You do realize that these letters are almost certainly not
authentic? They seem, on the face of it, to be a Creative Writing
assignment by a schoolgirl in [Portland, Maine] in the year
2007. Her name is "Maura," and she's in the
seventh grade.
When I glimpsed at them, they just looked instinctively improbable.
There isn't a single word about God in them, for one thing.
[Faced with Gregg's persisen denial, I responded in some
exaperation:]
( February 27, 2007, 06:12 PM)
Come Off It.
Look, is this an Alan Sokol/Social Text hoax, or some practical joke
of that nature?
I have Googled for several phrases from the disputed text, and
the searches all lead back to the same person, a little girl at a
middle school in Portland, Maine (not Portland,Oregon, as I first
assumed), and nowhere else. I am satisfied that the text was
not written by Samuel Adams, either under a pseudonym or otherwise,
and that it was not written in the eighteenth century. As nearly as
I can determine, it was in fact written in the twenty-first
century. If the author were not an innocent child, who I trust
has no idea of the way in which you are using her
writing, I would call this a clumsy forgery.
In one obvious anachronism, "protesting" is used in a sense unknown
to the Shorter Oxford Dictionary (3rd ed., 1944), or the
Webster's Collegiate Dictionary (7th ed., 1965). It is in fact
a coinage of the "New Left," in the 1960's. The eighteenth
century term for that kind of thing would have been "Charivari,"
"Shivari," "Rough Music," or possibly "Skimmington."
Again, note the use of the phrase "working the late shift." The
earliest citation given in the Shorter Oxford for the noun
"shift" in this sense is is 1809 or 1812, derived from the verb
"shift," (change). It is a term of the Industrial Revolution,
reflecting the pace of the steam engine.
I should think that, for the Bible-reading era, the
phrase "the greatest teacher" would most probably have
been understood as an allusion to Jesus Christ of Nazareth.
Note, finally, the recurrent emphasis on the author's
internal mental state. That is post-Freudian.
Compare it with Benjamin Franklin's authentic description of being
arrested for seditious libel: "I too was taken up and examin'd
before the council; but, tho' I did not give them any satisfaction,
they content'd themselves with admonishing me, and dismissed me,
considering me, perhaps, as an apprentice, who was bound to keep his
master's secrets." (Franklin, The Autobiography, Eliot
edition, 1909, p.22)