2. Lindley Murray: Quaker and GrammarianFootnote ²

From his Memoirs (Reference Murray1826), we know that Murray was born in 1745, in Swatara, a small village in Lancaster county in Pennsylvania, as the eldest of 12 children. A few years before his birth, his father and mother, who were from Scottish and Irish descent, respectively, had moved to America. His father initially owned a small flour mill, but ambitious as he was, he decided to try and make his fortune in New York. Murray was brought up as a Quaker, and although the family was not extremely strict in its adherence to the faith, the Quaker religion had a considerable impact on Murray's view on life and language use – which he was sometimes mocked for by other grammarians. After his school years, at around the age of 15, Murray initially worked for his father's business in New York, but he was not happy doing so, and a few years later he started to study law. Shortly after being admitted to the bar, he married Hannah Dobson (1748–1834), but they did not have any children. While he also kept himself engaged with various business enterprises, Murray practised law for a few years, until, as he wrote in his Memoirs, ‘the troubles in America’ began, by which he referred to the events leading up to the American Revolution. Murray appears to have made quite a fortune during those years, which has led to speculations on possible Loyalist wartime activities on his part. In any case, by the time the American War of Independence ended in 1783, Murray was able to ‘retire from business’, as he put it himself. Around that time, too, his health became a serious issue, and in 1785 doctor's advice brought him and his wife to Holdgate in Yorkshire (England), a county which at the time was ‘a stronghold of English Quakerism’ (Bell, Reference Bell1951: 253).

From his letters – which I collected, transcribed and analysed for the purpose of studying his grammar (see Fens–de Zeeuw, Reference Fens–de Zeeuw2011) – it appears that Murray's outlook on life changed drastically at this point. From a wealthy businessman and gentleman of leisure, he turned into a frugal but charitable man, as well as a valued member of the Quaker community in York: he became a Quaker Minister in 1791. He was, moreover, active in William Wilberforce's (1759–1833) anti-slavery campaign, and became an avid supporter of the establishment of a humane system of treatment in mental hospitals. It was not until Murray reached the age of 42 that he started writing – religious works, at first, but in 1795 his first textbook was published, English Grammar. Though intended for a local girls’ school, it became an immediate hit. Several other textbooks followed; for an overview of his many publications, some twenty altogether, see Barr (Reference Barr and Tieken–Boon van Ostade1996).

Most of his books did extremely well. Between 1801 and 1840 in Britain alone an estimated 15,000 copies were sold of each edition of the English Grammar; and by 1832 52 editions had been published there (Fens–de Zeeuw, Reference Fens–de Zeeuw2011). Altogether, at least 69 numbered editions appeared. Likewise, in the United States in the early decades of the 19^th century Murray was the most widely sold author of literacy textbooks. And worldwide, by 1850, of the English Grammar alone possibly two million copies had been sold, including a special edition for the blind with embossed characters. Publication was not restricted to the English-speaking world; the grammar was translated into many languages (see Alston, Reference Alston1965: 96), including Gujarati, and it even served as the basis for a Maori grammar, published in New Zealand in 1842 (Fens–de Zeeuw, Reference Fens–de Zeeuw2011: 162–3). The Abridgment of the grammar, first published in 1797, sold even more copies. According to Monaghan (Reference Monaghan and Tieken–Boon van Ostade1996: 27–44), the sum of all Murray's publications sold together equals some fourteen million copies – no mean achievement. His success as a writer, however, was overshadowed by a progressing and debilitating illness, which kept him increasingly confined to his home. He died on February 16, 1826, at the age of almost 81.

3. Murray in the HUGE database

From the usage guides included in the HUGE database, a selection was made of primarily grammatical usage problems; these are features showing divided usage or usage preferences, such as the placement of only, the dangling adjunct and the question of whether it should be data is or are. Altogether, the database includes 6,330 entries. Doing a full-text search in the database for Murray's name produced 131 references to Murray or his grammar in only five usage guides, which often included multiple references per entry: Brown (Reference Brown1851) (57), Moon (Reference Moon1868) (17), Crystal (Reference Crystal1984) (1), Webster's Dictionary of English Usage (1989) (54), Burchfield (Reference Burchfield1996) (2) and the third edition of Fowler's Modern English Usage (1926). Batko (Reference Batko2004), too, came up, but the two items in question were merely example sentences containing the name ‘Murray’ (Surely it didn't bother Murray that I rung the bell 30 times?). Since HUGE only comprises entries that relate to a selected list of usage problems for the database (123 items in all), Murray's name may in fact occur far more often in these five usage guides. To illustrate this, in Chapter 3 of Brown (Reference Brown1851) alone, which bears the title ‘Of grammatical success and fame’, Murray's name occurs as often as 30 times. To place these findings into a slightly wider perspective, I substituted Murray's name with that of his predecessor Robert Lowth (1710–1787) – another ‘icon of English prescriptive grammar’ (Tieken–Boon van Ostade, Reference Tieken–Boon van Ostade, van Kemenade and Los2006: 541) – which produced only 91 hits against Murray's 131, though they were scattered over more usage guides (11), which ranged over a longer period of time as well: from Hurd (Reference Hurd1847) to Heffer (Reference Heffer2010). Murray may have had a numerically larger presence in HUGE than Lowth, but Lowth's was longer lasting.

Not infrequently, both grammarians, but also others such as Priestley, Campbell, and Goold Brown, are mentioned and compared to one another in entries retrieved from the HUGE search, as in the following one from Webster's Dictionary (1989):

Webster's Dictionary would obviously have nothing to lose from a favourable discussion of Murray, unlike more contemporary writers like Brown (Reference Brown1851) and Moon (Reference Moon1868). Treating Murray's work critically, as done by these 19^th-century writers, served a deliberately harmful purpose,Footnote ³ even though by this time Murray's popularity was already on the wane: within a few years his grammars would no longer be reprinted.

Five usage guides in the database that mention Murray, two from around the middle of the 19^th century and three from the late 20^th, is not a lot by all accounts. For all that, it is worthwhile looking at the way in which these works treated him. I shall start with Webster's Dictionary (1989) for the simple reason of the presence of Murray's rival's name Noah Webster (1758–1843) in the title. Murray and Webster, who is designated by Finegan (Reference Finegan1980: 36) as a ‘devout Anglophobe’, were fellow countrymen. Webster's Grammatical Institute of the English Language (Reference Webster1784) had been the most popular grammar in America until the first American edition of Murray's English Grammar appeared in 1800 (Alston, Reference Alston1965: 93). In an attempt to fend off his potential competitor, Webster made the accusations that Murray's grammar contained errors (see Ikeda, Reference Ikeda1999 for a detailed discussion of this), and had plagiarised his own grammar. Murray attempted to account for the way in which he had made use of his predecessors’ work in a letter to his brother John, who had looked after Murray's affairs in America after he had moved to England:

Murray was, however, no less interested in Webster's grammar than Webster in his. In another letter to his brother John, Murray asked him to send him a copy of a new edition of Webster's grammar which had recently appeared, specifying exactly which edition he wished to have: ‘Please to send me Noah Webster's Grammar of that edition, which was published since 9^th: mo: 1802: no other’ (Murray to John Murray, September 5, 1803; Swarthmore College: Lindley Murray papers RG5/198 S1 F15). A few years later, Murray once again asked his brother to send him a copy of a newly published edition of Webster's grammar (Fens–de Zeeuw, Reference Fens–de Zeeuw2011: 185).

Despite the name in the title, Webster's Dictionary (1989) bears no relationship with Noah Webster's dictionary. The work is, moreover, not a dictionary but a usage guide, described by Pullum (Reference Pullum2005) as ‘the best usage book I know of right now’. It contains a large number of references to Lindley Murray and his grammar: 54 to be exact, in 22 entries retrieved from the HUGE database. In contrast to Noah Webster's references to Murray in his grammar, the majority of those in Webster's Dictionary are of a neutral nature, such as: ‘Murray's grammar was widely popular’ (1989: 7), and ‘Lindley Murray based his grammar on that of Lowth, Priestley and others’ (1989: 363). Some remarks are somewhat critical, such as ‘Murray is, in fact, only half right here’ (1989: 662), ‘Murray was notoriously strait-laced’, and, taking Lowth into its stride, ‘even a bishop could not put a preposition at the end of a clause and satisfy Murray’ (1989: 763). On the use of whose, Murray is said to be ‘of two minds’ (1989: 960). The one really negative comment I found was in the entry on ‘absolute adjectives’ (e.g. chief, extreme) already cited, which reads that ‘Lindley Murray 1795 is not tolerant’ when it comes to the use of superlatives of such words (chiefest, extremest) (1989: 6).

Another American rival of Murray was ‘that learned but cantankerous Yankee pedagogue’, as Moody (Reference Moody1976: 36) describes him, Goold Brown (1791–1857). Brown's Institutes of English Grammar (1823) – not included in HUGE since it is a grammar, not a usage guide, but still published during Murray's lifetime – contains numerous unfavourable references to Murray's grammar (Fens–de Zeeuw, Reference Fens–de Zeeuw2011: 175). Most of the preface, too, is devoted to a criticism of the grammar, with Brown noting that he did not intend ‘to impute to Murray any thing … except for those inaccuracies and deficiencies which still disgrace the work as a literary performance’. Brown continued his critical observations on Murray's grammars in an article published several years later, writing:

Not all Brown's references to Murray were unfavourable though. In Chapter 3 of the Preface to his grammar he remarked that ‘Murray was an intelligent and very worthy man, to whose various labours in the compilation of books our schools are under many obligations’, only to add that ‘in original thought and critical skill … [he] fell far below “most of the authors”’ to whom his grammar was indebted, i.e. ‘Harris, Johnson, Lowth, Priestley, Beattie, Sheridan, Walker, Coote, Blair, and Campbell’ (Brown, Reference Brown1823: x). Brown, moreover, according to Downey (Reference Downey and Brown1982: xiv), called Murray's work ‘dull’. He not only criticised Murray as a grammarian, but also objected to Quakers in general for not sticking to ‘their customary mode of forming the verb in connection with the pronoun thou, in familiar discourse’ (Brown, Reference Brown1823: 72). ‘Some of the Friends,’ he added, ‘(perhaps from an idea that it is less formal) misemploy thee for thou, and often join it to the third person of the verb instead of the second. Such expressions as, thee does, thee is, thee has, thee thinks, &c., are double solecisms; they set all grammar at defiance’ (Brown, Reference Brown1823: 73). Murray's popularity must have stung, the more so because nearly ten years after the initial publication of his own grammar, Brown still had to admit that ‘[t]here are, upon the subject of English Grammar, no publications more extensively known, than those of Lindley Murray’ (Brown, Reference Brown1832: 557).

With 57 references produced by my search in HUGE, Murray's name indeed comes up quite often in Brown's Grammar of English Grammars (1851). Although Brown also mentions other grammarians, such as Lowth (4 times) and Priestley (11 times), he appears to have made a thorough study of Lindley Murray's grammar in particular: not only did he examine various editions of the English Grammar, including the ‘Octavo Gram.’ (as he referred to it), published in 1808, he also consulted ‘Murray's Key’ (A Key to the Exercises, 1797), ‘Murray's Introductory Reader’ (The English Reader, 1799), ‘Murray's Exercises’ (English Exercises, 1797), and ‘Murray's Sequel’ (Sequel to the English Reader, 1800) (see Barr, Reference Barr and Tieken–Boon van Ostade1996 for publication details of these works). When Brown discussed what he called the ‘rules of agreement’ for ‘[t]he article a or an’, for instance, it is Murray who gets singled out as the representative of all grammarians who presented mistaken information on the subject:

Brown then added Murray's explanation from the English Grammar, and though in his view a ‘clumsy’ one, ‘broken, prolix, deficient, and inaccurate as it is, both in style and doctrine’, it was nevertheless ‘copied and copied from grammar to grammar’. In thus criticising Murray's grammar, Brown set the tone for his own work, especially insofar as it concerned Lindley Murray. He even used the grammar as a – negative – benchmark for others: ‘Some later grammarians are still more faulty than Murray, in their rules for the application of an or a’ (Brown, Reference Brown1851: 247).

17 years later, in 1868, George Washington Moon's (1823–1909) The Bad English of Lindley Murray and Other Writers came out: the name in the title confirms the poor regard in which Murray's grammar was held by this time. Like Brown before him, Moon drew attention to the errors of many grammarians who preceded him, and, as suggested by the title of the book, Murray was targeted in particular:

In his book, Moon attempted to expose Murray's inability (and that of other grammarians) to follow his own grammatical rules, but Reibel (Reference Reibel and Reibel1996: xx) argues that although Moon's book was certainly ‘entertaining reading’, he ‘pushes the principles of strict grammatical construction to even more ridiculous limits than did Cobbett’, another popular 19^th-century grammarian, whose grammar had been published in 1818.

How did Moon expose what he perceived as Murray's linguistic inabilities? When discussing the indicative mood, for instance, he argued that Murray's practice diverged widely from his own precepts:

Two pages down, he continued his criticism, even honouring Murray with a separate heading (as he did in several other places):

Moon, then, presented a few examples of Murray's so-called errors, adding his own corrections, and ending the section with: ‘This is very simple; but it is a matter that has been quite overlooked by Lindley Murray … Lindley Murray's practice, however, is not uniform’ (Moon, Reference Moon1868: 11–12). Eager to be comprehensive in his adverse treatment of Murray, Moon continues ten pages further down: ‘Having considered some of Lindley Murray's errors in the use of verbs, adverbs, and adjectives; we will now consider some of his errors in the use of pronouns’ (1868: 21–2). He further commented on Murray's improper use of the indefinite article a/an (just like Brown before him), and finally discussed ‘Murray's errors in the use of conjunctions’ (Moon, Reference Moon1868: 34–5). Searching the HUGE database yielded 17 references to Murray in the eight entries from Moon, a relatively small number when compared to the 91 references to Murray which I counted in the entire book – hardly surprising in view of the fact that a critical approach to this grammarian forms the main topic of the book.

Other usage guides in the HUGE database are the various editions of Fowler's Modern English Usage, first published in 1926, long after Murray's grammars had disappeared from people's radars. A second edition came out in 1965, edited by Sir Ernest Gowers, and a third in 1996, by R. W. Burchfield. The fourth edition, by Jeremy Butterfield (2015), came out too late to be included in the database (see Straaijer, Reference Straaijer and Tieken–Boon van Ostade2018). HUGE also includes the Pocket Fowler's Modern English Usage (1999). Any critical remarks in the different versions of Fowler's work, therefore, cannot have been intended to further the original author's or the later revisers’ own interests at the cost of Murray's reputation. Searching for Murray's name in these books, however, only produced two hits, i.e. in Burchfield's edition (1996).Footnote ⁴ The first one occurs in the entry on double negatives (Burchfield, Reference Burchfield1996: 226–7), where Burchfield writes that in present-day English in some cases ‘closely placed self-cancelling negatives are eminently acceptable’, whereas 18^th-century grammarians, including Lindley Murray, condemned the use of double negation: ‘Two negatives, in English, destroy one another, or are equivalent to an affirmative’ Murray wrote (Reference Murray1795: 121) – in effect reproducing Lowth's words here (Reference Lowth1763: 139–40) (Tieken–Boon van Ostade, Reference Tieken–Boon van Ostade2011: 12). The second reference to Murray is found in the entry headed ‘perfect’ (Burchfield, Reference Burchfield1996: 585). The entry discusses the unacceptability of ungradable modifying intensifiers like perfect or absolute with very, and it adds that though eighteenth-century grammarians like Murray would have agreed with this, applying such a rule today would be considered ‘mere pedantry’.

The usage guide in the HUGE database that pays least attention to Murray is Crystal's Who Cares about English Usage? (1984). The only reference found occurs in the section called ‘Is this something up with which we must put?’ (Crystal, Reference Crystal1984: 58–63), which deals with the question of the acceptability of preposition stranding, a much debated issue in prescriptive writings. Having referred to Dryden, who is often associated with the origin of this contested feature, Crystal continues:

Phrased like this, the passage seems to suggest that the origin of the stricture against preposition stranding lay with Murray. Since 1984, however, when Crystal's book was published, considerable research has been done on the subject, particularly by Nuria Yáñez–Bouza, who has shown that the issue occupied many 18^th-century grammarians well before Murray entered the scene, or even Lowth, from whom Murray copied this stricture as well (Yáñez–Bouza, Reference Yáñez–Bouza and Tieken–Boon van Ostade2008; see also Tieken–Boon van Ostade, Reference Tieken–Boon van Ostade2011: 115–16). All the same, it is interesting to see that it was Murray's name which appears to have stuck here; no doubt, this was due to his reputation, which, as the references in the HUGE database have shown, lingered on well beyond his status as an eminent grammarian had come to an end.

4. ‘Alas! poor Lindley Murray!’

As mentioned above, Crystal (Reference Crystal and Tieken–Boon van Ostade2018) found that Lindley Murray was the most frequently cited grammarian in Punch magazine, in the issues published between 1841 and 1901. But Murray, or his grammar, was not satirised in Punch alone: there is, for instance, a cartoon from 1884 – when there were presidential elections in America – which appeared in the American political magazine Harper's Weekly.Footnote ⁵ The accompanying caption, ‘Alas! poor Lindley Murray!’, is a reference to Hamlet's ‘Alas! poor Yorick!’, and the image shows two men, one of them representing senator John Logan, vice-presidential candidate, who had a reputation for poor grammar, and the other the presidential candidate, James Blaine, known for his critical attitude to the British government. Logan is addressed by Blaine, who says: ‘By jingo [Blaine's nickname], I cannot do it! Take this [a dagger], Logan; it comes natural [naturally] to you.’ In the background we see ‘The English’, represented by the Big Ben. Harper's Weekly published various jokes and anecdotes featuring Murray and his grammar, an example of which may be quoted in full here:

Satire is usually resorted to in order to show that someone's popularity is a thing of the past, and this is reflected no less in the critical treatment Murray received from writers like Brown and Moon, who wanted to secure a piece of the popular grammar pie for themselves as well. But so is parody: we find parodies of Murray's grammar from the 1840s onwards, such as The Comic English Grammar (1840) attributed to Percival Leigh (1813–1889) (Noordegraaf, Reference Noordegraaf and Tieken–Boon van Ostade1996), The Pictorial Grammar (Crowquill, 1842; see Reibel, Reference Reibel and Reibel1996) and The Comic Lindley Murray; or, The Grammar of Grammars (anon., 1871). The appendix to Crystal (Reference Crystal and Tieken–Boon van Ostade2018) lists items from Punch called ‘Law and Lindley Murray’ (1854), ‘Londonderry and Lindley Murray’ (1854), ‘Ladies’ Maids and Lindley Murray’ (1859), and ‘A “Rider” and Foot-note to Lindley Murray’ (1894) (for which, see also Fens–de Zeeuw, Reference Fens–de Zeeuw2011: 171–2). These represent a series of brief columns on what were referred to as ‘grammatical defects’ (anon., 1859: 66) that were encountered in English society at the time, all bearing variations upon the title ‘[…] and Lindley Murray’. According to Noordegraaf (Reference Noordegraaf and Tieken–Boon van Ostade1996: 114), Percival Leigh ‘worked for Punch from 1841 until his death’ in 1889, so it is not unlikely that he was the author of at least some of these columns.