Elihu Burritt (1810–1879), photographed in the 1860s or early 1870s. The albumen print comes from the Longfellow family's carte-de-visite album, with his name written on the back in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's hand. (Wikimedia Commons, public domain)
In July 1839 a physician from Richmond named Thomas Nelson was passing through Worcester, Massachusetts, and stopped to satisfy his curiosity. A year earlier the governor of Massachusetts, Edward Everett, had told an audience of Boston mechanics that a blacksmith in his state had, by his own unaided industry, made himself acquainted with fifty languages. Nelson wanted to see for himself whether that could possibly be true.
The blacksmith was at his anvil. Nelson introduced himself and said he had come because of the governor's account. The reply he recorded was not a boast. It was a correction.
"He very modestly replied, that the Governor had done him more than justice. It was true, he said, that he could read about fifty languages, but he had not studied them all critically. Yankee curiosity had induced him to look at the Latin Grammar; he became interested in it, persevered, and finally acquired a thorough knowledge of that language. He then studied the Greek with equal care." — Thomas Nelson, M.D., on Elihu Burritt, Worcester, July 1839, published in the Southern Literary Messenger, March 1840
Burritt was twenty-seven years old. He had been at the forge since boyhood. His schooling, in his own words, had been "very slender." And he had just handed a visitor the two facts that make his story useful rather than merely astonishing: the size of the count, and the size of the caveat attached to it.
New Britain, 1828: Mathematics Without Paper
Elihu Burritt was born in New Britain, Connecticut, on December 8, 1810, the youngest son in a family of ten children. His father, who farmed and made shoes, died in 1828, and Burritt was apprenticed to a local blacksmith to earn his living.
The first subject he taught himself was not a language but arithmetic, and the way he did it tells you what his working conditions allowed. At the forge he would invent problems for himself — the one that survives is how many barleycorns, at three to an inch, would it take to encircle the earth at the equator? — and work the whole calculation in his head, with no written aid of any kind, while he waited on iron. In the evening he gave the answer to his older brother Elijah, who wrote it on a slate and checked the process. The answer, according to the American Antiquarian Society's account of his life, came out correct.
Read that again as a study method rather than an anecdote. He had no desk, no notebook in reach, and no uninterrupted hour. So he trained the two things a forge cannot take away from you: mental computation and the ability to hold a question in mind across a long, physical interruption. Every adult learner who studies in fragments is working in the same conditions he was.
The Grammar That Started Everything
What changed his life was a Latin grammar. Not a plan, not a curriculum, not a school: a book he opened out of curiosity and then refused to close. Latin first, studied "with equal care" until it was thorough. Greek next. Then the modern languages, and then the languages that would eventually make the count absurd.
Two things about that order are worth noticing. First, he did the hard prerequisite work first — the case system, the inflection, the grammar of a language whose words he would never speak. Second, and more telling, Latin and Greek did not stay two languages. As he told Nelson, they unlocked four more at once: "An acquaintance with these languages had enabled him to read with facility the Italian, the French, the Spanish, and Portuguese." He was not memorizing languages one at a time. He was mining a family.
1837: He Walked to Find a Library
In 1837 the financial panic that swept the United States destroyed a small grocery business Burritt had started. Broke, he did something that sounds like a legend and is not: he started walking. His first destination was Boston, where he hoped to find a steamship passage that would carry him to the trade centers of Europe so he could collect foreign-language texts. That plan collapsed. So he turned around and walked west to Worcester instead, because he had heard that the American Antiquarian Society kept a library there.
It was not a casual decision. Burritt later said he considered himself under the greatest obligation to that Society and its library, which put at his disposal "such a wealth of philological material as he had never expected to be collected in one spot." The trustees gave a working blacksmith daily access to it, and he carried the key like a treasure.
"Yes, sir, I now have the key to that library" — showing it, Nelson wrote, as if it were the most precious jewel, the real key to knowledge — "and there I go every day and study eight hours. I work eight hours, and the other eight I am obliged to devote to animal comforts and repose." — Elihu Burritt to Thomas Nelson, Worcester, 1839
Eight hours of study, eight of work, eight for everything else: meals, sleep, and the repair of a body that had been swinging a hammer. Other accounts of his Worcester years describe days of ten to fourteen hours at the anvil, and the Society's records note that he earned twelve dollars a month at the forge. Whichever figure you take, the principle is the same one he would state in his own essay collections years later: the hours at his disposal were fragments, and he treated them as capital.
The Letter That Gave Him a Name
What made him famous was a private letter. Burritt wrote to a Worcester man named William Lincoln, offering his services as a translator and, in the process, describing how he had managed to educate himself. Lincoln was impressed enough to send the letter to Governor Everett, who read it aloud at a meeting of teachers and had it printed in full in a Boston newspaper.
Overnight, an unknown smith became "the Learned Blacksmith." Burritt's reaction, in a letter to Nelson written on December 16, 1839, is the most modern thing about him:
"An accidental allusion to my history and pursuits, which I made unthinkingly in a letter to a friend, was to my unspeakable surprise, brought before the public as a rather ostentatious debut, on my part, to the world: and I find myself involved in a species of notoriety not at all in consonance with my feelings. Those who have been acquainted with my character from my youth up, will give me credit for sincerity, when I say, that it never entered my heart to blazon forth any acquisition of my own." — Elihu Burritt to Thomas Nelson, Worcester, December 16, 1839
He went on in the same letter to describe the method that had produced the count, and this is the passage that repays study more than any list of languages.
The Method: Learn the Head of the Family
"With regard to my attention to the languages … I have tried, by a kind of practical and philosophical process, to contract such a familiar acquaintance with the head of a family of languages, as to introduce me to the other members of the same family. Thus, studying the Hebrew very critically, I became readily acquainted with its cognate languages, among the principal of which are the Syriac, Chaldee, Arabic, Samaritan, Ethiopic, &c. The languages of Europe occupied my attention immediately after I had finished my classics; and I studied French, Spanish, Italian, and German, under native teachers. Afterwards I pursued the Portuguese, Flemish, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Icelandic, Welsh, Gaelic, Celtic. I then ventured on further east, into the Russian empire; and the Sclavonic opened to me about a dozen of the languages spoken in that vast domain, between which the affinity is as marked as that between the Spanish and Portuguese." — Elihu Burritt, letter to Thomas Nelson, 1839
That is more or less the whole method, and it is a strange thing to find stated with such clarity in 1839. He learned one member of a family "very critically" — Hebrew, Latin, a Slavic language — and used the shared roots, inflections and sound correspondences to read its relatives. He studied Hebrew to get at Syriac, Chaldee, Arabic, Samaritan and Ethiopic. He studied Russian to get at "about a dozen" Slavic languages. He studied Latin and Greek to get at the Romance languages.
Modern research on third-language acquisition has caught up with him: what you learn in a second language travels, and related languages transfer faster and further than unrelated ones. Burritt applied the principle a hundred and eighty years early, from a blacksmith's shop, with no teacher for the Semitic and Slavic families at all.
He was also more careful with the word "learned" than his reputation was. Later research and reference works credit him with a reading knowledge of more than thirty languages, among them Sanskrit, Syriac and Hebrew — a number that sits somewhere below the fifty in the governor's address and far below the sixty or seventy that popular retellings of his life usually claim. He could read them; he said so himself; he declined to say more.
What He Did With the Languages
Burritt's languages were not a hobby he kept to himself. They were paid work at a moment when American institutions had no one else to ask.
Before he was famous, a will written in Danish — obscure and ungrammatical — arrived in the United States from the West Indies to be executed. Several college professors declined the job. Burritt translated it to the satisfaction of the probate court and accepted, as his fee, only the equivalent of what he would have earned at the forge over the same hours. Later, a marine insurance dispute turned on a document written in a dialect of the South Sea Islands, and the best expert opinion in Boston and Cambridge had given up on it before he deciphered it. On another occasion he wrote a letter in the ancient Breton or "Celto-Iberian" dialect to the Royal Antiquarian Society of France, working from nothing but a grammar and a dictionary in the Society's collection, and the formal acknowledgment was delivered to him at his anvil.
The languages also carried him out of the forge and into public life. He founded a weekly newspaper, the Christian Citizen, in Worcester in 1844, and in 1846 he founded the League of Universal Brotherhood, a peace organization whose branch societies he helped build across Britain. He organized the first international peace congress, in Brussels in 1848, and spoke at the congresses that followed in Paris, Frankfurt, London, Manchester and Edinburgh. When America needed a consul in Birmingham during the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln appointed Elihu Burritt.
Along the way he turned down a chance to study at Harvard that Governor Everett tried to arrange for him. His stated reason was that his place was with the common people. Years later he told Longfellow that he preferred to be regarded as a member of the working class.
The Odd Moments
If you want the sentence that best explains how a blacksmith learned fifty languages, it is not about talent. It is this one, written to Nelson in the same 1839 letter:
"All that I have accomplished, or expect, or hope to accomplish, has been and will be by that plodding, patient, persevering process of accretion which builds the ant-heap, — particle by particle, thought by thought, fact by fact. … These are the views and sentiments with which I have sat down, night by night for years, with blistered hands and brightening hope, to studies which I hoped might be serviceable to that class of community to which I am proud to belong." — Elihu Burritt, 1839
He kept returning to the same idea in print. One of the essays collected in his 1848 volume Sparks from the Anvil is titled "An Apprentice's Way of Acquiring a Library," a dialogue in which a young worker with forty dollars a year is challenged to explain how he scraped together a shelf of books half the size of the local minister's. Burritt's answer to that question, spread over a lifetime, was the only answer he had: he bought books and languages by the particle, in the fragments of time that other men spent resting.
There is a small piece of evidence for how far that reputation reached that is worth mentioning here, because it is what you are looking at. The photograph at the top of this page survives in the Longfellow family's album of carte-de-visite portraits. Someone wrote "Elihu Burritt" on the back in the handwriting of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the poet of "The Village Blacksmith" — a poem published two years after Nelson's visit, and one that Burritt is among the several real blacksmiths suspected of inspiring. The self-taught smith and the professor who did not finish college were acquaintances in the end.
What a Learner Can Take from Burritt
He was not a hyperpolyglot in the modern sense — he never claimed to converse in fifty languages, and the honest number for his reading knowledge is lower than the famous one. That is exactly what makes him a useful model.
- Learn the head of the family, then harvest the relatives. One well-learned member of a language family buys you reading access to its siblings: Latin for the Romance languages, Russian for the Slavic ones, Hebrew for the Semitic group. Choose the language you study next on the basis of what it unlocks, not just what it is.
- Study to the level your life actually requires. Burritt needed to read documents, so he built reading knowledge across thirty languages and used only a few of them for conversation. A reading level that exists is worth more than a speaking level you never reach.
- Convert fragments of time into capital. He studied eight hours a day in the middle of manual labor and called what he owned "odds and ends." If your study happens in twenty-minute fragments, you are not doing a lesser version of his method. You are doing the same one.
- Say what you can actually do. In 1838 a governor inflated him to fifty languages; in 1839 he corrected it in person. The learners who improve fastest tend to be the ones whose self-assessment is accurate, because it tells them what to work on next rather than what to feel good about.
- Use a public library like it is the main event. He walked to Worcester for a library, held the key as a treasure, and used it every day. Access is the cheapest form of an advantage in language learning, and it is the one most people leave idle.
Elihu Burritt died at New Britain in March 1879. He had published at least thirty-seven books and articles, founded an international peace movement, and served his country abroad. He was largely self-educated, and he never stopped being proud of the class he came from. Burritt College in Tennessee was named for him, and his twenty-eight volumes of manuscript journals are held today in the library that carries his name at Central Connecticut State University. The complete run of his newspaper sits in the American Antiquarian Society's collection, in the building whose key he once showed a stranger like a jewel.
What he left behind that a language learner can still use is smaller and more practical: a demonstration that the study of related languages is a system rather than a series of fresh starts, that a reading knowledge counts, and that a person with a forge, an anvil, a library card and a few hundred stolen hours can end up with a letter in a forgotten dialect of Brittany posted back to a learned society that assumed nobody in America could read it.