Thomas Dilworth

Who was Thomas Dilworth?

The Reverend Mr. Thomas Dilworth was an English cleric and author of a widely used schoolbook, both in Great Britain and America, A New Guide to the English Tongue. Noah Webster as a boy studied Dilworth's book, and was inspired partly by it to create his own spelling book on completely different principles, using pictures and stories of interest to children. By some accounts Dilworth was one of the few schoolbooks used by Abraham Lincoln. Published in 1761, by 1773, it was in its thirty-sixth edition. The last American edition was published in 1827 in New Haven, Connecticut. The full-page frontispiece portrait of the author was well-known to generations of doodling school children and is mentioned in Dickens; in Sketches by Boz. Chapter X there is a humorous description of rowers' togs on the Thames:

They approach in full aquatic costume, with round blue jackets, striped shirts, and caps of all sizes and patterns, from the velvet skull-cap of French manufacture, to the easy head-dress familiar to the students of the old spelling-books, as having, on the authority of the portrait, formed part of the costume of the Reverend Mr. Dilworth.