Joseph Emerson Worcester - Marriage and Family

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).