9

Webster’s Decline

Webster had trouble moving on. Throughout the 1830s, he continued to fume about how the competition and his detractors had dimmed his star as a lexicographer and reduced the income from his decades of hard work. His large quarto dictionary never sold much, but his speller sold phenomenally well, and the Goodrich/Worcester octavo continued modestly to outsell Worcester’s Comprehensive Pronouncing and Explanatory Dictionary in the United States—except in regional markets such as metropolitan Boston. He realized no income from the octavo, however, because Goodrich got it all. He was unable to rid himself of the feeling he was essentially an outsider who had to scrap for every advantage and recognition. What he felt he needed more than anything else, apart from money, was to get back in the game, to prepare a new edition of the quarto that would contain all the revisions and corrections he knew he had to make. Publishers were hard to find, however, and the money for it was scarce.

He was approaching eighty and, if we are to believe his letters, his health was worsening. He does not sound sprightly in this description of himself he provided his daughter Harriet in November 1835: “I have an irregular action of the heart which I have experienced more or less ever since I was twenty; but which is more troublesome now than formerly. Sometimes it gives me inconvenience to walk any distance; but when I am quiet, I am at ease. It is probably connected with the state of my stomack which is weak and my stomack is sensibly affected by my heart, so that, you see, I must quiet [moderate] study—at least in a good degree.” It would help, he added, if her husband, Fowler, could “take a few lessons in penmanship, or send us a Key for deciphering his letters,” or have her write out fair copies of his letters for him. On the other hand, his granddaughter described him in and about New Haven at the age of eighty as elegant in bearing and conduct: “tall, erect, and slender, but not thin in figure or face. As a young man he had brown eyes, sometimes called gray, and abundant hair, well cared for, of an auburn tint, and the fair ruddy skin that accompanies the reddish hair.” His ruddy face and thick head of auburn hair “seemed to give him the fire and enthusiasm of the sanguine temperaments with the stability and perseverance of the bilious races.” A family friend at this time described him “walking across that beautiful lawn in front of good old Yale,” a “tall, slender, remarkably erect figure with light elastic step.” Asked to reveal his secret in maintaining a robust appearance, he replied it was due to retiring at an early hour, rising with the lark, combining mental labor with bodily exercise every single day, and studiously maintaining “a conscience void of offense toward God and man.” As Joshua Kendall, Webster’s most recent biographer, puts it, Webster was a readily recognized figure striding around New Haven with his “flaming red hair and remarkably erect bearing [that] made him a striking figure. He wore long-tailed coats and frilled shirts long after they went out of style.”¹

2

In good health or not, only five months after his last Palladium letter Webster was doing what he could to promote his book and keep it alive. He feared his grip on the dictionary market was slipping away and that the public was turning away from his other books as well, especially in schools. He was gratified in 1835 that “the faculty of Yale College have lately determined that candidates for admission shall be examined in [according to] my Grammar—another proof of the convalescent state of English learning,” but he feared the future belonged to younger men like Worcester with energy and resources to carry the fight forward. All he could do was pin his hopes on a new edition of his 1828 quarto, stick to the drudgery of correcting the “mistakes” in his books, and keep writing letters advertising himself. In November of that year, he wrote out a full advertisement for a new edition, “Reasons for Adopting One Dictionary as a Standard of English Orthography”—by which he meant his own dictionary. He wanted Fowler, who was now acting as his constant confidant and sort of unofficial agent, to place the advertisement in the newspapers. All his works, it claims, were “constructed on the plan of uniform orthography,” including “his dictionaries, elementary spelling books . . . grammar and other books for schools.” Mindful of the savage clobbering he had endured from Cobb and others regarding his inconsistencies of spelling and pronunciation—which he chalked up to “oversight or forgetfulness”—he promises to put them all right in future editions.²

Picking up again on his resonant anti-British theme that almost always worked for him with the general public, his advertisement is a frontal attack on “the most egregious errors in the British books.” He directs his abuse at the British use of the language in the second half of the eighteenth century: the authoritative and pompous use of polite and ornate English practiced by the aristocracy and intellectuals as distinct from the speech of the common man; the affected “clamor of pedantry” of grammars that encouraged the study of dead languages (Greek and Latin); and the dominance of literary over popular speech, embodied by Dr. Johnson’s Latinate syntax and Edward Gibbon’s tediously ornamental rhetoric in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Webster had always been contemptuous of Johnson’s elevated style, his circumlocutions, fondness for “hard” and polysyllabic words, rotundity of phrasing, and formulaic elaboration of ideas in complex sentences built from balanced or parallel words, phrases, and sentences. For him, this amounted to “corrupt” practice, a decline from what he regarded as sensibly elegant and clear English. However, he objected to Shakespeare and seventeenth-century drama in general, we recall, because of Shakespeare’s use of vulgar words. As he told Thomas Dawes in 1809, “It was most injudicious in Johnson to select Shakespeare as one of his principal authorities. Play-writers in describing low scenes and vulgar characters use low language, language unfit for decent company; and their ribaldry has corrupted our speech as well as the public morals. I have made it a main point to reject words belonging to writings of this character, and shall proceed as far as propriety requires in cleansing the Augean stable.”³

He parades in this latest advertisement all his old themes, which by the 1830s were sounding tired and worn. He decries the authoritative standards of pronunciation and spelling, formulated and codified as they had been by “polite” English society. He also promises to undo “the immense mischief” done by English orthoepists, especially Walker. He repeats his old claim, which still was incorrect: “We now learn that the pronunciation of Walker is not and never has been that of the higher classes of society in the nation in general; but [of] local peculiarities or more properly dandyism. . . . So that after having our children instructed thirty or forty years in dandyisms, we are now brought back, and by British authorities too, to our old pronunciation. So much for American obsequiousness; but the evil which Walker has done will not be corrected in half a century.” American teachers were helpless; they did not know any better: “They are mistaken and ought to be appraised of the imposition.” He announces he would continue the fight in behalf of America.⁴

3

Worcester had come along at both an opportune and awkward moment for Webster. Webster could cast him in the role of usurper of his self-proclaimed kingdom: the leading champion of British imposition, the American spoiler, a kind of American Trojan horse intent on reversing the linguistic progress and destiny of the new nation that Webster had tirelessly carved out.

Regarding the extent to which Webster was trying to normalize the language with his reforms, he had argued back in August 1807—in the pages of the religious monthly the Panoplist, defending himself against a review by a “learned” “English gentlemen” of his Compendious Dictionary that had recently appeared in the journal Eclectic Review—that “the lexicographer’s business is to search for truth, to proscribe error, and repress anomaly.” What he had in mind by the “truth,” as regards orthography, was “common usage.” Had not both the British and Americans, though, rejected campaigns for the creation of national language academies for the very reason that it is impossible to manipulate language trends with theories and programs, or by force of personality, especially orthography and pronunciation? You can legislate language as much as you want, but you can never win against “language’s own life”: “The American accent that Webster hoped to define, and eventually to institute, through an elaborate set of linguistic rules was far more prescriptive than the English accent taught at Harvard and enshrined in Worcester’s dictionary,” the scholar Elisa Tamarkin writes, adding that “Webster might have listened to how Americans spoke but only in order to codify what he heard as a set of abstract linguistic laws for all Americans to follow.” While Worcester, on the other hand, was neither deaf nor indifferent to common American use, Tamarkin explains, his “determination to look to England is not just more conservative because it gives priority to precedent over an abstract idea of linguistic nationality but because it proceeds from the assumption that language should exist only as the world has made it.” Yet here was Webster again, almost half a century since he began his campaign, still refusing to back off from his mission to shape the American language, still pressing for reforms, still rejecting the realities of language history in the interests of linguistic nationalism. As we shall see, though, he was not alone. Many who were offended by his authoritarian manner and at times seemingly arbitrary scale of reforms and innovations did nonetheless agree that the American language must be allowed to make its own way independent of the mother country, and that there must be less carping about it. A few years earlier, in 1818, Edward Everett remarked disapprovingly from Harvard: “American innovations on the English language are ipso facto corruptions, the British, improvements; and in this . . . I have found a resolute spirit of decrying every thing American to be pretty universal.”⁵

4

One way Webster hoped to promote sales of his own dictionary and schoolbooks was to gain and retain the inside track with his booksellers and publishers. He could persuade them into pushing his books to the exclusion of others. He was not even beyond having members of his own family devote their lives to the cause. When Fowler told him in July 1836 that he was playing with the idea of leaving teaching at Middlebury College to open a business in bookselling, Webster rejoiced because he saw it as serving his own self-interest: “If you remove and enter into the business of bookselling, this course will render you serviceable to my interest, and this is the interest of all my family.” Fowler was thinking mainly of starting a business in Philadelphia or New York, while Webster had in mind his going to Cincinnati, the pivotal city in Webster’s crucial western market—by the 1820s it was commonly known as the “Queen of the West” because of its spectacular growth—where he could join Webster’s son, William, in the bookselling business. Something must be done immediately, Webster insisted, to come to the rescue of both the dictionary and schoolbooks: “The crisis now is important, as the question whether my elementary books are to be used generally as permanent school books is to be decided within a year or two. That such may be the case to a great extent is certain, if proper means are used. Conn[ecticut] and Vermont are undoubtedly in my interest. . . . The patronage of the West is to be retained at all hazards. I have it now, and it must not be lost.”⁶

William, out in Cincinnati, was supposed to be in harness to the great enterprise, but he felt differently and soon took a job as a teller in an Indiana bank. He had already damaged his eyes proofreading for his father at Cambridge University and apparently thought his dad was demanding too much. “I had always hoped,” Webster wrote on December 8, 1837, “to have my son a bookseller, and a grandson also who might take an active part in sustaining my efforts, but I am disappointed. William, we hear, is appointed teller in the banks. . . .” One month later he was still fixated on the help he hoped for, but concluded he would not get, from his family in the bookselling business: “I wish, by some means, I could form a bookselling establishment that might have an interest in publishing my books,” he confided to Fowler on January 9, 1838: “An edition of the quarto is wanted, and no house will undertake it, as the outlay would be large. . . . I wish, by some means, I could form a bookselling establishment that might have an interest in publishing my books. . . . All my books serve to support each other. But I must rely on the spelling books and dictionaries. . . . It would have been a great point gained for my family if a good bookselling house had been, some years ago, established, by my friends, either in New York or Philadelphia . . . [as the] success of books now depends very much or chiefly on booksellers. . . .” He still had his eye on poor Fowler on March 10: “I think my sons in law should think more of this plan. You are not a bookseller but if your family should go to [Philadelphia], I should go too, or be there for the most part and try to make an establishment for my books.” Fowler was ready to help by spending his summers promoting his father-in-law but wisely decided after all not to give up teaching.⁷

Webster had concluded that if his dictionary was going to be rescued from eventual oblivion, it was a new edition of the original 1828 quarto that would have to do it. On September 19, 1836, in the New Haven Daily Herald he notified the public that the 1828 edition was sold out and that anyone who wanted a copy would have no choice but to buy the English edition that was still in print. Without copies to sell, there was only the Goodrich/Worcester octavo and the small school editions left in America to carry his message to future generations, but Goodrich had total control of the former. Increasingly desperate, he asked Goodrich to speak to Norman White, the publisher of the octavo, to see if he was interested in publishing a revised quarto, but White wanted no part of it: “We think the demand would by no means justify the publication of an edition at present.” White was mildly receptive to what he called “the Websterian system” of orthography, as modified by Goodrich of course, and he was ready to continue publishing it by staying with the octavo, certainly not by taking control of both the octavo and a bank-breaking quarto.⁸

5

By early 1836, Webster had made up his mind in favor of a somewhat smaller, two-volume (octavo) version of his 1828 quarto. This new edition would be less bulky than the quarto, more widely usable and (presumably) salable, and more interesting to a publisher. Such an edition would be slightly larger than the Goodrich/Worcester octavo; nor under his supervision would it at all resemble what he viewed as a notorious abridgment that had insulted him by violating so many of his ideas about the English language. That was important, because he could then tell himself that according to the letter of the law such an edition would not break his and Goodrich’s signed agreement that he would never publish a rival octavo. His family expressed concern over the expenses of any new edition. Even his wife, Rebecca, loyal and self-sacrificing as she was, protested when he announced to Fowler he was “willing” to mortgage or sell their house for a smaller one in order to pay for the new edition. He looked everywhere for money, confiding to Fowler on February 27, 1839, “I think sometimes of asking you and Harriet to lend me money for the purpose. . . .” Ellsworth was not forthcoming with financial help, nor could Webster count on Goodrich. Webster, it seemed, would have to assume the economic risk himself: “I should now rather have a house of about half the rooms which my present house has, and spend the short remainder of my life in it. . . . I should not think it an embarrassment to have the value of the house in the Dictionary.”⁹

By July, the horizon had brightened. Webster felt the market for his new edition had improved, and with sales of his Elementary Spelling Book skyrocketing, his hopes soared. As in the past, and in spite of Cobb’s attacks, it was his spelling book that would bankroll this new book. He had managed to secure a printer for the new edition, and it was “pretty well determined that I shall begin the printing of an edition of my large Dictionary in September or October.” He turned to faithful Fowler to provide new words in mineralogy and geology and any others “deemed proper for insertion,” along with their definitions: “I wish you to make a paper book, alphabetical, in which words deemed proper for insertion may be entered, accented and briefly explained. If you think I shall be likely to mistake your letters, you can write first on a scrap of paper, and let Emily [Webster’s daughter] copy the words into the book. . . . If you can assist me in that way or any other, I shall make . . . compensation for the labor.” He peremptorily commanded William and his wife to return to Connecticut from Indiana in order to help him with the edition, swallowing up in the process several hundred dollars of his son and daughter-in-law’s savings.¹⁰

FIGURE 10.  Rebecca Greenleaf Webster. Oil on canvas, by Jared Bradley Flagg (1820–99). Courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, Paul Leicester Ford papers.

Far more important than either Fowler’s or William’s help with the new edition, however, was Goodrich’s. Apparently reassured by Webster that the new edition would not encroach on his octavo abridgment, Goodrich consented to pitch in and (for the sake of the family) help his aged father-in-law, but only in the way that interested him, by returning to the dictionary to identify eccentric spellings, isolate errors that had to be put right, and search for new words. Anxious to get the book out, Webster agreed. It was a decision that would largely determine the course and tenor of the next twenty years of Goodrich’s professional life. Eighteen months later they had finished the work, “I trust in a way to occasion me no embarrassment,” Webster remarked. “The sales will probably be slow, but sure. It is a work for which there is at present no substitute, and it is not an easy thing to make one like it.¹¹

Leaning persistently on Fowler and William, in the middle of all this Webster found time to indulge his vanity by ordering a bronze bust of himself done from a plaster cast by Chauncey Bradley Ives, a prolific and popular sculptor, then living and sculpting in New Haven, who went on to international fame. “The likeness is said to be very exact,” Webster told Fowler on July 9; “Emily and her family are delighted with it. William has sent one for you.” The bust was not just for family, however: “If the faculty of Amherst College will permit a copy of it to be set in the library, or other apartment, I will present one to the college for that purpose. Considering what interest I took in founding the institution, it seems to be, if not proper, at least not improper to place my bust in one of the public rooms.” A copy of the bust was duly placed in the college library.¹²

The two-volume An American Dictionary of the English Language—called a royal octavo, measuring about 6.5 by 10 inches, slightly larger than a regular octavo (6 by 9 inches)—was published in 1841 in New York by the publishers White and Sheffield, thirteen years after the 1828 edition and twelve after the Goodrich/Worcester octavo abridgment. It contained 1,079 pages and was priced at $15. The title page announced it contained “the whole vocabulary of the [1828] quarto, with corrections, improvements and several [15,000] thousand additional [entry] words.” Three thousand copies of the edition were printed. For some perspective on that print run, 2,500 copies of the 1828 quarto were published for the American market and 3,000 for the British, so not much had changed in the intervening years regarding low expectations of sales.

Oddly, given Webster’s continuing censure of John Walker ever since his Dissertations, and also his animosity toward Worcester, Walker’s Key to the Classical Pronunciation of Greek, Latin, and Scripture Proper Names finds its place in the edition and is even featured on the title page—a sign of Walker’s continuing popularity in America and Goodrich’s influence. Also unexpected is the inclusion of Worcester’s fourteen-page “Synopsis” of about 850 words of “disputed pronunciation” by six orthoepists, all English except for Webster, whose pronunciations are added for this edition, possibly by Goodrich, to those of the original six. That “Synopsis” is introduced and placed without any mention that Worcester had prepared it thirteen years earlier, creating the impression (on the part of those, at least, who did not know it in the Goodrich/Worcester octavo) that Webster was its author. That very likely was Goodrich’s decision. So was, undoubtedly, the inclusion of Goodrich’s preface to his and Worcester’s octavo revision that Webster despised, which mentions Worcester’s prominent role in that revision.

FIGURE 11.  Title page of the 1841 revised and expanded, abridged, two-volume edition of An American Dictionary of the English Language, edited by Chauncey Allen Goodrich with Noah Webster’s assistance. Courtesy of Indiana State University Special Collections, Cordell Collection of Dictionaries.

Notwithstanding the additional words, and even with Goodrich and Fowler’s help, the edition was essentially the same book as the original 1828 quarto, a “hasty piece of work” in eighteen months, far from the comprehensive revision that Goodrich, and Converse before him, knew the quarto badly needed. The approximately fifteen thousand additional words, mostly foreign and a string of scientific terms gleaned mainly from a professor of medicine at Yale, not from Fowler, were stuck into an appendix in the second volume because of Webster’s lingering reservations about the inclusion of too many scientific and technical terms in the lexicon. Goodrich made a somewhat perfunctory stab, as these things go in lexicography, at altering spelling and pronunciation in favor of more conventional usage. He, or Webster, or both, decided to scrap many more of Webster’s early orthographical eccentricities: for example, maiz was returned to its former self, maize, as was sovereign from suveran. Nonetheless, Webster refused to be nudged from such as aker (for acre), grotesk (grotesque), porpess (porpoise), and tung (tongue).¹³ The pronunciation of some “disputed words” in the “Synopsis,” we are told, was altered “in conformity with . . . more recent usage” and entered in the body of the work. Definitions were expanded somewhat, with new senses slipped in, and definitions of scientific words were also corrected.

While this edition was making its way through the press, Webster was still writing notes for “Addenda” comprising additional words and their definitions, which appear mostly in an 1844 edition published by Harper & Brothers, made up of unsold sheets of the 1841 edition. A few of these also found their way, however, into an appendix in the 1841 edition.¹⁴

In July 1841, Webster at first was sanguine about sales, reporting that the new edition had “found a good market in our large towns,” although “the price is too high for many clergymen and teachers”—at $15 it was priced $3 higher than Webster had hoped it would be, and a far cry from the $6 price tag of the Goodrich/Worcester in 1829. The price was far too high for the general public. Webster spent the rest of his life in a futile effort to increase its sales one way or another: “I have to struggle alone and this I shall not long be able and disposed to do.” He would end his days knowing that his dictionaries had never enjoyed financial success. He told Fowler in the parlor of his living room—their last conversation—that Goodrich “shall never again have the power to alter my dictionary.” It was not one of his more accurate prophecies. Goodrich’s “power” over revisions to his dictionaries would increase, not decrease, after Webster’s death.¹⁵

FIGURE 12.  The 1841 edition of An American Dictionary removed some of Webster’s orthographical eccentricities. Detail: The definition of editor has been revised slightly from the 1828 edition. Courtesy of Indiana State University Special Collections, Cordell Collection of Dictionaries.

6

In 1843, the shades were closing in on Webster. He did not suffer from any lingering illness or physically debilitating handicap in the last months of his life. He had his aches and pains but looked young for his age. He was active with his family, still helping his son William financially, interested in gardening, and a regular visitor to his daughters and old Yale friends, including professors Benjamin Silliman and James Luce Kingsley, and former college president Ezra Stiles. Just the year before, he had rounded up his own essays, written over a period of some fifty years, for a substantial volume with notes, A Collection of Papers on Political, Literary and Moral Subjects (1843), which was published only a few days before he died. In early May, he even completed some corrections for a new edition of his speller. On May 22, with a lame foot he had injured while sitting in his rocking chair, he twice walked three-quarters of a mile to the local post office on a clear but cold day. He struggled home the second time with a chill that quickly worsened into pleurisy, an inflammation of the lung. Finding it difficult to breathe, he took to his bed in his study.

We have a detailed account of his last days from his daughter Eliza, who, along with many other members of the family, stayed with him in his dying hours and recorded some of the last conversations they had together. He told her, “I have struggled with many difficulties. Some I have been able to overcome, and by some I have been overcome. I have made many mistakes, but I love my country, and I have labored for the youth of my country. . . .” His “literary labors were all ended,” he told Eliza. According to her, he did not specifically mention his lexicographical labors—perhaps an indication he did not think they would stand the test of time. He presented one of his grandsons with a treasured early edition of his speller. He spoke of his constant patriotism and closeness to God. “I’m ready to go,” he whispered, “my work is all done; I know in whom I have believed.” Asked by one of his daughters if he suffered much, he replied significantly, “Not acute suffering dear, but with an indescribable uneasiness.” He died a few hours later, on May 28, 1843, clutching a copy of his speller, the book that far more than his dictionary had made him famous.¹⁶

All of New Haven, where he had lived with his family for more than forty years, seemed in mourning. Several memorial services were held in Center Church on New Haven Green and at Amherst College. His long funeral procession included all his family, the entire Yale faculty and student body, and schoolchildren from New Haven and surrounding communities. He was buried near his home, in Grove Street Cemetery, the burial place of many Yale presidents, joined by his wife, Rebecca, four years later. Soon after his death, Benjamin Silliman wrote in his diary about his old friend Webster: “He died in the fulness of reputation, of health, of mental power, and of Christian faith. He has left a brilliant fame. Millions have been instructed by his writings, and millions more will study them in years to come. He encountered no small opposition, which was due quite as much to his personal peculiarities as to the boldness and novelty of some of his speculations. His elementary works for schools have received a universal sanction and many other works remain to instruct mankind. . . .”¹⁷