8

The “Common Thief”

A more formidable challenge than Cobb to Webster’s kingdom came in the shape of new dictionary competition from Worcester, who posed a more serious and permanent threat to both the success of Webster’s books and his place in American history. Far more than Cobb, whom Webster found it relatively easier to dismiss, Worcester would unintentionally haunt and anger Webster for the rest of his life. It was well known across the country that Worcester was a solid and reliable scholar with powerful Harvard and Boston friends, who had dared to venture onto Webster’s turf and offer an exceedingly strong lexicographical alternative to the American public.

Bruised from Cobb’s campaign against him and increasingly paranoid over criticism and competition, Webster deeply resented Worcester’s intrusion into his lexicographical domain through his editing of the Goodrich octavo. From that time onward, he nursed a private grievance against him that threatened to go public. Worcester had inadvertently made an enemy and would soon rue the day he had given in to Converse and Goodrich. He was made to feel that the $2,000 he had earned from revising the octavo were sin’s wages. As far as he was concerned, and as we shall see, the money became pitifully small compensation for the adversity it would cause him.

Even more disturbing to Webster than the Goodrich octavo was the Boston publication in 1830 of Worcester’s first full-fledged bid for America’s lexicographical attention, A Comprehensive Pronouncing and Explanatory Dictionary of the English Language. It was a small dictionary intended to be purchased by schools for their students. A second edition followed promptly in 1831, and another in 1835. Soon after its publication in 1830, Robley Dunglison, the first professor of medicine at the University of Virginia and personal physician to Thomas Jefferson, went on record in the American Monthly Review regarding the dictionary’s utilitarian value, especially its medical terms: “I can, without hesitation, award to this Dictionary the merit of being best adapted to the end in view of any I have examined. It is, in other words, the best portable pronouncing and explanatory dictionary that I have seen, and as such is deserving of very extensive circulation.” A few years later, the Common School Journal (founded and edited by Horace Mann, the brother-in-law of Nathaniel Hawthorne and progressive champion of the common school movement—public schools with a wider curriculum and more nurturing environment than traditional schools of the time) praised the 1835 edition, as the dictionary historian Eva Mae Burkett explains, for “the number of words, on the inclusion of the imperfect and past participle forms of the verbs, on its lists of words of doubtful orthography, and on its pronouncing vocabularies of proper names.” Apart from Webster’s quarto, Worcester’s was up to then the most reliable modern dictionary of English in existence, by an American lexicographer or anyone else. When Webster saw it, he recognized it as a formidable competitor that risked throwing his world into disarray. “His book will probably injure the sales of mine,” he wrote. A school edition competing with Webster’s unabridged quarto would be like David facing Goliath, but Webster had a newfound fear of Worcester, and the threat from the latter at this early stage of the dictionary wars seemed to him very real.¹

FIGURE 6.  Joseph Emerson Worcester, Webster’s great dictionary rival. His picture never appeared in his dictionaries published in America; it was included in a London edition after his death. Courtesy of Indiana State University Special Collections, Cordell Collection of Dictionaries.

FIGURE 7.  Title page of Joseph Emerson Worcester’s Comprehensive Pronouncing and Explanatory Dictionary of the English Language, 1830. Courtesy of Indiana State University Special Collections, Cordell Collection of Dictionaries.

2

The first thing to notice about Worcester’s dictionary is the author’s generous acknowledgment in his preface of Webster’s pioneering work a couple of years earlier: “a work of vast learning and research, containing far the most complete vocabulary of the language that has yet appeared, and comprising numerous and great improvements upon all works of the kind which preceded it, with respect to the etymology and definition of words.” He might have bitten his tongue when mentioning Webster’s etymology, and it is notable he does not mention Webster’s system of orthography or orthoepy; instead, he provides his own tables of comparative pronunciation, as well as “A Vocabulary of Words of Doubtful or Various Orthography.” With forty-three thousand entry words—six thousand more, he makes a point of stating, than Walker’s Critical Pronouncing Dictionary, editions of which had recently been published in the United States—Worcester’s dictionary claims to have added many new entry words never before included in a dictionary, quite a few of them drawn from a wide range of professions and sciences. It excludes, however, according to Worcester, many obsolete words and words of passing novelty that he thought might corrupt youth and mislead his general readership into thinking they were acceptable and had a future.

Webster complained to his son-in-law Fowler as early as November 1830 that although his dictionary contained about the same number of entry words as Worcester’s, Worcester had inflated his list by including, in fact, far too many obsolete words like abalienate, abative, abature, abearance, and abregation—all inappropriate for a book that would find its way into classrooms. He repeated that charge in another letter to Fowler on April 20, 1831: “These are copied from dictionaries but are not in use and ought not to be inserted even in a larger work unless for antiquaries.” Still, Worcester’s book was lean and therefore inexpensive, another annoyance for Webster, who recognized, of course, that a lower price meant higher sales. Worcester’s definitions were also dramatically concise, and they lacked etymology, but Worcester insisted they were as “comprehensive and exact as could be reasonably expected from the size of the volume.” And cogent, even abrupt, they certainly are. The five definitions, for example, cited earlier (chapter 4, section 9; chapter 6, section 1) from Webster’s 1828 quarto and Worcester and Goodrich’s octavo revision, respectively, are even shorter in Worcester: education: “bringing up, nurture”; marriage: “The act of uniting a man and woman for life; wedlock; matrimony; purpose: “intention; design; effect”; war: “public contest; open hostility”; woman: “an adult female of the human race.” Not weighed down by etymology, illustrative quotations, mystifying diacritics, and synonyms, their simplicity is just what young students needed.²

What Webster found especially galling about Worcester’s book was its emphasis on pronunciation and its purported “comprehensive” range with so many citations from eighteenth-century orthoepists, implying that Webster’s (among others) might be less so. Worcester did, and always would, particularly emphasize and document pronunciation, and in so doing demonstrated his undiminishing dependence on past English lexicographers. Whereas Webster went out of his way to distance himself from English lexicographers, maintaining that consulting them brought only chaos, not clarity, Worcester let them have major voices in his treatment of pronunciation, even providing tables comparing all of their pronunciations of words. Webster believed he had made a major contribution to the American language by lending his voice to the need for a national consensus about how words should be pronounced—to avoid the kind of widespread confusion that was rampant in Britain and found intolerable even in America. It was on that point that Webster, in the minds of readers, had the better idea: he was in favor of simplicity in the system of showing pronunciation, avoiding as much as possible these “ill-looking vocables,” as the lexicographer Charles Richardson had put it, and a multitude of diacritical marks. Worcester, on the other hand, favored consulting numerous English orthoepists and providing a more complicated (at least for the reader) system of notations. And yet here was Worcester, Webster grumbled, writing that he had made pronunciation “his leading object” and given it “special attention”: making a virtue of diversity, carefully recording variant pronunciations, and citing some twenty-six dictionaries and other sources for pronunciation in a discriminating and nuanced manner. Webster thought his rival’s treatment of pronunciation was retrogressive. Worcester’s system of notation, Webster protested, “goes to frustrate my plan of uniformity”: one of his own “chief objects had been to banish complicated schemes of notation. . . .” Worcester’s galaxy of past orthoepists, on the other hand, amounted to a survey of past British lexicography: Sheridan, Walker, Perry, Jones, Bailey, Johnson, Kenrick, Entick, Nares, and many others, “besides our own countryman Dr. Webster.” The battle lines between the two men were being drawn, and Webster was drawing them.³

FIGURE 8.  A sample page from Worcester’s 1830 dictionary, which favored a more complicated system of notations than Webster’s dictionaries provided. Detail: The definition of editor is significantly shorter than in Webster’s 1828 dictionary. Courtesy of Indiana State University Special Collections, Cordell Collection of Dictionaries.

3

For several years after Worcester’s dictionary appeared, Webster was distracted by the copyright bill passing through Congress and the completion of his new, revised edition of the Bible (based on the King James Version), The Holy Bible, Containing the Old and New Testaments, in the Common Version with Amendments of the Language (1833). He set out chiefly to banish words and phrases he thought were offensive, especially to youth and in polite company: “phrases very offensive to delicacy, and even to decency.” “Language which cannot be uttered in company without a violation of decorum or the rules of good breeding,” he writes, “exposes the scriptures to the scoffs of unbelievers, impairs their authority, and multiplies or confirms the enemies of our holy religion.” Fornication becomes lewdness, for example; putrefy becomes offensive; stink is replaced by odious (which is now an adjective), sucked by nursed; and whore by lewd woman. In certain places, he seems to have had something against the word womb, for “took me out of the womb” (Psalms 22) becomes “brought me forth into life”; and “grow in the womb” becomes simply “conception” (Ecclesiastes 11); elsewhere, he left the word alone. Along the same lines, “the young one that cometh out from between her feet” is simplified to, “her own offspring.” Such changes, known as the bowdlerization of a text, were all the rage in early-nineteenth-century America, especially after the appearance of The Family Shakespeare, an expurgated edition edited by Henrietta Maria Bowdler and long attributed to her brother, Thomas Bowdler, in 1807. Webster’s own distaste for Shakespeare’s “vulgar” language and his care to exclude it from his dictionaries was in step with his edition of the Bible and, more generally, this kind of policing of the language.

With this sort of attention to the Bible, Webster was also in step with the early-nineteenth-century Protestant evangelical “Second Great Awakening” and the religious landscape of the country. The insightful French observer of American manners and thought, Alexis de Tocqueville, was especially struck by this in his travels in America. He writes in Democracy in America (1835; chap. 17), “In the United States the sovereign authority is religious. . . . [T]here is no country in the world where the Christian religion retains a greater influence over the souls of men than in America.” Whether or not it was true, as he claims, that “Americans pursue a peculiar form of worship, from habit more than from conviction,” the centrality of religion to American culture was abundantly clear to both the foreign visitor and to Americans.

But for Webster his biblical detour was more than purely a religious experience. While he felt it was the culmination of his religious conversion twenty-five years earlier, he also envisioned a clear link between this new work on the Bible and his lifelong efforts in behalf of the American language: both sought to educate and inform and were written for a public seeking authority. The dictionary for Webster was in effect a “Bible,” meant for an American public that read dictionaries for all sorts of wisdom and knowledge in a nation given to “lexicographicolatry” (meaning the reverence for dictionary authority that verges on idolatry).⁴ Indeed, to some degree the dictionary today still is often thought of as a secular counterpart to the Bible, as one dictionary historian, Lynda Mugglestone, recently frames it: “[P]opular opinion tends to invest the word of the lexicographer with some of the same power as the Word of God—so much so that the dictionary and the Bible are often perceived as twin and (equally incontestable) sources of authority, one secular and the other divine. . . .” “The interplay between the pen and the pulpit,” in another critic’s words, that was an instinctual and deep-rooted characteristic of Webster’s intellect, was of course far more common in his day than it is now: “In a world where men of letters were often also men of the cloth . . . it can be no surprise that the wordbooks acquired (and still retain for many today) a quality of Holy Writ . . . especially when the Bible was one of the main reasons for learning to read.”⁵

Webster at first did not want to respond to Worcester’s new dictionary. He lacked health, concentration, will, and (he believed) time to bother about it except to write disgruntled letters to family and friends. “If the public most approve of my plan which is altogether more simple than his,” he wrote to Fowler, “then his notations will operate against his book.” Rather loftily, Webster asked, “When will truths, the sole object of learning, triumph over custom and prejudice?” He was convinced that Worcester “has borrowed much from my dictionary,” which was conduct “not less dishonourable nor immoral because it is common.” It is odd that with such a comment he could overlook his own heavy borrowing from Johnson.⁶

A few months later, after the passage of the copyright bill and his return to New Haven from Washington, Webster was warming himself into a more proactive and militant frame of mind. The following April in a letter to Fowler he detailed several areas where he maintained Worcester had erred egregiously—a sign that he might have been preparing himself to make his “democratic” case to the general public:

— Introduction of words “not in use and some never used in our language”: Some of these that Worcester lists were and remain archaic; others were not and exist today in our lexicon, such as abactor, abalienate, abature, abregate.

— Insertion of Latin and Greek words that were in Webster’s view “improper,” not belonging in a dictionary about common usage: “[T]he insertion of Greek and Latin names in a small book for non-English schools appears to me useless—a great part of them are never seen by English readers. But of this every man will judge for himself.” Also, many of Worcester’s technical words such as acidulae, acroteria, agger, albugo, Alguazil, anamorphosis, and apogacum do not belong in school, or in any but technical, dictionaries: “If the work is intended to contain all technical words, it is deficient in many thousands—if not, there is no more reason for inserting these and hundreds of others, than there would be to take all the technical words in all the sciences.”

— “Omission of most of the participles of common English words,” which every reader wants, in order to accommodate words that only “merely English” readers want, such as adapting, adding, assessing, congregating, purifying, and travelling, among many hundreds, all of which are included in Webster’s 1828 quarto and none of which are in Worcester’s Comprehensive (1830). Worcester states in his preface that the exception to his rule was participles of irregular verbs.

— “Mistakes in definition.”

— Inclusion of words that “dandies use, and which are condemned”: “Thus both suit and suite are inserted—the same word in fact, but differently pronounced.”

— Worcester’s “difficult” and largely “useless” system of notation is extremely confusing to young people: “The mode of notation is very bad. It is difficult and a great part of it entirely useless. . . . Who wants a mark under a [in] the first letter [of] abandon or over a in the second syllable? . . . One of my chief objects is to banish the complicated schemes of notation of the British [orthoepists]. And in the British notices of my dictionary . . . my scheme is applauded.”

He adds that he regrets consenting, doubtless under pressure, to the insertion of “different modes of pronouncing many words” “in my octavo,” “which is used by adults,” but “Worcester’s method must be perplexing both to teachers and pupils, and it tends to keep the pronunciation forever unsettled”; it also strikes a blow against his mission of a uniform language for a unified nation. Webster does present pronunciation differently in his own school dictionary, more simply and less cluttered with diacritical marks.⁷

This would not be the last time Worcester was attacked for parading the English orthoepists throughout his dictionaries. It was an argument that was bound to resonate with the average reader and in the classroom, especially in “common,” or public, schools.

4

Once he had completed his edition of the Bible in 1833, and more than four years after Worcester had debuted his own dictionary, Webster’s simmering hostility erupted. At that time, his anger at Worcester, Goodrich, Converse, Cobb, Walker, Johnson, and sometimes seemingly all the world might have cooled had it not been for his continuing financial distress and fear he was being wangled out of the dictionary market. An article appeared in the November 26, 1834, issue of the Worcester Palladium newspaper (named for the Massachusetts city of publication and having nothing to do with Joseph Worcester), under the heading “Webster’s Dictionary,” ostensibly written by the newspaper’s editor but most likely written by Webster himself, accusing Worcester of “gross plagiarism” in his dictionary. The misprints in the piece suggest it might have been rushed into print. The article resembles advertising propaganda, but it is more venal than that. It is a nasty, personal attack maligning Worcester as a “common thief.” In it, Webster is cast in the role of the famed and deserving but financially unrewarded redeemer of the language.

Webster’s Palladium article marks the first time the quarrels between the two men had broken out into a public forum, the opening shot in the very public and confrontational dictionary and language wars between the two of them that lasted well beyond Webster’s death. It alerts the public to Worcester’s alleged methods and thefts, the first part of which needs to be quoted for a full appreciation of its acrid content:

A gross plagiarism has been committed by Mr. J. E. Worcester on the literary property of Noah Webster Esq. It is well known that Mr. Webster has spent a life, which is now somewhat advanced, in writing a dictionary of the English language, which he published in 1828, in two quarto volumes. Three abridgments have since been made; one in an octavo form—and two still smaller, for families and primary schools. To aid in the drudgery of producing these abridgments, Mr. Webster employed Mr. Worcester who, after becoming acquainted with Mr. Webster’s plan, immediately set about appropriating to his own benefit the valuable labors, acquisitions, and productions of Mr. Webster. He has since published a dictionary, which is a very close imitation of Webster’s; and which, we regret to learn, has been introduced into many of the primary schools of the country. We regret this, because the public, inadvertently, do an act of great injustice to a man who has rendered the country an invaluable service, and ought to recieve [receive] the full benefit of his labors.

The article continues by returning to the theme of copyright: “If we had a statute which could fix its grasp on those who pilfer the products of the mind, as readily as our laws embrace the common thief, Mr. Worcester would hardly escape with a light mulct. At all events, before people buy his wares, they would do well to inquire how he came by them.” The personal emotion in this passage, its detail and tone of self-pity and arrogance over Worcester’s alleged effrontery, and its insulting phrasing were so poorly disguised that readers familiar with Webster’s writings or the man himself might easily have identified him as its author, not some editor prevailed upon to publish it as written by himself.⁸

After that opening salvo, the article parades the virtues of Webster’s quarto, the chief theme of which (as in many of Webster’s letters during these years) was that since Webster had done so much work and spent so much of his money on the dictionary, he had a unique and indisputable claim on “the patronage of Americans”: “His works have been produced only by immense labor, expense, and personal sacrifice; indefatigable application to all the means which Europe, as well as America, could furnish for a perfect Dictionary of our language. . . . [A]nd should literary pilferers rob him of his pecuniary rights, they cannot rob him of his well-earned fame.” In both this attack and those that soon followed in the ensuing exchanges in the Palladium, Webster claims not merely a proprietary stake in the dictionary market but also that he was, as so often in the past, the hapless victim of conspiracy, exploitation, and misrepresentation. Plagiarism, at any rate, was at best a tenuous and difficult-to-prove accusation when talking about dictionaries.⁹

One wonders if at times like this he might have recalled his own remark a year earlier about the impression that something Samuel Johnson had written in the Rambler had made upon him in his youth: “Dr. Johnson well observes that to fear [Johnson wrote “dread”] no eye, to suspect no tongue is the great prerogative of innocence, an exemption granted only to invariable virtue. This remark of Dr. Johnson I committed to memory fifty-five years ago; it has had no inconsiderable influence in regulating my moral conduct.”¹⁰

The article was immediately countered, not by Worcester, who had not yet seen it, but by his friend Sidney Willard, the Hancock Professor of Hebrew and Other Oriental Languages at Harvard. Willard was the first to tell Worcester about it. Willard had struck at Webster before with an article in the North American Review in 1817, retaliating against Webster’s ill-natured “Letter” to John Pickering on the subject of Americanisms. More than a decade after Webster’s defamatory article appeared, Worcester told how Willard’s intervention came about: “At this time the Christian Register, published in Boston, was edited by Professor Sidney Willard, who happened to be as well acquainted with my lexicographical labors, and the circumstances relating to them, as almost any gentleman in the community; and he answered this (as he styled it) ‘ferocious attack’ in such a manner as he thought proper, before I had any knowledge that such an assault had been made.” Among his several arguments and refutations, Willard highlighted what he called Worcester’s practical, sane approach to lexicography: he never violated linguistic custom or prevalent usage, which determine “the laws of a language,” in the interest of innovation, speculation, persona, political and religious ideology, or whatever other distorting personal agenda might steal across a lexicographer’s radar. What was at stake here was Worcester’s credibility, which Willard chose to defend not only by elaborating Worcester’s personal and professional credibility and his solidity as a scholar but also by casting an oblique light on Webster’s excesses.¹¹

Worcester was not temperamentally suited to public controversies in the press. This letter, however, infuriated him. He could not remain silent. His response appeared in the Palladium on December 10. He begins by giving the editor the benefit of the doubt: “As you, Mr. Editor, are unknown to me, I am bound to believe that you were not aware that you were publishing a statement that is grossly false, but that you were informed that it was true. . . .” He quickly puts the record straight: “I, however, know it and declare it to be utterly false, and I have ample means of proving it to be so, before any impartial tribunal.” With a sharp look in the direction of Webster, he adds, “I know not on whose evidence you have relied, but I do know that whoever has made you believe the truth of the statement has grossly imposed on you.” He then tells the public with what authority and background he had come to write his own dictionary. He assures readers that he has no need or incentive to plagiarize Webster: “So far from appropriating the labors of Dr. Webster to my own use, I challenge any one to enumerate a dozen words in my Dictionary for which I cannot readily give other authorities than Dr. Webster, or to show that with respect to . . . orthography, or pronunciation of a dozen words, I have been governed solely or chiefly by his authority.” On the contrary, “I have the most extensive collection of works on English Lexicography that I know of in the possession of any individual, or in any single library; and I have been for a good while attentive to this sort of literature. This I say, not from ostentation, but to show that in preparing such a work as I have published, I have little occasion to be indebted to Dr. Webster.” In any case, his dictionary is “far from being ‘a close imitation’ of Dr. Webster’s. It differs widely in . . . the selection of words, and in the orthography of a considerable number of words; the notation is entirely different; and the pronunciation is treated in a very different manner.” He insists he never had laid eyes on the two “smaller” school dictionaries of Webster’s before his book was published, one of which, moreover, was published just before his dictionary and one in 1833, no fewer than three years afterward. If called upon, he has “ample means of showing that I came as lawfully by my materials as Dr. Webster did by his.” Worcester does not in this instance actually call Webster a liar or attack his dictionary, or use the occasion to advertise his own. He leaves it to Webster to decide if he was going to wade more deeply into such perilous waters.¹²

He did not have long to wait for an answer. One week later, on December 17, Webster replied in the Palladium with a short note to the editor stating that back in March 1831 he had asked Worcester outright whether he had borrowed “many” definitions and words from his dictionary, to which Worcester had replied on March 25, “not many.” That was the opening Webster had been looking for. He interpreted it as an admission of guilt, snidely adding that Worcester’s dictionary would have been “less defective and more correct” if he had borrowed more. Oddly, perhaps showing his age somewhat, or his lack of ready access to dictionaries in order to check the accuracy of his claims, Webster maintained there was no question Worcester had borrowed some words and definitions from him because these were not to be found in other dictionaries. In fact, virtually all of them could be found in several other dictionaries. Perhaps Worcester thought the charge was not worth dignifying with an answer, but those who were familiar with Webster’s disposition could have told him that more of this same sort of splenetic attack was bound to follow.¹³

Worcester’s Christmas cheer—what was left of it after this flare-up—surely was spoiled on December 24 by another editorial attack in the Palladium. It opens with a glancing reference to Sidney Willard and others from “the charmed circle of Harvard College” who predictably might rise to Worcester’s defense. The editorial then recklessly asserts that because Worcester had published his dictionary shortly after completing Goodrich’s octavo revision, he “undoubtedly” had pilfered some twenty-one words that it alleges were not to be found in any other dictionaries. Since this list was compiled from only “a cursory review” of Worcester’s dictionary, the editorial maintains, there had to be many more besides. It also accuses Worcester of incompleteness because of the many words in Webster’s tome that are not in his dictionary. The editorial concludes by proclaiming that Webster’s dictionary is now a “standard work,” widely used by members of Congress (“not always the best judges,” it concedes), and that “the current of public opinion is in its favor.” It assures readers it has “not a particle of personal interest” in whose dictionary is better or which will ultimately be accepted as the nation’s “standard.” What does concern the author of the editorial is “that the products of the mind, which have been garnered up with unwearied and long-continued toil, should be pillaged and appropriated to their own use by ‘eleventh-hour’ laborers.”¹⁴

5

Webster came out into the open with a signed letter in the Palladium on January 25, 1835, addressed directly to Worcester. In it, he expands the list of 21 words in the Christmas editorial to 121, “which prima facie would seem to have been taken from my dictionary.” This is only a random collection, he emphasizes, drawn from less than one-tenth of Worcester’s book—at that rate there would be well over one thousand borrowings in the entire work. His list includes muskrat, obsidian, outlay, prayerful, prayerless, repealable, rock-crystal, safety-valve, savings-bank, semiannual, slump, souvenier, sparse, spinning-jenny, spry, squirm, succotash, tirade, tomato, volcanist, waffle, and wilt. Then comes the challenge: “to state in what other dictionary except mine, you found the foregoing words, and how many or which you borrowed from mine.” That challenge was just what Worcester wanted to hear. It gave him an opening to confront Webster directly and refute these accusations once and for all. His reply begins with the observation that as a lawyer Webster ought to know the burden of proof rests with the accuser, not the accused. Nonetheless, he will respond to Webster’s “unreasonable” demand “cheerfully” and “uprightly and faithfully” even in the face of his slander. Hinting that Webster has been lurking in the shadows of the Palladium’s editorials, he is “gratified” that he has finally broken cover: “[T]hough I have no love of contention, yet if I must be dragged into a newspaper controversy in defence of myself in this matter, I should prefer that, of all men in the world, it should be with yourself, writing under your own name.”¹⁵

Webster would prove to be an easy target because he was less familiar with other dictionaries than the author of a dictionary ought to have been. Worcester devotes his entire letter to explaining the sources of his word list, and although he does it politely, he also implies Webster’s incompetence and lapse in concentration:

You evidently supposed, Sir, that none of the words in your list were to be found in any Dictionary that was published before the appearance of your own work; but I confess I am somewhat surprised at this fact, inasmuch as, from your reputation as a lexicographer, it might naturally be supposed that you were extensively acquainted with works of this sort, and especially with the works which are so well known to all persons who have any just pretensions to much knowledge of this kind of literature, as are the several publications which I shall name.

“I shall not go out of my own library,” he adds, “or mention any work that I was not in the habit of consulting in preparing my Dictionary.”

He informs Webster (and the public) that of the allegedly purloined entry words he found twenty-one in Nathan Bailey’s Dictionarium Britannicum (1730), thirty-five in John Ash’s New and Complete Dictionary of the English Language (1775), thirty-seven in his own edition of Todd-Johnson (“published before the appearance of yours”), twenty-one in Pickering’s Vocabulary (1816), and about sixty in the Encyclopedia Americana and Sir David Brewster’s New Edinburgh Encyclopaedia (1807–30) combined. This is not counting the entry words he found in no fewer than fifty other English dictionaries and glossaries in his library. He goes on: “Of your one hundred and twenty-one words, six or seven are not to be found, so far as I can discover, in your Quarto Dictionary, and one of them is one of those three thousand words which are contained in Todd’s Johnson’s Dictionary, but are not to be found in your great work, and which were inserted by me in the octavo abridgment of your Dictionary.”

It is as logical to conclude from all this, Worcester tells Webster, “that you have not seen, or at least have not carefully examined, many British Dictionaries, as it would [be] to infer, with respect to a list of words, that because you do not know of their existence in British Dictionaries, they must, therefore, have been taken from yours; for it appears sufficiently evident that there may be words in British Dictionaries that you are not aware of.” Moreover, since Webster seems to have overlooked other sources as well, “it would not appear very wonderful, if I were able to find the few remaining words without any assistance from your labors.” On top of that, in his dictionary Webster has cited authorities for only 39 of his 121 words, while “I can, without going out of my own library, furnish authorities, in all cases different from yours, for upwards of a hundred of them”—and that included American terms and expressions, and words describing American life, such as chowder, clapboard, Congregationalist, grandjury, griddle, land-office, moccason (i.e., moccasin), pappoose (i.e., papoose), spring-jenny, and winter-kill.

No entry word is Webster’s exclusive property, Worcester continues, simply because it appears only in his dictionary; it belongs “to all who write and speak the language, to be used by them on all proper occasions.” He gives as an example in Webster’s list, semi-annual, not found in any other dictionary, “yet you cannot doubt that I was familiar with this word before your Dictionary was published; and as I have had occasion to use it repeatedly in my other publications, I thought myself authorized to insert it also in my Dictionary.” Only the words that Webster has himself coined or re-spelled, like canail, ieland, and nightmar, is he entitled to call his own, but that is no problem, Worcester cannot resist saying with—one imagines—a wry smile at Webster’s spelling reforms, for “it has been my intention scrupulously to avoid them, as being your own property . . . being willing you should for ever have the entire and exclusive use of them.” As for words in his dictionary but not Webster’s, Webster is welcome to slip them into his dictionary any time he wishes, since they all have “the sanction of respectable usage.” Worcester then ends by asking a loaded question, which he puts in italics: Would Webster “be so good as to inform me whether the charges against me in the Worcester Palladium were occasioned by any statements made by you, or whether you had ever made, or are now prepared to make, any such statements.” In the middle of all this, Worcester noticed his eyesight had begun to fail him, which was aggravated by the tense and pressured effort to defend himself. It was out of character for him to challenge an author like this in the public press, and he could only hope that his letter ended the matter.

Webster was never a man to back off from a fight. The feisty seventy-six-year-old struck back quickly just a week later. The entry words seemed to have led to an embarrassing dead end, so he returns to Worcester’s other alleged thefts, his definitions, and to his notations, which he maintained were bound to “unsettle the pronunciation, which in this country [unlike in Britain], has long been undisputed”—an astonishing contention. All of this “shows how improper it was for you to meddle with my books”—that is, in editing the octavo. Five years of pent-up resentment over that octavo now surface very publicly as he makes a pitch to win the public’s emotional sympathy with his stock recitation of how hard he had worked: “My quarto Dictionary cost me about twenty years labor and twenty thousand dollars. For this labor and such an expense I could never receive remuneration, had the market been left open.—How unkind then was it for you, who had been intrusted with the task of making an abridgment, and been well rewarded for it, to sit down and introduce some of my improvements into a book of your own compilation. . . . Now, Sir, rather than treat you in this manner, I would beg my bread.” He defends his pronunciation and spelling reforms, calling himself, not Worcester, the true American lexicographer with a “duty” to perform: “I have thought and I still think it the duty of the lexicographer [to] correct such palpable mistakes, and not to follow implicitly the English books. Whether the corrections shall be received or not I shall be satisfied that I have done my duty.” “If, in regard to the use you have made of my books, in your compilation,” he finishes sarcastically, “your mind is quite at ease, long may you enjoy it.”¹⁶

Webster had conjured up new charges in this last letter that Worcester could not ignore. In March, four long months after this controversy first rocked his scholarly and tranquil life, Worcester took the fight again to his antagonist. He begins by reminding readers that when he first joined this quarrel he stated openly he had nothing to fear from being “thoroughly investigated” and that since then he has “not met with an individual who has intimated an opinion that any thing wrong has been proved against me.” In a way, he notes, that is troubling, because it suggests “there must be something far from right elsewhere.” It bears thinking about because “it is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong,” and he feels that something in the Webster camp—or perhaps in Webster’s mind—must be amiss. He dares not speculate.

Still, he is not going to suffer in silence. Webster, he explains, had leveled three new charges against him: (1) he had used Webster’s definitions for words found in other dictionaries; (2) he had borrowed Webster’s rules of orthography; and (3) on every page of his book he had cited Webster’s authority on pronunciation. As for the first two, they are charges made “without proof,” and he warns Webster that any further efforts to substantiate them “will be found as ineffectual as have been similar attempts which have been made.” Any cursory look at his dictionary will reveal that he had made ample use of Johnson and Walker but had “little occasion to be indebted to you for rules or orthography which I adopted.” There is abundant evidence that, for better or for worse, “I decided independently of your authority.” He had not referred to Webster on every page but had indeed done so “in a great part of the pages” along with a long line of the most eminent English orthoepists—Sheridan, Walker, Entick, Sir William Jones, and William Perry, to name but a few: “I thought it was treating you with respect to do so, and never dreamed it would displease you. If I had known that you would rather be entirely omitted, I should have been inclined to act accordingly.”¹⁷

Worcester could be forgiven for thinking again that Webster was damning him both for at times following his rules of pronunciation and for ignoring them and thus “unsettling” the language by citing English authorities. For Webster to complain that Worcester had cited him mainly because he might in subsequent editions change his mind about the orthography and orthoepy is curiously inept. Webster had already been witheringly criticized for his unreliable orthography, notwithstanding his valued contribution to the spelling reform of certain classes of words. The obstacle Worcester could never surmount, however, nor perhaps ever fully understand, was that Webster was not inclined to allow his status in America to be eclipsed even partially by sharing the spotlight with the leading lexicographers and linguists in the history of the English language. That most of them were English did not help matters. That obsessiveness perhaps was the elusive key to Webster’s complex persona that Worcester sensed was “far from right.”

Before dropping the subject for what he hoped was the last time, Worcester returns to his blunt, unanswered question in his previous letter: Had Webster “occasioned” the editorial remarks in the Palladium that actually started this dictionary war? Webster had chosen “to dodge the question,” and at the same time was appealing “to the public sympathy under the pretense of having been injured.”

Needing desperately to have the last word, Webster sent one more tired short letter, more like a note, to the Palladium, but not to answer that question. Instead, he repeats his charge about the definitions, using the word clapboard as an example. Webster maintains he was the first to include that entry word, that it does not appear in any previous dictionary, either in America or England. Worcester could easily have replied, but did not, that he got the word from Pickering’s Vocabulary, who took it from Webster’s Compendious Dictionary. He would have had more trouble refuting Webster’s assertion that he (Worcester) copied the word’s definition verbatim from Webster. Webster’s comparison of his definition, “a thin narrow board for covering houses,” with Worcester’s, “a thin narrow-board for covering houses,” does suggest that Worcester took the definition verbatim from Webster. But it could be equally argued that since a clapboard is indeed a narrow piece of wood used to cover houses, those are the words, in that order, anyone might reasonably have used in a definition. Johnson had written in Rambler no. 143, “all definitions of the same thing must be nearly the same.” Clapboard, in fact, does illustrate the difficulty in tracing borrowings from dictionary to dictionary, and that it is futile and senseless to accuse fellow lexicographers of excessive types of borrowing when any single dictionary historically is a blend of several other dictionaries.¹⁸

Like most newspaper controversies, the Palladium skirmish concluded without either man emerging as a clear winner. And like many sensationalist newspaper controversies stirred up by journalists to increase their circulation, it did little more than damage the reputations of both Worcester and Webster. It commanded a good deal of attention among the literati, university professors, the cultured classes, and anyone interested in the progress of the language and role of dictionaries in the young nation, but it was not particularly edifying. For Worcester it was a huge distraction; for Webster, another convenient way to strike out at those who presumed to compete with him, have the temerity to question his destiny as America’s language savior, or disagree with his reforms and his view of the history of the English language.

One major beneficial effect of the controversy, however, was that the journalistic publicity of this skirmish inevitably raised the American consciousness of the role lexicographers were beginning to play in American society. While the Palladium quarrel itself did not reveal much about the authority of dictionaries per se in America in 1834–35—how they related to usage, for example, or what it meant, or could mean, for a dictionary to be the “standard” for a country in the lexicographical areas of spelling, pronunciation, etymology, and meaning, or in definitions of what it meant to be an American—it alerted the American public to the complicated identity and role of the individual lexicographers. That happened in these pages of the Palladium for the first time in a forceful, personal, psychologically revealing manner. These lexicographers were fighting, not about commercial gain but over how they saw themselves, and wished the public to see them, as serving the public. And the intensity of the controversy enabled the public to recognize the importance to the lexicographers, and to itself, of what was involved and why the issues raised mattered so much to everyone. Dictionaries belonged to everyone, and what they contained was important to society. Perhaps the key phrase in the heated exchange was Worcester’s, when he said that no entry word belongs to any one lexicographer, or (by implication) to one part of society more than another, or to one religion, or to one educational background: the language “belongs to all who write and speak the language.” Worcester is reminding the public that the work of a lexicographer, private, lonely, and personal as it is, is the property of everyone. From these points of view, the subtext of the Palladium exchange is ultimately about democracy. Something the English philosopher Edmund Burke remarked to Lord Berkeley in the late eighteenth century as he introduced “Elocution [John] Walker” to him, strikes this same universal note: “Mr. Walker, whom not to know . . . would argue want of knowledge of the harmonies, cadences, and proprieties of our language.” The Palladium controversy did not just open the first significant chapter of the dictionary wars between two men; it revealed to the public there were issues to be considered in the future that had not occurred to them so clearly before.¹⁹

6

Throughout the 1830s in Cambridge, Worcester quietly got on with his dictionaries and other reference works. The Palladium controversy had disturbed him and thrown him somewhat off balance, but it had not deterred him. He was in the race to stay. Just a few months after the Palladium clash, he came out with his Elementary Dictionary for the Common Schools with Pronouncing Vocabularies of Classical, Scripture, and Modern Geographical Names (1835; 2nd ed., 1843). It was a bold move by Worcester in a school market that Webster had sought to dominate. The Elementary Dictionary was a small (duodecimo), condensed version of his Comprehensive Dictionary in 350 pages and with forty-four thousand entry words, published by the Boston firm Jenks and Palmer. Jenks later would play his part in the fierce dictionary war that flared up between publishers. In his preface, Worcester explains how he had achieved such a compact book:

This work is substantially a reduced form of the “Comprehensive Dictionary,” and it has been brought to its present size by abridging a part of the definitions, by not retaining the notices of synonyms, and the various modes of pronunciation of words differently pronounced with their authorities annexed, and by the omission of most of such words as are obsolete or very rarely used, of many technical terms, and of some words from foreign languages. But notwithstanding these omissions, it contains a very full vocabulary of the common and well-authorized words of the language.²⁰

The book was inexpensive; sold well, as had most of his previous scholarship; and was reprinted in several editions until the 1850s. He also continued his editorship of the American Almanac and Repository of Useful Knowledge, a popular annual founded in 1830 by his friend and president of Harvard, Jared Sparks.

Worcester remained a wealthy and quiet bachelor during these years, eventually moving in the late 1830s to large rented rooms in the three-story Craigie “mansion” (built in 1759 and now the Longfellow House) on Brattle Street in Cambridge. Brattle Street was the handsome and expensive street known as “Tory Row” because most of the houses on the street before the Revolutionary War had been owned by British Loyalists forced to leave the country. The Craigie house had already become famous because George Washington adopted it as his headquarters during the Siege of Boston in 1775. The owner of the house, Andrew Craigie, the first apothecary general of the American army, had died in 1819, leaving his wife in debt and compelled to take in boarders.

When Worcester moved into the house, another tenant was the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, then a recent widower who had taken up the position at Harvard of Smith Professor of Modern Languages and Belles Lettres. In a journal recording his experiences at Craigie House, Longfellow remembered when Worcester arrived: “The next tenant of the vacant rooms was Mr. Worcester the geographer and lexicographer, who [later] purchased an undivided quarter of the estate—a tall, lean, crooked man, very slow of speech. He never gave a direct answer to any question put to him. He was then a forlorn bachelor, but has since been married and built himself a house near the island. At Mrs. Craigie’s death in 1841 he became the chief tenant of the house and lands. He was fond of gardening and took pride in pears and wring-necked squashes.” Longfellow also mentioned that when some poplar trees along Brattle Street showed some signs of dying, Worcester had them pruned so severely that they all died. Other boarders from time to time included three presidents of Harvard—Jared Sparks, Edward Everett, and Josiah Quincy—so in Craigie House Worcester found himself living more closely within the world of the higher reaches of Harvard.²¹

FIGURE 9.  Longfellow House, Brattle Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Joseph Emerson Worcester and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow were fellow boarders in the house until the 1840s, when Longfellow purchased the house and Worcester built his own grand house next door. Worcester sometimes complained mildly about his neighbor’s noisy children. Courtesy of National Park Service, Longfellow House–Washington’s Headquarters, National Historic Site.

In 1841, his life changed: at the age of fifty-seven, the “forlorn bachelor,” as Longfellow called him, married Amy Elizabeth McKean, thirty-nine-year-old daughter of the late Boylston Professor of Rhetoric, Oratory, and Elocution at Harvard, Joseph McKean, the founder of Harvard’s exclusive Porcellian Club. Amy Elizabeth and her father had been living in Fay House, which he owned, down the road from Craigie House, which later became part of Radcliffe College. When McKean died in Havana in 1818, where he had fled for his health, Amy Elizabeth had continued to live in Fay House for several years, teaching and administering a school in the building. Worcester had courted her for six years, getting to know her perhaps at popular social evenings at Fay House attended by several members of the Harvard faculty like Edward Everett and Longfellow and others, including Oliver Wendell Holmes and James Russell Lowell.

“My friend and fellow lodger Mr. Worcester is about making a rush into the Elysian Fields of matrimony,” Longfellow wrote, “thereby illustrating the great doctrine of the Perseverance of the Saints. He has been for six years looking over that fence with longing eyes; and has at last cleared the ditch at a leap, and to all appearances is revelling in clover.”²² With a new wife, Worcester needed to leave Craigie House, so when the Craigie land came up for sale, he bought thirty-two acres of it, including a large adjacent plot on the west side of the house containing a long, picturesque pond, which because of his presence there came to be known by its local name, Dictionary Lake. He immediately began to build his “mansion,” a grand, sprawling house—too big, in fact, for just him and his wife—in a modified Greek Revival style. He and Amy Elizabeth continued to rent their quarters in Craigie House until their house was completed. Longfellow’s new father-in-law, Nathan Appleton, meanwhile purchased and gave Craigie House to Longfellow. His wife, Fanny Appleton, wrote in May 1844, the “Worcester family left us in complete possession, with rooms nicely cleaned, and uncarpeted stairs and entries.” Worcester and his bride lived in their new home for the rest of their lives.²³

Life, therefore, was looking better than ever to Worcester. Married life and his new house clearly suited him. Amy Elizabeth was ready and willing to help him with his work in any way she could. He felt settled as never before and was about to enter a highly productive stage in his professional life as an author and editor. In less than two years after he and Amy Elizabeth moved into their “mansion,” he would publish the most important dictionary of English in either America or England since Webster’s first 1828 edition.