Writes Wes Baker:

Lew,

I’ve always thought spelling bees were a bit wonky.  Yea, they promote memorization which has been terribly deemphasized in the past 40 years, but there’s something some quirky about it. English is the story of conquest and subjugation – both of and by the Britons and their cultural descendants on this side of the pond.  Standardizing the spelling always seemed to take the history, meter and personal path each speaker brought to that ‘river’ of language.  (Pardon the equally wacky metaphors!)  Perhaps, though, it’s just the contrarian in me.

But then I came across this George Eliot quotation in the wikipedia entry on English orthography:

Mr. Tulliver did not willingly write a letter, and found the relation between spoken and written language, briefly known as spelling, one of the most puzzling things in this puzzling world. Nevertheless, like all fervid writing, the task was done in less time than usual, and if the spelling differed from Mrs. Glegg’s,–why, she belonged, like himself, to a generation with whom spelling was a matter of private judgment.

The last line, though, is far less humo(u)rous.  (Below in quotation marks.)  Although there is no footnote to this statement, I think it deserves further deliberation and investigation.  Perhaps your vast array of correspondents could comment on its validity.

“The modern English spelling system, with its national variants, spread together with the expansion of public education later in the 19th century.”