From the Classroom - A National Reputation for Academic Excellence

Lafayette faculty are experts in their fields. In “From the Classroom,” faculty members give insight into their particular subject, providing a window on the intellectual rigor that characterizes the environment of academic excellence at Lafayette. Departing from the norm, this issue features a towering figure among faculty of the 19th century to celebrate the publication of Francis A. March: Selected Writings of the First Professor of English by Paul and June Schlueter. Copyright © 2005, Lafayette College.

Albert K. Murray; portrait of Francis A. March, 1941 oil on canvas Lafayette College Art Collection. Gift of Thomas J. Watson

First Professor of English

Though it is common for one academic generation’s leaders to be eclipsed by succeeding generations, some groundbreaking researchers have been so instrumental in advancing the profession that it is imperative they be remembered. Francis Andrew March (1825-1911), distinguished American philologist, lexicographer, educator, and professor of English at Lafayette College, is such a figure. For March in his day was preeminent among both American academicians and scholars of language. Note these specifics:

• He was the first to hold the title “Professor of English Language and Literature” anywhere in the United States or Europe.
• He was the first to teach a required Shakespeare course.
• He was the first to teach Milton as well as a number of other English and American authors, including then-contemporary writers, at the college level.
• He was the first to study and write about the history of English from a historical perspective, thus establishing the ground from which most subsequent historical linguistic research sprang.
• He was among the first to embark on then-uncharted linguistic frontiers such as spelling reform and phonetic spelling.
• He formulated concepts about the teaching of English in college and about the role of liberal arts colleges that still resonate with relevance and original insights.

March played a major role in the establishment of English as an independent discipline. His scholarly accomplishments greatly influenced several generations of scholars in some of the nation’s foremost academic institutions.

As Frederick L. Rudolph, an historian of higher education, has noted, March, in combining literary analysis and comparative philology, “wrested English literature away from the old rhetoric tradition, with its stultifying emphasis on form and rules, and took to it some of the concern with thought, criticism, and esthetics that had characterized the uses of literature in the literary societies.” Lexicographer Clarence L. Barnhart observed that the fact that “English has been established as a serious discipline instead of an avocation is in no small part owing to March.” Stuart Berg Flexner called March “a true linguistic pioneer” and “one of the best linguistic minds America has produced.” Norman Cousins quotes an editor for whom he worked when he was young as believing March’s famed Thesaurus-Dictionary to be the “most remarkable reference book about words to grace the English language”; the editor stated that although Peter Mark Roget “employed the basic principles of a thesaurus,” it was March who “converted those principles into art.” Kemp Malone, himself a pioneering linguistic and literary researcher, once noted that March “raised collegiate instruction in English to the dignity of a mental discipline, and gave it the place which it has since occupied alongside the study of the classics.”

In addition, during his long professorial career, spent wholly at Lafayette College from 1855-1906, March demonstrated unusual breadth and dexterity, even for the relatively relaxed professional standards of the era, by also teaching numerous other subjects, including constitutional, public, and Roman law (he was also an attorney), mental and moral philosophy, political science, languages (French, German, Latin, and Greek), and even botany, and he served as the college’s first librarian. Were the term not so easily abused, one would be tempted to apply the label “renaissance man” to March, for it seems in retrospect that there was little that he tackled that he couldn’t do well. . . .

Francis Andrew March (shown with his wife, Mildred, in 1909) was the first to hold the title “Professor of English Language and Literature” anywhere in the United States or Europe.

March was a prolific, pioneering author of papers and books—some 195 in one incomplete 1895 compilation—in philology, the historical study of grammar, lexico-graphy, spelling reform, the teaching of literature, and pedagogy. He was the director of American readers for the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary (and is cited some 15 times in the OED as the source of various usages), he was instrumental in the creation of the Standard Dictionary (1893-95), and he edited four volumes of Greek and Latin classics.

March has long been recognized for these contributions; for example, he has been the subject of an entry in the Encyclopaedia Britannica since 1910, he is the subject of a fine tribute by Kemp Malone in the Dictionary of American Biography, and he has been praised for his pioneering work by other, varied voices. . . . Given [the] varied explicit and implicit acknowledgments of March’s pioneering efforts, it is astonishing to realize that only one of his highly influential books— A Comparative Grammar of the Anglo-Saxon Language . . . (1870)— is currently listed in Books in Print, though not from a major academic or scholarly press. His most popular work, A Thesaurus Dictionary of the English Language, prepared with his namesake son and published in 1903, went through five editions and remained in print for more than 40 years; it was reprinted (with slight variations in title) in 1958 by Doubleday in both cloth- and paperbound editions and in 1980 by Abbeville Press. March prepared the theoretical organizational plan for this influential work in 1861, the year before English philologist Peter Mark Roget (1779-1869) issued the first edition of his more renowned—and endlessly reprinted—thesaurus; initial editions of Roget’s thesaurus used a cumbersome organization that was changed in succeeding editions to the format that March initially proposed and that even today makes March’s thesaurus far more usable. . . .

“Irregyular and Unrizonabl” “Dhi problem ov illiterasi haz long bin familiar tu Americanz as won ov dhi most important ov soshal saiens. It haz letli cum up fresh and firful in England. And it iz fuli recognaizd dhat dhi trubl laiz in dhi irregyular and unrizonabl speling of English.” —At the forefront of the 19th-century movement in spelling reform, March “advocated such widespread changes that it almost became an obsessive cause.” While he used conventional spelling in all but a few writings (including this 1877 essay, “Spelling and Progress”), “March was indeed a true believer in such change.”

March’s work may not be widely read today; indeed, to a modern audience, removed from the century in which his groundbreaking analyses first saw print, his ideas may seem dated . . . Yet much of his scholarship remains remarkably current, and there is no dispute about the major role this distinguished figure played in the establishment of English as an independent discipline. . . .

March specialized, in common with then-contemporary interests and tastes, in “Anglo-Saxon,” i.e., Old English or early medieval English. His landmark book A Comparative Grammar of the Anglo-Saxon Language, in Which its Forms are Illustrated by Those of the Sanscrit, Greek, Latin, Gothic, Old Saxon, Old Friesic, Old Norse, and Old High German (1870), is not just a mouth-filling title; it also suggests the kind of work he was attempting in virgin scholarly territory, a profoundly detailed comparative analysis of the forms of the English language with other major Indo-European tongues. As Kemp Malone noted, in this book March “laid the foundation on which all future historical grammarians . . . were destined to build, and his fame will ever rest secure as . . . the founder of a science.” In the same year of 1870, March published his Introduction to Anglo-Saxon: An Anglo-Saxon Reader, a textbook intended for classroom instruction (and in continual use for graduate study for some 80 years, until 1950 or thereabouts), suggesting his dual thrust of scholarly writing for both specialists in the field and for students just beginning linguistic analysis, a practice also illustrated in his earlier Method of Philological Study of the English Language (1865).

March’s long academic career, 1855-1906, was spent wholly at Lafayette.

Nor was March interested solely in linguistics, for, as indicated by some of the selections that follow, he was also a pioneer in teaching works of literature previously unrepresented in college classrooms. March had much to say, of course, about writings in Latin and Greek, for these were the heart of the nineteenth-century literature curriculum. But recognizing the importance of literature in English, March transferred his instructional methods to the study of the vernacular, relying on select literary passages for an analysis that the professor would “make . . . as hard as Greek.” . . . What survived long into the twentieth century was March’s esthetic sense: a lover of both language and literature, he characterized the language of literature as “an ideal language, shaped to peculiar forms by men of genius under the direction of an idea of the beautiful.”

March . . . wrote numerous essays and reviews of literature in English. He showed a special interest in Malory, Shakespeare, and Milton, but he also had perceptive comments to offer on nineteenth-century figures, including Lamb, Tennyson, Arnold, Browning, and Morris. Generally respectful of these now-canonical writers, he bristled on his first encounter with Whitman, railing in his review of Leaves of Grass against the poet’s “dullness” and “repulsive” diction. (It is an essay we may now say reflected more about the nineteenth century’s squeamishness about sexual expression in literature than about Whitman’s merits as a poet.)

March wrote about education as well: the idea of the scholar; tributes to other scholars; high school instruction as preparation for admission to and success in college. His comments about the teaching of English at Lafayette College, his sole home as a professor, are equal mixtures of dated pedantry and tributes to a college that had proven willing to concur with [the] innovative ideas . . . evident throughout his scholarly career. Much of his pioneering work in language and literature was accomplished before the Civil War, but he was still active in his 70s, contributing important and influential writing. Although only a fraction of his work remains in print a century after his death, his essays form a body of historical literature that remains fascinating and instructive, not only to those holding a Lafayette College degree but to all who use and admire the English language.