6 - Queeney Thrale and the teaching of English grammar

Summary

Introduction

On 1 February 1770 Hester Lynch Thrale (later Piozzi) (1741−1821), an eighteenth-century literary hostess best known as a friend of Dr Johnson's, noted in her journal that her daughter:

Hester Maria Thrale was four Years and nine Months old when I lay in of Lucy; and then I first began to teach her Grammar shewing her the Difference between a Substantive and an Adjective as I lay in Bed.

(Hyde 1977: 34)

Hester Maria, otherwise known as Queeney (1764−1857), a nickname none other than Dr Johnson had given to her, may have been a precocious child (see Navest 2003: 1−2), but teaching grammar to such young children was by no means unusual at the time. According to Michael (1970: 550), the Reverend John Ash (1724?–79) of Pershore in Worcestershire wrote his Grammatical Institutes: or Grammar, Adapted to the Genius of the English Tongue (1760) for his five-year-old daughter, who ‘learnt and repeated the whole in a short Time’ (Ash 1766: Advertisement). It was Ash's grammar which the novelist Fanny Burney (1752–1840) used while teaching her six-year-old son Alexander the rudiments of grammar in 1801 (Percy 1994: 127).

Even Robert Lowth's (1710–87) popular and authoritative Short Introduction to English Grammar (1762) was originally begun as a grammar for his son Thomas Henry (1753–78), who was about four years old at the time (Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2000b: 25–6; 2003: 43).