 Alexander Pope (1688 – 1744) On this day in 1688 Alexander Pope was born in London, the only child of middle-aged, Catholic parents. His religion barred him from politics, or from attending university for a professional career, and his teenage tuberculosis made him a hunchback no more than 4′ 6″ tall. Many biographers portray him as an outsider and attribute his penchant for satire to such a convergence of circumstances. |
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 James Boswell On this day in 1795 James Boswell died, aged fifty-four. Even without his two-decade relationship to Samuel Johnson and the famous books which came from it, Boswell would have a secure place in literary history. This is due to the remarkable stash of journals, letters and personal papers which he kept, and which friends, relatives and negligence kept from the world for over a century. |
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 William Shakespeare (1564 – 1616) On this day in 1594, Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew was entered in the Stationers’ Register. Much of the main plot seems to come from a 1550 popular ballad called “Here Begynneth a Merry Jest of a Shrewde and Curste Wyfe, Lapped in Morrelles Skin, for her Good Behaviour.” By the endeth, this contribution to the shrew-taming canon was merry from only one perspective. . . . |
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Look at me … Quirky spellings, as used in the film title Inglourious Basterds, invariably attract attention.
Tony Blair and Dan Quayle have both made famous gaffes. Henry Hitchings on the importance of spelling.
The title of Simon Horobin’s book poses what, at first blush, seems a banal question. I imagine most readers would answer “Yes, spelling matters”, perhaps adding “though not as much as some believe”. Yet if the question of how words should be written is not uppermost in many people’s minds, its nagging everyday presence is nonetheless evident in the existence of spell-checkers and school spelling tests, as well as in mnemonics designed to help us with spellings, such as the venerable “i before e except after c”.
Phenomena of this kind betray an unease about the irregularities of spelling, and English spelling (Horobin’s focus, though he does say a bit about spelling reform in French, Dutch and German) has long drawn complaint. This has ranged from the smooth-tongued – Jerome K Jerome’s line that English spelling “would seem to have been designed chiefly as a disguise to pronunciation” – to the splenetic, such as the view of the Austrian linguist Mario Wandruszka that it is “an insult to human intelligence”. Lament is certainly the norm, so it may be a surprise to meet with the assessment of Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle that English spelling “comes remarkably close to being an optimal … system”.
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 James Murray On this date in 1928, the final volume of the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary was published. The original estimate was that the complete four-volume set would take ten years; when it took five years to get to “ant,” the editors knew they had underestimated spectacularly. They did not know that they were being significantly helped by a contributor from the insane asylum. |
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 Fanny Burney On this day in 1840 Fanny Burney died. Burney’s four novels have earned her favorable comparisons to other giants of the genre-Austen, Richardson, Dickens-and Virginia Woolf’s declaration that she is “the mother of English fiction.” If a best-seller and a celebrity in her own day, it is as a diarist that Burney is now best known-one who was eye-witness to The Madness of King George, and who enlivened the later years of Samuel Johnson. |
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 Samuel Johnson (1709 – 1784) On this day in 1784 Samuel Johnson died. Johnson’s last years have been told According to Queeney (Beryl Bainbridge, 2001) and many others, but his large personality seems to escape any one perspective. According to Harold Bloom, Johnson may be beyond reach in all ways: “There is no bad faith in or about Dr. Johnson, who was as good as he was great, yet also refreshingly, wildly strange to the highest degree.” |
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 James Boswell On this day in 1762 James Boswell left Edinburgh for London, beginning the eight-and-a-half-month stay that would be recorded in his London Journal, and earn him a reputation as one of the great British diarists. From Boswell’s account of his first meeting with his ticket to history: “Mr. Johnson, indeed I come from Scotland, but I cannot help it.” “Sir, that, I find, is what a great many of your countrymen cannot help.” |
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 Samuel Johnson (1709 – 1784) On this day in 1762, Samuel Johnson and Sir Joshua Reynolds departed on their six-week trip to Devonshire, an excursion now rich in Johnsonia. It was made possible by the impoverished and very Tory Johnson having received a government pension from the ruling Whigs, to great outcry and this retort: “I wish my pension were twice as large that they might make twice as much noise.” |
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 P. D. James On this day in 1920 P.D. James was born. Her 1999 “fragment of autobiography” is entitled Time to Be in Earnest, from Samuel Johnson’s statement that “At seventy-seven it is time to be in earnest.” The memoir is a one-year diary beginning with her seventy-seventh birthday and ending with the assurance that “I shall continue to write detective stories as long as I can write well….” True to her word, her next novel, at age eighty-one, had reviewers declaring that she had “transcended the crime genre.” |
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