Capitals in M&D

[Tim Strzechowski]

Interestingly, this thread reminds me of a college professor I once had 
whose background was in 18th Century prose (he was a visiting prof out of 
Penn State) who said that the capitalization at that time was often used by 
writers as a means of stressing certain words within the context of the 
sentence, similar to the way Emily Dickinson would later use the varying 
lengths and angles of dashes her manuscripts (which, sadly, are not 
preserved in modern publications of her work).




> These are the sort of spelling and Capitalization writing conventions one 
> would find in materials published during the Colonial era in what was 
> about to become the United States of America. Noah Webster was developing 
> the first dictionary of "American" English at the time. In 
> pre-"Websterized" written English, normalized, consistent rules for 
> capitalization and spelling were absent. I remember an edition of 
> Bartholomew Fair, where the spelling was deliberately (and quite 
> creatively) inconsistent, in order to more accurately reflect the actual 
> pronunciations of the characters in the play. Mark Twain did a similar 
> thing in "Huck Finn." The lack of consistency is the point. This 
> individualizes the speech patterns of the characters in the works 
> mentioned.
>