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See later & also
12019-07-12T12:41:06+00:00Joelle Thomas0feb3b2b7a8befeee2c7d2d710d303ed9677214112Note and citationsplain2019-07-12T12:43:29+00:00Joelle Thomas0feb3b2b7a8befeee2c7d2d710d303ed96772141See later, for example, Mark Twain’s use of baby dialect in Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894). For an example of baby dialect more later contemporary with Johnson’s letter, using similar vocabulary elements (“oo,” and “ittle”), see “Caring for a Baby,” in Fred Hart, The Sazerac Lying Club: A Nevada Book (San Francisco: Henry Keller, 1878), 205-206. It seems that “baby talk” was a matter of some concern during the century among those who thought it might slow development; see for example Marion Harland, “Familiar Talks with Mothers: Baby Talk,” in Babyhood 2.1 (1885), 338-340; and “A Word to Mothers on Baby-Talk,” The Mother’s Magazine and Family Monitor 21 (1853): 37; as well as an anecdote about Samuel Johnson disapproving the practice that seems to have gone mildly viral, for example in John Timbs, A Century of Anecdote from 1760-1860, Volume 2 (London: Richard Bentley, 1864): 36.
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12019-07-12T12:41:22+00:00a region destitute of literacy1Cohen page 10plain2019-07-12T12:41:22+00:00As Christopher Hager has observed, northerners, and especially abolitionists, often spoke of the South as a region destitute of literacy. Works like Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Dred were “fixated on the arrested literacy of slaveholders,” Hager writes, and quotes Theodore Dwight Weld’s judgment that most slaveholders “are ignorant men, thousands of them notoriously so, mere boors unable to write their names or to read the alphabet." Johnson is often at pains in his correspondence with Whitman to demonstrate his wide reading, and to differentiate himself from what he regarded as the undereducated and uncurious folks among whom he lived, with their “lack of culture and the love of the ideal in any sense other than the old and barbarous." Still, this letter’s fanciful premise and use of dialect may well have been formal choices designed to flout that Northern prejudice about Southern smarts. For starters, Johnson’s son’s persona in this letter may not be able to spell, but then, he’s eight months old. And more significantly, with its trope of the child speaker and its consistent use of eye-dialect, the letter partakes of the same kind of authority-effect that dialect writing more broadly did in the hands of nationally famous American authors. The letter dares its famous northern, abolitionist, and literary reader to dismiss the opinions of its speaker based on inexperience, ignorance, or illiteracy.