Joshua Kendall > Quotes

“For the next few years, an often nervous and distraught Webster kept track of a wide range of data, including demographic information, temperature readings, wind currents and voting records.”
― Joshua Kendall, The Forgotten Founding Father: Noah Webster's Obsession and the Creation of an American Culture

“For Webster, too, counting could help mitigate the angst that lurked within.”
― Joshua Kendall, The Forgotten Founding Father: Noah Webster's Obsession and the Creation of an American Culture

“Generations of British writers would look up to Roget as a kindred soul who could offer both emotional as well as intellectual sustenance. In the stage directions to Peter Pan, J.M. Barrie includes an homage to Roget: The night nursery of the Darling family, which is the scene of our opening Act, is at the top of a rather depressed street in Bloomsbury. We might have a right to place it where we will, and the reason Bloomsbury is chosen is that Mr. Roget once lived there. So did we in the days when his Thesaurus was our only companion in London; and we whom he has helped to wend our way through life have always wanted to pay him a little compliment. For Barrie, Roget's masterpiece was synonymous with virtue itself. To describe the one saving grace of the play's villain, Captain Hook, Barrie adds, "The man is not wholly evil--he has a Thesaurus in his cabin.”
― Joshua Kendall

“The thousand copies of the first edition published in May 1852, priced at fourteen shillings apiece, sold out quickly. Roget felt immense pride when he began reading the glowing reviews. On July 8, 1852, the Times noted, "There cannot be the slightest doubt that, upon the whole, it is one of the most learned as well as one of the most admirable contributions that have been made to philology since...the Diversions of Purley." Likewise, the Literary Examiner referred to "its great value." However, a few reviewers had a quibble. As The Athenaeum stressed in September 1852, good writers didn't really need a "crutch.”
― Joshua Kendall

“Too low for the sublimity of my genius and the elegant taste of N. Webster.”
― Joshua Kendall, The Forgotten Founding Father: Noah Webster's Obsession and the Creation of an American Culture