English spelling and spelling reform

The author surveys English orthography, tracing its irregularities to historical pronunciation shifts and inconsistent letter values, and enumerates vowel, digraph, and consonant problems. He recounts personal advocacy and educational attitudes toward reform, compiles scattered facts about spelling history and phonetics, examines proposed relief methods, and responds to common objections such as loss of etymological information, confusing identical spellings for different meanings, rendering existing books obsolete, and the limits of purely phonetic systems. The work closes by weighing practical, gradual measures and the considerations required to implement a restrained and workable reform.