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From: Ross Clark <benlizro@ihug.co.nz>
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Lindley Murray born (7-6-1745)
Date: Fri, 7 Jun 2024 22:58:42 +1200
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(My note from the 2018 Linguistic Birthday sequence)

Born Harper Tavern, Pennsylvania. Had a successful legal practice in New 
York, but suffering from chronic poor health (which Wiki suggests was
post-polio syndrome) he retired to England (!) in 1784.
His English Grammar (1785) was, along with that of Robert Lowth, the 
most influential of the late 18th-early 19th century.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindley_Murray

(from Crystal) The grammar was written at the request of teachers at a 
boarding school for young ladies, which Murray had helped to establish.
This was in York, where he lived his later years (†1826).
By 1850 the grammar had sold more than two million copies.

Lindley Murray was very famous indeed. "He is mentioned in novels by 
George Eliot, Mark Twain, Charlotte Brontë, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and 
others.... Charles Dickens, in _The Old Curiosity Shop_, tells how Mrs 
Jarley in her waxworks exhibition 'altered the face and costume of Mr 
Grimaldi as clown to represent Mr Lindley Murray as he appeared when 
engaged in the composition of his English Grammar'.