Kirkham's Grammar: The Book That Shaped Lincoln's Prose

Rating:
Summary: Usefulness depends on your interest
Review: This is a facsimile edition of the 11th edition of Kirkham's Grammar (1829), a widely used grammatical textbook of the mid-19th century. The usefulness of this book depends on what you want it for. If you are interested in things like the history of education or language study, as I am, then the book is worthwhile. Apart from the grammatical presentation (the traditional, Latin-based paradigm of most older textbooks), there are a series of "philosophical notes" that represent Kirkham's attempt to be scholarly. He is particularly taken with etymology, and if such things interest you these notes alone make the book worth getting, although from the perspective of modern knowledge, most of his etymological comments are ludicrously wrong. (Of course, scholarly study in the history of language was still in its infancy.) On the other hand, if you want to learn to write like the grand old prose stylists of the 19th century, you should go elsewhere. The book represents an antique style of studying grammar--parsing is an exercise in naming everything grammatical about each word (no diagrams). The book's subtitle is, I suppose, historically correct, since we know he studied it, but this is mostly publishers' hype. Lincoln's mature prose was quite different from the sort taught as the norm--much sparer than the ornate rhetoric that was preferred. He developed that on his own, later in life, and I doubt Kirkham had much to do with it. Further, English has changed in subtle but important ways since the 1820s, and thus to learn grammar from this book would be anachronistic. Even for that period, Kirkham's paradigms are somewhat arntique (e.g., he still presents paradigms with "thou" for the 2nd-person singular.)