Goold Brown, schoolteacher and grammar obsessive, had a lofty ambition: he wanted to produce “something like a complete grammar of the English language.” Twenty-seven years after first resolving to undertake this task, he finally published The Grammar of English Grammars, which contained 1,192 pages filled with tiny print surveying a selection* of 548 English grammar books that had been published in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, up until the 1851 printing of his own book.*
