The Forgotten Founding Father- Noah Webster by Joshua C. Kendall Page B

speller, Webster realized, could quickly put an end to this debate, as it would be destined to shape the speech habits of Americans for generations to come. “A spelling book,” he would later write, “does more to form the language of a nation than all other books.” The emotionally fragile and often despondent Noah Webster, Jr., was compelled to think big. This project with its potentially vast repercussions could well meet his pressing need for both fame and silver dollars.
    Dilworth’s New Guide contained five parts. The first part, which covered about half of the book, included syllabariums (lists of syllables) followed by tables of related words and short readings. Dilworth began by presenting columns of syllables such as “ma, me, mi, mo, mu” and “ab, eb, ib, ob, ub”; a few pages later, he provided various monosyllabic words such as “an,” “as,” “at,” “ax” and “ay.” And then to give children a chance to practice what they had learned, he featured “some early lessons on the foregoing tables.” Lesson I featured the following reading:
    No man may put off the Law of God.
The way of God is no ill way.
My joy is in God all the day.
A bad man is a foe to God.
    Adhering to the same format, Dilworth went on to teach the pronunciation of words containing more and more syllables. The second part of Dilworth consisted solely of “a large and useful table of words that are the same in sound, but different in signification.” While the third part contained a grammar, the last two parts were readers that featured fables and prayers, respectively.
    Webster would eventually rework the five parts of Dilworth’s speller into three separate books—the three volumes of his A Grammatical Institute, of the English Language, Comprising, an Early, Concise, and Systematic Method of Education, Designed for the Use of English Schools in America . The first volume, his speller, roughly paralleled the first two parts of Dilworth—consisting largely of syllable lists and the tables of homonyms. Likewise, Webster’s second and third volumes—his grammar and reader—revised the third, fourth and fifth parts of Dilworth. Webster’s grammar, published in March 1784, never sold too well, and he abandoned it in 1804 (though he later wrote an academic treatise, Philosophical and Practical Grammar of the English Language ). His reader, which first appeared in February 1785, fared better, and lasted until it was superseded by the McGuffey reader in the late 1830s. But Webster’s so-called blue-backed speller—the nickname derives from the thin blue paper that covered later editions—was a sensation that would stay on the market for more than a century. Its initial print run of five thousand copies was more than the total number of spellers sold in a year throughout the colonies back when Webster was a West Division schoolboy. In 1784, the second and third editions of the 120-page text were published. Nearly four dozen more editions—some with print runs as high as twenty-five thousand—would come out by the end of the eighteenth century. The tiny speller—it was about six and a quarter inches long and three and a half inches wide—was the cash cow that enabled Webster to devote the second half of his life to the dictionary. To use the nautical metaphor of his granddaughter Emily Ford, “it was the little steam tug that conveyed the large East Indiaman laden with spices and silk, or the man-of-war bristling with cannon.”
    Webster was not the first person to revise Dilworth, nor the first to challenge its dominance in the American marketplace. In 1756, the British author Daniel Fenning published his Universal Spelling-Book . Its tenth edition—the first one printed on the other side of the pond—appeared in Boston in 1769. Modeled closely on Dilworth, the text by Fenning also contained five parts, including a grammar and reader. But it also featured some material not found in Dilworth, such as a dictionary