Timothy Dexter
Life and career
Timothy Dexter (1747–1806) was a Massachusetts businessman who made himself a conspicuous figure in Newburyport. He adopted the title Lord without holding an aristocratic rank and used print to answer people he thought had slighted him. A Pickle for the Knowing Ones, published in 1802, gathered opinions and complaints about family, neighbours, and public affairs in highly unconventional spelling and punctuation. When readers objected to the missing punctuation, a later edition supplied marks for them to distribute themselves. His writing is thus both an assertion of personal importance and an invitation to consider who gets to set the rules of respectable expression.
Self-assertion in the shape of a page
Dexter's spelling and punctuation are part of the encounter with his voice. They resist the conventions through which respectable print usually presents authority, even as the writer demands recognition for his importance. The later edition's introduction adds another performance, turning a local celebrity into a subject of curiosity. The reader therefore meets both self-presentation and the packaging of that self for others.
A Pickle for the Knowing Ones
Timothy Dexter's brief writings combine personal boasts, grievances, commercial recollections, political opinions, and declarations of his own importance. Their irregular spelling and extraordinary handling of punctuation are inseparable from the voice: the author treats readers as people who ought to recognize his success even when they question his literary methods. This edition surrounds the text with an introductory account of Dexter's career, house, public displays, and relationship with his self-appointed poet. It also preserves the famous response to complaints about missing punctuation by supplying marks for readers to distribute themselves. The book is both an exercise in determined self-presentation and a record of the way an eccentric local celebrity was packaged for later curiosity. English fourth edition, 1848, with introductory preface.
Read for rhythm before correcting
Try a short passage aloud and notice where its movement supplies pauses that punctuation does not. What does the writer want acknowledged? Compare his account with the introductory portrait. Amusement need not depend on erasing the difference between the two voices. The famous supply of spare marks extends the argument about who controls how a reader should receive the text.