Illustrating Webster

In May 1843, less than a month before he died at the age of eighty-four, Noah Webster published his last book, A Collection of Papers on Political, Literary and Moral Subjects. Most of the papers were reprinted, but one essay, "Modes of Teaching the English Language," appeared for the first time.¹ Although the essay was new, much of it rehearsed traditional methods of instruction. Reading should be taught atomistically, letter by letter: first letters, then syllables, then monosyllabic words, then disyllabic words. For Webster, to read was to decipher, or to "spell."² Webster's American Spelling Book, published in 1787 and destined to sell millions of copies in dozens of editions,³ taught reading as well as what we call spelling; or, rather, it taught reading as spelling.⁴

After rehearsing the truisms of method in this essay, Webster did hazard a fresh topic: the doubtful value of illustrations in textbooks. He reported a varied bill of complaints, most of them attributed to others—"a teacher in the South," "parents," "teachers," and "gentlemen"—evident proxies for himself:

And here it may be suggested that many persons question the usefulness of pictures in elementary books. A teacher in the South reprobates the practice of using pictures; parents remark that their children contract such a habit of looking at pictures, that they will not read books without them; teachers remark that children employ most of their time in looking at pictures, turning over the leaves and wearing them out, or soiling them. If to some extent pictures are useful, it is very certain, that the practice of filling books with pictures is carried to excess; they increase expense without an equivalent advantage, and it may be questioned whether pictorial books have not done as much harm as good. Gentlemen observe that they have very much promoted superficial learning.

It may be added that many of the pictures in school-books are not representations of the life of real objects; but fictitious representations formed by a painter or the engraver. This fact may not be generally known.⁵

Webster was not the first person to object to graven images; pictures have long raised anxiety among men of letters (indeed mostly men), and elsewhere I review some of the history of such iconophobia.⁶ Here it is enough to consider one aspect of Webster's discomfort. Learning to read on Webster's model was a regime of deferred gratification: students would work to master the sounds of the alphabet and to learn the words that letters composed, without necessarily understanding what the words meant. Phonology first, semantics later. "The opinion that a pupil should never pronounce a word which he does not understand, is a great error; as it makes it necessary that a knowledge of spelling should proceed no faster than that of definition. A more absurd opinion, and one more directly opposed to the laws of the human mind, was never broached" (307). Pictures, which offer immediate gratification without work, have no place in such a regime. Analog, not digital, they can be quickly apprehended, even at a glance, not assembled piece by piece. Operating in a different labor economy, they compromise the Protestant ethos of Webster's classroom. They are guilty pleasures.

Webster himself was not wholly innocent: in his long career as an educator he had committed more than a few pictures to the printed page. Modeling his spelling book on its most influential British predecessor, Thomas Dilworth's A New Guide to the English Tongue, Webster added eight Æsopian fables at the back of his book, as readings for practice. Æsop had long been published with illustrations, one for each fable, and so Dilworth supplied each of his fables with a woodcut illustration; and Webster followed suit. Figure 1, for example, illustrates Webster's second fable, "The

Figure 1.

"The Country-Maid and Her Milk-Pail." Woodcut by Isaac Sanford. Noah Webster, American Spelling Book, 12th Ed. (Providence, RI, 1789), 87.

Country Maid and her Milk-Pail."⁷ Like Dilworth, Webster mined his fables from...