Americanisms and Briticisms; with other essays on other isms — Reading Companion

The Texture of Transatlantic Speech

Matthews builds his case from the ground up, citing actual sentences from novels, newspapers, and letters. He observes that an Australian character “eaten his evening meal—damper and a hard junk of wallabi flesh” while his “billy of tea was warming”—a line that forces the reader to infer meaning from context. Matthews praises this technique but also criticizes its inconsistency: the authors provide no glossary, leaving “the wild howling of the dingoes in the scrub” to stand unexplained. This attention to authorial choice—whether to embed, footnote, or omit definitions—reveals Matthews’s interest in the writer’s responsibility to an audience. He extends the method to Americanisms, noting how “tenderfoot” parallels “newchum”, and how such terms reflect frontier experience. The essay does not merely catalog; it interrogates why some words travel and others do not.

Sydney Smith’s Ghost and the Literary Score

Matthews revisits Sydney Smith’s 1820 taunt—“Who reads an American book?”—not to rehearse old grievances but to measure change. He notes that Smith’s question appeared just as Washington Irving’s Sketch Book was published, yet no one then recognized it as a turning point. Matthews lists the major American authors alive at the time—Irving, Cooper, Bryant, Emerson, Poe, Hawthorne—and observes that only Knickerbocker remained readable seventy years later. The passage is striking for its bluntness: “in the four quarters of the globe nobody to-day reads any American book published before 1820—except Irving’s Knickerbocker.” Matthews uses this historical pivot to argue that literary independence was earned slowly, through works like Cooper’s Spy (1821) and the first Leatherstocking tale (1823). He does not claim triumph; he documents a process.

The Turn of the Critical Tables

A later essay dissects a transatlantic quarrel: Matthews had called British criticism of Cooper’s era “more ignorant then and even more insular than it is now,” and Andrew Lang took offense. Matthews responds by reprinting Lang’s protest and then calmly parsing the logic. He points out that his statement implies improvement over time, not a fixed flaw. The exchange becomes a case study in how national pride inflects literary judgment. Matthews notes that “Mr. Charles Dudley Warner once let fall an innocent remark about the British strawberry; and more than one British journal flushed with rage.” He tracks similar flare-ups involving W. D. Howells and Theodore Roosevelt, showing how small provocations reveal larger sensitivities. The tone is wry but precise: Matthews treats Lang’s “International Girlishness” as a specimen of the very insularity he describes.

Diction as Evidence of Cultural Change

Throughout the collection, Matthews treats word choice as historical evidence. He notes that “American spelling” was once a political battleground, and that debates over -or versus -our reflected deeper anxieties about independence. In the essay on Cooper’s centenary, he praises Professor Lounsbury’s biography for showing “how bravely Cooper fought for our intellectual emancipation from the shackles of the British criticism of that time.” Matthews himself fights with similar tools: he quotes from reviews, letters, and novels, letting the language of each era speak for itself. He avoids sweeping claims, preferring to say “the change is pleasant” rather than declaring victory. This restraint gives the essays their enduring value as documents of linguistic and literary history, grounded in the specific choices of writers and critics.

Readers approaching Matthews’s essays should expect a conversational yet rigorous style, one that moves from a single Australian phrase to a transatlantic literary feud without losing focus. The book rewards those who attend to its footnotes and asides, where Matthews often tucks his sharpest observations. Because the excerpts are incomplete, the full arc of his argument about “other isms” remains partially hidden, but the method is clear: let the language itself be the witness.

Reading Matthews’ fussy distinctions between “lift” and “elevator” stirred a memory of my grandmother, who corrected my American “sidewalk” to “pavement” every visit. That same gentle tug of belonging to two worlds came back with Ginger-Snaps — Edition Insights, where a scattered preface suddenly felt like a letter from someone who also loved the odd, in-between corners of language.