A Scholarly Edition of Samuel P. Newman’s A Practical System of Rhetoric

Abstract

Beth Hewett’s Scholarly Edition of Samuel P. Newman’s A Practical System of Rhetoric provides an authoritative version of this underappreciated landmark in American rhetoric and writing instruction. The volume includes a foreword by a descendant of Newman’s, an eighty-four-page introduction, a thoroughly annotated text (that of the seventh edition [1839]), which Hewett contends is “settled” (71), a series of appendices featuring significant selections from earlier editions, an extensive bibliography, and an index. Hewett’s notes, among other helps, trace textual differences in the many editions Newman published during his lifetime and locate the sources of many—although not all—of the quoted passages unidentified by the author.Hewett’s enthusiasm for Newman’s work is quickly palpable. Although she acknowledges at the outset that, because of his devotion to eighteenth-century belletrism and his perceived exclusionary tendencies, “[Newman] has been disdained within most histories of rhetoric as more harmful to the discipline than facilitative of it” (2), her introduction and textual apparatus provide a rich sense of the book’s rhetorical and cultural context in the process of constructing a credible case for its enduring significance as “the first substantively original U.S. rhetoric” (61). In fact, her treatment constitutes an homage to the text and is clearly a labor of love.Aligned with Jeffrey Walker’s emphasis on rhetoric’s “pedagogical enterprise” (2011, 3), Hewett’s case for Newman’s importance builds on the contention that “it may be more in the daily practice of teaching that rhetoric scholars develop their most original and creative contributions to the field” (2–3). Following this trajectory, Hewitt ably demonstrates the special status of the Practice System as a teacherly bridge between eighteenth-century British rhetoric (characterized by Hugh Blair’s belletrism and George Campbell’s philosophical inquiry), on the one side, and nineteenth-century American composition pedagogy, on the other. She characterizes Newman’s “most original contribution to American rhetorical study” as “inflecting Belletrism with American models” (59) and carefully explains how Newman adapts concepts essential to the rhetorical scholarship of the Scottish Enlightenment such as taste, imagination, the sublime, and the beautiful for a distinctly nineteenth-century American pedagogy. Furthermore, she suggests connections between Newman’s pedagogy and contemporary writing studies such as his explication of the clumsy quotation practice now known as patch writing. And, although she explicates the considerable contributions of A Practical System of Rhetoric, she is not unaware of its limitations, as demonstrated by her discussion of Newman’s minimal coverage of rhetorical invention and reasoning, a deficit characteristic of nineteenth-century writing pedagogy.I find Hewett’s editorial work solid, her case for Newman’s enduring relevance to rhetorical study sound, and her textual glosses engaging. I do note that her account of A Practical System of Rhetoric’s nineteenth-century American context is stronger than her treatment of its eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British roots. Likewise, her bibliography of American rhetoric appears to be more up-to-date than its British counterpart (which is missing a number of important recent studies), and she exhibits an overreliance on older secondary sources for eighteenth-century texts. Nonetheless, I heartily recommend this edition for students of nineteenth-century American rhetoric and—more generally—compositionists with an interest in our complex, contentious, endlessly captivating family tree.