The Scholar's Spelling Assistant.

8vo, pp. 132; original grey cloth blocked in blind, spine sunned; inscribed on front free endpaper 'Harriet Trivett, July 1854.'

having one up to seven syllables, uses a variety of easy to remember typographical ideas to differentiate sounds, and adds a short section on grammatical terms, abbreviations and synonyms etc.

We know very little of Thomas Carpenter, but in an effort to place him in some sort of context we have been able to give an outline of his life and place in education during the first half of the nineteenth century. Carpenter was born in Blackwall, then a village in Middlesex, but soon subsumed into the East End of London. He taught at an academy at Barking in Essex from the 1790s into the early years of the nineteenth century, as the town had a population of only 1,500 people he may have been in charge of the Free School there which had at that time about 40 girls and boys. When Carpenter was at Barking he had published the first edition of his spelling assistant in 1796. Despite being poorly reviewed, the work must have had something to recommend it for it became in time the standard spelling assistant for nearly a century. From the 1820s he supervised an academy at Ilford in Essex and latterly moved to Church Street in West Ham where to he continued to teach and edit new editions of ^gThe Scholar's Spelling Assistant.^g until his death in 1852, at the age of 78. In 1798 he had married Martha Flint from Little Bromley in Essex and they had together at least six children, with teaching remaining something of a family occupation, with at least one daughter and a granddaughter becoming governess's.

There were several other associated titles published by Carpenter including ^gThe young scholar's manual of useful knowledge^g, ^gThe new orthographical assistant^g and ^gAn English vocabulary: in which the words are arranged indiscriminately^g. His main work was, however, the most successful and soon reprinted in America, Canada and Australia, probably without permission. Later editions edited by others continued to appear after Carpenter's death until the early twentieth century. Despite the proliferation of editions each is now known to be recorded in just one or two surviving copies. Our edition is no exception to this rule with only a single copy located at the University of Oxford.