Marriage and Family
In 1841 he married Amy Elizabeth McKean, but the couple had no children. McKean, daughter of the founder of Harvard College's Porcellian Club, had previously served as a teacher after taking over the post of Sophia Ripley.
Around this time, Worcester was living in the Craigie House in Cambridge, Massachusetts, renting rooms from the widow of Andrew Craigie, first apothecary general of the United States. When Mrs. Craigie died, Worcester rented out the entire house from her heirs and subleased rooms to the poet and professor Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. In 1843, after the house was purchased by Nathan Appleton on Longfellow's behalf, Worcester rented a portion of the house from Longfellow until the construction of his own home a few doors down was completed that spring. The home is still standing at 121 Brattle Street in Cambridge.
Worcester continued to revise his dictionary, producing A Universal and Critical Dictionary of the English Language in 1846. When a British edition of the work stated that it was based on the work of Noah Webster, and omitted Worcester's introductory statement claiming otherwise, he responded with "A Gross Literary Fraud Exposed". He earned LL.D. degrees from Brown University (1847) and Dartmouth College (1856).
Read more about this topic: Joseph Emerson Worcester
Famous quotes containing the words marriage and/or family:
“It appears that ordinary men take wives because possession is not possible without marriage, and that ordinary women accept husbands because marriage is not possible without possession; with totally differing aims the method is the same on both sides.”
—Thomas Hardy (1840–1928)
“Nothing strengthens the judgment and quickens the conscience like individual responsibility. Nothing adds such dignity to character as the recognition of one’s self-sovereignty; the right to an equal place, everywhere conceded—a place earned by personal merit, not an artificial attainment by inheritance, wealth, family and position.”
—Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902)