The Dictionary People, by Sarah Ogilvie

Author: Sarah Ogilvie. Review by Lucy Pollard

Friends love wordless silence, of course, but some of us love words too, written or spoken. This book is the latest in a line of fascinating works about the history of the Oxford English Dictionary.

The business of constructing the dictionary was done by an editor, James Murray, and his team, who would receive slips of paper from readers with examples of words being used. I was delighted to find three Quakers among the many and various people who wrote to Murray. He was the third editor, and worked in that role for over thirty-five years; his team of lexicographers defined half a million words for the dictionary, which was published in parts from 1884 into the late 1920s, with subsequent supplements.

It is not a coincidence that many of the contributors, including the three Quakers, were women: we are talking about a time when it was difficult for intelligent women to get a decent education, and more or less impossible for them to fulfil any academic aspirations. Often they had to educate themselves, and exercise their brains wherever they could, which was usually at home.

Mary Pringle (née Vernon) married her husband Charles in 1870, when she was twenty-five. As a young wife with a small son, she found two occupations to stimulate her: one was collecting data about rainfall, and the other was reading books about religion and collecting words. Over a period of eight months she sent Murray slips for over 500 words from her reading. Her words included ‘ravishing’ and ‘make-bait’. We don’t know how Mary came to be involved in dictionary work, but a local factory owner from the same village had been sending slips in for a year before Mary started, so it was probably by word of mouth. Sadly, her contributions came to an end after the death of her son in 1884.

Readers for the dictionary were based all over the world. Anna Thorpe Wetherill, an anti-slavery campaigner and suffragist living in the Philadelphia area, helped, with her husband, to run the Underground Railroad for enslaved people seeking escape. Her reading of Fanny Kemble’s plantation diary generated slips for a thousand words, including ‘abolition’ and ‘apoplectic’.

The third Quaker contributor was Elizabeth Cadbury (née Taylor), who certainly does not fit the ‘poorly-educated’ description. She had qualified to go to Cambridge, but decided instead to work with London dockers, refugees from the Franco-Prussian War, and slum-dwellers. In 1879 she sent in 600 slips from a life of William Pitt the Elder. As author Sarah Ogilvie asks: ‘When she sat down to read for the Dictionary after a long day on her feet at the London docks, was this simply another aspect of her devotion to service for the public good, or for the pleasure of reading itself?’ After Elizabeth married George Cadbury, they founded the village of Bournville for the Cadbury chocolate factory’s workers.

I recommend this enticing book, and not only for its Quakers.

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