney in Philadelphia, “I have inserted in my vocabulary the word phonology from some of your writings. I believe I understand it, but for fear I may not, I will thank you to give me your meaning in a brief definition.” Webster asked the Yale professors Benjamin Silliman and Denison Olmsted to review the scientific terms. And in January 1827, he hired Dr. James Gates Percival, a Yale-educated physician and celebrated poet fluent in ten languages and able to write verse in thirteen, to proofread his entries. But Webster’s temperamental employee, who had given up medicine after seeing his first patient, would abandon his assignment two months before the dictionary went to press.

While Percival had the ideal qualifications for the job, he was even more eccentric than Webster. The stubborn and volatile bachelor also preferred books to people; though condemned to a life of poverty, he would eventually amass a library of ten thousand volumes. The closest Percival ever came to embracing a woman was grazing the hand of a pupil whom he tutored in her home; this momentary contact filled him with so much emotion that he immediately left the room, never to return. The signature poem of the humorless Percival was “The Suicide,” which featured dozens of chilling verses such as the following:

By 1821, when the twenty-six-year-old poet published his highly regarded first collection, he had already attempted suicide twice. The tall and blond Percival, neatly clad in the brown camlet coat which he wore day after day, had large blue eyes with dilated pupils that were fixed in a permanent stare. While Webster occasionally flirted with madness, Percival incarnated the thing in itself. Percival was the man Webster might have become had he not stumbled upon his reliable sources of comfort—his loving wife, his religious faith, his sealed-off second-story hideaways and his dictionary.

Percival was initially thrilled to be working with Webster. Sharing a passion for defining, he also loved tracing words back to their roots. In fact, he was a step ahead of his boss, as he kept abreast of the latest German scholarship on etymology. When once asked by a friend if his tasks were dry, Percival responded, “I took more pleasure in editing Webster’s Dictionary than in anything else I have done.” Percival was supposed to proof the printed pages, but the printing proceeded so slowly that he had to read the manuscript as well. He didn’t get started until May 1827, and he soon felt oppressed by the grueling fourteen-hour workdays. On December 4, 1827, he confided to his friend Dr. George Hayward, “My situation is one of disgust and toil. . . . I regret that I have ever engaged in the thing. It will be one of the miseries of my life to think of it.” Later that month, Webster left Percival a note about his alleged untidiness: “I have to request you not to write on the MSS, as many of your remarks are illegible and they injure the writing, which is already bad enough. You will oblige me to write all your remarks, as Prof. Olmsted does, on a separate piece of paper.” An enraged Percival shot back, “If you have confidence in me, my articles had better remain as they are. If you have not, it is idle for me to have any further connection with the dictionary.” Though the two men soon reconciled, Percival then started challenging Webster’s etymologies. When Webster insisted that his assistant focus solely on proofreading, Percival began sneaking in some changes on his own. To express his now unspeakable pique, Percival lapsed into Latin in his January 9, 1828, update to Hayward,
“Multa absurda removi”
[Many absurd things I have removed]. By September, Percival, whose name would not appear in the dictionary, had moved on.

In the months immediately preceding the publication of “his great book,” Webster was highly agitated. Henry Howe, the son of his publisher, who at the age of eleven delivered page proofs from his father to Webster, later recalled, “I do not remember to have seen him smile. He was a too-much pre-occupied man for frivolity, bearing, as he did, the entire weight of the English tongue upon his shoulders.” On September 15, Webster informed Harriet, “I remain troubled with head ache and can but little business. To write this letter is for me great effort.” On Wednesday morning, November 26, 1828, the last pages of
An American Dictionary of the English Language
came off Howe’s printing press. The following day, in honor of “the great event,” Rebecca invited dozens of guests over to Temple Street for “a solid Thanksgiving supper.”