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213 8 The Rise of the Spelling Book The use of a spelling book in Christopher Dock’s little German-language schools was a sign of changing times. By 1750, the spelling book was emerging as an introductory reading instructional text that had already appeared in classrooms across the American colonies; by 1760 it was firmly established, and by 1770 it was an indispensable text. It would continue to be so for the following four decades. In England, enthusiasm for publishing spelling books had continued unabated since the turn of the century. In the first decade of the eighteenth century,authors— one of them Thomas Dyche—produced some 15 new titles. In the 1710s, a half dozen more titles appeared; in the 1720s, another 8, which included the speller of Henry Dixon; 3 more in the 1730s; 16 in the 1740s, one of them the work of Thomas Dilworth, and from the 1750s to the 1770s, 13, 13, and 11 new spellers, respectively, were published each decade. Meanwhile, many of the older ones were still being reissued, including the venerable English School-Master by Edmund Coote, which reached its fifty-fourth printing in 1737, 141 years after its first publication.1 “Spelling” was consistently defined as naming the letters of a word aloud in their correct sequence. This process was used in the service of all three literacy activities, reading, writing, and oral spelling. As the British hymn writer Isaac Watts remarks in The Art of Reading and Writing English, published in London in 1721, spelling is “the Art of composing Words out of Letters and Syllables, either in Reading or Writing.”2 In both, the process was similar: for each word, the reader or writer identified (aloud) the letters of the first syllable and then pronounced it as a unit. The learner repeated this process, accumulating syllables until he or she had pronounced or written the entire word. An example of this cumulative spelling technique is provided in one of the spelling books: “D, o, x, Dox; o, doxo; l, o, lo; Doxolo; g, y, gy; Doxology.”3 The Uses of Spelling for Writing The role that spelling books were to play in American reading instruction(spellingfor -reading) can be understood only in relation to another kind of book that focused on the uses of spelling for writing instruction: the “secretary” books that began to be printed in Boston as the seventeenth century turned into the eigh- 214 Decades of Transition, 1730 to 1750 teenth. Good spelling was viewed, as it is today, as important to good writing. American imprints—all of them copies of imported English works—reflected this emphasis in the publication of books aimed at clerks (“secretaries”), who, it was assumed, had already learned to read. The intellectual progenitors of what we might call these “secretary” books were authors such as Nathaniel Strong, whose England’s Perfect School-Master had first appeared in London in 1674 (and was still being reprinted in Boston in 1710), but their instruction was far better suited to the intricacies of the legal world than his. The “secretaries” of the time were invariably men working for other men, and the titles of these books usually indicated that their target was young men. The use of the word secretary in the title of T. Goodman’s The Experienc’d Secretary, published in Boston in 1708, implied a male readership. This text for the experienced includes some examples of nonbusiness correspondence (termed “Familiar Letters ,” and written mostly by men to other men), a recherché discussion of rhetorical tropes, and a short dictionary. But its chief value was as a source of information on legal forms. Because the author assumed that the purchaser would have fully mastered the basic features of the written language, the book contains no information on letter-sound correspondences.4 A Boston product of the preceding year, The Young Secretary’s Guide, had also offered its readers models of letters and a dictionary along with legal forms. But it had apparently been compiled from various sources by its printer, Bartholomew Green, and it soon had to compete with the authentic Young Secretary’s Guide, attributed to Thomas Hill, whose fourth edition was reprinted in 1713 by yet another Boston printer, Thomas Fleet—without the dictionary.5 The publications of only a few years later, however, show a marked increase in their interest in the structure of the English orthographic system. The Young Man’s Companion (with no...

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