The Meaning of Everything

7

The Hermit and the Murderer—and Hereward Thimbleby Price

Thos. Austin, 165,000 quotations; Wm. Douglas, London, 136,000; Dr. H. R. Helwich, Vienna, 50,000; Dr. T. N. Brushfield, Salterton, 50,000; T. Henderson, MA, Bedford, 40,000; the Rev. J. Pierson, Ionia, Michigan, USA, 46,000; R. J. Whitwell, Kendal, 36,000; Dr. F. J. Furnivall, London, about 30,000; C. Gray, Wimbledon, 29,000; H. J. R. Murray, Oxford, 27,000; Miss J. Humphreys, Cricklewood, 18,700; the Rev. W. Lees, MA, Sidlow, Reigate, 18,500; the Rev. B. Talbot, Columbus, Ohio, USA, 16,600; the late S. D. Major, Bath, 16,000; Miss E. Thompson and Miss E. P. Thompson, Wavertree, Liverpool, 15,000; G. H. White, Torquay, 13,000; Dr. R. C. A. Prior, London, 11,700; Miss E. F. Burton, Carlisle, 11,400; G. Apperson, Wimbledon, 11,000; Miss A. Foxall, Edgbaston, Birmingham, 11,000.

H. H. Gibbs, MA, London; Miss J. E. A. and Miss E. Brown, Cirencester; Dr. W. C. Minor, Crowthorne, Berkshire; the Rev. Kirby Trimmer, Norwich; the Rev. W. B. R. Wilson, Dollar.

(Appendix to the Preface to Volume I, listing a small fraction of the volunteer readers, James Murray, The Scriptorium, Oxford, 1888)

Just who were these people? This question invariably forms whenever a curious and distracted reader takes a good, close look at the details of the great completed Dictionary. It is more or less impossible not to wonder—impossible not to be curious whenever one takes from the shelves any one of the 47 paperbound parts; or whenever one finds, buried in the basement of one of the world's better libraries, some of the 128 slender paperbacked sections, with their inadvertently wonderful titles—Sweep to Szmikite, Onomastical to Outing, Invalid to Jew, or Gaincope to Germanizing—by which the Dictionary was originally offered to the world.

Readers have to wonder because, on the opening pages of Volume I of the completed work, and at the front of every part and of almost every single section of the work in progress, there is an elegant and utterly absorbing introductory essay, explaining how this volume or this part or this section was actually put together. The essays are essential reading: they tell of fascinations— like how the word set was so much more difficult than is, how unexpectedly tricky marzipan was, or how fraternity turned out so much longer and monkey so much more ancient than anticipated, or that C was so much more complex than D, and how the compilation of Jturned into a lexicographic bloodbath and Q was (though the editors would never say such a thing) really an absolute dog.

But the puzzled wonderment begins for a quite different reason: for in each of these essays, at a point usually towards their end and following the description of the cat-herding trials that were involved in gathering in all the words, there is a collection, usually in small print or in a different fount, of scores and scores of names.

These are the collected names of everyone who was involved in the project and, more importantly, whose involvement was worthy of the editors' gratitude. Without regard to class or standing, qualification or creed, and certainly disregarding gender (which in Victorian times was unusual, to say the least) here are listed the names of, on the one hand, the paid helpers, the sorters of slips, and the expert advisers, and on the other the unpaid readers, the checkers of proofs, the suppliers of quotations, the bringers of sustenance, and the boosters of morale—the men and women without whom, quite literally, the immense project could not have been begun, let alone ever finished.

Above all, the unpaid, volunteer readers. It has to be remembered that this was a dictionary that relied, quite centrally and pivotally, on its amassment of readers, on the hundreds upon hundreds of readers who were cajoled into action by the public exhortations of the editors, and who then supplied the slips and presented the quotations that revealed the meanings that were ultimately to be defined in the thousand of pages of the Dictionary. Their names are all recorded in the prefaces and introductions and acknowledgements; there are lines upon lines, paragraphs upon paragraphs of names, lists of old-fashioned names that look likely to be sonorous if read out loud, like those of Beachcomber's `Huntingdonshire Cabmen', the famous Daily Express column, and fascinating to behold in print—and yet at the same moment in some strange way mysterious, tempting of speculation, and utterly intriguing.

Who could not first be mesmerised and then intrigued by any list that included the names, for example, of Professors Johann Strom and S. Bugge of Christiania; Gudbrandr Vigfusson of Oxford; the Norroy King of Arms; Professor Julius Zupitza of Berlin; the Very Reverend the Dean of Canterbury; Eduard Sievers of Halle (formerly of Tübingen); the Hon. Whitley Stokes; and W. Sykes, Esq., MRCS, of Mexborough? What, for instance, of such as W. Beck, author of The Draper's Dictionary; of Professor Axel Kock, of Lund; of Prince Louis-Lucien Bonaparte; of R. H. Davies, Esq., of the Apothecaries Hall; of J. A. Kingdon, Esq., Late Master of the Grocers' Company: P. L. Sclater, Esq., FRS, Secretary of the Zoological Society; and of the frequently mentioned but little-known spinster, Miss Lucy Toulmin Smith?

These were the grandees (a tiny fraction of them: the lists went on for columns), the fully established figures from whom Murray and Bradley and the other senior editors sought intellectual succour and enlightenment—and for most of them there are entries in directories and obituaries in newspapers which speak at length of their achievements and renown. But it is the less well-known, the more anonymous helpers who present an even more fascinating face—a raft of personalities whose collective portrait tells us something of the times when this book was assembled, and of the kind of men and women who were content to devote their lives and waking hours to helping with its assembly.

So, to repeat the question—who exactly were these people? Where did they all come from? What did they do? How and why did they become involved, and how did they know so much that they felt able to make so memorable a contribution to so extraordinary a work?

It is perhaps easiest to explain about the people in just the same way that the Dictionary explained about its words—by way of illustration. Two men in particular offer a portrait of the extremes with which Murray and his colleagues found they had to deal.

One—perhaps the man who is today best known to those who are captivated both by the mechanics of lexicography and by the curious personalities of those who find its disciplines and details so attractive, and so who eagerly signed on as volunteer contributors for Murray's great work—is a man whose name sounds more like that of an institution than of a sentient being: Fitzedward Hall.

He was an American, he was colourful, and he was by all accounts exceptionally difficult. He was also perhaps the most steadfast of all Murray's volunteer helpers, devoting at least four hours of every day for twenty years, mainly to examining and critically reading the Dictionary proof sheets. Murray praised him unceasingly for his `voluntary and gratuitous service to the English language'—and yet never once met him.

It is the strangest story. Fitzedward Hall was born in Troy, New York, in 1825. Twenty-one years later, as he was about to begin studies at Harvard, his father demanded he instead board an eastbound clipper ship and sail from Boston to Calcutta, to try to find his elder brother, who had absconded. The ship promptly foundered in a typhoon in the Bay of Bengal, and Hall was washed ashore. He made his way up the Hooghly River to the British Indian capital and, having no vessel on which to sail home (nor any brother—he never found him) decided to stay awhile, and learn languages. He became fluent in Hindustani, Bengali, Sanskrit, and Persian, and made a respectable income translating into these languages books written in English, as well as in French, Italian, and modern Greek, all of which he spoke fluently.

After three years in Calcutta he moved to the holy city of Benares, on the Ganges—now Varanasi—and taught Sanskrit at the local government college, and then became an Inspector of Schools, a senior position in the Imperial government of the day. He got himself into all manner of scrapes—he narrowly avoided death when a dynamite ship blew up beside his house, and he was caught up in the Indian Mutiny of 1857, ¹ and spent seven months besieged in a fort. But he survived, married well (the daughter of a colonel in the British Indian army), and came to live in England— taking up a post as Professor of Sanskrit and Indian Jurisprudence at King's College, London, taking a position at the India Office, and being awarded the degree of Doctor of Civil Law at Oxford. All seemed set fair for Dr Hall to pursue from now on a life of dignified and estimable scholarship.

Except that then, in 1869, when in quite another circle the Dictionary was just bestirring itself, he became embroiled in an almighty row. We do not know the specifics, other than that it involved another philologist well known to Murray and his colleagues, Theodor Goldstücker, who taught Sanskrit at University College. The upshot was disastrous for Hall: he was dismissed or suspended from his various posts, thrown out of the Philological Society, and accused (unfairly, as it happens) of being a drunkard and a foreign spy, morally unsound, and an academic charlatan. The viciousness of disputes in the rarefied world of academia can on occasion be legendary, and irreversible, and this dispute evidently was one of those. Hall fled with his family to a remote cottage in the village of Wickham Market, in East Anglia; a year later his own family left him, and he remained for the rest of his life a hermit, rarely emerging from his cottage for the better part of the next 32 years. He discovered the potential for work with the Dictionary, and the unquestioningly sympathetic attitude of Murray—who minded little of the personal trials or failings of a helper, so long as he helped—in 1881, just two years after Murray's appointment. From that moment onward he wrote every single day, with quotations, clippings, suggestions—and then with sheet after sheet of proofs, corrected, changed, closely read and carefully parsed, just as Murray wanted. On those few occasions Hall fell ill, Murray was frantic:

The everyday wish which I have from visitors to the Scriptorium, or correspondents on the subject ofthe Dictionary, is `May you live to see Zymotic'; that wish, I most heartily transfer to you, for I really dread to think of the falling-off in our work, which the failure of your help would mean. It is true that you have spoken of leaving materials at my disposal, but alas! how little worth are the best materials without the master-mind that knows how to use them, and make them useful.

And so Hall recovered, and went on helping—`I have to record with deepest gratitude', Murray wrote at the end of D, `our obligations to you for your superb help, which has so enriched the 3 volumes now finished, and to express with trembling the earnest desire that you will be able to give us your help for a long time to come.'

He did just as everyone hoped. Letters record the specific assistance he gave—over words like develop (which caused the editors no end of difficulty), over Devanagari (the script in which Hindi, among others, is written), over diagram, diaskeuast, ² handsome, and the pronoun He (he provided quotations for he being used as a word for mountains and rivers, for the redundant or pleonastic he being used in phrases such as the noble Murray he, of the combinations he that and he who or the slightly different he who, in the sense of anyone who, and of he combined in a prepositional phrase like he of Oxford or Henry VIII, he ofthe six wives). Reading the Hall letters, and the Hall books that were recovered from his little cottage after his death, reminds one forcefully of the richness and complexity of the work that all were engaged upon.

When he died, on 1 February 1901, the Scriptorium staff were stunned. `It is with the profoundest regret that we have to record his death,' Murray wrote in his Preface to Volume VI. Fitzedward Hall, for all his troubles, had `rendered invaluable help in all the portions hitherto published of the Dictionary'. The section in which Murray wrote these words concludes with definitions of the noun lap—`a liquid food for dogs, that part of a railway track used in common by more than one train, the front portion of the body from the waist to the knees of a person seated' … to all of which lexical complications this remarkable, unforgettable, and deeply troubled volunteer had devoted his time.

The other most celebrated of the volunteers—though as a reader of books and provider of quotations, and not as a critical student of the proofs—was an American also. He was a troubled man too— William Chester Minor, a former surgeon-soldier in the United States Army, a survivor of the Civil War who in the autumn of 1871 had been sent by his family in Connecticut across to London, to convalesce after falling desperately ill at home. Some weeks before he had been dismissed from the army because of his strange and erratic behaviour. Since he was well born and well connected, he was, however, allowed to keep his pension; and since he was a talented painter and flautist, and a collector of rare books, it was expected that he would improve.

The calming airs and cultured society of London did not improve his condition, though. He became even more ill, and in February 1872, during an attack of what now looks to have been paranoid schizophrenia, he shot and murdered an innocent working man on a night-time street in Lambeth. He gave himself up to the police, and was tried—found innocent of wilful murder by virtue of what by now was his very evident insanity. He was still sentenced to be put away, for the public good: he was ordered to spend the remainder of his life—or at Her Majesty's pleasure, as the court's archaic language had it—in one of Britain's then most up-to-date asylums for criminal lunatics, Broadmoor, in the Berkshire village of Crowthorne.

The story of Fitzedward Hall might seem one of anger, bitterness and yet an obsessive devotion to duty; that of W. C. Minor, by contrast, is one of dangerous madness, ineluctable sadness, and ultimate redemption—redemption in which his work for the Dictionary became in time his therapy, a labour that he needed to perform in order to remain halfway sane. If the outward parallels between the two men—both Americans, both learned, both with Eastern connections, ³ both troubled in the mind—are intriguing, the different ways in which the two made their separate contributions to the Dictionary—and the ways in which the Dictionary in turn made improvements to their lives—seem even more so.

Minor discovered the Dictionary in 1881, or thereabouts—we cannot be entirely certain, but at almost the same time as Hall wrote his first letter to the editor. The way in which Minor made the connection is uncertain, too—he may well have seen a mention of the project in the Athenaeum, to which it is known he subscribed from his cell, and which urged Americans to help. The story I prefer to believe is that the widow of the man he murdered, Mrs Eliza Merrett, who (somewhat improbably) came regularly to visit him at Broadmoor, carried without knowing it a copy of Murray's famous Appeal for Readers in a pile of books she had brought for the prisoners' library. It is said that Minor found the small slip of paper between two volumes, read it, and exclaimed that this, this dictionary work, was how he could to some extent now redeem himself.

However the connection was made, Minor worked assiduously for the next 21 years until he fell ill, in 1902, after cutting off his own penis during a fit of insane self-loathing. Murray paid endless tributes to him: one read, `Second only to the contributions of Dr Fitzedward Hall in enhancing our illustration of the literary history of individual words, phrases and constructions have been those of Dr W. C. Minor, received week by week.'

Minor's technique of word-gathering was very different from those of most other readers—and though he rarely equalled the totals of the super-contributors (such as those noted in the epigraph, like the also apparently often insane Thomas Austin, who had already contributed 165,000 slips by 1888, with more to come), he performed his work in such a way as to make himself uniquely useful to the dictionary makers.

He read, prodigiously. He had two cells at Broadmoor, one in which he ate and slept and painted and played his flute, the other which he had shelved as his library, and in which he kept his very considerable collection of antiquarian books. Knowing that all of the books he had collected were likely to be of use to the Dictionary, he created a potentially very useful way of reading them.

He would first prepare, by folding a number of sheets of paper together, a small eight-page quire of blank writing paper. He would then open the chosen book from his library, one that he suspected might hold a number of interesting words, ⁴ and begin reading. When he came upon a word that interested him and which he thought, in time, might interest the Dictionary staff, and which, moreover, was used in what he considered to be `an illustrative way' in the book, he would write it down in tiny letters—he was capable of the most minute legible handwriting—in his folderlike booklet.

Let us say, for sake of argument, that the word was bungalow, and that it appeared in the self-evidently illustrative sentence: `Every day I stopped once or twice at a travellers' bungalow, or rest-house' (which is a quotation that Minor did indeed find in an 1875 copy of Lippincott's Magazine, and which the Dictionary later used). He would place the word in his booklet so that it was likely, eventually, to occupy its logical place in what he was in essence creating, an alphabetical index of the main book. Hence he would place bungalow on a very early page (since its first letter was b) somewhere towards the bottom (since its second letter was u) of the page.

If the next word-and-quotation he found interesting was bread, he would position this word somewhere above bungalow, leaving enough space for words whose second letters lay within the range

-re to -un, words like broken, bubble, and bully and which, if he happened upon them later, would slide in between those he had already found. If the next word that intrigued him was chortle, he would place this on a page or so a little further on; and if it was youngster, say, then it would go on the middle part of a page towards the end of the book. Against each word he would write the page number and line on which he had found it, so that he could find the sentence that included it in just a matter of moments.

After some weeks of work—being a prisoner who was, essentially, serving out a life sentence, he had a limitless number of weeks ahead of him, so time was not a problem as it might have been for others—he would find he had completed a full word index for the book. He would head it with the title of the book; and then begin work on another, making another booklet for that, and then another and another, and so on.

He would then wait for a communication—a letter or a postcard—from the editors. Rather than contribute quotations as he came across them—which is what almost all the other volunteers did, and often in vast numbers—he would bide his time until the editors asked him to solve a problem which immediately confronted them. A card would come in: the staff were just then working on the word bungalow—had Dr Minor by any chance any illustrative quotations for it? Had he by happenstance something in his index books that would satisfy what the editors were calling their desiderata—had he something (in this case a word, a quotation, or the solution to some lexicographical puzzle), which the labourers in the Scriptorium wanted, required, or desired?

And the doctor—no one in Oxford in those early days knew he was in an asylum cell; it was supposed by those who knew what Broadmoor was that he worked on the asylum staff—he would go to the index folders, look up those entries for bungalow, find the relevant quotations noted in his index—often there would be scores of entries, perhaps dozens in one book alone—write each on a separate quotation slip, and put the bundle in the post for the Scriptorium. The editors would duly receive the bundle the next morning, and would ease them into the very page of the Dictionary on which they were then working. Working with Minor was just, one of them said, like turning on a tap. Whenever the Dictionary wanted specific material for words, an editor had merely to send a postcard to Broadmoor, and out the details flowed, in abundance and always with unerring accuracy.

Murray and Minor did meet, and under unusual circumstances—no one at the Dictionary, least of all James Murray, had hitherto suspected that their most assiduous contributor was a madman, a murderer, and an American. But once the two did meet they became the firmest of friends; and when the elderly Minor, ill from his self-mutilation, was clearly no further threat to any member of the public, Murray saw to it that he was permitted to go home to spend his final years in the America of his birth. The Home Secretary at the time, the minister ultimately responsible for the asylum, was Winston Churchill, and he signed Minor's release papers in 1910. When the ailing old soldier sailed away home—with his elderly brother, who had been at the trial where he had first been sentenced 38 years before, to escort him back —he took with him as memento the first half-dozen completed volumes of the Dictionary to which he had made so immense— but in many senses unsung—a contribution. And in his later years, which he spent in yet more asylums and later in a hospital for the elderly insane, he told visitors that he could remember almost by heart what Murray had written of him, so warmly, some years before he left:

The supreme position … is certainly held by Dr. W. C. Minor of Broadmoor, who during the past two years has sent in no less [sic] ⁵5 than 12,000 quots. These have nearly all been for the words with which Mr. Bradley and I were actually occupied, for Dr. Minor likes to know each month just what words we are likely to be working on during the month and to devote his whole strength to supplying quotations for those words, and thus to feel he is in touch with the making ofthe Dictionary.

So enormous have been Dr. Minor's contributions during the past 17 or 18 years, that we could easily illustrate the last 4 centuries from his quotations alone.

The phrase `to feel he is in touch with the making of the Dictionary' has a kindly feel to it—an illustration, I like to think, of the little-seen compassionate side of Murray's normally rather stern nature. By then the editor had been well aware of Minor's sad condition; he thought, in a generous way (and, as it happens, with perfect correctness), that Minor would be a happier man if he could know that he was involved, however peripherally, in so grand and noble a project. Murray thought that it would give him a sense of purpose, a source of joy in his otherwise ruined life that he was doomed to spend behind the high walls and iron bars—and tortured fantasies—of his unending imprisonment.

And there were many others besides, men and women who were in their own ways just as eccentric, their stories just as strange— though generally rather more cheerful than the sagas of Hall and Minor. In all the nooks and crannies of this project there lurked learned and remarkable people—those who were paid seem at this remove to have been every bit as unusual as those who did their work as reader volunteers. Consider, for example, the kind of mind that must have been possessed by one of the most tireless of Murray's editorial assistants, Frederick Sweatman.

Sweatman was the son of a printer, and had little by way of a formal education. He joined the Bodleian Library in 1888, when he was just fifteen; and two years later, once Murray had come up from Mill Hill to the Banbury Road, joined him working in the Scriptorium. He remained as a word-slave for the following 43 years, saw the Dictionary through to its completion, and then worked on the Supplement that eventually came out in 1933. He died in 1936.

That he must have been exceedingly bright is axiomatic: no one with a less than razor-sharp mind would have survived the intellectual rigours of working under Murray and Bradley (nor under their immediate successors, William Craigie and Charles Onions, for whom Sweatman was also an assistant). But a clue to his particularly unusual imagination came in the early 1900s, when he decided to write a playful definition of the word radium. ⁶

Pierre and Marie Curie had discovered this new radioactive element in 1898; its first mention as a linguistic entity was made in both Nature and Chemistry News the following January. By what some might think a coincidence, and others a piece of lexicographic good fortune, the newly appointed William Craigie was working on the section R-Reactive in 1902, within just three years of the word radium coming into existence. One might suppose Craigie would have swooped on the word—some volunteer reader would have uncovered the quotation (`These different reasons lead us to believe that the new radio-active substance contains a new element, to which we propose to give the name of radium'—because it emitted rays) and inserted it into the section, then into the part R and then the completed Volume VIII, Q-S.

But dictionaries do not respond so quickly. Craigie, like all his brother editors, was a cautious man. And James Murray, who by

1903 was sunk in a brown study pondering both Kaiser-Kyx and P-Pennached, would have agreed with his caution. Would the new word last? Was it merely a scientific arcanum, jargon for a specialized priesthood? Or would it in due time enter the language proper, become a true part of the English tongue? To determine that, said Craigie, with Murray's concurrence—wait a while. And just for now, leave it out.

Charles Onions

William Craigie

So radium is not listed in the completed first edition of the Dictionary, and makes its first appearance only in the 1933 Supplement—an 867-page volume it was found necessary to publish in order to list all the new words (such as radium) and all the new meanings and senses of already listed words which had appeared or had been invented during the decades that the Dictionary itself had been in preparation. It was therefore up to Craigie and Onions to write definitions for these new words and meanings—and to tackle entirely new concepts, like radium. Frederick Sweatman (or Henry Bayliss), it is supposed, had the first try.

First, he wrote a wondrously complex etymology, followed by the sparest of definitions:

Radium. [mod.L. radium (B. Balius Add. Lex. : not in DuCange). The orig. source is Preh.—adamispadi, to dig;—Antediluv. randam (unconnected with PanArryan randan.) Cognate with OH Hash, mqdrq; Opj. rangtrum; MHGug. tsploshm; Mubr. dndrpq; Baby. daddums and N.Pol. rad are unconnected.] The unknown quantity. Math. Symbol x.

Cf. Eureka.

And then he had fun with an almost endless list of quotations and explanations, offered here in abbreviated form:

Aristotle De. P.Q. LI. xx says it may be obtained from the excrement of a squint-eyed rat that has died of a broken heart buried 50ft below the highest depths of the western ocean in a well-stopped tobacco tin, but Sir T. Browne says this is a vulgar error; he also refutes the story that it was dug in the air above Mt. Olympus by the ancients.

[Not in J., the Court Guide, or the Daily Mail Year Book before 1510.]

1669 Pepys Diary, 31 June, And so to bed. Found radium an excellent pick-me-up in the morning. 1873 Hymns A & M 2517 Thy walls are built of radium.1600 Hakluyt's Voy. IV.21 The kyng was attired simply in a hat of silke and radium-umbrella.

Probably many of the other assistants were similarly talented, though sadly few today are remembered. One, however, is quite unforgotten: John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, who worked under Bradley for one year, 1919, and is known today (though by the more formally British version of his name, J. R. R. Tolkien) by children of all ages, for writing The Hobbit and The Lord ofthe Rings. In dictionary circles he is known specifically for having laboured mightily over words beginning with W, among them warm, wasp, water, wick, wallop, ⁷ waggle, and winter. He also dealt at length with the three very tricky W words walnut, wampum, and walrus, and in lexicographical circles his struggles with walrus have become almost famous, since in the Bodleian library there is a ring-backed notebook in Tolkien's distinctively neat handwriting listing a bewildering variety of its possible definitions and puzzling etymologies.

W was always in any case reckoned an interesting letter— there are essentially no Greek or Latin derivatives that begin with W, and its words are generally taken, as Bradley put it, `from the oldest strata of the language'. Walrus, a classic example of an extremely ancient W word, ⁸ is from Dutch and Low German, and when Tolkien finally got it right—he inserted a lengthy explanation of the etymology and of the curious word horse-whale, which is part of the convoluted story of walrus—and when he submitted his definition to the approving Bradley, what he wrote was quite masterfully precise:

The sea-horse, or morse ( Trichechus rosmarus), a carnivorous pinniped marine mammal allied to the Phocidae (seals), and Otariidae (sea-lions), and chiefly distinguished by two tusks (exserted upper canine teeth). It inhabits the Arctic seas. A variety found in the N. Pacific has sometimes received the distinct specific name obesus. ⁹

Tolkien said later of the time he spent with the Dictionary that he `learned more … than in any other equal period of my life'.

Among the other largely unremembered notables are Sidney Herrtage, who, as already mentioned, turned out to be a kleptomaniac, and was fired for stealing; Herbert Ruthven, who was Murray's brother-in-law, a fair-to-middling lexicographer and, most importantly, the pigeon-hole-building Scriptorium carpenter; Alfred Erlebach, who was quite brilliantly supportive in the early days of the project, but vexed Murray mightily by leaving to teach at his brother's school; Charles Balk, who worked for Murray for 28 years and then wrote a lengthy meditation on life entitled Life is Growth; Arthur Maling, who worked from 1881 until 1927, was a wealthy Cambridge-educated mathematician and an eager Esperanto enthusiast, and who wore his distinctive green star badge in an effort to promote this most lost of causes; Wilfrid Lewis, the son of a college servant who managed to relieve the monotony of his 44-year stint with the slips by compiling what many still regard as the best and most comprehensive historical dictionary of the language of cricket; the magnificently named Hereward Thimbleby Price, ¹⁰ who was conscripted into the German army, captured by the Russians, and escaped overland to China—he wrote a book in 1919 called Boche and Bolshevik: Experiences ofan Englishman in the German Army and in Russian Prisons; the equally delightful-sounding LawrencesonFitzroy Powell, whose father had been a trumpeter in the Charge of the Light Brigade and who himself, though without any academic qualifications, became Librarian of Oxford's Taylorian Institution and an authority on Johnson and Boswell; and the redoubtable Catholic priest and missionary Father Henry Rope, who joined the team some time before 1905 and was still working, sending in quotations at the time of his death in 1978, when the four supplements were being prepared; the archive shelves groan under the weight of Father Rope's contributions, many of them scrawled on the backs of envelopes and labels and scraps of paper.

And these were only the assistants. There were many other categories of helpers, each of which is seasoned by a number of memorable but largely unremembered characters. There were the sub-editors, for instance, those who were charged with working on specific letters; all of their names and the letters for which they were responsible, and the dates they worked—from `W. J. Anderson, portions of M and P, 1880-1900' through to `Mrs W. A. Craigie (Lady Craigie) revised arrangements of U, 1917-1918'—were faithfully listed in the completed Volume I once the project was fully finished. ¹¹

Those who stand out from the dozens listed include the Sanskrit scholar and Mayor of Guildford, Philip Whittington Jacob, who worked for a while on the immense word set, the most complex in the entire Dictionary; William Michael Rossetti, brother of the more famous Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and the author of a letter found in the OED archives today that sheds an interesting light on the pronunciation of the word Pre-Raphaelite: `My brother and I always pronounced the name Raphael with the sound Rahfyel … It certainly appears to me that the other Pre-Raphaelite Brothers adopted … the same pronunciation … It must no doubt be true that a great number of Englishmen pronounce the raph like man, bat, &c.'; the magnificent-sounding Gustavus Adolphus Schrumpf (whose sonorous name certainly rivals that of the Bolshevik prisoner Hereward Thimbleby Price <sup>12</sup>), who taught, rather ordinarily, at a school near Wolverhampton, and sub-edited in A and H; an indefatigable spinster of the Cotswold village of Further Barton, near Cirencester, Janet Brown, who was an author of religio-didactic works such as The Heart ofthe Servant, which one newspaper thought should be required reading by all household staff, and to whom Murray was later to refer as `an honoured personal friend' (she left him £1,000 in her will); and Edward Charles Hulme, who was a librarian at the Patent Office and whose name was inexplicably omitted from Volume I ¹³ —Murray later wrote an embarrassed note in his Preface to a rather later part, apologizing and calling Hulme `one of the best workers for the Dictionary'.

There were also plenty of linguistic advisers—towering figures of scholarship to whom Murray and Bradley would write on the finer points of their various specialities. James Platt was one such—a polymath and ghost story writer who knew scores of languages and once famously declared that the first twelve tongues were always the most difficult, but having mastered them, the following hundred should not pose too much of a problem. He helped Murray divine etymologies from obscurer languages of Africa and the Far East. Marie-Paul-Hyacinthe Meyer, who had worked on the documents relating to the Dreyfus affair, helped with medieval French and ProvencËal (which Murray spoke quite well anyway); the antiquarian Frederick Elworthy, a great friend of the Murray family who lived in Somerset, assisted with archaic West Country and Cornish dialect words; and Henry Yule, well known to any fan as one of the editors of the endlessly fascinating collection of Hindustani terms known as Hobson-Jobson, ¹⁴ assisted in matters Oriental. Professor H. R. Helwich of Vienna copied out, with barely believable assiduity, all of the Cursor Mundi (the most quoted work in the OED) and the Destruction ofTroy. And a Mr and Mrs A. Caland, who lived in Holland, fell out with one another over the work: Mr Caland said his interest in the book was the one thing that kept him alive. His wife would only speak through gritted teeth of what she called `that wretched dictionary'.

There were many Americans, Fitzedward Hall and W. C. Minor aside. Dozens flocked to the side of Murray and his team, in part because of the energies of Francis March, whom Murray had appointed head of the American reading programme in 1879. In addition to the readers, most of whom have vanished into obscurity, there are grand figures like George Perkins Marsh, who was an environmentalist before it was fashionable to be so, the man who introduced the camel into the Wild West (to the rather limited degree that it has been introduced) and, confusingly, the first American readers' coordinator in the very early days of the project, and whose role was taken over by the so-similarlynamed Francis March; Albert Matthews and C. W. Ernst of Boston, who sent in thousands of examples of peculiarly American uses and phrases, while Ernst was a diligent scholar in medieval Latin; and William Dwight Whitney, the chief editor of the enormous Century Dictionary, against which Murray's dictionary was constantly being measured. Job Pierson, a librarian and Presbyterian minister from Ionia, Michigan, was one of the most energetic readers: he contributed some 46,000 quotations in 1888 alone—good enough to make this chapter's epigraph, but nowhere near as productive as the man who heads it, Thomas Austin Jr. of Hornsey and Oxford, a man who also managed to edit a volume entitled Two Fifteenth-Century Cookbooks, and who fell ill with a nervous disorder—Victorian middle-class shorthand for madness—while doing so.

Sons of gardeners and college servants, daughters of chemists and boat-builders, ministers in all churches known to Christian (including that of Pitsligo, Banffshire) and to infidel, criminal and company and constitutional lawyers, schoolmasters from Holland and Birmingham and California and from all points between, doctors responsible for every part of body, mind, and animal, scholars of Welsh and Greek, Aramaic and Chaldean, Icelandic, Persian, Slavonic, and English place names, elderly divines, young and muscular civil engineers, theatre critics, one ophthalmic surgeon (James Dixon, author of Diseases ofthe Eye, 1855), mathematicians, men who were antiquarians, naturalists, surgeons (and one man—Joseph Fowler of Durham—who was all three), businessmen, novelists (including Beatrice Harraden, who wrote the breathless Ships that Pass in the Night, became a suffragette, and went on to write The Scholar's Daughter, involving much derringdo among a cast of lexicographers), phoneticians, bibliographers, an iron merchant-cum-antiquarian named Richard Heslop who gave Murray advice on mining and iron-forging terms, botanists, aldermen, naval historians, geologists and geophysicists, jurists, palaeographers, Orientalists, diplomats, museumkeepers, surgeons, soldiers (W. C. Minor was both, of course), climbers ( John Mitchell was killed while climbing, to Murray's `unspeakable grief'), zoologists, grammarians, patent officers, organists, runic archaeologists, fantasists, anthropologists, men of letters, bankers, medievalists, and Indian administrators—these and a thousand more professions and pastimes occupied those men and women who otherwise devoted hours, weeks, perhaps even years of their time to read for Murray and Bradley, and later for Craigie and Onions. The range of interests of these hundreds was prodigious; their knowledge was extraordinary; their determination was unequalled; and yet their legacy—aside from the book itself— remains essentially unwritten. Only their names, in long lists in the volumes, the parts, and the sections, exist to make some readers stop and wonder for a moment—just who were these people?

One last half-answer to the question comes from a clue that is to be found in every single part of the great book, from that which begins with A right through to that which finishes with zyxt. The clue is the existence in each one of the Prefaces of one recurring name: Thompson.

`The following readers have contributed most largely to the materials,' it says in the Appendix to the Preface of Volume I, its first part published in 1884, `Miss E. Thompson and Miss E. P. Thompson, Wavertree, Liverpool, 15,000.' `In the revision and improvement of the work in the proof stage [of the letter O] continuous and indefatigable help has been rendered by the Misses E. P. and Edith Thompson of Landsdown, Bath.' `During the editorial progress of the letter W, which began in 1919, outside help has been given in the reading of proofs by the Misses Edith and E. P. Thompson.' `The material for X, Y, Z passed through the hands of a voluntary sub-editor, the Rev. J. Smallpeice, in 1882-4,' says the Preface to the final volume, published in 1928. `The first proofs have been read by the Misses Edith and E. P. Thompson.'

We know where these two ladies settled over the years— Liverpool, Reigate, and Bath. We know from other references that the (usually only initialled) younger sister was in fact called Elizabeth Perronet Thompson. We know that Edith Thompson was obsessively secretive and determined to remain as anonymous as possible. She seemed to shiver with excitement on occasion during her correspondence with James Murray—and when she ventured, as she very seldom did, some personal opinion, she hoped that Murray would not regard it as remiss. `If it is, treat it as confidential.' We know that there was an interesting correspondence involving either the word pace or the word gait, with charming diagrams to illustrate the way in which horses of different breeds arrange their legs when moving. We know that the ladies were found to be so competent that they were asked to sub-edit, and did so for all the letters following C. We also know that Edith wrote a highly popular, well-regarded and long-in-print History ofEngland in 1873, ¹⁵ and that young Elizabeth wrote an exquisitely tame bodice-ripper of a novel set in the seventeenth century and entitled A Dragoon's Wife.

We know these things, but we do not really know why so many people gave so much of their time for so little apparent reward. And this is the abiding and most marvellous mystery of the enormously democratic process that was the Dictionary—that hundreds upon hundreds of people, for motives known and unknown, for reasons both stated and left unsaid, helped to chronicle the immense complexities of the language that was their own, and that they dedicated in many cases—such as the Thompson sisters did—years upon years of labour to a project of which they all, buoyed by some set of unfathomable and optimistic notions, insisted on becoming a part. The Thompson sisters of Liverpool, Reigate, and Bath, living an otherwise blameless and unremarkable (though moneyed) suburban life in three most ordinary English towns, left no greater memorial than the work they performed for the greatest literary enterprise of history. They became footnotes in eight-point Clarendon type in a preface to a volume of that enterprise. That was truly their only reward—and yet in all likelihood they, and scores of others like them, surely wanted no other.

[6] This is an educated conjecture. The handwriting on the slips looks very much like Sweatman's, and he was certainly in the right place at the right time for the entry to be written. But there is no absolute proof that the work is his. Some evidence suggests it might also have been an assistant named Henry Bayliss. However, the general point— that the definition of radium illustrates the kind of mind that was possessed by workers on the project—remains true, no matter who was the author of this particular entry.

William Craigie, who was senior editor at the time of the triumphant completion of the first edition in 1928, edited the final volumes from the University of Chicago, where he had been appointed Professor of English.Back

[11] Not quite all, in fact: the editors did practise some quite harsh selectivity in deciding whom to list and whom to omit. Bradley, for example, seems not to have listed one James Bartlett, of Bramley, near Guildford, who worked on G, M, O, R, and S. Perhaps this is because of his exasperation with the man, recorded in exchanges of correspondence which still exist. Most notable among them is a discussion over the word shake, where Bartlett writes: `I feel quite incompetent to tackle the formidable early forms of the word, and so leave them alone. Also the numbering off.' Bradley, with an irritable harrumph!, replies curtly: `I move to delete all after “incompetent”.' Back