Literature, American Style. Ezra Tawil
that—for all of his rhetoric of imposing order on chaos—some degree of linguistic confusion be allowed to remain. As a result of this conviction, Johnson finds any attempts to perfect the language dangerous in principle. In the preface to the dictionary, Johnson confesses to having once been tempted by the dream of a bolder and more comprehensive lexicographic achievement, which he compares to a fantasy of epic heroism: “When first I engaged in this work, I … pleased myself with a prospect of the hours which I should revel away in feasts of literature, the obscure recesses of northern learning, which I should enter and ransack, the treasures with which I expected every search into those neglected mines to reward my labour, and the triumph with which I should display my acquisitions to mankind.”111 But ultimately he chooses to deny himself these fantastical pleasures, which he calls “the dreams of a poet doomed at last to wake a lexicographer.”112 What he awakens to is the explicitly anti-utopian realization that “thus to persue perfection, was, like the first inhabitants of Arcadia, to chace the sun, which, when they had reached the hill where he seemed to rest, was still beheld at the same distance from them.”113 In the 1747 Plan, Johnson had already warned against those bearing such schemes of linguistic perfection: “There are, indeed, some who despise the inconveniencies [sic] of confusion, who seem to take pleasure in departing from custom, and to think alteration desirable for its own sake; and the reformation of our orthography, which these writers have attempted, should not pass without its due honours, but that I suppose they hold singularity its own reward, or may dread the fascination of lavish praise.”114
Now Johnson, to state the obvious, was not referring to Noah Webster (who was born the year after the Plan was published), but Webster would seem to be the kind of thinker Johnson cautioned against—those who “take pleasure in departing from custom” and “think alteration desirable for its own sake.” Was not departure from (British linguistic) custom his goal? Was not an “alteration” of British English regarded as an end in itself, and did he not settle specifically on “reformation of our orthography” as the means to that end? Beyond that, is there not more than a hint of the utopian in Webster’s wish that “the inhabitants of America can be brought to a perfect uniformity in the pronunciation of words” and in his explicit pursuit of “a perfect correspondence between the spelling and pronunciation”?115 The first thing we can infer from the seeming applicability of Johnson’s critique to his posthumous American successor is simply that Webster’s reforms must not have been so unprecedented. Those to whom Johnson referred in the lines above were, in a manner of speaking, the Noah Websters of the prior two centuries—men who, indeed, did so “despise the inconveniencies of confusion” that they proposed to correct irregularities through a comprehensive reform. Since one of my goals is to add nuance to a rather flattened historical narrative of a linguistic declaration of independence, a revolution against British orthographic authority, it is essential to understand this whole matter in its full cultural and historical context. And that entails reading backward from this transatlantic late eighteenth-century dispute to its much earlier English origins.
* * *
The story of modern spelling reform in English properly begins with the arrival of print in England in the late fifteenth century (William Caxton set up the first printing press in England in 1476).116 At this time, there was still nothing like a “generally recognized standard form of English speech, and only the beginnings of a standard orthography.”117 The new possibility of rapid reproduction and circulation of printed copies put more pressure on this problem than had the circulation of manuscripts.118 By and large, “printers of the early sixteenth century demonstrate little obvious interest in working towards a standardized orthography” (Salmon, “Orthography and Punctuation,” 27), which made them the targets of invective by commentators on the state of English spelling such as John Hart, who in 1551 noted “the divers vices and corruptions which use (or better abuse) mainteneth in our writing.”119 Vivian Salmon summarizes these “abuses” according to Hart, which include some of the same orthographic defects of which Webster would complain later: “Arguing that ‘vicious’ writing ‘bringeth confusion and uncertainte in the reading’ … he lists the major faults as ‘diminution,’ ‘superfluite,’ ‘the usurpation of one letter for another, by their confusible double powers,’ and ‘the mysplacing and disordering of them.’ ”120 By the end of the sixteenth century, “the ‘correct’ relationship between the spoken and the written word … occupied printers and grammarians alike.”121 This led to a period of “intense discussion” about “the lack of a standard orthography and the possibility of providing a more satisfactory one,”122 such as those proposed by Sir Thomas Smith in 1568, Hart in 1569, and William Bullokar in 1580. Some advocated the reform of spelling on phonetic lines, while others merely aimed for more consistency of any kind, regardless of the gap between spelling and pronunciation. Some called for a new or revised alphabet more capable of capturing English speech, while others (like Bullokar) opted for “the traditional alphabet with a great variety of diacritics.” In turn, these attempts also brought about strong counterarguments against spelling reform, such as those by John Caius and John Baret in 1574.123
The early modern phase of orthographic reform culminated with Richard Mulcaster’s 1582 treatise, Elementarie, which was “the first consistent attempt to codify and promulgate detailed rules for normalising and regularising traditional English spelling.”124 The work bears some comparison to that of Webster, not so much in the particulars of its suggestions for reform (Mulcaster opposed a purely phonetic spelling system) but in its general aspirations and its rhetorical tone. Driven “by his typically Renaissance esteem for the English language, and by his desire to bring it to the utmost perfection,”125 Mulcaster refused to yield to an acceptance of its faults or of the impossibility of correcting them; he argued instead that the language is “as readie to yeild to anie rule of Art, as anie other is”126—much as Webster would later claim in opposition to Johnson’s tolerance for irregularity. And in Webster’s famous claim that his is the “situation the most favorable for great reformations; and the present time is, in a singular degree, auspicious,”127 we see shades of Mulcaster’s assertion that every language has a moment in which it is “fittest to be made a pattern for others to follow” and that “such a period in the English tung I take this to be in our daies, for both the pen and the speche.”128
This Renaissance orthographic debate was enough in circulation by the 1590s that Shakespeare could mine it for satire in Love’s Labour’s Lost: in act 5, scene 1, the pedantic scholar Holofernes complains of the linguistic style of Don Armado, specifically castigating him for not actually pronouncing the b in doubt or debt as they are written:
He draweth out the thread of his verbosity finer
than the staple of his argument. I abhor such
fanatical phantasimes, such insociable and
point-devise companions; such rackers of
orthography, as to speak dout, fine, when he should
say doubt; det, when he should pronounce debt,—d,
e, b, t, not d, e, t: he clepeth a calf, cauf;
half, hauf; neighbour vocatur nebor; neigh
abbreviated ne. This is abhominable,—which he
would call abbominable … (lines 1750–59)
The real “racker of orthography” in this scene, of course, is Holofernes; though more accurately, it is orthoepy he places on the rack, by insisting that these graphemes be spoken. By having him do so, Shakespeare dramatizes the absurdity that can result from uttering words as they are written—particularly when, in the case of words like debt and doubt, the “b” is only present by virtue of historically recent attempts to reflect the Latin roots, debitum and dubitare, respectively.129 (Webster would respell “indebted” as “indeted.”) In other words, not only is the general linguistic practice being satirized here the exact counterpart of Johnson’s later suggestion that men ought to “speak as they write,” but these particular spellings are directly in line with the