Review

In the latest issue of Literary Review – a magazine you really ought to buy or, better, subscribe to – I review The Dictionary People by Sarah Ogilvie. Here, more or less verbatim, is what I wrote...

Browsing in the basement archives of the Oxford University Press one day in 2015, lexicographer Sarah Ogilvie struck gold – well, lexicographer’s gold. It was only a rather battered black book bound with cream ribbon, but it contained the names and addresses of some three thousand volunteers who had contributed to the making of the Oxford English Dictionary. Each address was written out and annotated in the immaculate cursive of the presiding spirit and driving force of the great dictionary, James Murray, its editor from 1879 until his death in 1915.
 The OED was, like many Victorian information-gathering ventures, crowdsourced (though the word was unknown to the Victorians, being coined in 2006). In an age of leisured amateurs, proliferating learned societies and energetic enthusiasts – not to mention a swift and efficient postal service – this was the natural way to do things, and Murray brought it to perfection. From the outset, the dictionary editors had invited members of the public to contribute by reading books, noting examples of how particular words were used, writing down the words and the sentences in which they occurred on standard four- by six-inch slips of paper and sending them to the editors. Until Murray took over, this had been a rather haphazard affair, but he, with characteristic thoroughness, tightened up the process, and issued a worldwide appeal for more Readers to join in building what was to be a dictionary of not only English English but world English. The massive response turned Murray’s Oxford home into a lexicographical factory, with Murray and his assistants working in the Scriptorium, a large iron shed in the garden, and members of his family also enlisted as workers on the great enterprise.
 This aspect of the making of the dictionary has been written about before, notably in Katharine Murray’s Caught in the Web of Words, but the contribution of all those volunteer Readers has attracted far less attention, largely because so little was known about them. The exception was William Chester Minor, a murderer and inmate of Broadmoor, who was the subject of Simon Winchester’s The Surgeon of Crowthorne (1998). Otherwise, the great majority of the Readers whose details are so assiduously recorded in that address book of Murray’s were unknown figures. When Sarah Ogilvie found it, she realised that she held in her hand ‘a key to understanding how the greatest English dictionary in the world was made’, and who those volunteers were who contributed so much to its making. But could this material be turned into a readable book? The answer is a resounding ‘yes’. Ogilvie’s research has been distilled into a fascinating collection of biographical sketches of a hugely diverse range of people, united only by their eagerness to contribute to the Dictionary project – an eagerness that sometimes faltered: Murray labelled one category of volunteers ‘hopeless contributors’, among them Karl Marx’s daughter Eleanor, who was hoping to get some much-needed money by contributing (small sums were sometimes paid), but did no useful work.
 What makes The Dictionary People so readable (and dippable-into) is that it is, like a dictionary, arranged alphabetically, from A for Archaeologist – Margaret Alice Murray (no relation), who began by sending in slips from Calcutta, became an eminent Egyptologist and at the age of 100 wrote an autobiography titled My First Hundred Years – to Zealots, a category including James Murray himself but also, from more recent times, a reader in Australia who sent in 100,000 slips with words gleaned from the Brisbane Courier-Mail. The longest chapter in the book is ‘L for Lunatics’, a category that includes three of Murray’s top four contributors. Which came first – the madness or the word-collecting? They do seem closely related, the insanity no doubt exacerbated by obsessive overwork on the dictionary. These three men sent in staggering numbers of slips – over 165,000 in the case of Thomas Austin, who spent time in institutions suffering from paranoid delusions. Not far behind him was a man known as William Douglas, whom Ogilvie, in a fine piece of biographical detective work, reveals as a family member of Frederick Furnivall, Murray’s predecessor as Chief Editor of the OED. ‘L for Lunatics’ and the chapter that follows, ‘M for Murderers’ – three of them, two unconvicted – are page-turning stuff, but every chapter has its rewards and surprises. Perhaps the most insightful is ‘O for Outsiders’ – a word first written down by Jane Austen (as were ‘chaperone’, ‘fragmented’, ‘irrepressible’ and ‘doorbell’). The making of the OED was very much an enterprise of outsiders, often self-taught amateurs seizing the chance to collaborate with the academic elite in a grand project. Murray himself left school at 14 and was largely self-educated, but his rise from lowly origins was as nothing compared to that of Joseph Wright, compiler of the mighty English Dialect Dictionary. At the age of six, Wright was working ten-hour days as a donkey boy in a coal mine, and at 15 was still illiterate – and yet he ended up an Oxford professor. The Outsiders are followed by a single Pornographer, Henry Spencer Ashbee, father of the Arts and Crafts designer C.R. Ashbee and obsessive collector of erotica, who sent in slips gleaned from his diligent reading in that field. And so it goes on (‘Q for Queers’ next)…
 The Dictionary People is a fascinating read for anyone with an interest in dictionaries, in social history, or just in people. Sarah Ogilvie has found a great subject and done it full justice.