Lessons from 'A Grammar of the English Language' by William Cobbett

Today, I picked up ‘A Grammar of the English Language’ by William Cobbett, which I’d bought in the early 2000s. This is part of the Oxford Language Classics Set. It was first published in 1819 and re-issued as a paperback in 2002.

William Cobbett lived between 1763 and 1835. In the words of G.K. Chesterton, he was ‘the noblest English example of the noble calling of the agitator’.

The text of this book is that of the 1823 edition, which includes grammar lessons “to lay the solid foundation of literary knowledge amongst the Labouring classes of the community, to give practical effect to the natural genius found in the Soldier, the Apprentice, and the Plough-boy…”

It is written in an epistolary fashion and is by the author to his 14-year-old son, James, in the form of letters, each letter outlining a lesson in English Grammar.

The book is dedicated to Queen Caroline.

Many of the rules are as relevant today as they were in 1820. “Letter XVIII offers exactly the advice which young journalists received in the 1970s from The Daily Mirror ‘style book’ written by Keith Waterhouse, “ says Roy Hattersley in the Introduction.

In the first letter, the author emphasizes the importance of grammar, saying that it teaches us how to make use of words. He says a sentence is “one of those portions of words which are divided from the rest by a single dot, which is called a period, or full point; and that a paragraph means one of those collections, or blocks, of sentences which are divided from the rest of the work by beginning a new line a little further in than the lines in general…”

In the second letter, Cobbet defines grammar and its parts.

He reiterates that grammar teaches us how to make use of words in a proper manner.

The four parts or branches of grammar include:

Orthography – This is a word made up of two Greek words, which mean spelling. It means putting letters together to form words. A, E, I, O, U are vowels and in certain cases, Y, too. The rest are consonants.

Prosody – It is a word from Greek that means pronunciation or using the right sounds for the correct time, in uttering syllables and words.

Etymology – This is also a word from Greek, which means the pedigree or relationship of words. For example, walk, walks, walking etc.

Syntax – From a Greek word meaning the joining of several things together. It means those principles and rules that teach us how to put words together to form sentences. There are four points: the comma, the semi-colon, the colon, and period. The marks include the exclamation mark.