Noah Webster American Men of Letters — Inside the Classic

From Village Stillness to Political Heat

The opening chapter's pace is measured, dwelling on ancestral stock and the Webster family's five generations in Connecticut. Scudder lingers over the landscape—'the wide fields which lie below it, stretching away to Talcott Mountain'—before noting that Webster's father sold the eighty-acre farm because he was poor. This quiet, almost pastoral rhythm contrasts sharply with later sections where Scudder quotes Webster's political pamphlets. In those passages, the narrative accelerates, reproducing Webster's blunt, forceful sentences: 'Let him appoint his deputies; let them be few, but let them be paid.' The shift in pace mirrors the transition from Webster's rural origins to his public life.

The Lexicographer's Statistical Gaze

Scudder's voice becomes more analytical when describing Webster's 'inordinate love of detail.' He recounts how Webster, during a brief residence in New York, 'numbered the houses in the city, and found that they were thirty-five hundred.' The biographer notes that Webster would count houses on both sides of a street and record the results in his diary. This obsession with enumeration, Scudder suggests, intensified through 'contemplation of those battalions of words which make his spelling-book pages look like spiritual armies marching against ignorance.' The prose here adopts a wry, almost amused tone, a departure from the earlier solemnity.

Bluntness Over Elegance in Webster's Prose

Scudder directly evaluates Webster's writing style, calling it 'not elegant; it is sometimes ungrammatical; but it is intelligible.' He compares Webster's work unfavorably to Franklin's 'The Whistle,' highlighting its 'inartistic form.' Yet Scudder respects the directness, noting that Webster's bluntness 'could hardly fail to make itself felt.' This critical assessment is embedded in a broader discussion of Webster's 'practical philosophy and philanthropy,' showing how the biographer balances judgment with contextual appreciation. The pace here is brisk, moving through a list of Webster's miscellaneous writings—from tornado accounts to white-washing—before settling on his passion for statistics.

Scudder's biography rewards readers who attend to its shifts in tempo: the slow, scenic openings give way to brisk analyses of Webster's pamphlets and a catalog of his eccentric interests. The narrative voice remains steady, but its pace varies with subject, offering a portrait of a man whose own writing was never elegant but always purposeful.