A Pickle for the Knowing Ones, also known as Plain Truths in a Homespun Dress, is an 1802 autobiographical book written by American businessman Timothy Dexter. The book uses spelling and grammar that are often considered poor, and contains almost no punctuation. Dexter was a rich businessman and an eccentric, known for gaining his wealth through ill-advised but ultimately lucky investments like sending coals to Newcastle at the time of a miners' strike. The book includes complaints about things such as politicians and the clergy, while Dexter praises his own glory and even says that he should be the emperor of the United States. The second edition is noted for containing pages of punctuation in the appendix, so that the reader, in Dexter's words, "may peper and solt it as they plese ".
Author's background
Dexter was born in Malden, Massachusetts, in 1743, and began working as a tanner at 16. He moved to Newburyport, Massachusetts, when he was 21 and married a wealthy widow, Elizabeth Frothingham, obtaining a sizable fortune with the marriage. At the end of the Revolutionary War, Dexter purchased a large sum of Continental currency that was worthless at the time. Several years later it had regained its value from prior to the war, making Dexter extremely wealthy. With it, he purchased ships and began a trading company.
Dexter began selling bed warmers to the tropical West Indies, a move that proved to be successful when the captain sold them as ladles in molasses production. In another instance, Dexter bought a large amount of coal and sent it to Newcastle, an idea given to him by opponents as a trick, but it happened that Dexter sent the coal during a miners' strike in the town. Dexter's luck in the trading business soon made him one of the richest men in Massachusetts, drawing much contempt from other businessmen in the area. Dexter had published letters in a number of newspapers that, in the words of Dexter, "amused the public with the comical ebullitions of Lord Dexter's genius." Dexter wrote A Pickle for the Knowing Ones and distributed it to the public for free.
Content and themes
The first edition of A Pickle for the Knowing Ones is 8,847 words long. The book contains no punctuation, many misspellings and grammatical mistakes, and randomly capitalized letters. An example of this can be found in the start of the fourth edition:
The text is structured like a series of letters; each section is signed "Timothy Dexter", "T Dexter", or "T D'r" variously at the bottom, with some containing headings like "From the museum of Timothy Dexter, esq." Throughout, Dexter complains about things like politicians and the clergy, while praising his own glory and power. He also suggests that what the United States needed was an emperor, and that they should "Call for me to take the helm".
After receiving complaints about the lack of punctuation, Dexter published a second edition in 1805, this time containing pages full of punctuation in the appendix. He tells the readers to "peper and solt it as they plese". Six more editions were published after Dexter died on October 26, 1806, containing letters and speeches by Dexter added by editors.
Reception The writing style of A Pickle for the Knowing Ones was heavily criticized by poets and writers; in 1890, nineteenth-century poet Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. wrote in The Atlantic that Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman should not have allowed Dexter to write the book, since his countrymen would believe that they "need not go to the Heralds' College to authenticate their titles of nobility", and that they should disregard correctly spelling words.
Described as a "jumble of letters promiscuously gathered together", the book was also covered by The New York Times in 1925. The author drew a comparison to Benjamin Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanack and detailed its usefulness in teaching typing, writing "for the student cannot allow his eyes to stray from the text to the keys and make a successful copy." Additionally, Dexter and A Pickle for the Knowing Ones were written on by author W. H. Blumenthal in a 1932 essay about eccentric authors, in which he analyzed how readers and the general public should treat them.
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