What is the earliest book where bad spelling is primarily for humor value?

Question

I've enjoyed books like Molesworth by Geoffrey Willans and The BFG by Roald Dahl, where bad spelling and grammar (the BFG's extensive writing on the dream jars) are an integral part of the joke, and it establishes the narrator as wise if not book-smart.

But these are before the Internet age, which featured an explosion of leetspeak, etc., and it's quickly lost its novelty value. But I am wondering what the earliest book is in English that uses bad spelling for humor value. I don't mean spelling that was right then but looks odd now, or spelling that was wrong then but is acceptable now.

I don't know if I'd need a separate question to for earliest American effort as opposed to the earliest English effort, but I'd be interested in either. I hope that doesn't make the question too wide in scope.

Answer 1

James Whitcomb Riley was perhaps the most well-known American humorist who wrote primarily in dialect. Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn is probably the best-known American book written in dialect, but it's only semi-humorous. Zora Neale Hurston's transcendent Their Eyes Were Watching God has all the dialog in dialect, but it's neither for humor nor for cruelty. Finnegans Wake is written all in an idiolect, and is arguably intended to be humorous, but it's such a difficult work that it's hard to say anything definitive about it. Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is in an invented composite dialect, but again, not primarily for humor. Trainspotting is arguably bleakly humorous, and some of the humor comes from the language. Terry Pratchett often uses humorous idiolects in his books, and outlandish alien slang is a reoccuring joke in Douglas Adams Hitchhiker series. Bruno's babyish language is milked shamelessly for (putative) humor in Lewis Carroll's Sylvie & Bruno.

Answer 2

But I am wondering what the earliest book is in English that uses bad spelling for humor value.

I realise I'm somewhat stretching the scope of your question, but if you include plays as "books", and in the context of spoken dialogue you interpret "bad spelling" to include the author putting the wrong word in a character's mouth for the audience's amusement, then malapropisms offer some early options.

The term "malapropism" itself is derived from the surname of Mrs Malaprop, a character in Richard Brinsley Sheridan's comedy of manners The Rivals, which was first performed in 1775. Mrs Malaprop is a moralistic widow, and guardian of the main character Lydia; as the primary comic figure in the play, she frequently chooses a word that sounds like the one she means, but is completely (indeed, ludicrously) wrong in the context. It might therefore be thought of as a verbal spelling error.

Examples of her misspoken words:

"Sure, if I reprehend any thing in this world it is the use of my oracular tongue, and a nice derangement of epitaphs!" [Likely substitutions: "reprehend" for apprehend; "oracular" for vernacular; "derangement" for arrangement; "epitaphs" for epithets]

"illiterate him quite from your memory" ["illiterate" for obliterate]

"she's as headstrong as an allegory on the banks of the Nile" ["allegory" for alligator]

While Sheridan's play gave the modern name to this technique, its use for comic effect goes back much earlier. In Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing, first published in 1623, the attempts of his comic character Constable Dogberry – an officious, incompetent, amateur police chief – to appear sophisticated result in tortured descriptions and ridiculous malapropisms.

Perhaps Constable Dogberry's best-known line is when he reports the arrest of two villains:

"Our watch, sir, have indeed comprehended two auspicious persons." ["comprehended" for apprehended and "auspicious" for suspicious].

Interestingly, as a result of this popular play such vocabulary errors became known as dogberryisms, a term that endured until the arrival of Mrs Malaprop.