English as She is Wrote: Showing Curious Ways in which the English Language may be made to Convey Ideas or obscure them

In Short

Published anonymously in 1883, English as She is Wrote is a curated anthology of real-world linguistic blunders, awkward constructions, and playful verbal oddities gathered from everyday life. Rather than inventing parodies, the text compiles unprompted slips from newspaper reports, public signs, tombstones, personal letters, and classroom lessons. It preserves the genuine confusion that occurs when grammar fails or when style collapses under its own weight. It has endured as an entertaining primary record of Victorian colloquial speech, advertising quirkiness, and the perennial gap between what a writer intends to say and what actually reaches the page.

The Story

The book advances through seven distinct domains where written English goes awry, demonstrating how sentence structure and spelling can obscure or invert human thought. It opens with the inadvertent slip-ups of the educated and semi-educated—reporters, clergy, and public officials whose hasty phrasing creates bizarre visual images. Readers encounter accounts of two-mile-long chaplain reports, a town hall capable of holding hundreds of students sitting four stories high, and a gentleman accused of preaching while in a state of drunkenness. The prose then moves outdoors to examine public advertising and posted notices. Here, landladies offer single rooms twelve feet square for single women, photographers advertise three-minute portraits finished while you wait, and barbers announce "physiognomical hair-cutting."

Turning toward solemn matters, the work reviews graveyard epitaphs across Britain and America. These verses show how the demands of meter and rhyme frequently override biographical truth, leading grieving families to alter dead relatives' real surnames or accidentally claim that someone died prior to their own birth. The narrative then shifts to private correspondence, showcasing letters sent to editors, theatrical managers, and publishers. In these letters, aspiring authors, eager schoolteachers, and hopeful romantic advisors struggle with runaway syntax and phonetic spelling while asking for employment or book catalogs.

The argument expands into deliberate linguistic extravagance, dissecting the inflated, overly floral prose of journalists, theater critics, and legal minds. A dramatic review of an actress describes her as an "empress of pistol and dagger" while claiming the audience's tears flooded the theater orchestra so deeply that the bassoon players choked their instruments. Furthermore, a humorous legal condensation transforms the nursery rhyme "Mary Had a Little Lamb" into a sprawling, multi-clause government report on domestic wool production and international diplomacy.

In its final stages, the book explores intentional wordplay, grammatical tricks, lipograms, and excessive puns, illustrating how the flexibility of English can be deliberately stretched to its limits. It concludes by looking at the untutored language of children and schoolboys, where naive dictionary definitions—such as calling dust "mud with the juice squeezed out"—reveal how beginners construct meaning from observation. The work ends on this observation of innocence, completing its overview of English from high-flown institutional rhetoric down to natural, unrefined speech.

How It Unfolds

The voyage begins The book opens by defending a writer's right to independent expression, noting that while anyone can write correctly, real originality lies in accidental missteps. Early examples highlight news reports where misplaced modifiers cause chaplains, church buildings, and schoolhouses to appear in ridiculous physical configurations.

Signs and storefronts Moving into public spaces, the collection gathers commercial signboards and newspaper notices that inadvertently offer impossible services. Photographers promise to finish babies in ten minutes, landladies advertise rooms with questionable dimensions, and tavern keepers write rhyming verses to justify their prices.

Inscriptions in stone The narrative examines cemetery monuments where local poets clash with meter and mortality. Tombstones record individuals buried fifty years before their own deaths, husbands whose names are forcibly changed to fit a rhyme scheme, and solemn warnings about fatal helpings of calf salad.

Epistles from the field Unfiltered personal letters demonstrate how uneducated writers navigate official business. School directors, young pupils, and local merchants draft earnest requests for educational textbooks, love-letter templates, and supplies while using highly personal phonetic spelling.

The height of rhetoric The text turns to hyperbole, presenting theatrical reviews and scientific definitions that drown simple facts in absurdly dense prose. Simple flowers are defined through complex botanical terms, and famous children's rhymes are expanded into endless legalistic paragraphs.

Playing with the language A series of linguistic experiments showcases odd verb forms, lipograms that omit common letters, and extensive pun-filled poems. These exercises reveal how homophones and shifting pronunciations can be manipulated to construct convoluted, tongue-twisting stories.

Youthful definitions The collection closes with the speech of children and unstudied students. Classroom mishaps and naive dictionary definitions highlight how young minds interpret technical vocabulary based on literal, everyday experience.

The People

Because the book is a collection of real-world writing rather than a scripted narrative, its key figures are the recurring archetypes of nineteenth-century society who produce the language under review.

• The Inaccurate Reporter: A hurried journalist who desires to capture public events, grand speeches, and local tragedies. Hindered by misplaced clauses and hasty editing, this figure continually produces descriptions where buildings appear four stories tall or chaplains seem two miles long.
• The Hopeful Advertiser: A small-business owner, tavern keeper, or photographer striving to attract customers. Constrained by limited print space and basic grammar, this figure unintentionally offers to extract teeth with great pains or finish portrait subjects in minutes.
• The Local Tombstone Poet: A well-meaning verse writer attempting to honor deceased neighbors. Struggling against strict rhyming requirements, this figure routinely changes the subject's actual name, creates impossible family timelines, or attributes tragic deaths to mundane meals.
• The Untutored Schoolteacher: An earnest rural instructor seeking educational supplies, textbooks, and guidance from urban publishers. Facing a lack of formal training, this figure writes passionate, phonetically spelled letters urging the distribution of books to combat regional ignorance.
• The Effusive Critic: An overzealous cultural observer writing for newspapers. Driven to describe dramatic performances or simple natural phenomena in grand terms, this figure buries basic facts beneath an overwhelming deluge of metaphors, classical allusions, and exaggerated praise.

In Its Own Voice

An Ohio farmer posted a notice warning that "If any man's or woman's cows or oxen gits in this here oats his or her tail will be cut off, as the case may be."

In an old church-yard, a stone records the memory of a man "whose father and mother were drownded on their passage to America. Had they lived they would have been buried here."

Describing a local theatrical performance, an enthusiastic newspaper columnist declared that "the house was crowded with hundreds more than it could hold, with thousands of admiring spectators who went away without a sight."

What It's Really About

English as She is Wrote explores the gap between thought and expression. It demonstrates that clear communication requires more than just good intentions, as a misplaced modifier or an unstudied word choice can completely reverse a writer's meaning. The collection serves as an informal study of nineteenth-century social history, capturing how ordinary citizens, rural teachers, small merchants, and working-class families actually spoke, thought, and communicated outside of formal literature. Beneath its lighter moments, the book makes an argument for simplicity in speech and writing, showing that when prose becomes overly ambitious, it frequently collapses into nonsense.

Why Read It Today

English as She is Wrote offers a charming, brief glance into the unintentional humor of historical everyday speech. Readers who enjoy wordplay, historical linguistics, or observational humor will find it a delightful quick read that feels surprisingly modern. Because the text consists of short, authentic entries, it moves at a swift pace and reads much like a modern collection of internet typos or misdesigned billboards.

The primary difficulty for contemporary readers lies in its reliance on nineteenth-century context. Some entries depend on familiarity with period occupations, obsolete slang, or forgotten public figures, while others include outdated cultural attitudes and casual regional stereotypes common to 1880s publishing. Additionally, readers looking for a continuous narrative may find the catalog structure somewhat repetitive if read in a single sitting. However, its value as an unedited snapshot of real human expression remains untouched. The book serves as a comforting reminder that long before auto-correct, social media, and digital publishing, writers of every background were making the exact same hilarious errors we make today.