The Forgotten Founding Father- Noah Webster, page 32
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:
He once could love, but Oh! That time was o’er,
His heart was now the seat of hate alone,
As peaceful—is the wintry tempest’s roar
As cheerful—torture’s agonizing groan.
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.”
Webster soon would have even more to celebrate. Having languished as a persona non grata in his own country for nearly a quarter of a century, he had staged a remarkable comeback. On January 31, 1829, The Connecticut Mirror compared Webster to the Roman poet Horace, who had famously created a literary “monument more lasting than steel,” observing, “We are aware of no other publication in this country or in Europe, upon which equal research and labor has ever been expended by a single individual.” A week later, Webster wrote to his son-in-law William Fowler: “My great book seems to command a good deal of attention. Mr. Quincy, now president of Harvard, spent an hour with me on Thursday. He assures me the book will be well reviewed. Chancellor Kent writes me that the best judges of New York speak of it with the highest respect, and he has no doubt it will supersede Johnson. It is considered as a national work.” The timing was much better than for the “compend.” Americans had gotten used to the idea that Johnson’s day had come and gone. The public was also prepared to accept that Webster was not a wild innovator, as his critics had once charged. In April 1829, James L. Kingsley, a Yale Latin professor, wrote a fifty-page review in the North American Review, in which he concluded, “The proper effect of the author’s labors in the cause of the language of his country will not fail, sooner or later to be produced. . . . it will be seen in the more correct use of words, in the check which will be put on useful innovations. . . . in the increased respect . . . with which the author will be viewed.” However, this review by Kingsley—a Temple Street neighbor who had provided a blurb three years earlier—left a drained Webster, whose headaches still hadn’t gone away, disappointed. Right after reading it, he complained to Fowler, “This will probably satisfy my friends, but there are some differences between us and in some points the reviewer is certainly wrong. I believe however that I shall let it pass unnoticed.” As more positive feedback came in, Webster could afford to lie low. On May 29, 1829, he reported to Fowler from New York, “From the observations of many literary gentlemen and all I have seen, I find that public sentiment is pretty fully settled as to the substantial merits of my great book.”
The comprehensiveness of Webster’s American Dictionary was breathtaking. It contained seventy thousand words, some twelve thousand more than the 1818 version of Johnson edited by Henry John Todd. Webster succeeded in forever expanding the scope of the dictionary. After Webster, all English lexicographers felt duty-bound to capture the language not just of literature, but also of everyday life. According to Webster’s estimate, he added at least four thousand new scientific terms, including, for example, “phosphorescent” and “planetarium.” He also inserted hundreds of commonly used words—“savings-bank,” “eulogist,” “retaliatory,” “dyspeptic,” “electioneer” and “re-organize” all became official. However, his inclusiveness occasionally made readers squirm. Of “co-bishop,” one reviewer wrote, “We consider such a word . . . too vilely formed ever to be tolerated.” In perhaps his greatest contribution, Webster transformed definitions from little more than lists of synonymous terms to tightly knit mini-essays, which highlighted fine distinctions. Compare, for example, Webster and his predecessor on “ability”:
Johnson: The power to do any thing, depending on skill, riches or strength; capacity, qualification and power.
Webster: Physical power, whether bodily or mental; natural or acquired; force of understanding; skill in arts or science. Ability is active power, or power to perform, as opposed to capacity, or power to receive.
Webster was also the first lexicographer to turn his own examples into a central component of definitions. To explain morality, he noted, “We often admire the politeness of men whose morality we question.”
While Webster improved upon Johnson, he also borrowed liberally from his rival. Based upon an examination of both Webster’s copy of Johnson’s 1799 dictionary and the 1828 dictionary, scholar Joseph Reed concludes that about one-third of Webster’s definitions demonstrate the influence of Johnson. This figure includes a few direct transcriptions—sometimes without attribution—as well as numerous cases where Webster made slight alterations. Citing Reed’s research, critics have occasionally tried to downplay Webster’s achievement. But such attacks, which tend to be mounted by Johnsonians, are unwarranted. After all, as Reed concedes, “Borrowing—even plagiarism—is no sin to lexicographers.” Particularly in the days before committees assembled dictionaries, compilers often recycled the work of one another. Johnson, for example, borrowed heavily from his direct predecessor, Nathan Bailey, author of An Universal Etymological Dictionary, originally published in 1721. Moreover, Reed himself is also struck by the remarkable breadth and originality of Webster’s work, adding, “Webster did more than perhaps any other lexicographer to initiate the encyclopedic dictionary.”
Since his return from Europe, Webster had also reworked his dictionary to give it a purely American flavor. To broadcast his intentions, he slapped on a highly patriotic preface. While he still hoped to market the book in Britain—and was no longer the anti-English rebel of the speller—he wholeheartedly embraced the goal that had first motivated him nearly thirty years earlier: “It is not only important, but in a degree necessary, that the people of this country, should have an American Dictionary of the English Language; for although the body of the language is the same as in England, and it is desirable to perpetuate that sameness, yet some differences must exist. Language is the expression of ideas; and if the people of one country cannot preserve an identity of ideas, they cannot retain an identity of language.”
Citing Johnson’s famous phrase, “The chief glory of a nation arises from its authors,” Webster sought to celebrate America’s founders—Franklin, Washington, Adams, Jay, Madison, Hamilton and Marshall—as “pure models of genuine English.” He also felt it necessary to clarify the key terms of American politics. “The judges of the supreme court of United States,” read one of his examples, “have the power of determining the constitutionality of laws.” As in his speller a half century earlier, he also stuck in countless references to American locales. In the entry for the verb “view,” which he defined as “to survey,” he alluded to a favorite spot in western Massachusetts: “We ascended Mount Holyoke and viewed the charming landscape below.”
Webster’s “great book,” like that of his idol, was also part autobiography. Just as Samuel Johnson had expressed his feelings toward Lord Chesterfield by defining “patron” as “a wretch who supports with insolence, and is paid with flattery,” Webster also repeatedly dragged in incidents from his own life. In the definition for “embalm,” he alluded to his own devastating loss: “The memory of my beloved daughter is embalmed in my heart. N. W.” And under “when,” he recalled his near-meeting with Washington’s adopted son: “We were present when General Lafayette embarked at Havre for New York.” Likewise, to illustrate the familiar meaning of “absent”—“not at home”—Webster mentioned an excuse that he himself often resorted to: “The master of the house is absent. In other words, he does not wish to be disturbed by company.” While Webster didn’t prescribe the right way to use language, he did prescribe the right way to live. The definitions frequently had a didactic tone that reflected Webster’s values, particularly his Christian faith. Under “seducer,” Webster opined, “The seducer of a female is a little less criminal than the murderer”; and under “seduction,” he volunteered some homespun advice: “the best safeguard is principle, the love of purity and holiness, the fear of God and reverence for his commands.”
While Webster’s Synopsis was not appended to the dictionary as he had hoped, his dubious etymological ideas made an occasional appearance. As in his “compend,” he insisted on some archaic Anglo-Saxon spellings, such as “bridegoom” for “bridegroom.” Though the former term is closer to the Anglo-Saxon “brideguma,” this entry struck most readers as ridiculous. Citing this example, Britain’s Westminster Review, which considered Webster’s work “one of a very important character,” accused him of having “a few words in which he is very adventurous in his orthography.” In a handful of entries, Webster also left in incomprehensible references to the unpublished Synopsis. Under the verb “heat,” in a long paragraph of fanciful etymology which came before the definition, Webster noted, “See Class Gd. No 39, and others. It may be further added that in W[elsh] cas is hatred, a castle, from the sense of separating; casau, to hate; and if this is of the same family, it unites castle with the foregoing words.” Such “choice sentences” led another British periodical, The Quarterly Review, to issue one of the few pans, “There is everywhere a great parade of erudition and a great lack of real knowledge.” But most Americans were forgiving of the lexicographer’s odd notions. In 1829, the Norwich Courier observed, “Noah Webster, thinking that molasses ‘by any other name would taste as sweet,’ has in his new Dictionary spelt it Melasses. Notwithstanding this high authority, it is extremely questionable whether any Yankee can be made to swallow such a word with hasty pudding.”
Webster suddenly commanded respect from America’s literati, who had long abused him. Both financial security and lionization were soon to follow. In a speech at Yale, his old friend James Kent, the former chief justice of the New York State Supreme Court, compared his dictionary to the Parthenon and the pyramids of Egypt. Webster will, Kent declared, “transmit his name to the latest posterity. It will dwell on the tongues of infants as soon as they have learned to lisp their earliest lessons. . . . This Dictionary and the language which it embodies, will also perish; but it will . . . only go with the solemn temples and the great globe itsel f.” In a letter to Harriet, Webster dismissed Kent’s remarks on his “great book” as “flights of imagination,” but he savored every drop of praise.
12
“More Fleshy Than Ever Before”
FLESHY, adj. 1. Full of flesh; plump; musculous. The sole of his foot is fleshy. Ray. 2. Fat; gross; corpulent; as a fleshy man.
On October 29, 1829, the seventy-one-year-old Webster and his wife celebrated their “great anniversary.” “Forty years ago today,” Rebecca wrote that afternoon to Eliza, then living in Greenfield, Massachusetts, “your father and I joined our hands in marriage, and I will venture to say, few have jogged on together more harmoniously.” To mark the occasion, Rebecca prepared a roast turkey and a host of desserts, including Webster’s favorite, custard. Harmony would continue to prevail in the Webster family, which eventually consisted of more than three dozen grandchildren, but it typically came at the expense of catering to the aging patriarch’s wishes. Webster made sure that the entire family continued to revolve around him. While his two sons-in-law, William Fowler and Chauncey Goodrich, along with his son, William, helped him manage his vast publishing empire, he never gave them any real authority. “We are treated like boys and girls,” Emily, his eldest, once complained to Harriet. And whenever someone in the family struck out on his own, Webster became uncomfortable. In April 1838, when it became clear that William Ellsworth was to be elected Connecticut’s governor, Webster joked with Emily, “We shall treat you just as we used to do, and we shall often mistake and call your husband Mr. Ellsworth.”
In 1837, Emily Webster (1790-1861) published a book of short stories, Wild Flowers. That year, her father wrote to her, “Only think. NW’s eldest daughter commenced authoress. It stands you in hand to write pretty well, because the public will expect it.”
