The spelling bee, by Our Own Correspondent
An original newspaper report written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.
This report, published in a county newspaper in 1876, describes a public spelling competition, a craze that had recently spread to Britain from America.
The spelling bee, which has crossed the Atlantic this spring in company with the American organ and the rocking chair, reached Brackenford on Thursday, and Brackenford has talked of nothing else since. The Drill Hall was taken for the purpose, tickets were sold at a shilling and sixpence, and by seven o’clock every seat was filled and the overflow was standing on the stairs, craning to see forty of the town’s most respectable inhabitants submit themselves to public examination, like schoolchildren, in the spelling of their native tongue.
The arrangements were very solemn. The competitors sat in two rows upon the platform. The Reverend Mr Spurway presided as spelling master, with a dictionary so large that it required a small table of its own, and the doctor and the manager of the bank sat beside him as umpires. The prizes were displayed in front: a writing desk of walnut, a silver pencil case and a volume of sermons, the last of which, we noticed, attracted little attention.
The first to fall was a solicitor’s clerk, on ‘parallel’, which he furnished with an extra letter and a look of injured innocence. A corn merchant went down on ‘separate’, and a churchwarden on ‘ecstasy’, though he defended his own spelling for some minutes and was silenced only when the dictionary itself was carried down from the platform and opened before him, like the tablets of the law. Each fall was greeted by the audience with a roar such as Brackenford usually reserves for a goal at football. Two ladies in the second row of competitors took careful notes throughout, and will, we suspect, be dangerous next year.
At a quarter to ten the umpires fell into a dispute over whether ‘gauge’ might also be written without its ‘u’, and the hall waited a full quarter of an hour while three educated men turned pages and contradicted one another. Mr Spurway settled it at last by a ruling which satisfied nobody and which we shall not attempt to repeat.
By eleven the forty had become five: the two ladies from the second row, a retired schoolmaster, Miss Merriweather of the girls’ school, and the curate, who had been expected to win and appeared to expect it himself. Mr Spurway, mindful of the hour, gave them ‘phthisis’. The curate began briskly with an ‘f’. The schoolmaster put in a ‘y’ where none belongs. Miss Merriweather and both ladies, one after another, came to grief somewhere in the middle, and in a quarter of a minute the platform was empty of survivors. A voice from the gallery then invited the spelling master to spell it himself. Mr Spurway, to his great credit, closed the dictionary, tried, and failed, and the roar that followed was the night’s loudest.
And yet we came away thinking better of Brackenford than when we went in. The prizes were divided by lot, and the volume of sermons fell, very properly, to the curate. Not one of the forty had refused to stand up and be laughed at, and not one went home sulking. The evening raised eleven pounds and four shillings for the parish lending library, and on Friday morning, we are told, the stationer in the High Street had sold every dictionary in his shop by noon. A craze which sends a whole town to its dictionaries may be absurd, but it is not contemptible, and we shall take our own seat at the next.
“The writer finds the spelling bee more ridiculous than admirable.”
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120 exam-style questions on Eduqas GCSE English Language 2.1 Section A (30%) - Reading, covering 2.1.1 Two unseen non-fiction texts, 19th and 21st century. Each one has a worked solution and a mark scheme showing where the marks go.