Paradigm Catalogue
Textbook
ColloquiumParadigm, Vol. 2 (2), (October, 2000)
Charles Monaghan (New York, Urban History Press, 1998) 166 pp., $34.50.
Reviewed by Bernard Austin
In a Textbook Colloquium meeting in York in commemoration of the bi-centenary in 1995 of the English Grammar of Lindley Murray (1745-1826), Charles Monaghan opened up the record of Murray’s life on the western side of the Atlantic. Monaghan has gone a good deal further still in The Murrays of Murray Hill. Murray Hill, the estate of the Murrays, was on Manhattan, and the name is now used for the modern district. Monaghan’s book has two main emphases: it examines in detail the business and political background of the Murrays before, during and after Lindley Murray settled in York, in the North Riding of Yorkshire, as it then was; he then investigates the success of certain of Murray’s books, particularly their history in America. On both scores, what Monaghan has to say comes as an awakening for those who have relied on Murray’s Memoirs as published by his amanuensis, Elizabeth Frank, immediately after his death in 1826.
The Murrays were of Irish and Scottish puritan or protestant stock and, like many such fellow settlers, had become Quakers. Again, like others of such a background, they engaged in trade, and created thriving business houses, dealing with commerce, manufacture and shipping before Lindley Murray was born. Monaghan reveals the extent of Lindley’s evasiveness in the ‘letters’ composed for the Memoirs in the first decade of the 19th century, and traces his schooling, his pursuit of a liberal education, and his training in the law, all in New England.
The crisis in Murray’s career was the conflict between business and politics in the rebellion. In 1765 (or 1766), Robert Murray, Lindley’s father, sailed for Britain to set up a commercial establishment in London. As a Quaker, he had introductions and with a Friend, Philip Sansom, a business was soon trading as Murray and Sansom. Lindley, newly married, followed his father a year later, and stayed in London until late in 1771. When, therefore, the colonies slipped into rebellion, the Murrays had trans-Atlantic bases. American Quakers urged non-participation, but the Murrays were also business men and it soon became clear that they were trading with London. They even had a vessel that unloaded ‘contraband’ by stealth. The Murray assets in America might well have been forfeited. By 1784 the Murrays were on the defensive. Following a retreat in New England, it emerged that Lindley and his wife would quit America. The London base was then very convenient, for the couple embarked in one of Murray and Sansom’s own ships for England. This flight Murray covered with the excuse of ‘ill health’. Monaghan contends that Murray’s exile was the price the family paid for defying the rebels’ ‘non-importation’ legislation. He is familiar with the relevant documents, and his conclusion is convincing and more interesting than the tales spun by Murray in his own Memoirs.
The second emphasis in Monaghan’s book is Murray’s publishing history. Outside America, interest in Murray’s publications -- such as it was until recently -- has concentrated on his English Grammar, hence the 1995 meeting. That book was randomly ‘demonised’ in canonical English literature far into the 19th century. The revival of interest in the Grammar owes almost everything to the growth of modern linguistic history. Monaghan, however, essentially by-passes the Grammar because he has a new story to tell. His focus falls instead on Murray’s English Reader (1799), the first of his text books to be published in America. And in America the sales figures must have been unforeseen. The Reader was a ‘success’ there from the outset, and between 1815 and 1836 it went into 159 editions. The quantity of approval of the book in America was matched by historical quality. For Lincoln, the Reader was ‘the best schoolbook ever put in the hands of American youth’. There may even be some link, therefore, between the canonisation of the book in America and the abolitionist cause. In his analysis of the Reader’s contents, Monaghan makes a few comments with which one might quibble. The term ‘enlightenment’, for instance, is becoming rather slippery for continued use.
The volume from which the two aspects only have been chosen for treatment here unfolds its history in lively style. Charles Monaghan has shed light where darkness ruled, and it is hard to believe that his subject could have been treated more convincingly.
Textbook
Colloquium