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debate already had some historical legs—and it is also clear whom Johnson might have had in mind when offering somewhat sarcastic “honours”
131 to previous attempts at orthographic reform. Most significantly for my purposes, it becomes clear that Webster’s late eighteenth-century argument in favor of the perfectibility of English was not in fact a call to “innovate” the language, but rather an attempt to restore it to an earlier and more perfect state. For all of his association with linguistic novelty, Webster was in fact placing himself in a lineage of language reformers who preceded Johnson and his contemporaries by two centuries. This was no secret; on the contrary, it was one of the explicit terms of Webster’s cultural authority. “In the essays, ritten in the last yeer,” he wrote in a 1790 preface testing out his revised orthography, “a considerable change of spelling is introduced by way of experiment. This liberty waz taken by the writers before the age of Queen Elizabeth, and to this we are indeted for the preference of modern spelling over Gower and Chaucer.”
132 In the appendix to the
Dissertations, Webster cites, as precursors to his own attempts, those “formerly made in England to rectify the orthography of the language,” including those of Sir Thomas Smith in 1568 and two early seventeenth-century reformers, Alexander Gil and Charles Butler.
133 In this way, Webster framed his own reforms as a resumption of an unfinished Renaissance project. “Every possible reezon that could ever be offered for altering the spelling of wurds,” he asserts, “still exists in full force; and if a gradual reform should not be made in our language, it wil proov that we are less under the influence of reezon than our ancestors.”
134 This was to be a rather different kind of “American Renaissance” than F. O. Matthiessen’s: not a renaissance of America’s own so much as America’s completion of a cultural rebirth that had begun in England centuries earlier but had stalled in its country of origin.
