11

Waiting for Worcester

From the very beginning of their interest in Webster’s dictionaries, the Merriams’ greatest fear was Worcester. Every historical, geographical, and lexicographical work to which Worcester had ever turned his hand had met with general approval, high commendation, and commercial success. He was acknowledged by Goodrich, among others, to be a superior lexicographer to Webster. Worcester was without doubt at the height of his powers and on the move, but he had not reckoned with the commercial hostility and extraordinarily intense entrepreneurship of George and Charles Merriam.¹

The imminent publication of Worcester’s 1846 edition worried them. There were things they could do right away to sully Worcester’s reputation and discredit him by restaging the old allegations against him, reviving the charges that Webster had egregiously paraded before the public in 1834–35. “Worcester, as you know,” Charles Merriam wrote to Ellsworth on March 2, 1846, “was employed by Dr. Webster to abridge his work . . . [and] in this way possessed himself fully of Dr. Webster’s plan and the whole art of dictionary making.” Worcester had done the unthinkable: while Webster was still alive, Merriam continued, Worcester had deviously never let it be known he planned to write his own dictionary, which the “community would have esteemed disingenuous, if not dishonorable, and morally wrong.” Now, Merriam added, with Webster dead, Worcester was free to steal from Webster’s work: “No one supposes he could sit down and compile such a work as he will bring out, seriously affecting, as it doubtless will, the sale of Webster . . . if Dr. Webster had not written his large work.” Worcester had every right to write a dictionary of English, of course—never mind what Webster was doing. In any case, Worcester surely felt that his work on Todd’s edition of Johnson’s dictionary was a far better tutorial toward his own edition than was Webster’s work, given that Johnson’s notions of English matched his own far more than Webster’s did thus far.²

The Merriams even contemplated legal action against Worcester but decided against it because of costs. Their best option, they concluded, was to return the favor and pillage from Worcester’s dictionary: “Professor Good-rich’s view has been, therefore, that we look at Worcester, when [his book is] out, and avail ourselves, as we legally and righteously may, of his labors, so that his work shall not combine the results of Webster’s labors and his own, while ours has Webster’s only.”³ Legally, yes, but perhaps not righteously. The knotty problem was that Webster’s claims of Worcester’s alleged thefts had never been substantiated. On the contrary, Worcester had defiantly refuted these allegations, when they first were leveled at him, and had publicly shown Webster to be seriously misguided and oddly unfamiliar with British lexicography, or any lexicography anywhere else for that matter.

Charles maintained that Goodrich had long been convinced Worcester would “avail himself largely of Dr. Webster’s labors.” The reverse, in fact, was true. The Merriams preferred to overlook Goodrich’s unequivocal remark to them just a few months earlier that, if anything, the borrowing was the other way around. “Now the fact is,” Goodrich told them, “Dr. Webster did borrow directly from the 8vo [octavo] abridgment, a good deal of matter which Mr. Worcester and I put there.” He did some counting and cited an unspecified “three thousand words which we had inserted from other dictionaries” and numerous words and their definitions new to dictionaries.⁴

Everyone knew Worcester was about to publish a new dictionary that was expected to reconfigure the American dictionary landscape. But the Merriams did not know when it was likely to be published, nor did they know enough about it—details they needed in order to devise their strategies effectively. They scouted through their Boston network to see if they could discover some insider information and came up with a look at a few of Worcester’s printed sheets and an idea of just how much further he had to go before he completed his present edition: “His work has not yet appeared,” Charles Merriam wrote to Ellsworth in March 1846, “having been delayed by the great care and pains-taking with which he has elaborated it. . . . The Stereotyper is upon the letter w and it will yet be three months before it appears, perhaps a little longer.” They were under no illusions. Worcester was going to produce a fine dictionary: “We have seen some of the paper, and so has Professor Goodrich. His [Worcester’s] draughts upon Webster are apparent, and his own additional labors are also important.” Without giving examples, Merriam mentioned that “on a single page Worcester has 19 words not in Webster; on another, 30, and so on.” It was crucial for them to know when Worcester’s dictionary was likely to be published so they could plan their own publishing and advertising strategy. “Shall we await the appearance of Worcester?” Merriam wondered. As long as they obeyed the terms of their contract to come out with the new edition, Ellsworth did not much care whether they waited or not. Ask Goodrich, he replied a couple of days later. In the end, they decided to wait just in case Worcester’s edition exhibited the degree of borrowing from Webster they hoped for and which they could publicize as part of their negative advertising campaign.⁵

2

They did not have long to wait. Worcester at last published his Universal and Critical Dictionary of the English Language in 1846 with the Boston publisher Wilkins, Carter and Company. It was a larger octavo (947 pages, of which 76 pages were prefatory material) than his Comprehensive Dictionary and was based on Todd-Johnson, integrating Walker’s Critical Pronouncing Dictionary, and containing no fewer than about twenty-seven thousand additional entry words for a total of about eighty-three thousand, more than any dictionary then bearing Webster’s name—without resorting to the practice in other dictionaries of including many thousands of entry words in their participial forms ending in ing and ed. The edition gave Goodrich and the Merriams more to think about than they had bargained for. (It is note-worthy, incidentally, that unlike Webster, whose self-advertising was ceaseless, Worcester did not in this dictionary, or any of his dictionaries printed in America, ever adorn his edition with a frontispiece displaying an engraving of himself. It was always Webster’s way to do so; it was not Worcester’s.)

Worcester explained in his preface that as he began preparing his Comprehensive Dictionary back in 1828, he had “adopted the practice of recording all the English words which he met with, used by respectable authors, and not found in Todd’s edition of Johnson’s Dictionary.” His plan for his new dictionary at first was simply to enlarge his Comprehensive, but having “found the words which were not registered in any dictionary more numerous” than anticipated, he decided a new dictionary was in order, containing “as complete a vocabulary of the language as he should be able to make.” There may well have been other, more personal, factors behind that decision, such as the understandable human emotion to push back at the Merriams, whose behavior since they appeared on the Webster stage did not strike him as “righteous.” In any case, this was not good news for the fate of Webster. He had taken many words from eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century English dictionaries, especially those by John Ash, Charles Richardson, and B. H. Smart, as well as from several scientific volumes. Another important source was William Allen, former president of Bowdoin College and Dartmouth College, assistant librarian of Harvard, and author in 1809 of An American Biographical and Historical Dictionary. He had collected some ten thousand words not to be found in any standard dictionaries, many of them technical. At first, Allen agreed to supply the Merriams with the words, at the rate of $10 per one hundred words, but ultimately they did not publish many, because a large number were compound words and therefore “of little worth.” Allen then passed the manuscript on to Worcester, from which Worcester obtained upwards of 1,500 additional words he had missed.⁶

FIGURE 14.  Worcester’s A Universal and Critical Dictionary of the English Language was published in 1846. Detail: Definition of edge-rail, a technical term. Courtesy of Indiana State University Special Collections, Cordell Collection of Dictionaries.

Allen’s collection is an example of the American amateur preoccupation and fascination with words at the time, for the most part independent of the work of lexicographers: collecting, counting, evaluating, sharing, popularizing, philosophizing, politicizing, and writing about them. This was the era of the rise of democratic urges about the English language, expressed in the precipitous growth of literacy and access to literature of all kinds rolling off the mechanized presses, fresh interest in the language of the Bible, establishment of “common schools” and public libraries, accelerated coinage of new words, and the development of technology, science, and medicine. Words had become democratized, social equalizers, no longer the concern chiefly of the learned and social elite. The general public claimed ownership. Ten thousand words sounds like a large number, and it was for the amateur enthusiast, but for the lexicographers this era of surging interest in words was a field day. Words were springing up everywhere. It was the job of dictionaries to keep up with and sort them. If a lexicographer could boast he had more words in his dictionary than existed in any other, he might be able to sell more copies. Worcester was more fortunate than Webster, it must be said, that he lived, collected, and wrote further into this new lexical universe, although he had no interest in chucking out the old to let in the new. On the other hand, Webster had a head start in linking up with new patriotic, democratic linguistic trends in America, launching himself as the voice of the people. And his legacy was perpetuated by his editors in the coming decades.⁷

In a lengthy introduction to the Universal and Critical Dictionary, Worcester’s impressive scholarship is on display. It includes strongly worded sections on pronunciation; orthography; grammar; the history of the language; Americanisms and provincialisms (and archaisms); a lucid history of British and American lexicography; and two catalogs, one of “English Dictionaries of Words” going back to the fifteenth century, and the other of “American Dictionaries of English”—both drawn mostly from his world-class private collection of lexicons. What is striking about the dictionary is Worcester’s scholarly and practical consistency, his quiet but authoritative tone, born of sound research and alert lexicography. People felt they could trust Worcester. His friend and Harvard academic Sidney Willard summed up Worcester’s achievement in 1846: “He does not belong to the corps of militant etymologists, who war against custom, which establishes the laws of language. On the contrary, he pays due fealty to these laws, and gives no countenance to a revolutionary spirit. We have discovered no instance in which he has changed the orthography of a word to make it conform to an assumed theory. In these respects, he has, wherever we have traced him, shown that fidelity to our language as we found it, which makes him worthy of entire confidence.”⁸

Although he risked the ire of outspoken patriotic readers and devoted Websterians, Worcester is not shy in stating in his preface that the authorities for most of his entry words are “mostly English”—mainly Johnson and Walker, in fact—or that he has cited English rather than American authors “of equal or even higher respectability” because “it is satisfactory to many readers to know, in relation to a new, uncommon, or doubtful word, that it is not peculiar to American writers, but that a respectable English authority may be adduced in support of its use.” To which Webster might well have replied, “Why do we need English support for the uses of our words in the first place?” But Worcester approached all aspects of the dictionary with, as one critic has called it, “judicious moderation.” Having been wounded more than once by Webster and not wishing to take chances that someday his ghost, in the voice of a new, antagonistic publisher, might resurrect the old attacks on him, in his preface he reviews how, when, and why he had begun writing dictionaries. Webster’s work did not enter into his calculations, he says: “With respect to Webster’s Dictionary, which the Compiler several years since abridged, he is not aware of having taken a single word, or the definition of a word, from that work. . . .” He had vigorously made this point, we must recall, in defending himself in the 1831 Worcester Palladium controversy against Webster’s allegations that he had plagiarized from him. Whether his claim is plausible is virtually impossible to document given the nature of lexicography and the manner in which lexicographers had “borrowed” from each other for centuries. Nevertheless, Worcester argues that he went out of his way to avoid taking words or definitions from Webster. But regarding words of “disputed” pronunciation, he has given Webster’s “authority” its due, along with that of several eminent English orthoepists.⁹

Worcester raises one more pointed objection to Webster on the matter of pronunciation: “The standard of pronunciation is not the authority of any dictionary, or of any orthoepist; . . . it is the present usage of literary and well-bred society.” This contention, of course, appears to contradict Webster’s popular (or populist) belief that the standard of pronunciation in America must, for the sake at least of national unity, be that of “common” people. But what Webster was tuned into was not the speech and orthography of the people as much as his own language theories—partly political and nationalistic, partly philosophically derived from the dubious Horne Tooke (although he had drifted away from this mentor in his later work) and Charles Richardson, and partly etymological. What Worcester really opposed was Webster’s perceived manipulation of language according to “rational” or schematized linguistic conceptions. Worcester was not, and never had been, adumbrating social, political, philosophical, or schematized linguistic principles. He can be seen as a “conservative” linguist not because he was a defender of the language as used in England, or a champion of Samuel Johnson and John Walker, but because he abhorred indulgence. Worcester did, in fact, keep his eyes on American usage, although he never branded his books “American” dictionaries. Where Webster pushed for “radical” linguistic schemes based on analogy and essentially incorrect etymology to determine spelling and pronunciation, Worcester’s lexicographical purpose was to write dictionaries that record the language as it existed in America. He never opposed American words. The corollary of that was not that therefore he would need to have rejected elegance and correctness as a model for literature and speech—and that if he did not, he would not qualify as a lexicographer of the people. A dictionary must contain, he writes, “all the words of the language,” which recalls his remark in the Palladium controversy that no lexicographer owned entry words. The fact was that both sides of these dictionary wars—in the newspapers, universities, schools, writings of literary figures, politics, and speech of men and women of “the highest literary culture”—agreed, as Kenneth Cmiel puts it, “that Anglo-American literature, broadly meaning prose published in books, was the foundation of a solid English dictionary.” There was such a thing as “authentic elegance.” In the middle of all the fighting over the language that was going on, Worcester nevertheless still honors Webster in his preface to the 1846 edition, generously calling him “the greatest and most important” English lexicographer since Johnson and describing his quarto as “of great learning and research,” with “many and great improvements with respect both to the etymology and definitions of the words.” Having written that, however, Worcester slips in a caveat, “the taste and judgment of the author [meaning Webster] are not generally esteemed equal to his industry and erudition.”¹⁰

Worcester’s “judicious moderation” is apparent in a number of ways. To begin with, he decided he would include etymology sparingly, where useful, not dealing with it as an independent study in parallel with definitions. His principle is that since Anglo-Saxon is the “mother tongue” of English and that most of the words frequently used derive from it “with more or less change of their orthography,” he omits most of the etymology of such words. He certainly was not going to launch himself into the kind of etymological journey that consumed so much of Webster’s time, not because he was not competent to do so, but rather because he did not believe a dictionary was the appropriate forum for testing such theories. As regards vocabulary, most of his additional entry words, he explains, were drawn from years of reading, and from Johnson and Walker—he places asterisks on the thousands of words he did not take from them—but all of them were “revised with much labor and care, in relation to their orthography, pronunciation, etymology, and definitions.” There is also a large increase—over any other dictionary ever published—in the lexicon of words relating to the arts and sciences. Again, he took many from Johnson, but hundreds of them he drew from encyclopedias and various specialized dictionaries of fine arts, war, medicine, technology, manufacturing, mining, gardening and agriculture, commerce, building, architecture, archaeology, chemistry, mineralogy, midwifery, anatomy, veterinary science, the military, and marine life. Virtually all of those words “have been defined entirely new.”¹¹

Worcester chooses to include a good selection of foreign words and, more controversially, archaic and “many words which are obsolete, and many which are low or unworthy of being countenanced,” but he maintains that since readers come across them all the time in their reading, they will be grateful to be able to look them up in an English dictionary. He anticipates that many critics will feel he has been too “liberal” in throwing his net out too far and wide to draw in words. This is not a newfound concern on his part. Indeed, Webster had chastised him precisely for including so many obsolete, archaic, foreign, and scientific words in his 1830 Comprehensive Dictionary; but as he writes, “a dictionary which is designed to be a complete glossary to all English books that are now read, must contain” many such words.¹²

All things considered, it was his definitions in which readers were most interested. They vary considerably in length, at least half of them only one line long, others (rarely) as much as twenty or more lines. A characteristic succession of several related words following each other in quick succession in a definition often illustrates his impatience with imprecision, as he patiently chooses one word after another to introduce senses that unfold the biography of the entry word as fully as possible. A sample of a few of his definitions:

Function: “Performance; employment; office; occupation; office of a member of the body; place; charge, faculty; power;—a mathematical expression considered with reference to its form.”

Mother: “She that has borne offspring: a female parent; correlative to son or daughter; that which has produced any thing:—that which has preceded in time; as, a mother church to chapels:—a familiar term of address to a matron or old woman.— . . . A thick, slimy substance formed in liquors, especially in vinegar.”

Patriot: “One who loves and faithfully serves his country. It is sometimes used ironically [as Johnson did when he defined ‘patriotism’ as ‘a factious disturber of the government’].”

Pauser: “One who pauses or deliberates.”

Thin: “Not thick; rare; not dense; not close; separate by large spaces; not closely compacted or accumulated;—exile; small;—not coarse; not gross in substance; as, a thin veil:—not abounding; not fat; not bulky; lean; slim; slender; meagre; slight; unsubstantial.

An especially long definition of almost thirty lines invariably includes some etymology, as in sirloin, in which he cites part of Johnson’s definition and relates the word’s etymology to its orthography: “It is not found in any English dictionary previous to that of Johnson, with the orthography of surloin. [Nathan] Bailey’s Dictionary has surloin of beef, corresponding to the French surlonge de beouf, the obvious or probable etymology. Surloin is also given by [Robert] Ainsworth; and the word occurs repeatedly in [Randle] Cotgrave’s Dictionary, the first published in 1611, with the orthography of surloine and surloyne.”

For those who still held his and Goodrich’s octavo abridgment against him, Worcester insists it had not been his idea: he “was induced to undertake the labor of making the octavo abridgment of Dr. Webster’s ‘American Dictionary of the English Language.’ ” He “had no responsibility” in his editing beyond the “rules” that were part of his understanding with Good-rich. Having got that off his chest, he apparently felt himself well above and beyond the fray and safe from further sniping by Webster’s militia of defenders. It would not be long before he discovered he was not as safe as he thought.¹³

3

Soon after Worcester’s Universal and Critical Dictionary of the English Language was published in 1846, the Merriams began a deliberate and sustained hunt for evidence of Worcester’s alleged thefts, hoping to tilt the competition in their favor even before they published their edition. William Webster was in New York, removed from the hotbed of these clashing interests in Massachusetts, but they wrote to him for assistance anyway. Search through Worcester’s Universal dictionary, they instructed him, for evidence that Worcester had taken “the exact language” from Webster. William read over Worcester’s new dictionary and failed to find any. He was surprised more by the “meagerness of his definitions” and concluded that Worcester did not steal from Webster, and the Merriams had little to worry about from him. That was not exactly what the Merriams wanted to hear. It was the sinning, not the virtuous, Worcester they wished to portray.¹⁴

They also called on Noah Porter, a graduate of Yale and a professor of moral philosophy and metaphysics there since 1846, to spearhead an attack on Worcester. Porter, who would become president of the university in 1871, had a worldwide reputation as a philosopher and theologian, having written on a wide variety of subjects. His best-known work, The Human Intellect, would be published in 1868. Apart from the Yale connection and the fact that this conflict was shaping up partly as a Yale versus Harvard contest, he had no apparent reason to turn against Worcester at this particular moment if the Merriams had not commissioned him to do so. If Goodrich advised him against any attack on the integrity of his friend, Porter ignored him, for he was quite blunt in an unattributed review article he published in the May 1847 issue of the American Review, a magazine particularly favorable to Webster. Whether he received a fee for writing this, or did it as part of the general Yale faculty support of Webster, is unknown.

Porter’s discourse describes what he thinks all modern dictionaries of English should aspire to be like by midcentury. He starts off neutrally enough: “What is wanted in such a dictionary is the good usage of educated and sensible people in England and America—not the ultra and impracticable affectations of the salon, not the stiff and studied overdoing of the actor, or the professed doctor of pronunciation, not the refined nor the coarse cockneyisms of the city, nor again the negligent and vulgar provincialisms of Old or New England; but the actual use of the intelligent and refined who speak the English language.” He agrees with Worcester that greater notice should be taken of English usage than of American, but without importing the language habits of the “affected Englishman” into the American language: “[W]e had rather err from provincial ignorance than from mistakes of affected imitators.”

Porter divides the rest of his review into four sections: pronunciation, orthography, new words, and definitions, mostly dedicated to finding shortcomings in Worcester. He praises Worcester for his expansion of the lexicon to reflect the progress of the arts and physical sciences but insists he is too liberal when he includes, among his twenty-seven thousand new entry words not included in the latest edition of Johnson’s Dictionary any word that has been used even just once by a writer, English or American, be it ever so contrived, absurd, or coined for a merely immediate effect. His examples of such offensive words that he says Worcester put in, all of which are part of our lexicon today, include cantankerous, cutter, dandyize, dyssillabification, facsimile, scruff, shopocracy, and squirearchy. (Except for one of these, Porter is correct: none is mentioned in either Worcester’s 1830 Comprehensive or Webster’s 1841 edition, but cutter appears in both.) He surmises that Worcester has done this simply to make his book sell well by inflating the entry word count. For every word Webster had introduced, he argues, with absurd exaggeration, Worcester has flooded the language with a hundred.

As for definitions, Webster’s strong suit, Porter continues, Worcester is “unequal,” usually correct but resorting too often to synonyms in definitions rather than to descriptions, “with little attention to the development of meaning” that is crucial to a more complete understanding of a word. Worcester is not even close to Webster’s artistry in defining words, Porter contends. He then comments, accurately, on twenty-five examples of the incompleteness or erroneousness of Worcester’s definitions, such as neology: “A term applied to a new system of interpretation of the Scriptures in Germany.” “How much information does this convey?” Porter asks. “Why not tell what system of interpretation?” Porter also questions Worcester’s definition of saddle-cloth as “A cover for saddle,” which is not “the more common signification” of a blanket between the saddle and the horse; and of kraal, which Worcester defines as “a rude hut or cabin of Hottentots, with conical or round tops.”¹⁵ Not correct, says Porter: “[I]t is a village of such huts, never a single one.” (Worcester accepted such corrections and expanded or corrected all of these in his 1860 edition.)¹⁶

The last page of Porter’s “review” is less an analysis of Worcester’s dictionary than a defense of Webster and an advertisement for the Goodrich-Merriam edition about to be released. With this review Porter strengthened his credentials in the eyes of the Merriams as an able Yale-based defender of any future Merriam-Webster editions, should he ever be needed.

4

The new, one-volume Goodrich-Merriam quarto edition of the American Dictionary, with a lexicon of 1,281 pages, was published late in 1847 with the title The American Dictionary of the English Language by Noah Webster . . . Revised and Enlarged by Chauncey A. Goodrich. The purpose in publishing it as a quarto was to have it create a greater impression as a more substantial work than Worcester’s 1846 octavo. In order to achieve that in one volume, the Merriams were obliged to use smaller type. It was put on the market at the low price of $6 (more than $150 today)—substantially less expensive than the $20 price of Webster’s 1828 two-volume quarto and the same price as Worcester’s 1846 edition. Goodrich remarks in the preface that it is “the fruit of nearly three years of care and attention.” Because work on the edition had survived the concerns of the Webster family about how extensively the new Merriam edition would revise Webster’s lexicography, and also because Fowler had complicated Goodrich’s work by wanting to have a major part in it, Goodrich makes a point of stating that he “has not acted . . . upon his own personal responsibility,” but has, from time to time, laid open the sheets to the inspection of the other members of the family. . . .”¹⁷

Unlike both Webster and Worcester, in his preface to this edition Good-rich does not indulge in the numbers game of boasting how many new words he has added. He says only “some thousands.” More to the point, he warns against the damaging effect of “a hasty introduction” of new terms and innovations into the lexicon: “There is at the present day, especially in England, a boldness of innovations on this subject which amounts to absolute licentiousness. . . . Our vocabulary is already encumbered with a multitude of words which have never formed a permanent part of English literature.” It is a “serious evil” to insert any more, he adds—a pertinent statement in light of how rapidly new words were then popping up in the American language. Worcester thought the same thing. Obsolete and archaic words, however, that are found in the works of Bacon, Spenser, Shakespeare, and others are not the problem, and they ought to be included if the writings of England’s great authors are to continue to be understood. So-called Americanisms are not a concern, since there are very few of them in any way worthy of being in a dictionary, Goodrich asserts, most of which have come over from Britain.¹⁸

According to Goodrich’s preface, the new dictionary is “designed to present, on a reduced scale, a clear, accurate, and full exhibition of the American Dictionary in all its parts.” The book is meant for a wide market, for use in academies and other institutions of higher learning, counting houses (business accounting and bookkeeping offices), and the family, and as a tool to aid in writing and pronunciation. The definitions are easily understandable and economically worded in “short descriptive sentences and clauses” for a wide range of users. Gone forever are the 1828 quarto’s at times seemingly endless essaylike, discursive, personal definitions. Goodrich stresses that the dictionary has now been made into a “Synonymous Dictionary”: “Every one engaged in literary composition has felt, at times, the want of such a work . . . to discriminate nicely between the shades of meaning in similar terms . . . to present, under each of the important words, an extended list of others having the same general import, out of which a selection may be made. . . . This arrangement, it is hoped, will be found of frequent use even to those who are practiced in composition; while it will afford important aid to young writers in attaining grace, variety, and copiousness of diction.” Examples are abiding: “dwelling, remaining, continuing, enduring, awaiting”; and peaceable: “peaceful, pacific, tranquil, quiet, undisturbed, serene, mild, still.” In Worcester’s footsteps, discriminating synonyms thereafter became a staple of Merriam-Webster dictionaries.¹⁹

FIGURE 15.  The first Merriam edition of Webster’s dictionary, published in 1847–48, advertised Goodrich as editor. Courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, G. and C. Merriam Company Papers.

Goodrich also stresses in the preface the vital role of the edition in clarifying and stabilizing pronunciation. He had opted to continue to use Worcester’s “Synopsis” (mentioned on the title page though not identified there as Worcester’s) as a major authority citing different pronunciations by many distinguished orthoepists in both America and England in cases of disputed pronunciation. But that has now been “completely remodeled,” he adds. The principal authorities are B. H. Smart and Worcester himself, “whose long-continued labors on this subject entitle his decisions to high consideration.” For good measure, the introduction includes a section called “Principles of Pronunciation and Remarks on the Key.” Walker’s Key, though, has been “enlarged and improved,” with more than three thousand words added by English academics in London and Oxford. Not only in the treatment of pronunciation but throughout the entire edition, we can trace an influence straight back to the popularity in America of Worcester’s Critical Pronouncing Dictionary, his preoccupation with pronunciation in his role as chief editor of the original 1829 abridgment, and his prominent use in that octavo of Walker’s Key, which he included in an appendix. The presence of Walker’s Key in this new Goodrich-Merriam edition was tantamount to a major rejection of Webster’s well-advertised early abhorrence of Walker and, as he thought, his negative influence on American speech and spelling.²⁰

As for the orthography, Goodrich included Webster’s both disputed and commonly accepted spellings, explaining that (in the 1841 edition) he had rejected many of Webster’s innovations after twelve years of reflection on the subject following the publication of the 1828 quarto. In 1849, he wrote to the Morning Courier and New York Enquirer, less tactfully than in the preface, openly informing the general public of the stunning news that the orthography in the first Merriam edition of 1847 was “not Webster’s orthography at all” and that in his most recent edition “the most offensive peculiarities of his former system are laid aside; and there is really nothing left which can with any propriety be called his.” While this claim has to be taken with a grain of salt, given the great numbers of contested spellings at play and Goodrich’s stake in convincing the Merriams he was making a clean sweep of them, he was essentially correct. The Webster family may have flinched a little on reading this, but Goodrich was under no illusions about the consequences if he failed in this great purge. The only reason certain American spellings attributed to Webster, such as the s in words like offense and pretense, have survived is that Goodrich allowed them into his 1847 Merriam-Webster edition. As for the ck spellings in such words as frolick, magick, mimick, physick, and traffick, which were regarded as eccentric even in Johnson’s day and were listed as secondary spellings in dictionaries by John Ash and Benjamin Martin, Goodrich had allowed Webster to keep such reforms in the 1841 royal octavo but decided to remove them entirely in the 1847 dictionary.²¹

The 1847 Goodrich-Merriam edition represented a significant turning point in the history of Webster dictionaries. It sold well, and after the copyright was renewed, Merriam was able to pay the Webster family considerable royalties. One critic half a century later looked back and judged that the edition “embraced, or ultimately affected, all the editions and sizes of Webster’s Dictionary. . . .”²² The edition not only removed Webster’s “innovations” and excessive claims that had always dragged down his dictionary but also signaled that the proper function of an American dictionary was, without being overly authoritarian, to help people from all walks of life understand how to speak and write the language. That function had never been more important. Between 1790 and 1820, about one million immigrants had arrived in the United States, but that figure had risen to one million more in the 1840s alone. Between 1840 and 1890, about fifteen million flowed in, mostly Germans, Irish, British, and Scandinavians. Goodrich claimed in his preface that the new edition “was the most populist dictionary yet published in either America or England,” by which he chiefly meant that he had made it a practical compendium, without confusing spelling innovations, with a good selection of the most recent vocabulary current in the country, and with a guide to pronunciation that was more prescriptive than Worcester’s, whose citations from multiple orthoepists left too much up to the user. The edition’s feature most appreciated by the public, especially those millions of immigrants pouring into the country, was the guidance and authority it provided for them.

Goodrich and the Merriams recognized they had to firm up Webster’s reputation in the wake of such a wholesale revision of his lexicography. Goodrich, undoubtedly with some help from the Merriams and the family, therefore added after the preface what has to be one of the more remarkable memoirs of an author’s life to appear in an edition of his work; it was printed in every Merriam edition, along with his portrait, for almost half a century. (Worcester’s editions had neither of himself until much later.) When the Merriams took over the dictionary, Webster’s name had cachet, but his self-proclaimed iconic status needed polishing up because of the lexicographical controversies he had stirred up in the last fifteen years of his life, of which journalistic coverage had made the public aware. And the Merriams knew there would be fiercer fights ahead in the papers and magazines, since they themselves intended to raise the temperature of the dictionary wars. The public needed to be reminded what a great man Webster was. Most of the details of the memoir were written by Webster himself in 1833 for The National Portrait Gallery of Distinguished Americans (1834). Goodrich added to this and virtually canonized Webster as an early American saint. The memoir is a step toward the perpetuation, the branding, of the Websterian myth that to this day has powered editions of dictionaries bearing his name, and that presented a formidable headwind against whatever private hopes Worcester may have entertained of surpassing Webster as America’s lexicographical leader. Month by month and year by year, we follow Webster’s life in the eight-page, double-column memoir, much of which is not very edifying but apparently was thought to be necessary in order to humanize the moral and spiritual account of how he overcame his highly advertised obstacles. For a taste of the eulogy, this will do: “[T]he name of NOAH WEBSTER . . . is known familiarly to a greater number of the inhabitants of the United States, than the name, probably, of any other individual except the ‘FATHER OF HIS COUNTRY.’ Whatever influence he thus acquired was used at all times to promote the best interests of his fellow-men.”²³

Refreshingly, and less seriously, Mark Twain had some fun over the size and weight of this quarto. (It is the quarto’s size that makes it likely he is writing about this edition.) In his travelogue Roughing It (1872), he writes tongue-in-cheek of the problems the dictionary’s bulk had posed for him in 1861 when he packed his belongings for a journey from Missouri to Nevada and points west with his brother. His brother had the bright idea of taking along Webster’s massive volume, which weighed six pounds and posed serious baggage problems, because passengers were limited to twenty-five pounds each on the stagecoach: “And we had another nuisance, which was an Unabridged [Webster] Dictionary. It weighed about a thousand pounds, and was a ruinous expense, because the stagecoach Company charged for extra baggage by the ounce. We could have kept a family for a time on what that dictionary cost in the way of extra freight—and it wasn’t a good dictionary anyway—didn’t have any modern words in it—only had obsolete ones that they used to use when Noah Webster was a child.” Not only that, but en route “every time we avalanched from one end of the stage[coach] to the other, the Unabridged Dictionary would come too; and every time it came it damaged somebody”—once it launched itself into Twain’s stomach. Of course, by the time he wrote Roughing It, he might have said the same about Worcester’s quarto.²⁴

5

Worcester had struggled with his eyesight for years and finally lost it almost entirely. Goodrich felt for him, and admonished the Merriams on December 1, 1847, that Worcester was to be pitied, not attacked: “Mr. Worcester has ruined his eyes by his labors on the fine print of a dictionary. He has to live in a dark room, and has undergone a number of operations.” Worcester remained virtually blind from 1847 to 1849, and after three operations on the right eye, which failed, and two on the left, he recovered his sight only partially in the left eye. In these years he could do little research and writing, and was, among other things, neither able to read Porter’s article for himself when it came out nor keep track of the resurgence of dictionary controversies in the press generated by the Merriams and the publisher and critic William Draper Swan (more about him later). As Worcester explained a few years later, “There has been, as I have understood, considerable controversy relating to the Dictionaries in the newspapers and literary journals, particularly in the city of New York; but it took place when I had little use of my eyesight, and I have seen little of it. While my Dictionary was passing through press, one of my eyes became blind by a cataract, and not a great while after, the sight of the other eye was lost in the same way. . . .”²⁵

It was only when Worcester partially recovered his eyesight in early 1849 that he was able to read Porter’s attack on him. He was staggered by its polemical tone and content, surprised that a professor at Yale could be suborned by the Merriams as a “public advocate” of their edition and detractor of his, not primarily in order to further the understanding and progress of American lexicography but apparently for commercial advertising reasons. He wrote later that he had reason “to be entirely satisfied” with numerous reviews of his dictionary except for Porter’s article on it in the American Review, “which is in remarkable contrast to any other review of the work” and most of which the Merriams “have seen fit to insert . . . in their Advertising Pamphlet.” Worcester singles out facetiously one “specimen of candor and truthfulness” in Porter’s review that he felt warranted special comment. He quotes Porter, who had targeted one of his main innovations in illustrating pronunciation in a dictionary: “He [Worcester] has . . . collected and attached to every important word, every method of pronouncing it that has ever been recommended by a writer, whether great or small, conceited or well-informed, judicious or affected.” Not true, Worcester protests, and furthermore Porter surely knew he was twisting the truth if he had read what Worcester had stated in the preface to his dictionary—that his sources were not indiscriminately chosen writers but eleven of the best-known English pronouncing dictionaries, and at least twelve lexicographers, aside from “the distinguished American lexicographer, Dr. Webster.”²⁶

Charles Merriam countered that Worcester, through no fault of his own, was ignorant of the facts concerning who started the new phase of the “wars” now rising up again. It was not Porter at their bidding, he claimed, but Worcester’s new publishers Jenks, Hickling, and Swan who fired the first shot. The Merriams took the condescending line that Worcester was a good but naive scholar who, especially in his blindness, had no idea what his publishers were up to. They were right that while he was blind he was able to keep track of very little in the newspapers and in the larger literary world, but to link that to an alleged general naïveté sounded underhanded: “If Mr. Worcester knew the facts in the case and designs to represent Professor Porter as a mercenary, a hired ‘public advocate of our work,’ he does what ‘no honorable or honest man would do.’ We feel sure, [however] that he did not know, as in other particulars he has not known, the ‘facts in the case.’ ”²⁷