Quote Originally Posted by MacMillan of Rathdown View Post
By the 1860s spelling was pretty uniform throughout the USA and Scotland.
Not true.

The American Anthropologist printed a symposium on the subject in March 1893. It had noted considerable variations in the spelling of English words. Moreover, delegates to the symposium heard how, of 1,972 failures to pass the civil service examination in Britain, 1,866 had failed because of poor spelling. The thrust of the symposium was that people spelled badly because English spelling was arbitrary and inconsistent.

Francis A. March noted in the History of Spelling Reform (1893) how the word "could" was "a markt exampl of unpardonabl spelling; the "l" is a sheer blunder, the "ou" has a wrong sound."