Founding Grammars

by Rosemarie Ostler

  Those who performed especially well were moved to the front benches. That meant that their turn to recite a grammar lesson came around again more quickly than if they’d stayed in place. When a boy could recite every word of the grammar book three times in a row, he received the dubious reward of promotion to the first bench, where he was introduced to the mysteries of parsing. This system understandably squelched any potential enthusiasm for mastering the subject of grammar. “Such was the horror in which this exercise was held,” recalls Fowle, “that boys, whose turn it would be to say grammar the next day, would miss words in spelling, so as to drop down to a lower form, and put off the evil day.”3 Many who had the opportunity to advance to the first form intentionally gave wrong answers to avoid the move.

  In Fowle’s view, teaching grammar by forcing students to memorize and recite it is not only mind-numbingly tedious, it’s ineffective. To the boys who struggled with memorization, grammar lessons were a recurring nightmare. To those—like Fowle himself—who excelled at it, the lessons were less painful but still ultimately meaningless. The schoolmaster never discussed the context for the rules or explained how to apply them. Students simply parroted the lessons without comprehension.

  Fowle discovered the uselessness of knowing grammar books by heart when he entered the prestigious Boston Latin School at the age of thirteen. One of his teachers tested his grammar skills by demanding the past participle of love. Fowle was humiliated to realize that he couldn’t remember it. He concludes, “It is not to be wondered at, therefore, that I hated grammar, had no faith in the utility of teaching it as it was then taught, and determined to reform the method if I ever had a good opportunity.”4 That opportunity would eventually come, but Fowle would discover that grammar teachers—as well as their former pupils—were remarkably resistant to change.

  After two years at the Boston Latin School, William was ready to enter Harvard. Unfortunately, his father was once again mired in financial difficulties, so instead of going to college, William signed on as a bookseller’s apprentice. His master was none other than Caleb Bingham, author of The Young Ladies’ Accidence—now retired from teaching and in the business of publishing and selling textbooks. Fowle’s unhappiness with the way grammar was taught did not extend to his new mentor. He greatly respected Bingham. He later wrote of him as “a good scholar; a very successful and much beloved teacher; a gentleman in the best sense of the word.”5

  Fowle’s apprenticeship dramatically influenced his ideas about education, including grammar education. Because the bookstore dealt only in textbooks, business was sporadic. Fowle had plenty of time to read and found that he enjoyed this informal way of gaining an education. He also began developing his own ideas about teaching. Bingham was a prominent school reformer, and the bookstore was a gathering place for like-minded teachers. Fowle often joined in their lively conversations.

  The store was so congenial that when an acquaintance, theologian William Ellery Channing, offered to pay Fowle’s way through Harvard, he declined. He later wrote that he was grateful that poverty had prevented him from attending college, “which would have furnished me with a diploma to wrap up and bury my intellect.”6 Instead he continued learning on his own. He formed the “Belles-Lettres Society,” a group of a dozen or so shop clerks that met once a week to read each other original essays. The group stayed together for two years, and several members later became professional men or teachers.

  When Bingham died in 1817, his family hired the twenty-two-year-old Fowle to run the business. Fowle spent five more years at the bookstore. Then he got the chance to put some of his educational theories into practice. Boston’s Primary School Committee discovered two hundred young people who had somehow slipped through the school system’s cracks. They were now too old to attend primary school, but not qualified to attend classes with pupils their own age. The Committee decided to educate them in a special school.

  The sum allocated to furnish a schoolroom and hire a teacher was a barely adequate $1,000 (equal to about $21,000 today), so to save money, the school was organized on the “monitorial” system.7 The monitorial system was a recently invented way to keep students with varying skill levels occupied while employing only one teacher. The teacher focused on instructing the oldest, most advanced students. These students—the monitors—would then listen to the younger children reciting their lessons. That way, the whole class could be active at once. Normally students sat silently much of the time, waiting for their turn to recite. Fowle, who was a member of the Primary School Committee, volunteered to do the teaching until a permanent instructor could be found.

  Fowle’s first experience teaching grammar, described in The Teacher’s Institute, reinforced his disgust with mainstream grammar books. When quizzing the monitors on the parts of speech, he discovered to his chagrin that they could not correctly identify the parts of even the simplest sentences. Asked to parse the sentence David smote Goliath, one young woman guessed that smote was a preposition. Her reasoning—prepositions, according to Murray, “serve to connect words with one another and to show the relation between them.” In this case, the student explained, smote connected David with Goliath. When asked what she thought the relation between them was, she ventured that it was not a very friendly one.

  This incident, so reminiscent of Fowle’s own embarrassing experience at the Latin School, made him realize that grammatical ignorance was common even among those who had studied the fabled Murray. He comments drily that his student’s performance shook his faith in “the perfection” of that book.8 No doubt it also strengthened his resolve to one day provide an alternative.

  Fowle’s temporary teaching assignment grew into a career. He approached it with the zeal of a born didact, introducing several innovations previously unheard of in Boston. These included using blackboards to write out grammar and spelling exercises and do arithmetic; teaching geography by drawing maps; and using instruments like air pumps to teach science. Instead of the usual instructional method of mindless repetition, he tried the novel approach of engaging the students according to their interests and capacities. Fowle also allowed girls to attend the school year-round, instead of the usual arrangement of teaching them only during the summer when the boys were busy elsewhere. Even more radically, he abolished corporal punishment.9

  Fowle’s reforms paid off. The special school was so successful that the School Committee eventually rewarded him with a regular teaching appointment and a schoolmaster’s salary. In 1823 Fowle took over the headship of the Female Monitorial School—an early version of teacher training for young women. He remained there for seventeen years, until worsening health forced him to abandon teaching and return to bookselling.

  Fowle’s innovations gave him a taste of the hostile reception that radical reformers can expect. Conventional public schoolteachers saw Fowle’s success as a threat. Not only would the monitorial system cut down on the need for their services, but they might be forced to introduce some of the same changes into their own classrooms. In an effort to close the special school after its first year, a teachers’ group organized a campaign of letters to the newspapers, arguing that the new system was a way of cutting corners. They told parents it had nothing to recommend it but cheapness.

  Although a placid, tolerant man in private life, Fowle reacted ferociously to attacks on his work. He jumped into the fray with a series of newspaper essays defending his methods and, incidentally, accusing other Boston schools of inefficiency. Under pressure, the City Council announced that the experimental school would be shut down. Later—after furious protests from the School Committee and perhaps after reading Fowle’s essays—they changed their minds. The school was allowed to go forward with Fowle at its head. The furor over Fowle’s school reforms was a preview of the violent reaction that his alternative grammar book would trigger several years later. It convinced him, as he would later write, that “there are no greater enemies to improvements in education than schoolmasters.”10

/>   * * *

  While running a school and contesting with the City Council, Fowle still found time to write textbooks. Within a few years he produced a French-American dictionary, an arithmetic book, a geography book, a reading and spelling guide, and an introduction to linear drawing. He wrote over forty textbooks altogether during his career.11 In 1827, he finally produced the grammar book that he’d been planning since his own school days. The True English Grammar was intended to make grammar study meaningful by explaining the true structure and history of the language. The detailed subtitle—An Attempt to form a Grammar of the English Language, not modelled upon those of the Latin and Greek and other Foreign Languages—makes Fowle’s purpose clear.

  Fowle’s years of training teachers should have translated into a highly functional grammar textbook. Unluckily for the success of his project, he was diverted by John Horne Tooke. By the time Fowle began writing, Horne Tooke’s two-volume work on the origins of English, Winged Words, or the Diversions of Purley, was more than two decades old. The second volume had appeared in 1805 and Horne Tooke himself had been dead since 1812. His influence was still strong, however, in the United States.

  The Diversions of Purley (as it’s usually called) strikes a bizarre note with modern readers. The “Purley” in the title refers to the country house of Horne Tooke’s patron, where the book is set. Horne Tooke and his fellow guests at Purley—all scholarly men—“divert” themselves with a series of conversations about the origins of English words. These are really closer to monologues. They usually open with one of Horne Tooke’s companions questioning some aspect of his theory that all parts of speech are ultimately traceable to ancient nouns or verbs. Horne Tooke then launches into a detailed defense of his ideas, pummeling his listeners with an overwhelming battery of facts and arguments in support of his claims. By the time he’s finished, they are more than ready to admit that he’s right.

  Horne Tooke’s arguments would not be so readily accepted today. His approach to word histories was slapdash at best. Modern etymologists uncover a word’s history and development by carefully tracking its appearances in historical documents over time. Horne Tooke favored a more intuitive approach. Often he connected words based on little more than a spelling resemblance, twisting meanings in far-fetched ways to make the words in question fit in with his theory. As a result, many of his word histories are wrong, as later discoveries in etymology would show.

  In one typical scenario, a member of the party questions how a preposition like from can really be a disguised noun or verb. It seems to him that from encompasses several complex meanings—indicating a source in These figs come from Turkey, a point in space in That lamp hangs from the ceiling, and a starting point in That lamp is falling from the ceiling. Surely all these meanings can’t have come from a single term.

  Horne Tooke replies that from has “as clear, as precise, and at all times as uniform and unequivocal a meaning as any word in the language. From means merely beginning and nothing else. It is simply the Anglo-Saxon and Gothic Noun Frum,… Beginning, Origin, source, fountain, author.” He then demonstrates that the word beginning can substitute for from in all these instances without changing the meaning—“Figs came BEGINNING Turkey … Turkey the Place of BEGINNING to come.”12

  (According to the Oxford English Dictionary, from derives from the Old English adjective fram, with the general meaning of “forward.” Later the meaning shifted to “onward” or “away.” By the ninth century, it was being used as a preposition. Gothic frum, meaning “to forward, promote, or supply,” is indirectly related to fram, but its modern English descendant is the verb furnish.)

  Challenged with sentences using from in different ways (The alarm rang from morning till night), Horne Tooke shows how each one really means beginning (“The alarm rang BEGINNING morning, i.e., Morning being the time of its BEGINNING to ring”).13 He bolsters his arguments with extended footnotes that feature such wide-ranging evidence as quotations from Chaucer, lines from early English poetry, the opinions of earlier linguistic philosophers, and related words in Dutch and German. He also uses the footnotes to take jabs at mainstream grammarians like Lowth and Murray.

  It seems astonishing today that educated nineteenth-century readers could have taken this mixture of bombast and quasi-scholarship seriously. One explanation is that the scientific tone, no matter how spurious, strongly appealed to Americans of the Jacksonian era. They were enthusiastic about all types of scientific progress. Several institutions for the promotion of science were founded around this time. Philadelphia’s Academy of Natural Sciences dates from 1812 and the Franklin Institute from 1824. New York’s Lyceum of Natural History, later the New York Academy of Sciences, opened in 1817. In 1835, during Jackson’s second term, the United States received the bequest under James Smithson’s will that led to the Smithsonian Institution. The lyceum movement—named after the garden where Aristotle taught philosophy—also took hold during the 1820s, with lyceums springing up around the country. Americans eager to hear about the latest scientific discoveries and inventions could attend lectures sponsored by their local lyceum.

  During these years, scholars were keenly interested in scientifically organizing and classifying the natural world, a trend that spilled over into grammar study. Grammarians began treating their subject more like a science. Lindley Murray and other eighteenth-century grammarians defined grammar as the art of speaking properly, but grammar writers in the 1820s talked about the science of language. Fowle was part of this new approach. He believed that by applying Horne Tooke’s theories to the parts of speech, he was giving the structure of English a more rational and scientific basis.

  As linguists a decade or two later started to construct a more genuinely scientific history of English, The Diversions of Purley would gradually fall out of favor. Horne Tooke’s early detractors accused him of having a poor command of Anglo-Saxon English and other ancient languages. This criticism would appear even more obvious to the next generation of readers. By the time a new edition of Diversions appeared in 1840, the world had changed so much that a Blackwood’s reviewer would scornfully describe the book as “one of the most consummate compounds of ignorance and presumption that ever practiced with success upon human credulity.”14 In the 1820s, however, the field of etymology was still in its infancy. Horne Tooke’s incisive writing style made his word histories sound convincing and few were equipped to challenge them.

  Fowle organized The True English Grammar like a typical textbook, but the conventional format is misleading. Although the book opens with a standard definition of grammar (“rules for writing or speaking the English language”) and a conventional description of nouns, it quickly plunges into Horne Tooke territory. Fowle spends most of the book presenting detailed arguments for reclassifying almost every part of speech. Horne Tooke’s influence is especially apparent in a long section titled “Contractions, Anomalies, Etc.,” which is simply a shortened version of The Diversions of Purley. Here Fowle presents a list of several dozen words normally identified as prepositions or conjunctions, from as (“means the same as it or that”) to unless (“the Anglo-Saxon verb dismiss”), and claims that they are really verbs or nouns.

  Throughout the book Fowle notes his disagreements with other grammarians in asides such as “in consequence of a misperception … Mr. Murray has constructed his Passive voice” or “what is called the imperative mood by Dr. Lowth and his followers.” He also criticizes Murray more directly in an appendix titled “Strictures on Murray’s Grammar.” Fowle admits that anyone correcting the great man faces an uphill climb. “In the United States,” he writes, “Murray’s Grammar, under one form or another, is universally used; and so satisfied is the publick mind of its perfection that any attempt to check its progress will be viewed as a desperate adventure.”15 Even so, he feels that Murray’s word classifications should be revised.

  In Fowle’s view, the only reason why Murray and his followers have sorted English words into articles
, prepositions, pronouns, and the like is to bring them into line with Latin word categories. They’ve adopted case distinctions like nominative and accusative for the same reason. He doesn’t see any value in organizing English this way. Concluding that “we are surely as competent to improve our grammar as to simplify and improve our machinery,” Fowle proposes that Americans abandon all Latin-based linguistic complications in favor of his more logical system.16

  Fowle considered his book a practical guide to English, but he provided almost no usage guidance. Typically, grammar book writers of the time included a “Syntax” section where they pronounced on issues such as the importance of making pronouns agree with their antecedents. Fowle omits this discussion. Nor does he mention the nonstandard usages that Webster argued for so insistently, such as Who did she speak to? and It is me. Although he praises the common man’s linguistic instincts, he stops short of actively encouraging nonstandard speech.

  The book does offer some sensible suggestions for making grammar easier to learn. Fowle labels nouns according to their use in the sentence—“agent” or “object”—rather than with the case names “nominative” and “accusative.” He also provides easily intelligible definitions for the few parts of speech that he accepts, saying that nouns are “names of things” and verbs are “words which express what nouns do.” He instructs teachers to explain the material so their students understand it rather than merely forcing them to memorize it. This approach, a clear improvement over the usual practice, was highly unorthodox at the time. Unhappily, these useful hints are nearly hidden among dense discussions about word origins.