The Scholar's Daughter

"This is my rogue choice, just a bit of fun really. Beatrice Harraden was a novelist and a suffragette. She was a good friend of Frederick Furnivall, who was the second editor of the dictionary before James Murray. There is a biography of Frederick Furnivall which tells you what an amazing character he was, and Beatrice Harraden was a friend of his who called him ‘Ferney.’ Because he was a great supporter of the dictionary—in fact, the dictionary wouldn’t have happened without him—he was keen to show her all about the dictionary, and she must have come to visit James Murray in the workshop where he and his assistants worked on the dictionary. Murray called it the ‘Scriptorium.’ A scriptorium was originally a place where monks used to write illuminated manuscripts, but it became the place where the OED was written, the part of it that James Murray was responsible for. Beatrice Harraden was evidently looking for material for her next novel, and she wrote The Scholar’s Daughter. I recently reread it and reminded myself how wonderfully trashy it is. It’s a romance. The central characters are: Professor Grant, for which read, James Murray. I mean, in the novel, he is not Scottish. He’s not got a long beard like James Murray has, but I think we can certainly see the dictionary that the people in the book are compiling as the OED, in all but name. So it is Professor Grant and his bookworms, that’s the three assistants who work alongside him, one of whom is called Mr. Gulliver. I have a fellow feeling for him. Then there is an actress called Charlotta Selbourne. It turns out that Professor Grant’s wife left him and a young baby to go off with another man, and obviously, they became estranged, and the daughter was brought up believing her mother to be dead. But actually that woman was the actress Charlotta Selbourne who comes back to Professor Grant’s study and the novel concludes with a reconciliation scene. Professor Grant says—I think the last words are something like—“’Lotta,’ he murmured, ‘Lotta.’” So it’s just Mills and Boon really and it’s only got the most tenuous connection with the OED. But there are a couple of scenes in the book which are an evocation of the room where all the lexicography was being done, and it so clearly must have been based on a visit or two by Beatrice Harraden. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Working with slips of paper. The front cover of Caught in the Web of Words is probably the most famous picture of James Murray and the OED. It’s him working in the Scriptorium, and the walls of the Scriptorium are lined with pigeonholes, full of slips of paper: millions and millions of slips of paper. When I started working on the dictionary in 1987, compiling an entry was the same process. for application and then apply. There will probably be hundreds of slips of paper about all the different uses of ‘apple’ — like ‘the apple of one’s eye,’ and so on. So, in order to create a dictionary entry, you look through all of the slips (this is in the pre-computer age), you look through all of the evidence that you’ve got for the word, group the quotations into different senses, write a definition for each one, arrange them in chronological order to show the historical development, and then, of course, you have to investigate where the word came from. I mean, ‘apple’ is, I think, one of the oldest words in the language. It goes back to the earliest strata of Old English. But, in other cases, you might find that it’s a word that’s been borrowed into English from Hawaiian in the 20th century or French in the 15th. And you write all of this: the definition, the etymology, and the quotations that are already written on slips, and those bundles of slips will go off to be printed. Now, it’s not so very different. We still have slips. There are slips on every desk out there, but also, of course, we can look at many, many more examples of how a word is used. It’s become easier and harder. It’s become easier because let’s suppose you have a word that seems to have started out as an American word and it looks like the sort of word that might have started out in newspapers. Then you can look through these huge newspaper databases and just type in the word and see when the first occurrence is. The only alternative in the past would have been to send a library worker to go and read back issues of some newspaper, trying to find earlier examples of the word. So the access to the data is easier. But the volume of information is very hard to manage. I always draw the analogy of sensitive hearing. It is as though our hearing — the extent to which we can hear all of the detail of the language — has become much more sensitive, and it is deafening. But the process of looking at the examples and saying, ‘Well, in these earlier examples, the word seems to be used slightly differently from the later examples, so there’s perhaps two different meanings here. That’s the same process; you need the same skills. Yes, right from the beginning, the OED was trying to capture not just the history of English in Britain, but the history of English all over the world. But so many more people speak English now, and the more people speak a language, the more likely new words are to come in. We are trying to keep up. We have people reading and collecting evidence for all varieties of English. There are now historical dictionaries that concentrate on particular varieties of English, so there’s a historical dictionary of Australian English and a historical dictionary of South African English, and so on. You can go into more detail by going and looking at (say) the dictionary of South African English. But we are trying to cover it all. It’s about 70. That’s really just the people working in this office, and then we have an office in New York, and we have people doing research in libraries: in the Library of Congress , and around the world, and then we also use consultants in specialist subjects. We might make the first attempt at writing a definition in a particular subject area, but then we might ask a specialist to see if we’ve got it exactly right. No. It’s a lovely job and after 29 years I still can’t think of a job that I would rather do. It gives me great pleasure. But it is nice to have a life. James Murray had a life as well, he had 11 children. He probably also had the odd servant and a wife who did a lot of the work. But all of his children, as soon as they were old enough to read, earned their pocket money by sorting the slips into alphabetical order. It was a family industry. And it gets people like that. I do find if I’m at a party and somebody says, ‘What do you do?’ and I say I work for the Oxford English Dictionary , people are always interested because people are always interested in words. They’ve always got some bee in their bonnet about a particular word, or they’ve just noticed a new word that’s come into to their language. It is a fascinating job, but I don’t want to let it take over. Yes, the kind of dictionary you’re talking about is a dictionary of current English, of the words that are in use now. The OED is a dictionary of all the words that have even been in use, even if they’ve died out. If a word stopped being used in the 18th century, then we’ll mark it as obsolete, but it is still there. So if you want to look up the word ‘toilet’, then to be told that in the 15th century, it meant ‘a piece of cloth’ — that’s not really what you need to know."