The Forgotten Founding Father- Noah Webster, page 25
The revelation that one of America’s foremost men of letters had officially entered the lexicography business was national news. However, the swift verdict rendered on Webster’s new vocation, which was nearly unanimous, was: ridiculous. Both Federalists and Republicans responded with contempt. Just three days later, a columnist in The Gazette, one of Philadelphia’s leading Federalist papers, advised Webster “to turn his mind from language-making to something really useful. . . . there is nothing I am more desirous to avoid than God’s curse in a confusion of tongues.” A generation after the Revolution, most Americans, including Webster’s Federalist allies, saw the linguistic status quo as sacred. In an article, “On the Scheme of an American Language,” published in his journal, The Monthly Magazine and American Review, that summer, Charles Brockden Brown traced this mainstream view back to the Hebrew scriptures, which had taught that “diversity of language” was an “evil.” As Brown argued, Webster was heading in the wrong direction: “This evil, like other evils inflicted by heaven, we are permitted to repair and diminish in some degree.” After all, in the preface to his dictionary, Samuel Johnson had also railed against the “caprices of innovation” in language. The lexicographer’s job, as Johnson defined it, was to create order out of chaos, and Webster, according to his critics, proposed to do just the opposite.
Likewise, on June 12, Joseph Dennie—the editor of Philadelphia’s other prominent Federalist paper, The Gazette of the United States, who four years earlier had written Webster a fan letter about The Prompter—also lambasted him. Dennie’s weapon of choice was a half page of missives from faux readers exemplifying the chaos that might ensue should Webster’s new publishing venture succeed. The following letters illustrate two potentially new forms of debased English:
To Mr. noab Wabstur
Sur,
by rading all ovur the nusspaper I find you are after meaking a nue Merrykin Dikshunary; your rite, Sir; for ofter looking all over the anglish Books, you wont find a bit Shillaly big enuf to beat a dog wid. so I hope you’ll take a hint, a put enuff of rem in yours, for Och ’tis a nate little bit of furniture for any Man’s house so it ’tis.
Pat O’Dogerty
Brother noab
Instead of I keant keatch the keow, an English man or a town bred american would say, I cannot Catch the Cow, but you being a brother Yankey will be sure to spell right in your new Yankey dictionary
yours, &c.
Brother Jonathan
N.B. mind and give us a true deffinition of bundling.
Describing himself as “An Enemy to Innovation,” Dennie also added to the barrage: “If as Mr Webster asserts, it is true that many new words have already crept into the language of the United States, he would be much better employed in rooting out the noxious weed than in mingling them with the flowers. Should he, however, persist in his attempt to erect a revolution in our language, I trust that a system fraught with such pernicious consequences will meet with the contempt it deserves from all the friends of literature.”
Twenty-five years after Lexington and Concord, Webster’s plan to replace the King’s English had few takers; his linguistic revolution would be a lonely one.
The equally fierce Republican opposition was actually the more surprising. Though Republican editors had been vilifying Webster’s political views for nearly a decade, they might have been expected to embrace his “bottom-up” approach to lexicography. After all, Webster the wordsmith was a compiler, not a prescriber; in the dictionary, as in the speller, he championed the words of the common man—language as it was, not as it ought to be. But that June, Benjamin Franklin Bache, the editor of Philadelphia’s Republican paper, the Aurora, smeared Webster, calling him “this oddity of literature.” For Bache, in contrast to the Federalist editors, Webster’s whole career—not just his recent turn to lexicography—was an embarrassment:
After involving the question of the yellow fever in deeper obscurity, and producing nothing but the profit by the sale of the work, he now appears as a legislator and municipal magistrate of Connecticut; writes nonsense pseudo-political and pseudo-philosophical for his newspapers at New York, and proposes to give to the American world no less than three dictionaries! . . . The plain truth is . . . that he means to make money by a scheme which ought to be and will be discountenanced by every man who admires the classic English writers.
But Bache was just heaping abuse on Webster. In reality, Webster had already made his money. For Webster, as opposed to his idol, Samuel Johnson, dictionary-making was not a means, but an end in itself.
Even Connecticut Federalists had nothing kind to say. In the fall of 1801, Warren Dutton—dubbed “a pupil of the Connecticut pope” because he had studied divinity under Timothy Dwight at Yale—repeatedly attacked Webster in his “Restorator” columns in the New England Palladium, a new Federalist paper out of Boston. On October 2, Dutton, who worked as assistant editor under Webster’s longtime friend Jedidiah Morse, mocked “the great lexicographer” for planning to add a bunch of silly words to the English language. Dutton didn’t think much of the locally grown “happify” (which Webster had used in his recent editions of his speller), “lengthy” or “belittle.” According to Dutton, Webster would be creating not an American dictionary but rather one solely of “the vulgar tongue in New England.” Noting that the explorer Sebastian Cabot had first discovered the eastern states, Dutton wondered, “Would it not be better to prefix to it [the dictionary] the epithet Cabotian?” In his November 2 column, “the Restorator” published an inflammatory letter by “Aristarchus” (the pen name of the Boston pastor John Gardiner). Concerned that Webster had not yet been “subdued,” Gardiner hoped to prevent the Connecticut lexicographer from injecting “barbarisms . . . into books.” “But if he will persist,” Gardiner lamented, “in spite of common sense, to furnish us with a dictionary which we do not want, in return for his generosity, I will furnish him with a title for it. Let, then, the projected volume of foul and unclean things bear his own Christian name and be called NOAH’s ARK.”
Webster felt betrayed. On November 10, he fired back with a letter to the Palladium in which he accused Dutton of attempting “to vilify a fellow citizen . . . whose whole life has been devoted to . . . the honor and . . . the rights of his country.” Webster replied that it was reasonable to add many well-established words to English lexicons; all that mattered was that the new definitions were “correct.” To put Dutton in his place, Webster clarified the meaning of his pseudonym: “As the word Restorator is the least known in this country, I might take the liberty of defining it according to the sense it bears in the gentleman’s own writings, viz, a man who . . . retails ordinary fare.”
One of the few sympathetic voices was William Rind, editor of the Washington Federalist, who expressed his hope that Webster, “heedless of the sarcasms of those who are fond of belittling every thing American. . . . will bestow on his mediated undertaking all that attention and investigation which have marked his former writings.” But even without any encouragement, Webster was prepared to go on. This loner was used to fighting against the rest of the world. Though nothing could stop him now, completing his two planned dictionaries would prove much more difficult than he ever imagined.
9
Paterfamilias
FAMILY, n. The collective body of persons who live in one house and under one head or manager; a household, including parents, children and servants, and as the case may be, lodgers or boarders.
When will Squire Webster be returning home?”
That’s what Rebecca Webster, eight months pregnant with the couple’s sixth child (who would turn out to be Eliza), kept hearing from her Water Street neighbors throughout December 1803. Though she wasn’t sure herself, Rebecca would answer, “At Christmas.”
But Webster wouldn’t be back until after the beginning of the New Year.
Shortly before Thanksgiving, Webster headed to Philadelphia to procure types for the revised version of his spelling book. During his two-month hiatus, New Haven was not quite the same. Without its leader, the choir at the Brick Meeting House ceased singing.
During his travels, Webster stayed in touch by mail. The letters from his two eldest daughters, Emily, then thirteen, and Julia, then ten, provide a unique glimpse into how the Webster children related to their paterfamilias.
Feeling put upon by all the activity in his bustling household, the socially awkward scholar demanded not only submission to parental authority but also cheerfulness. He was a topsy-turvy parent, tending to look to his children for affection and support rather than the other way around. His manner was intimidating, and his preferred mode of communication was the lecture. When writing from upstate New York that summer, he tried to turn his itinerary into a pedagogical exercise: “Such is my progress my dear girls and you must take your maps and trace it out. . . . It will help you to remember the geography of this country.” Quick to anger, Webster could get highly animated about matters of principle. And jokes with double entendres or coarse references of any sort could set off a tirade. While he mostly directed his outrage toward other adults (rather than family members), his children often felt fear in his presence. After witnessing a harsh rebuke toward a particular “culprit,” one of the girls once blurted out, “Papa makes me siver [shiver] like a top.” Webster also had a punitive streak. While on a trip years later, he wrote to Eliza, “If my name is a terror to evil doers at home, I hope there will be little occasion to use it. Tell Louisa there must be no evil doings at home & if I do not learn that she is a good girl, I shall not bring her pretty things when I return.”
In their letters that winter, both Emily and Julia tried their best to win their father’s favor. Unfortunately, this tack meant internalizing his critical temperament and burdening themselves with feelings of inadequacy. On November 24, 1803, an apologetic Emily had a hard time putting pen to paper, writing from her father’s study, “However, as it [this letter] is intended for my father’s perusal, and he well knows what an ignoramus his Emily is—I will scribble just what pops into my head first.” Identifying with Webster, Emily, too, lapsed into the third person to talk about herself; likewise, just as he often complained about family intrusions into his dictionary-making, the teenager expressed annoyance with her rambunctious younger siblings—namely, her sisters Harriet and Mary, and the two-year-old William: “Pardon, Dear Pappa, the many mistakes and blots I have made occasioned by frequent interruptions and the noise of the children in the next room.”
A couple of weeks later, Rebecca, Emily and Julia all passed on their thoughts in a joint update to Webster. Keenly missing her husband, Rebecca was upset that a time had not yet been set for his return: “It is now three long weeks since you left us.” She also complained of ill health, stressing, “Yet I am as well as I can reasonably expect to be.” In contrast, Emily’s tone was more lighthearted; she reported on how she and her siblings, no doubt patterning themselves after the eminent wordsmith, made fun of the baby’s pronunciation errors: “William grows fat and very funny. . . . Some times we speak a hard word on purpose to hear his little blunders for he repeats every word we say.” Up next, Julia hoped to impress her father with her industriousness and attention to detail, writing, “I go to school very steadily & pass 8 or 9 hours there every day, there are 68 scholars. . . . I have began [sic] ciphering [arithmetic] and have got to multiplication. & I have almost finished a little cap—for somebody.” After finishing her remarks, Julia signed off with “your most dutiful daughter,” omitting her name.
The day after Christmas, Emily shared some joyful news with her father: “The dear babe is plump and weighs 8 pounds; we wait for your consent to call it Elizabeth.” In that letter, Emily also added a poignant plea for his love: “We have just received your kind letter, but I am half angry to think that papa would say William needed beauty when he is so much handsomer than any of us so that is as much as to say we all [sic] ugly as witches, but it is a truth I always knew and tho wanting in beauty I hope I am not wanting in affection to my dear papa.”
“HAVE YOU COMPLETED your dictionary?” So asked Webster’s uncle, Eliphalet Steele, in a letter dated May 20, 1801, at which time the forty-two-year-old retired newspaper editor had hardly begun.
Webster would face this query time and time again over the next twenty-seven years, and he eventually gave up trying to respond. As he would write his brother-in-law Thomas Dawes several years later, “I am often asked what progress I have made in the compilation of my proposed dictionary; and when in all probability it will be completed. To these questions I am not able to give precise answers, as the field of inquiry enlarges with every step I take.”
On June 6, 1804, Webster placed an anonymous article in The Connecticut Courant, in which he updated the public about his literary activity. After announcing that his new American Spelling Book—about to become the valuable annuity that would support his family for the rest of his life—was to be published in a few weeks, he described the status of the next project on his assembly line:
In compliance with repeated solicitations from the friends of American literature in various parts of the country, who urge the utility of a complete system of books for the instruction of youth in our language by a single hand, the same author has prepared a Compendious Dictionary of our language, upon the latest edition of Entick improved—correcting the more palpable mistakes, and adding three or four thousand words with which the vast improvements in chemistry, natural science, have within half a century supplied the language.
Webster, an inveterate self-promoter, here attempted to gloss over the widespread abuse heaped on his initial announcement four years earlier. In fact, few people were clamoring for his name to appear on yet another pedagogical text; the impetus for his first dictionary came largely from within. A warm-up exercise to his complete dictionary, Webster’s Compendious Dictionary—compendious means concise—was a rewriting of the New Spelling Dictionary of the English Language by John Entick, which had been reissued numerous times since its initial publication in 1764. “This work,” Webster declared, “will be put to press in a short time, and an elegant edition may be expected in the course of the summer.” But Webster’s first foray into lexicography wouldn’t actually appear for another two years. Writing a dictionary, Webster would learn, typically takes longer than expected.
One reason for the delay was that Webster was also engaged in compiling another massive reference work, Elements of Useful Knowledge, an encyclopedia for children. The first two volumes, which concerned the history and geography of the United States, appeared in 1802 and 1804, respectively; the third volume, on Europe, Asia and Africa, came out in 1806; and the fourth volume, on animal history and classification, in 1812. He relished documenting the inherent order in the universe. “Nature, in all her works,” he wrote in the preface to volume, “proceeds according to established laws, and it is by following her order, distribution and arrangement, that the human mind is led to understand her laws, with their principles and connection.” Thus, at the same time as Webster was defining words for adults, he was also defining places, people and animals for children. According to his master plan, he would become the pedagogue for all Americans: “My views comprehend a whole system of education—from a spelling book through geography and various other subjects—to a complete dictionary—beginning with children and ending with men.”
Webster’s encyclopedia read like a dictionary. The text consisted of short paragraphs, given numbers in the last two volumes, each of which clarified a particular term. (He hoped that this format would enable children to commit his words to memory, but this fantasy was never realized.) Though Webster believed he was transmitting only hard facts, his personal prejudices were much in evidence. Consider, for example, paragraph 224 in volume 3, describing the “character and morals” of his least favorite nation, France: “Ancient authors all agree that the Gauls were a fickle, perfidious people, prompt to action, but impatient of toil, and ever studious of change. The present French are remarkable for their vivacity, gayety and politeness; fond of show and pleasure, but not cleanly in their houses. The sanguinary scenes of the late revolution manifested a ferociousness of character, rarely found among civilized men, and impress the mind with horror.”
The reclusive scholar was now obsessed with categorizing and describing everything in the external world, which he no longer had much interest in exploring in the flesh. He preferred to live among the thoughts percolating inside his own mind. Though teachers in Connecticut ordered this text, it didn’t have much of a market outside his home state.
After selling his papers, Webster stopped commenting on national politics. In occasional freelance articles, he explored his various avocations, such as tending to his fruit trees and making cider. In October 1804, he wrote a couple of columns for the Courant devoted to “the diffusion of agricultural knowledge”—the ultimate utilitarian, Webster never could do anything entirely for the fun of it. He prefaced both “Farmer’s Repository” pieces with an epigraph from Jonathan Swift that conveyed his disgust with the Jefferson administration: “Whoever can make two ears of corn, or two blades of grass grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, deserves better of mankind and does more essential service than the whole race of politicians put together.” In the first one, dated October 24, he began by describing himself as a member of a small breed of “philosophical agriculturalists”: “I possess not a farm on which to indulge my inclination for experiments, my experience is limited to a small garden; but even this experience may have offered a few useful truths, to spread the knowledge of which this is the sole motive for this communication.” Webster went on to dispense some advice for coping with insects that preyed on Connecticut homes during winter: “I make it a practice to scrape off these lodgers to expose them to bad weather and destroy as many as possible.”
