3 There was no country-wide copyright until 1790.
4 pp. ix and x.
1 pp. 22 and 23.
2 Cf. Warfel, pp. 345 ff.
3 p. 38.
4 The first volume was published in 1786.
5 The best account of their speculations is in Leonard, lately cited.
6 New York, 1828. This introduction ran to nearly 70,000 words.
1 p. 348. I should add that a high philological authority, Dr. Franklin Edgerton, professor of Sanskrit and comparative philology at Yale, does not agree with this. In his Notes on Early American Work in Linguistics, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 1943, p. 26, Edgerton speaks disdainfully of Webster’s “Chaldee” etymologies, which were retained in his Dictionary until his death in 1843, and indeed until 1864, when they were finally eliminated “by C. A. F. Mahn, a German scholar who was then put in charge of the etymological department of the work.” “Even the relative isolation of American scholarship from Europe,” says Edgerton, “hardly excuses such astounding ignorance in Webster, writing forty years after Sir William Jones, twenty after Schlegel, a dozen after Bopp, and half a dozen or more after the first volume of Jacob Grimm.” Jones (1746–94) first called attention to the similarity between the grammatical structures of Sanskrit, Greek and Latin in 1796. Franz Bopp (1791–1867) published Über das Conjugationssystem der Sanskritsprache in Vergleichung mit jenem der griechischen, lateinischen, persischen und germanischen Sprache in 1816, and his Analytical Comparison of the Sanskrit, Greek, Latin and Teutonic Languages (in English) in 1820. Jacob Grimm (1785–1863) published the first part of his Deutsche Grammatik in 1819 and the second in 1822. August Wilhelm von Schlegel (1767–1845) began publishing his Indische Bibliothek in 1823. The first really scientific philologian to rise in America was W. D. Whitney (1827–94). He was a child in arms when the first edition of Webster’s American Dictionary appeared in 1828.
2 It is reprinted in Franklin’s Works, edited by John Bigelow; New York, 1887–8; Vol. IV, pp. 198 ff.
1 Franklin was probably wrong in this surmise. Increase Mather’s Essay for the Recording of Illustrious Providences (the tide was commonly reduced to Remarkable Providences) was not published until 1684, and the DAE shows that to improve in the sense here dealt with was used in the Connecticut records so early as 1640. The same authority shows that Franklin himself used it in 1789!
2 In this sense of to occupy the DAE traces the verb to the Connecticut records of 1647.
1 The pertinent parts of the letter are reprinted by Mathews. It appears in full in The Writings of Benjamin Franklin, edited by A. H. Smyth; New York, 1905–07; Vol. X, pp. 75 ff.
1 I am indebted for these extracts to Warfel, pp. 201 and 202.
2 It issued from Sidney’s Press at New Haven on Feb. 11, and made a volume of 408 pages, plus a 21-page preface. The original price was $1.50. The full title was A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language.
3 Some of the most bitter were launched by Joseph Dennie, editor of the Gazette of the United States and the Port Folio in Philadelphia. This Dennie was a Bostonian, a graduate of Harvard, and a violent Anglomaniac. He studied law but after 1795 devoted himself to journalism. In 1799 he was private secretary to Timothy Pickering, then Secretary of State. He died in 1812. Cf. Warfel, pp. 289–323.
1 pp. 306–308.
2 Oxford, 1911; revised in 1929 and 1934.
3 Towards a Historical Aspect of American Speech Consciousness, April, pp. 301–05. I am indebted to Howard for much of what follows.
4 A Glossary of Words and Phrases Usually Regarded as Peculiar to the United States; second ed., Boston, 1859, p. 255. Hereafter referred to as Bartlett.
1 The DAE reports, on the authority of the Transactions of the American Philological Association, 1886, that it was still in use among the Pennsylvania Germans in that year.
2 Port Folio, Nov. 21, 1801.
1 i.e., Webster’s trial-balloon dictionary of 1806, announced some time before this.
2 Travels in North American in the Years 1827–28; 3 vols.; Edinburgh and London, 1829.
1 Cited in Section 1 of this chapter, p. 4. Cairns (1867–1932) was a scholar who deserves to be remembered. He was educated at the University of Wisconsin, became assistant professor of American literature there in 1901, was made full professor in 1917, and served in that chair until his death. His contributions to the history of American letters were original and valuable.
2 Cited on pp. 1 ff.
3 English Studies (Amsterdam, Holland), Oct., 1935, pp. 161–78.
4 Boston, 1816. Hereafter cited as Pickering.
5 1808, p. 241.
6 Vol. VIII, p. 606.
7 The word is perfectly good English, and is traced by the NED to c. 1449.
8 Vol. II, p. 184.
9 Vol. V, p. 97.
10 Vol. I, pp. 356 and 376.
11 Jan., 1814, p. 497. The Quarterly was then edited by William Gifford, perhaps the most ferocious American-eater that England has ever produced. There is some account of him in AL4, pp. 19 and 79.
1 Allston (1779–1843) was both a writer and a painter. He was a South Carolinian, but grew up in New England. In 1801 he became a pupil at the Royal Academy, London, of which another American, Benjamin West, was then the president. He spent four years in Rome. In 1809 he returned to the United States, and devoted the rest of his life to painting and writing. His poem, The Sylphs of the Seasons, was published in 1813, and his novel, Monaldi, in 1841.
2 1815. Quoted by Cairns, p. 14.
1 The Americans, wrote Southey in 1812, “have in the course of twenty years acquired a distinct national character for low and lying knavery, and so well do they deserve it that no man ever had any dealings with them without having proofs of its truth.” Twenty-eight years later, in his Table-Talk for May 28, 1830, he showed a much more friendly spirit. “I deeply regret,” he said, “the anti-American articles of some of the leading reviews. The Americans regard what is said of them in England a thousand times more than they do anything said of them in any other country. The Americans are excessively pleased with any kind or favourable expressions, and never forgive or forget any slight or abuse. It would be better for them if they were a trifle thicker-skinned.”
2 Brown (1771–1810) wrote seven of them, all now forgotten save by literary archeologists. Brought up in Philadelphia under Quaker influences, he succumbed to the English radicals of the time, and was regarded as an advanced thinker. He was the first professional author that America ever produced. For his relations with Shelley see Shelley and the Novels of Brown, by Melvin Solve, in Fred Newton Scott Anniversary Papers; Chicago, 1929, pp. 141–56.
1 “We owe to the Quarterly,” said N. P. Willis in the preface to Pencillings by the Way; London, 1835, “every spark of ill-feeling that has been kept alive between England and America for the last twenty years. The sneers, the opprobrious epithets of this bravo in literature have been received, in a country where the machinery of reviewing was not understood, as the voice of the English people, and an animosity for which there was no other reason has been thus periodically fed and exasperated. I conceive it to be my duty as a literary man — I know it is my duty as an American — to lose no opportunity of setting my heel on the head of this reptile of criticism.” The Quarterly still survives, but is no longer the power that it once was. W. E. Gladstone once described it as “the food which is served up for the intellectual appetites of the highest classes.” See Every Saturday (Boston), Aug. 4, 1866, p. 128, for an account of its skulduggeries in that era.
2 Nov., 1809, and Jan., 1814.
1 Letters From America, Historical and Descriptive; London, 1792, pp. 59–61. For this extract I am indebted to Read’s British Recognition of American Speech in the Eighteenth Century, before cited.
2 Other reports on the early emergence of the New England twang are in Read, just cited, pp. 325–27.
3 The Journal of Nicholas Cresswell; New York, 1824, p. 271. Here again
I am indebted to Read.
4 Read suggests that the “penetrating observer” was probably John Witherspoon, who invented the term Americanism in 1781. See the footnote on p. 5.
5 London, 1805, Vol. I, pp. 30–40.
6 Both words seem to be Americanisms. The DAE’s first example of slops is from Parkinson, but the NED does not find it in England until 1815. The DAE traces blades to 1724.
1 An Excursion to the United States of North America in the Summer of 1794; Salisbury (England), 1796, p. 214.
2 Travels in America One Hundred Years Ago; New York, 1894, p. 167.
3 Travels Through the Interior Parts of America; London, 1789, Vol. II, p. 197.
4 Philadelphia, 1818.
5 In three volumes. They included not only his reviews, but also his Peter Plymley Letters on the subject of Catholic emancipation (1807), and a number of his speeches and sermons. There was an edition in one volume; Philadelphia, 1858.
6 As, for example, in AL4, p. 13, n. 1.
1 Dwight (1752–1817) was a clergyman and president of Yale from 1795 until his death. His grandson, also Timothy, was president from 1886 to 1899. The elder Dwight, who was the grandson of Jonathan Edwards, was reckoned one of the Hartford Wits, but he was a gloomy fellow and clung resolutely to the Puritanism of his ancestors. His principal poems were The Conquest of Canaan, 1785; Greenfield Hill, 1794; and The Triumph of Infidelity, 1788. They survive today only as literary fossils.
1 Another of the Hartford Wits. His chief poems were The Vision of Columbus, 1787; Hasty Pudding, 1796; and The Columbiad, 1807. Barlow (1754–1812), finding poetry unremunerative, took to land speculation, and in 1788 went to France as agent of the Scioto Company. He made a fortune there by trading in French securities, but simultaneously became converted to radicalism and was made a French citizen during the French Revolution. On his return to America he moderated his ideas, was appointed consul to Algiers, and later became minister to France. In 1812 he followed Napoleon to Russia to negotiate a trade treaty, was overtaken by the retreat from Moscow, and died in Poland. He was one of the backers of Robert Fulton, the pioneer of the steamboat.
1 He also protested occasionally against the high-handed way in which the British government dealt with the United States. Thus in his 1818 article: “The vice of impertinence has lately crept into our Cabinet, and the Americans have been treated with ridicule and contempt. But they are becoming a little too powerful, we take it, for this cavalier sort of management, and are increasing with a rapidity which is really no matter of jocularity to us, or the other powers of the Old World.”
2 On p. v of the preface to his Vocabulary.
1 A book that gives all such dates in a clear and convenient way is Chronological Outlines of American Literature, by Selden L. Whitcomb; New York, 1894. In an introduction to this work Brander Matthews says: “It would be possible to maintain the thesis that American literature began in 1809 with the publication of Irving’s Knickerbocker’s History of New York.”
2 Blackwood’s began as the Edinburgh Monthly Magazine in 1817. Its name was changed to the still surviving form with its seventh issue. It appeared too late to be included in Cairns’s report on the anti-American diatribes of the British reviews, 1783–1815.
3 An excellent account of the reports of these pilgrims, with copious extracts, is in American Social History as Recorded by British Travelers, by Allan Nevins; New York, 1923. Other useful books on the same theme are As Others See Us, by John Graham Brooks; New York, 1908, and The English Traveler in America, 1785–1835, by Jane Louise Mesick; New York, 1922. All three works include bibliographies, and Brooks also lists French and German books.
1 Published in two series; Philadelphia, 1849 and 1851.
2 Literary Notices, p. 857.
3 Two volumes; Boston, 1851.
4 See AL4, pp. 29 and 30.
5 Edinburgh, 2 vols. There was a reprint in Philadelphia the same year. Hamilton was a younger brother to Sir William Hamilton (1788–1856), the Scottish philosopher, and a son and grandson of distinguished medical men. Born in Edinburgh in 1789, he died in 1842. He is best remembered as the author of Cyril Thornton, a novel, 1827, very popular in its day. His Men and Manners in America was translated into French and twice into German.
1 pp. 129–30. Palmer made his tour with two companions, and on the ship coming from Liverpool to New York they found that William Cobbett, in flight from the English police, was a fellow-passenger. Palmer admitted that his dialogue was “not a literal copy,” but added that it embraced “most of the frequent and improper applications of words used in the back country, with a few New England phrases.” He offered it as “a specimen of the worst English you can possibly hear in America.”
2 Creature, in its English sense, of course, took in horses and cattle, but its special application to them seems to have been an Americanism. It was almost always pronounced critter. In the sense of a horse or mule the DAE calls it “chiefly Southern” and traces it to 1782. It was listed as crittur in the glossary appended to David Humphreys’ Yankey in England, 1815. In that printed in the Virginia Literary Museum and Journal of Belles Lettres, Arts, Science, &c., in Dec., 1829, and usually ascribed to Robley Dunglison it was accompanied by the following note: “Much employed in New England for horses, oxen, &c.; this extensive signification is probably obtained from Ireland. In Virginia the word is often restricted to the horse.” It does not appear in P. W. Joyce’s English As We Speak It In Ireland; 2nd ed.; London and Dublin, 1910.
3 As we have seen, p. 32, the use of elegant as a counter-adjective in the sense of the more recent swell was marked by many of the other English travelers of the period. “The epithet is used,” reported Morris Birkbeck in Notes of a Journey in America; London, 1818, “on every occasion of commendation but that to which it is appropriate in the English language.” Birkbeck said that he had heard elegant mill, orchard and tanyard. The DAE, which traces the vogue of the word to 1764, adds elegant fireworks, flannel and potatoes, 1772–1822, and Thornton adds elegant lighthouse, eight-day clock, mare, coffin, schoolhouse, parasol, real estate, lodgings, man, hogs, steamboat, bacon, corn, whiskey, and cement, 1765–1824.
4 This use of heap in the sense of much or many was not actually an Americanism — the NED lists English examples from 1661 to 1884 — but the word was commoner in the United States. In the Virginia Literary Museum glossary it is described as Southern and Western. It does not appear in Pickering, but it is listed by Adiel Sherwood in his Gazetteer of the State of Georgia, 1837. Heap sight is a true Americanism, but it did not appear until half a century later.
5 The DAE quotes one Todd as reporting that in 1835 O my and possible were “universal interjections in America.” Possible does not appear in Humphreys, 1815; Pickering, 1816, or Dunglison, 1829.
1 Dreadful as an adverb was certainly no stranger to English, though it may have been more often used in America. Humphreys, 1815, listed it as “used often, as, very, excessively, even as it regards beauty, goodness, etc.” Bartlett, in 1848, grouped it with awful, powerful, monstrous, mighty, almighty and all-fired as in common use in the South and West.
2 Big had become the favorite adjective of magnitude in the United States, and at a later date also came to signify fine or excellent.
3 Humphreys, in his glossary, 1815, noted under calculate that it was “used frequently in an improper sense, as reckon, guess.” Reckon occurs in many English dialects and is not unknown in the standard speech. In 1871 Benjamin Jowett put it into the mouth of Socrates in his translation of the Dialogues of Plato. But it was in much wider use in the America of 1800–75 than it has ever been in England, and it is still heard often in the South.
4 Why Palmer should have underscored reared I do not know. It is actually much more English than American, and Shakespeare used it in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1590. The more usual American term is raised, which the NED calls “chiefly U.S.” To raise, at one time, was also used in England, but the DAE says that it “bec
ame obsolete in British usage about 1800.” It was denounced by the North American Review in 1818 as “a provincialism … not to be found in any correct writer” … and “confined almost exclusively to Virginia, and perhaps some of the neighboring states.” It was denounced again by Sherwood, who said primly in his Gazetteer of Georgia, 1837: “We raise horses, cattle and swine, but not human beings.” In his American Dictionary of 1828 Noah Webster said of it: “In New England it is never applied to the breeding of the human race, as it is in the Southern States. In the North we say to raise wheat and to raise horses or cattle, but not to raise men, though we may say to raise a sickly child.” But Dunglison in the Virginia Literary Museum, 1829, gave “I was raised in Virginia” without comment, and the term is now in general use in the United States. “The writers of grammars and rhetorics,” says Mathews, p. 140, “have for over a century voiced their unanimous disapproval of raise … and have commended rear for use in connection with ‘the breeding of the human race’ … [But] a large number of people have never heard of the distinction … and have used raise with peaceful and pleasurable results in places where, according to the rhetorics, rear should have been employed.”
5 This is a true Americanism. The DAE, overlooking Palmer, takes its first example from The Letters of Major Jack Downing, 1834.
6 The DAE’s first example is dated 1796. At first the term was applied only to England, but after the Civil War it began to be used by immigrants from other countries.
1 Following this dialogue, pp. 130–31, Palmer lists the following “other words and sayings that are peculiar to the United States or differently applied to what they are in England”:
Smart. Clever, active, industrious.
Sick. Unwell; they never use the word ill.
Log. A trunk of a tree when felled and the branches off.
Right away. Straight along.
Hwich, hwen, etc. Sometimes used for which, when, etc.
Madam. The word spoken at full (except in the cities) [i.e., not reduced to ma’am.]
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