Personal Recollections of Birmingham and Birmingham Men

by Eliezer Edwards

Earl Grey, on the adverse vote of the House of Lords, had resigned on the 9th of May. The Duke of Wellington and Sir R. Peel endeavoured to form a Government, but failed utterly; so that on the 18th, Earl Grey returned to power. "At the personal request of the King, a large number of the Tory peers consented to absent themselves from the House of Lords during the further discussion of the Reform Bill." "By the first week of August the bills had received the Royal assent, and the political excitement which had kept the country agitated for nearly two years was suddenly changed into complete listlessness and apathy."

Meanwhile, the personal sacrifices which Mr. Edmonds had made, and the sufferings he had endured, were not unheeded by his friends. On April 25th, 1831, a meeting was held, under the presidency of Mr. John Betts, at which it was resolved to raise a subscription in his behalf, in recognition of "his superior talents, his tried integrity, and the persevering industry with which he has, for a long series of years, devoted himself to the great cause of public liberty, and more especially to the rights, privileges, and welfare of his fellow-townsmen." Mr. Thomas Attwood was appointed the treasurer, and a committee of twenty of the leading Liberals of the town took charge of the movement, which resulted in a handsome sum being presented to Mr. Edmonds.

Mr. Edmonds was not one to become politically listless and apathetic. He considered the passing of the Reform Bill to be only the stepping-stone to other beneficial measures. At his instigation it was resolved that the Political Union should not be dissolved, but should be "kept firmly united." On May 20th, 1833, another monster meeting was held on Newhall Hill, at which the Government was censured for passing the Irish Coercion Bill; for refusing the right to vote by ballot; for persevering in unjust and cruel Corn Laws; and for continuing the House and Window Taxes.

George Edmonds was one of the most active agitators for the grant of a Charter of Incorporation to the town. He was generally selected to be either proposer or seconder of the Reform candidates, at the elections. Few political meetings of any kind, were held at which he was not only present, but took an active part; and even when old age had bent his frame and weakened the tones of his once trumpet-like voice, he would occasionally make the walls of the Town Hall ring, as he denounced oppression, or called upon his fellow-townsmen to rise to vindicate a right. His spoken addresses were singularly clear and forcible in their construction. His language was very simple, and was nearly pure Saxon, and his enunciation of every syllable of each word distinct and perfect. He was a born politician, and a bold and fearless leader. He had a very genial disposition, and a charitable heart; but was impulsive, and was very strong in his resentments. He was what Dr. Johnson might call "a good hater." He combined the fierceness of the lion with the gentleness and docility of the lamb.

Hitherto, I have spoken of Mr. Edmonds chiefly in reference to his professional career and his political activity. I now turn to a phase of his character which is little known, but which is not in any way less remarkable. As a scholar and a philologian he had rare abilities, and a rarer industry. Having, somewhat early in life, possessed himself of a copy of the works of Dr. Wilkins, who was a bishop in the reign of Charles II., he became impressed with the thought that a universal language was within the bounds of human possibility, and he set himself diligently to work out the problem. During the whole of his busy political life; all through his active professional career; amid the strife and the worry, the turmoil, and the rancour, of the controversy in which he was so prominent; it was his habit to rise from his bed at three or four o'clock in the morning to endeavour to master this intricate task. In the failures of others who had essayed this gigantic work, he saw only incentives to fresh exertions. Nothing daunted him. Failing to find in ordinary type, as used by printers, the necessary symbols to embody his thoughts, he, at enormous expense, had an entirely new fount, from his own designs, made expressly for the book which was to be the crowning monument of his life. Finding no printing-office willing to undertake a work of so unaccustomed a nature, he fitted up a room in his house in Whittall Street, and here, by his own hands, the whole of the type was set. Mr. Massey, of Friday Bridge, informs me that he printed the book, and he has obligingly placed at my disposal a few specimens of the peculiar types used. The result was, a thick quarto volume, every page of which bristles with evidences of acute erudition, and the most accurate reasoning and discernment. It bears the title of "A Universal Alphabet, Grammar, and Language," and it has for a motto a text from the book of Zephaniah—"For then will I turn to the people a pure language, that they may call upon the name of the Lord."

He seems to have aimed at the production of an "Alphabet of Characters," which should indicate the various sounds of the voice, and he succeeded. "I thought," he says, in the preface to his book, "and still think it, theoretically, a near approach to perfection. Into this character I translated the whole of St. Matthew's Gospel, and various extracts from the Psalms and other books." "With great reluctance, and not without much pain," he came to the conclusion that this system was impracticable, and he "therefore gave up the idea altogether of that character, and looked about for some other." It then occurred to him that the Roman alphabet "might be supplemented by certain marks, so as to represent all the elementary sounds;" and this resulted in his compiling an alphabet containing forty symbols, of which five—ai, au, oi, ou, and oo are compounds; the remaining thirty-five are the ordinary letters, some of which have marks under them, like the dash we make under a word in writing to indicate greater force or emphasis, thus—U D Z o d z.

Having arrived at this point, he intimates his belief that his next discovery was the result of direct inspiration. "I am far from superstitious, yet I must confess, with regard to this discovery, I have long felt as though I had been no more than a mere instrument, accomplishing the will of Another; and that the direction of my thoughts, and my ultimate convictions, were only a part of the development of my own mind, enforced and controlled by some internal law, which ensured its own effects without any original exercise of my own reason. One thing is certain: I cannot tell how it was brought into my own i mind, and I have no recollection of the process which ultimately revealed to me a knowledge of the power and essential importance of the discovery."

The discovery of which he speaks is that the "success of the Philosophic [language] turned upon the proper use of two short vowels and three nasal consonants. These are the short u, as in faithful, and the i in pin, and the consonants, m, n, and n [i.e., ng]. One of these three consonants is to be found in the centre of every root of the [philosophic] language. They resemble the reed in the hautboy—they give B metallic ring in the words where they occur. They may be compared to the sound of the trumpet in a concert; the other consonants are the sound of the drum—rub-a-dub-dub."

It is of course impossible, in a short notice like this, to give a thousandth part of the methods and arguments by which Mr. Edmonds works out his theory; but I shall attempt to make his process clear by one or two short examples.

He starts by assuming that, as all words are reducible to nouns as a first principle, so the whole of the nouns can be classified into forty "genera." These genera are each divisible into "differences," and the differences are sub-divisible into "species." He gives a list of the "genera," each of which is composed of two vowels and two consonants; and then, in a series of very elaborate tables, he proceeds to show how words of every possible signification can be built up from the materials thus provided and classified. For instance, amongst the genera, onji is the root-word for insects, anji for fish, enji for birds, and inji for beasts. Taking anji—or fish—for my example, because it is the shortest, I may mention that he divides fish into nine "differences," two of viviparous, five of oviparous, one of crustacea, and one of scaly river fish. I will give one example of each class, merely pointing out that the letters anj occur in the middle of each name. The final letters give the species, and the initials the specific fish indicated, thus: Panjoo is whale, Banjoi is skate, Danjo is herring, Kanja is gurnet, Danji is sea-perch, Danjai is eel, Banjino is plaice, Vanjoinoi is star-fish, and Fanjino is salmon.