International Journal of Lexicography Advance Access originally published online on July 26, 2006
International Journal of Lexicography 2006 19(3):287-319; doi:10.1093/ijl/ecl015
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John Entick's and Ann Fisher's Dictionaries: An Eighteenth-century Case of (Cons)Piracy?1
Departamento de Filología Moderna, University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria
arodriguez{at}dfm.ulpgc.es
mariarodgil{at}telefonica.net
In the eighteenth century a combination of economic and social circumstances gave rise to a debate over the notions of authorship and originality in London. The growing diffusion of printed works caused an increasing popularity of certain authors who were on the way to professionalization. An accurate attribution of works became thus a key point in their careers and incomes, but also in those of influential booksellers who, zealous of their business, used their power to protect their investment. This zeal, notwithstanding, did not prevent authors from copying, using and imitating other authors without acknowledging their sources. Such a practice caused problems of authorship, as in the case of the dictionaries written by Entick, The New Spelling Dictionary (1765), and by Fisher, An Accurate New Spelling Dictionary and Expositor of the English Language (17732). In a small set of letters written by Ann Fisher and some unpublished draft copies of the preface to her dictionary, she defends herself against a charge of piracy in which Entick's dictionary was involved. In these documents she not only denounces the falsity of these accusations but also tackles the question of authorship/originality in the production of dictionaries. The aim of this paper is to check Fisher's line of defence by, first, comparing both dictionaries and, second, briefly revising the eighteenth-century lexicographers’ practice of using an array of sources to devise their dictionaries.
1 This paper is a contribution to the research project BFF 2002-00659 co-sponsored by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology and European FEDER funds. We want to thank Dr Ingrid Tieken-Boon Van Ostade and the anonymous reviewers of IJL for useful suggestions which have enriched this article.
2 A similar practice was extended among eighteenth-century grammarians (Smith 1998: 435).
3 Kersey's Dictionarum Anglo-Britannicum (1708), Kersey-Philips The New World of Words (1706 or 1720 edition), Skinner's Etymologicon Lingua Anglicanae (1671), Coles's English Dictionary (1676), and John Ray's Collection of English Words Not Generally Used (1674) (Starnes and Noyes 1991: 102–103).
4 The first extant edition is the second one, published in 1750. Though no copy has been located of the first edition, Alston (1965: 25) states that: ‘Wells conjectures a first edition published anonymously under the title An Easy Guide, Newcastle, 1748. No such grammar appears to have survived.’ However, it is generally acknowledged that the first edition was published earlier, in 1745, when it was advertised in the local press, the Newcastle Journal, in the following terms: ‘This day is published, pr. 1 s. A New Grammar and Spelling Book: being the most easy Guide to Speaking and Writing English Properly and Correctly’ (Newcastle Journal, 29 June 1745).
5 For more information on A. Fisher, see Rodríguez-Gil 2002a, 2003 and 2004.
7 On the practice of using well-known authors’ names to promote a work, Love considers Richard Savage's An Author To Be Let (1729) ‘a satire on the use of false attributions by booksellers of the time but probably not far from the truth’ (Love 2002: 181). Other eighteenth-century authors who were victims of booksellers’ ‘misappropriation of authorial names’ include Fielding, Defoe, Swift and Prior (Baines 1999: 42–43).
8 Before the publication of Fisher's 1773 dictionary, William Rider had written A New Universal English Dictionary: or, a Compleat treasure of the English language in 1759 and Charles Vyse, The Tutor's Guide: being a complete system of arithmetic, with various branches in the mathematic in 1770.
9 Based on information from English Short Title Catalogue. Eighteenth Century Collections Online. Gale Group. <http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/ECCO>
10 Baines (1999) records numerous cases of forged document in the eighteenth century, a period in which forgery increased, especially as an urban phenomenon (1999: 8–9).
11 By the end of the eighteenth century the period of harmony between London and provincial book trade reached an end (Isaac 1987: 5; see Feather 1985: 2–3 on the protective measures on the book market that profited a small group of London booksellers). Fisher in her personal documents comments on this rivalry and hopes the economic disputes among them be settled for the benefit of both groups: ‘So with the present State of Literature woeful Experience having opened the Eyes of the most Circumspective of the London Trade to the Impossibility of ruining the Country Dealers without mutually suffering with them, being like the Belly & Limbs all dependant Members of one & the same Body from which Consideration Matters ‘tis hoped, may be settled far sooner & cheaper & perhaps more equitably too’ (Hodgson Papers, unpublished draft of The Preface, f. 24v).
12 In an obituary dedicated to G. Robinson, there is a reference to his ability to control the copyright of a great amount of books: ‘R's [sic] spirit, knowledge of his business, and reputable connection, soon enabled him to achieve the highest branches of the business, and, in the purchase of copy-rights, he became the rival of the most formidable of the old established houses’ (Weban 1801: 579).
13 The name of Crowder, a London bookseller, is also mentioned once in the draft copies of the preface, as taking part of the injunction. But it is Dilly who is always mentioned elsewhere and blamed for it.
14 Fisher denounces the exposed situation of writers in the eighteenth century when any book could be suppressed by the ‘London combination’, as she calls it, without any sound reason: ‘The London Combination have now got all they wanted (without an act of Parliament) for if they can procure Injunctions upon all Books (interfeering with their own vamp’d up Copies) from he saids & she saids which never existed they canmay say enough for one another’. (Hodgson Papers, Letter to Mr Leth’ney, no date, f. 18r).
15 During the Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, imitation of classical authors and the use of original texts by auctores was searched as a token of learning and prescribed as an excellent rhetorical training for university students, preachers, poets and men of knowledge (Murphy 1974, 1978).
16 Copying in other artistic branches such as sculpture is studied by Ramage (2002: 74) who asserts that faking ‘fell into the category of normal behaviour among artists of the eighteenth century’.
17 In his discussion on the features that characterised the discourse community of eighteenth-century grammarians, Watts mentions as one of the most salient features of the members of this community the ‘explicit references to earlier works and the reworking of sections of text from earlier works, with or without acknowledgement of the source’ (Watts 1999: 44).
18 In the same vein, the grammarian Lindley Murray also considers his work a compilation, given the number and quality of previous grammars. Murray, like Fisher, thinks his contribution consists in ‘... a careful selection of the most useful matter, and some degree of improvement in the mode of adapting it to the understanding, and the gradual progress of learners. In these respects something, perhaps, may yet be done, for the ease and advantage of young persons’ (1795: iii). However although Fisher and Murray acknowledge the use of sources, neither of them explicitly indicate them (Tieken-Boon van Ostade 1996: 82).
19 Entick's ‘modesty’ is also mentioned by Fisher in a very ironical excerpt where he is also accused of plagiarising Fisher's grammar in his ‘A Grammatical Introduction to the English Tongue’: ‘Now theres a Genius for you ye very Quintescence of Modesty; with as much Notability to boast of as ye original Mr Entick ye first Founder of ye English Language whereby every unconnected Word in it becomes originally his own as well as his Abstract of English Gramr anexed to his said Dictionary with his Chapter of Capitals, which I stole out of ye Revd Mr Enticks Bra Brain about forty years ago see Fishers GramrPage Page 143 as it first lurked there in Embrio tho’ it has undergone some little Mutilations since’ (Hodgson Papers, unpublished draft of The Preface, ff. 38r-v).
20 We have to bear in mind that the meaning of this word in the eighteenth century differs from Present Day English meaning. At the time, it referred to ‘one who is taught in a school; esp. a boy or girl attending an elementary school’ (OED 1992, entry 1.a.)
21 Cf. A Pocket Dictionary (1753), Hammond (ca. 1760), Manson (1762), A Vocabulary, or Pocket Dictionary (1765), Fenning (1767), Kenrick (1773), Ash (1775), Sheridan (1780), or Clarke (1793).
22 Michael (1985) enumerates seven different divisions of grammars in English grammars up to the end of the eighteenth century. The division found in Entick's Dictionary belongs to Michael's third group: ‘Orthography, Etymology, Syntax; Letters, Syllables, Words, Sentences’. According to Michael, this division is found ‘in rather more than a quarter of the grammars. The division into Letters, Syllables, Words and Sentences is significant in two ways: it picks up again the division made by Peter Helias, and it forms part of the reforming movement to establish an English, rather than a Latin, approach to grammar’ (Michael 1985: 186).
23 The ‘movement of reform’ is a term coined by Michael to give name to a group of eighteenth-century English grammarians that departed from the tradition in an attempt to ‘give English a grammar more suited to it and less subservient to Latin. Although they are few in number and scattered over sixty years they represent a tendency for which there is clear evidence, and it is no exaggeration to call it, if not a reforming movement, at least a movement of reform.’ (Michael 1985: 509). Michael explains that this vernacular movement has got two features in common: ‘(i) a fourfold system of the parts of speech [...] comprising substantive, adjective, verb and particle. [...] (ii) the second characteristic is an attempt at a vernacular terminology, if only for one or two categories.’ (Michael 1985: 509).
24 ‘This fourfold division appeared first in the Middle Ages and was adopted by Lily, but not by the majority of the renaissance grammarians. It appears in rather more than forty per cent of the English grammars.’ (Michael 1985: 185–6).
25 ‘Etymology’ was an eighteenth-century term used as ‘the usual name for that division of grammar which described the parts of speech’ (Michael 1985: 185).
26 Cf. Rodríguez-Gil (2006) for a discussion of the changes in these grammars.
27 Entick adds a third letter in the 1773 edition of his dictionary.
28 Other contemporary dictionaries also joined letters <i> and <j> and <u> and <v> under the same section. Cf. for instance, Dyche (1725), Hammond (ca. 1760), Manson (1762), A Vocabulary, or Pocket Dictionary (1765), and A New and Improved Spelling Dictionary (1771). As Davis (1999: 75) puts it, ‘until the eighteenth century, there was a great deal of uncertainty about what letters constituted the alphabet: whether, for example, i and j, u and v were distinct, and if so what was their ‘correct’ alphabetical order’. <v> and <j> were used as variant graphs of <u> and <i> for a long time and were therefore treated as two letters alphabetically up to the eighteenth century (Scragg 1975: 81).
29 Cf. Phillips (1706), which added ‘the interpretation of proper names of men and women’; Dyche (1725), which included proper names in the alphabetical list provided; Buchanan (1757) which incorporated ‘A supplement of upwards of 4000 proper names’ (1757: title-page); Carter (1764) which inserted at the end of the dictionary ‘an alphabetical list of all the proper names in the Apocrypha, which are not in the old or new testament’; A New and Improved Spelling Dictionary of the English Language (1771) which added ‘a list of proper names of men and women’.
30 Bentick (1786) adds a dictionary of this type as late as 1786, however other spelling dictionaries, such as Dyche's (1725), Hammond's (ca. 1760), A New and Improved Spelling Dictionary (1771), Carter's (1764), Scott's (1786), and Clarke's (1793), do not contain this section.
31 Although Entick does not include a dictionary of this type in his 1765 edition, he makes a new change in the 1776 edition of his dictionary introducing now ‘A succinct Account of the Heathen Gods and Goddesses, Heroes and Heroines, &c. deduced from the best authorities’ in the fashion of Fisher's one. He refers to ‘Dr Ash's large octavo dictionary’ (1775) as his main source, however, many of the names in Entick are not recorded in Ash, and even if they are, Entick provides much more information on the gods’ deeds and attributes. Since Fisher may have ‘inspired’ some elements in the original edition (The introduction to English grammar) and some addition in subsequent editions, e.g. the third letter at the top of the pages, it is not surprising that a brief comparison between Fisher's and Entick's dictionary of gods reveals an outstanding similarity not only in the entries recorded but also in their contents.
32 Including encyclopaedic knowledge in eighteenth-century dictionaries was a common practice. Cf., for instance, Bailey (1721), Johnson (1755), Hammond (ca. 1760), Bentick (1786), and Scott (1786).
33 Enlarging the dictionary with additional information must have proved profitable, since in a sixth edition of her dictionary, Fisher introduced a new section called ‘A sketch of the Rise and Progress of the English Language’, which, by the way, she copied freely from Bailey's An Universal Etymological Dictionary (1721), which, in turn, drew heavily from A Pocket Dictionary (Starnes and Noyes 1991: 167).
34 n = z2 * N * p * q/N * E2 + z2 * p * q where n = size of the sample; N = size of the population; z2 = level of confidence [z = 2 (95,5%)]; E = expected error; p = phenomenon probability; q = complementary probability. This mathematical formula guarantees that the sample corpus is representative of the whole corpus and has been effectively used in other articles and books on language, language acquisition and linguistics: Cf. Rodríguez Juárez (forthcoming), ‘Priority Hierarchies in Subject Assignment in English: Cases of Conflation’, Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses 18 (2005); Rodríguez Juárez (forthcoming), ‘A New Parameter for the Description of Subject Assignment: the Term Hierarchy’, Atlantis. Journal of the Spanish Association for Anglo-American Studies 28:1 (2006); Rodríguez Juárez (forthcoming), ‘A Multi-Dimensional Description of Subject Assignment in English: a Corpus-Based Study’, Studia Anglica Posnaniensia 42; M. Wood, M. Peñate and P. Bazo, eds. (2004), FreconWin: corpus canario de inglés escrito (2004, Las Palmas: ICEC).
35 Although the number of entries in Entick's dictionary is higher than the ones in Fisher's, in our corpus Fisher's list outnumbers Entick's in 17 words. The inclusion in Fisher of the letters themselves as the first entry of each letter may partially account for this difference:
A, A vowel, having (in simple syllables) two sounds, viz, at the end of a syllable, it sounds a, as the English call it; when the syllable ends with a consonant, aw, as the Scots pronounce it.H, A letter expressed by breathing which opening with, or sliding on a vowel, make a syllable; as ba, be, bi, &c.