JOSEPH EMERSON WORCESTER
JOSEPH EMERSON WORCESTER
1758
October 16, Monday: At the battle of Clostercamp, the French were triumphant over the combined forces of Great Britain, Prussia, Hanover, Brunswick, and Hesse-Kassel.
Noah Webster, Jr. was born in the front, upstairs bedroom (then described as “parlor”), probably in its 4-poster “guest” bed, in a square, white house on South Main Street in what is now West Hartford, Connecticut to Noah Webster, Sr. and Mercy Steele Webster.1 You can still visit the family farm where he was born, at 227 South Main Street (unless today happens to be Wednesday). It is probable that Noah initially attended South Middle School in Hartford, and Hopkins Grammar School of Hartford under Mrs. Wales. He would be one of the approximately 150 young scholars prepared for college by the Reverend Doctor Nathan Perkins, pastor of his village church, entering Yale College at the age of 14. It would be said of this lexicographer that, “if you had met him in China you would have known that he hailed from Connecticut” (also famous in West Hartford would be Dr. Joseph Emerson Worcester, Webster’s lexicographic rival, who would refuse to sacrifice the
1. On his mother’s side he was a great-great-great grandson of Governor William Bradford of Plymouth Colony, a Pilgrim First Comer. On his father’s side he was a great-great grandson of a Puritan, John Webster, who had emigrated from Warwickshire settling initially near Boston and then in 1638 migrating to “Newe Towne” (Hartford, Connecticut) as part of Hooker’s band. This John Webster had become Governor of Connecticut. Noah’s father had been born at Hartford on March 25, 1722 and was a farmer, soldier, Deacon, and Justice of the Peace; he would live to the age of 91. Noah’s mother had been born in October, 1727 and would die on October 5, 1794 at the age of 67. These parents produced five children: Mercy, born November 8, 1749; Abraham, born September 17, 1751; Jerusha, born January 22, 1756; Noah; and Charles, born September 2, 1762. Both elder sisters would marry early. Elder brother Abraham would become a farmer in New York State near Utica; younger brother Charles would enter business. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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tradition and elegance of language to anything so mundane as usage).
1784
August 24, Tuesday: In England, Dr. Erasmus Darwin’s daughter Emma was born.
In Bedford, New Hampshire, Joseph Emerson Worcester was born. Neither he nor any of his 13 siblings would be permitted to leave home to begin their formal education until the date of their 21st birthdays. All but one of these 14, including Joe, would become teachers. Joseph would rise to fame as a lexicographer but, unlike his competitor Noah Webster, Jr., would be disinclined to sacrifice the tradition and elegance of language to anything so mundane as usage.
1805
Having reached the age of 21 years, Joseph Emerson Worcester was allowed to leave home to attend Phillipps’s Academy, where he would sit with a class of 9-year-old colleagues.
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1809
Joseph Emerson Worcester went on from Phillips’s Academy to Yale College, where, at the age of 25, he would again be vastly older than other matriculants.
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1811
Joseph Emerson Worcester graduated from Yale College and began to teach at a private academy in Salem, Massachusetts. One of his pupils would be Nathaniel Hathorne [sic].
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1813
Nathaniel Hathorne injured his foot playing ball, causing a lameness which for two years and four months would prevent regular school attendance. During this period he would be taught at home by Joseph Emerson Worcester (who would later become well-known as a lexicographer).
1817
Joseph Emerson Worcester’s A GEOGRAPHICAL DICTIONARY OR GENERAL GAZETEER.
1818
Joseph Emerson Worcester’s A GAZETEER OF THE UNITED STATES.
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1826
Joseph Emerson Worcester’s ELEMENTS OF HISTORY, ANCIENT AND MODERN.
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1827
Joseph Emerson Worcester edited a new edition of JOHNSON’S ENGLISH DICTIONARY AS IMPROVED BY TODD AND ABRIDGED BY CHALMERS, WITH WALKER’S PRONOUNCING DICTIONARY COMBINED.
“THE POET” [Emerson’s ESSAYS, 2ND SERIES]: “I look in vain for the poet whom I describe. We do not, with sufficient plainness, or sufficient profoundness, address ourselves to life, nor dare we chaunt our own times and social circumstance. If we filled the day with bravery, we should not shrink from celebrating it. Time and nature yield us many gifts, but not yet the timely man, the new religion, the reconciler, whom all things await. Dante’s praise is, that he dared to write his autobiography in colossal cipher, or into universality. We have yet had no genius in America, with tyrannous eye, which knew the value of our incomparable materials, and saw, in the barbarism and materialism of the times, another carnival of the same gods whose picture he so much admires in Homer; then in the middle age; then in Calvinism. Banks and tariffs, the newspaper and caucus, methodism and unitarianism, are flat and dull to dull people, but rest on the same foundations of wonder as the town of Troy, and the temple of Delphos, and are as swiftly passing away. Our logrolling, our stumps and their politics, our fisheries, our Negroes, and Indians, our boasts, and our repudiations, the wrath of rogues, and the pusillanimity of honest men, the northern trade, the southern planting, the western clearing, Oregon, and Texas, are yet unsung. Yet America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres. If I have not found that excellent combination of gifts in my countrymen which I seek, neither could I aid myself to fix the idea of the poet by reading now and then in Chalmers’s collection of five centuries of English poets. These are wits, more than poets, though there have been poets among them. But when we adhere to the ideal of the poet, we have our difficulties even with Milton and Homer. Milton is too literary, and Homer too literal and historical.”
ALEXANDER CHALMERS
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1829
Joseph Emerson Worcester took on the job of prepping a new cheaper edition of the WEBSTER’S DICTIONARY 00 for a fee of $2,000. . It was titled THE AMERICAN SPELLING-BOOK: CONTAINING THE RUDIMENTS OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE FOR THE USE OF SCHOOLS IN THE UNITED STATES BY NOAH WEBSTER and was published by William H. Niles in Middletown, Connecticut. The 71-year-old Noah Webster, when he would see the result, would be radically incensed at the ruthlessness with which Worcester had disposed of so many of the personal idiosyncracies of the previous publication.
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THE MAINE WOODS: The Anglo-American can indeed cut down, and grub up all this waving forest, and make a stump speech, and vote for Buchanan on its ruins, but he cannot converse with the spirit of the tree he fells, he cannot read the poetry and mythology which retire as he advances. He ignorantly erases mythological tablets in order to print his handbills and town-meeting warrants on them. Before he has learned his a b c in the beautiful but mystic lore of the wilderness which Spenser and Dante had just begun to read, he cuts it down, coins a pine-tree shilling, (as if to signify the pine’s value to him,) puts up a deestrict school-house, and introduces Webster’s spelling-book.
NOAH WEBSTER JOSEPH EMERSON WORCESTER
1830
Joseph Emerson Worcester’s COMPREHENSIVE, PRONOUNCING AND EXPLANATORY DICTIONARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
An English translation of Jean-François Champollion’s work was offered by the Reverend Samson Reed.2
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1832
Joseph Emerson Worcester’s ELEMENTS OF GEOGRAPHY, ANCIENT AND MODERN: WITH AN ATLAS. A NEW EDITION (Illustrated by Alexander Anderson; Boston: Hilliard, Gray, & Company). This text was required for admission to Harvard College and has been found in Henry Thoreau’s personal library.
ELEMENTS OF GEOGRAPHY
Friend Luke Howard’s ESSAY ON THE MODIFICATIONS OF CLOUDS. / BY LUKE HOWARD, F.R.S. &C. / [FIRST PUBLISHED 1803.] / LONDON: / PUBLISHED BY HARVEY AND DALTON, / GRACECHURCH- STREET. / MDCCCXXXII. At Widener Library of Harvard University, this is now cataloged as “KE 31948” and bears the following inscriptions: B Sept. 1856 [BOOKPLATE WITH OLD HARVARD SEAL] “Christo et Ecclesiæ” “Bought / with the Fund bequeathed by Horace A. Haven / of Portsmouth, N.H. / (Class of 1842.) / Rec.d Dec. 2, 1851.” [ON TITLE PAGE] “From the Author — Manchester / 28 June 1842.” HOWARD PUBLICATIONS
2. The Reverend Samson Reed, foremost American member of the Swedenborgian New Church, would be referred to by Waldo Emerson as his “early oracle.” 10 Copyright Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1834
November 26, Wednesday: Waldo Emerson lectured at the Lyceum in Concord.
Joseph Emerson Worcester was being publicly accused of having plagiarized the work of Noah Webster.
December 10, Wednesday: Joseph Emerson Worcester replied moderately and specifically and factually to the accusations that he had been plagiarizing the work of Noah Webster.
Sir Robert Peel, 2d Baronet, took over as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, who had for three weeks been acting for him (because at the time of the dismissal of Lord Melbourne in November, he had been in Italy).
William Gladstone would be appointed Junior Lord of the Treasury in Peel’s 1st ministry.
Alexander Chalmers died in London after having produced, in addition to the materials already cited, editions of the works of the Scottish poet and philosopher James Beattie, the novels of Henry Fielding, and the historical treatises of Edward Gibbon.
December 17, Wednesday: Noah Webster himself reiterated the charges against Joseph Emerson Worcester, providing a list of 121 allegedly purloined definitions. Worcester would respond in detail, showing in each case that either Webster had not defined the word, or that Webster had himself plagiarized the definition from elsewhere, or that the definition he had offered actually differed significantly from Webster’s.
Giacomo Meyerbeer was elected a Membre associe etranger of the Academie Royale des Beaux-Arts de l’Institut de France.
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1846
Joseph Emerson Worcester’s A UNIVERSAL AND CRITICAL DICTIONARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
William Haynes of New-York commissioned authors to whack out one-handed books to be churned out by his press. The titles included:
•BERTHA: MEMOIRS OF A NEW ENGLAND SPRING MATTRESS •THE CALIFORNIA WIDOW •GAY GIRLS OF NEW YORK
By 1871, Haynes’s press would be churning out 100,000 such volumes of erotica per year.
1855
An expanded edition of Joseph Emerson Worcester’s 1830 COMPREHENSIVE, PRONOUNCING AND EXPLANATORY DICTIONARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE was published under the expanded title APRONOUNCING, EXPLANATORY AND SYNONYMOUS DICTIONARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
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1860
June 15, Friday: According to urban legend, this was the day of the founding of the 1st town in the Idaho Territory, Franklin. The settlers were 13 families of Mormons who were presuming themselves to be within the territory of a Greater Utah, who named their place “Franklin” in honor of one of the current dozen leaders of their Church, Apostle Franklin D. Richards. Actually, Lemhi, Idaho, site of Fort Lemhi, had been the 1st Mormon settlement in the Idaho Territory and had been in existence since 1855, while Lewiston (named overtly in memory of early passer-by Merriwether Lewis but covertly in honor of the Maine town of Lewiston, origin of one of the settlers), was also already in existence and would become the state capital. In actuality nothing in particular of record happened in this tiny settlement during this day (Brigham Young had visited on June 10th, in between wives, to consecrate Preston Thomas as Bishop over the community, which had been arriving in wagon trains during that spring). So, why do we now have this urban legend, sponsored on the internet, that on this day the 1st town in the Idaho Territory was created, and named Franklin? –Because on March 7, 1911 the Idaho Legislature would belatedly set June 15th apart as “Pioneer Day” and said Legislature would belatedly decree this to constitute its explanation. –And who are you to say nay to your elected representatives who have determined it to be in the public interest to pin this tale on this Franklin donkey, may I enquire?
Anyway, present-day Franklin, although close, is not exactly on the site of this 1860 Franklin.
Joseph Emerson Worcester having issued his A DICTIONARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE, George P. Marsh
compared this with the latest dictionary issued by the Webster empire, for the New-York WORLD, finding Noah Webster to be by contrast “unscholarly and unsound.” Worcester eventually would come to have the support of Thomas Carlyle, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Horace Mann, Sr., Daniel Webster, and The Atlantic Monthly.
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1865
October 27, day: Joseph Emerson Worcester died in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others, such as extensive quotations and reproductions of images, this “read-only” computer file contains a great deal of special work product of Austin Meredith, copyright 2012. Access to these interim materials will eventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup some of the costs of preparation. My hypercontext button invention which, instead of creating a hypertext leap through hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems— allows for an utter alteration of the context within which one is experiencing a specific content already being viewed, is claimed as proprietary to Austin Meredith — and therefore freely available for use by all. Limited permission to copy such files, or any material from such files, must be obtained in advance in writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 27705. Please contact the project at
“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.” – Remark by character “Garin Stevens” in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST
Prepared: December 8, 2012
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ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT
GENERATION HOTLINE
This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by a human. Such is not the case. Instead, upon someone’s request we have pulled it out of the hat of a pirate that has grown out of the shoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (depicted above). What these chronological lists are: they are research reports compiled by ARRGH algorithms out of a database of data modules which we term the Kouroo Contexture. This is data mining. To respond to such a request for information, we merely push a button.
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Commonly, the first output of the program has obvious deficiencies and so we need to go back into the data modules stored in the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then we need to punch that button again and do a recompile of the chronology — but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary “writerly” process which you know and love. As the contents of this originating contexture improve, and as the programming improves, and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whatever has been needed in the creation of this facility, the entire operation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminished need to do such tweaking and recompiling, and we fully expect to achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring robotic research librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world.
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