scheme), “there iz no alternativ.”101
But where Webster most profoundly departs from Johnson was not in the particulars of his orthographic solutions, but rather in his determination to “solve” the problem at all. Webster was completely committed to what he saw as the lexicographer’s responsibility to “remove causes of error,”102 not just to identify them. By contrast, what is most striking about Johnson is how little he actually attempted to do about the fundamental linguistic problems that both of them understood so similarly. “Our inflections,” writes Johnson at one point in the Plan, “are by no means constant, but admit of numberless irregularities, which in this Dictionary will be diligently noted.”103 Not corrected, mind you, but just “diligently noted.”104 And so when it comes to spelling, it can be surprising how much Johnson is willing to accommodate his dictionary to an orthographic status quo that he describes so pejoratively: “The present usage of spelling, where the present usage can be distinguished, will, therefore, in this work, be generally followed; yet there will be often occasion to observe, that it is in itself inaccurate, and tolerated rather than chosen.”105 From the perspective of a true language reformer like Webster, Johnson’s willingness to tolerate the intolerable must have seemed a scandalous abdication of lexicographical duty. Not content to say, as Johnson did, that English spelling “is too inconstant to be reduced to rules,” nor that it is simply “not in our power to have recourse to any established laws of speech,” Webster absolutely refuses the underlying assumption that comprehensive reform was impracticable or impossible. However variable they may seem, Webster insists, “it does not follow that pronunciation and orthography cannot be rendered in a great measure permanent.”106 It just “requires some labor to adjust the parts and reduce them to order.”107 Where Johnson saw it as his job to make a note of irregularities, Webster determines to regulate. Where Johnson proposed to “embalm”108 the language in order to arrest its decay, Webster believes he can actually revive the patient.
Johnson’s reluctance to take corrective linguistic action was a principled lexicographical philosophy he had first announced in his Plan: “The chief rule which I propose to follow is, to make no innovation without a reason sufficient to balance the inconvenience of change; and such reasons I do not expect often to find.”109 This conservative aversion to anything that smacks of reform is fueled by Johnson’s conviction that “all change is of itself an evil, which ought not to be hazarded but for evident advantage; and as inconstancy is in every case a mark of weakness, it will add nothing to the reputation of our tongue.”110 The irregularity of English, it is true, is a form of “inconstancy” intrinsic to the nature of the language; but to move too hastily to innovate would only be to compound it with the inconstancy of all human art. Johnson’s highest priority, as he repeatedly asserts throughout the Plan, is to stabilize the language, not to perfect it. This dictates that—for all of his rhetoric of imposing order on chaos—some degree of linguistic confusion be allowed to remain. As a result of this conviction, Johnson finds any attempts to perfect the language dangerous in principle. In the preface to the dictionary, Johnson confesses to having once been tempted by the dream of a bolder and more comprehensive lexicographic achievement, which he compares to a fantasy of epic heroism: “When first I engaged in this work, I … pleased myself with a prospect of the hours which I should revel away in feasts of literature, the obscure recesses of northern learning, which I should enter and ransack, the treasures with which I expected every search into those neglected mines to reward my labour, and the triumph with which I should display my acquisitions to mankind.”111 But ultimately he chooses to deny himself these fantastical pleasures, which he calls “the dreams of a poet doomed at last to wake a lexicographer.”112 What he awakens to is the explicitly anti-utopian realization that “thus to persue perfection, was, like the first inhabitants of Arcadia, to chace the sun, which, when they had reached the hill where he seemed to rest, was still beheld at the same distance from them.”113 In the 1747 Plan, Johnson had already warned against those bearing such schemes of linguistic perfection: “There are, indeed, some who despise the inconveniencies [sic] of confusion, who seem to take pleasure in departing from custom, and to think alteration desirable for its own sake; and the reformation of our orthography, which these writers have attempted, should not pass without its due honours, but that I suppose they hold singularity its own reward, or may dread the fascination of lavish praise.”114
Now Johnson, to state the obvious, was not referring to Noah Webster (who was born the year after the Plan was published), but Webster would seem to be the kind of thinker Johnson cautioned against—those who “take pleasure in departing from custom” and “think alteration desirable for its own sake.” Was not departure from (British linguistic) custom his goal? Was not an “alteration” of British English regarded as an end in itself, and did he not settle specifically on “reformation of our orthography” as the means to that end? Beyond that, is there not more than a hint of the utopian in Webster’s wish that “the inhabitants of America can be brought to a perfect uniformity in the pronunciation of words” and in his explicit pursuit of “a perfect correspondence between the spelling and pronunciation”?115 The first thing we can infer from the seeming applicability of Johnson’s critique to his posthumous American successor is simply that Webster’s reforms must not have been so unprecedented. Those to whom Johnson referred in the lines above were, in a manner of speaking, the Noah Websters of the prior two centuries—men who, indeed, did so “despise the inconveniencies of confusion” that they proposed to correct irregularities through a comprehensive reform. Since one of my goals is to add nuance to a rather flattened historical narrative of a linguistic declaration of independence, a revolution against British orthographic authority, it is essential to understand this whole matter in its full cultural and historical context. And that entails reading backward from this transatlantic late eighteenth-century dispute to its much earlier English origins.
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The story of modern spelling reform in English properly begins with the arrival of print in England in the late fifteenth century (William Caxton set up the first printing press in England in 1476).116 At this time, there was still nothing like a “generally recognized standard form of English speech, and only the beginnings of a standard orthography.”117 The new possibility of rapid reproduction and circulation of printed copies put more pressure on this problem than had the circulation of manuscripts.118 By and large, “printers of the early sixteenth century demonstrate little obvious interest in working towards a standardized orthography” (Salmon, “Orthography and Punctuation,” 27), which made them the targets of invective by commentators on the state of English spelling such as John Hart, who in 1551 noted “the divers vices and corruptions which use (or better abuse) mainteneth in our writing.”119 Vivian Salmon summarizes these “abuses” according to Hart, which include some of the same orthographic defects of which Webster would complain later: “Arguing that ‘vicious’ writing ‘bringeth confusion and uncertainte in the reading’ … he lists the major faults as ‘diminution,’ ‘superfluite,’ ‘the usurpation of one letter for another, by their confusible double powers,’ and ‘the mysplacing and disordering of them.’ ”120 By the end of the sixteenth century, “the ‘correct’ relationship between the spoken and the written word … occupied printers and grammarians alike.”121 This led to a period of “intense discussion” about “the lack of a standard orthography and the possibility of providing a more satisfactory one,”122 such as those proposed by Sir Thomas Smith in 1568, Hart in 1569, and William Bullokar in 1580. Some advocated the reform of spelling on phonetic lines, while others merely aimed for more consistency of any kind, regardless of the gap between spelling and pronunciation. Some called for a new or revised alphabet more capable of capturing English speech, while others (like Bullokar) opted for “the traditional alphabet with a great variety of diacritics.” In turn, these attempts also brought about strong counterarguments against spelling reform, such as those by John Caius and John Baret in 1574.123
The early modern phase of orthographic reform culminated with
