Peter Gilliver's Reading List

"She was one of his granddaughters, and Caught in the Web of Words is a biography of James Murray. But because his life was so bound up with the Oxford English Dictionary , it’s both a biography of James Murray and the story of the OED in so far as he was involved with it. It’s been called one of the best biographies of the 20th century, and I think that’s fair enough. It’s brilliantly done. He was just a most amazing man, really. When I started doing research into the history of the dictionary, this was one of the great texts that I knew I could draw on. It portrays him as this most prodigious man with extraordinary abilities. He never went to university, but he spoke a large number of languages. He was capable of incredible hard work. I slightly thought when I started work on the history, ‘Am I going to find that he’s not as heroic as his granddaughter—who’s going to be loyal to him—has cracked him up to be?’ And I’ve come to the conclusion that he really is. He doesn’t have feet of clay, he is amazing. Just the passionate sense of vocation, the sense that God had placed him on this earth to do this job, and that all of the skills that he had, had been developed for this specific job. He would work late into the night, late into his 70s. You come across evidence that he’s actually at work at 11 o’clock at night in the middle of winter, day after day. That was the job of all the people who worked on the dictionary. One of the things I really try to get across in my book is just how much of a collective process it is. I mentioned all the people sending in examples of words. Literally thousands of people worked on the dictionary in that way. Working alongside the editor, there was a whole team of assistants and consultants, and James Murray was always at pains to say, ‘It’s not just my work.’ By the time James Murray was taken on board as editor, the idea of the dictionary was already well developed. He didn’t have the idea. But it rapidly became apparent that he was the best possible person for the job. His name was on the first title page, but, eventually, there was more than one editor. As he and his staff worked through the dictionary, it wasn’t getting done fast enough. So Oxford University Press appointed a second editor to work on a different part of the dictionary. That was Henry Bradley, and then he was followed by a third one and a fourth one. That’s right. I suppose it goes back to this idea that specific academic training isn’t going to be the way to make a lexicographer. So the second editor of the OED, who worked alongside James Murray for many years, is a man called Henry Bradley. He likewise didn’t go to university. One of the things I always like to mention is that he learned to read upside down. His father read to the family from the Bible on his knees, and young Henry seems to have worked out how to read, and when he was first given a book to read for himself, he held it upside down. He came from a fairly humble background, worked in a Sheffield cutlery firm for many years and then came to London. He wrote a review of the very first part of the dictionary when the first instalment came out which was so able and insightful that people thought, ‘We ought to have him come and work for us.’ He worked on the dictionary first as an assistant, and then as an editor responsible for the letter ‘E.’ He had separate responsibility for a different part of the alphabet, and he had his own team. James Murray was always the chief editor and a big character in so many ways that Henry Bradley tends to get overshadowed, but he’s pretty impressive. He liked to say that James Murray set up the plan, and he carried on the work after Murray died."

"It’s all sorts of things. James Murray had written books before he became the editor of the OED, he wrote an important book on Scottish dialect, for example. But once he became editor of the OED, that was what he did. He didn’t really have time for anything else. Somehow Bradley, while he was working on the OED, continued to produce scholarly articles on place names and solving problems in old texts. He wrote articles for the Dictionary of National Biography and the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and several books, like a popular history of English called The Making of English. These collected papers contain some of those journal articles. But the reason I’ve chosen it is because it begins with a memoir of Henry Bradley. It tells the story of his life and it’s by the poet laureate Robert Bridges, who was a great friend. Just by looking at it really hard. I suppose his reading enabled him to pick up little details. I mean, he wasn’t the only reviewer of the first fascicle of the dictionary to spot mistakes. It wasn’t that he found lots and lots of mistakes. It was just the way he wrote about them. He showed himself to be very perceptive."

"Working on the history of the dictionary as I have been, I’ve been really conscious of just how many individuals there are who have an amazing story to tell. Like the man who only worked on the dictionary for a little while, but then went off and got captured by the Russians on the Eastern Front in the First World War . There are all sorts of stories and these people just have little footnotes in my book because my job, in The Making of the Oxford English Dictionary, is to tell the story of the project. I’ve tried not to get too distracted by all these fascinating stories, though sometimes there are very long footnotes… Get the weekly Five Books newsletter No, not all of them. Some of them are amazing because they gave their entire working lives to this one project, and, for that reason, didn’t leave any other mark on the world, they’re obscure figures. The Surgeon of Crowthorne is not about one of the staff, but about one of the people who sent in quotations to the dictionary, a man called W.C. Minor. The quotations for the dictionary were sent in by members of the public. W.C. Minor was a member of the public, but he just happened to be a murderer who was banged up in Broadmoor. He was an American who had fought in the American Civil War and was traumatised by his experiences. His family sent him over to this country to rehabilitate; it didn’t work. He remained convinced that people were out to kill him, and he shot a man in the street and was put away when Broadmoor was really quite new. The name Broadmoor has such a resonance now, but not then. The story goes that when this useful material started coming into the dictionary from this address, ‘Broadmoor, Crowthorne, Berkshire,’ it sounded like a nice country house: perhaps it was from somebody who had a lot of leisure time, with private means. Eventually James Murray discovered that actually, no. The crime and the trial had been in the papers, it was well-known in America, and he had heard about it. Dr Minor was clearly insane, and one part of his mind was unhinged. He was convinced that he was being spirited off to Constantinople every night. But another part of his mind was perfectly capable of reading books and writing out quotations for the dictionary in a useful, intellectual way, and he did that for many years. Because of the obsessive quality of Dr Minor’s work, the quotations he supplied were really useful, and it makes a great story. In fact, it’s currently being made into a film, with Mel Gibson as James Murray and Sean Penn as Dr Minor. The Surgeon of Crowthorne was apparently not a clear enough title in the American market, so they re-titled it The Professor and the Madman for the American edition, which is more vivid, though James Murray was never a professor. He mainly read books from the 16th, 17th, 18th centuries. In those days, if you were well-off—and he came from a well-off family—you could have quite nice rooms in Broadmoor. I seem to remember he actually had other inmates waiting on him. He played his flute and he had fine books which he would read for the dictionary. Quite often they were books about travel to far away places. He didn’t read them in quite the same way as other people read books for the dictionary. He would make indexes to each book in tiny, tiny writing — almost exhaustive word-by-word indexes which you would have to be obsessive to do. Nowadays, you just expect to be able to search for any word in an e-book. He was doing that on paper. An ordinary volunteer reader would just have to make the best guess they could. So if you’re reading a book and you come across a word that you think, ‘Gosh that’s quite unusual for this period’ or ‘It sounds like an early use of the word,’ then you’d send it in. With Dr Minor, if the editors told him, ‘We’re working on this word here and we need examples before this date,’ then he could look it up in his little indexes. He got special attention because his work was so useful. The editors did issue lists of: ‘These are the words that we are working on, and the earliest example we have so far is 1682. Can anyone do better than that?’ They were called lists of ‘desiderata,’ and they went out to people closely involved with the dictionary. Dr Minor fought in the American Civil War in the 1860s. He went to Broadmoor in the early 1870s and began to work on the OED in the 1880s and carried on into the 1900s. So The Surgeon of Crowthone is a really good story focusing on just one, well two, individuals—Dr Minor and James Murray—but there must be so many other books that you could write about some of the individuals who contributed to the OED."

"It helps to understand where this idea about, ‘What kind of dictionary do we need — or is still needed?’ came from. This is a really good introduction to the intellectual climate, what people thought about language, and how they thought about it academically. I confess that the earlier part of the book is very dense and about the philosophy of language. But it traces the development of particular ideas about language and in the last couple of chapters it talks about the foundation of the London Philological Society, which was the society that set the dictionary going, and some of the people involved in that society. You asked me to select five books. If I could have chosen chapters, there is a more recent book, the Oxford Handbook of Lexicograph y , which has a chapter in it by John Considine on the development of the idea of the historical dictionary. I think that would be a better introduction to where the OED came from. It is straight to the point because Aarsleff’s book is about the history of the study of language generally, whereas John Considine’s chapter talks about the development of the historical principle, the idea that the way to write a dictionary entry is to work out all of the different meanings that a word has had and illustrate them using examples following the actual evidence of a word from its birth to its death. The development of that principle started in Germany, with German scholars. First of all, a German scholar working on a dictionary of Greek wanted to apply the principle to his Greek dictionary. Then the same historical principle was applied by the Brothers Grimm who, as well as collecting fairy tales, also started the German equivalent to the OED. German was the first of the European languages to be treated in this way. The Deutsches Wörterbuch was started by the Brothers Grimm, but it took an awful lot longer than the OED to finish. But it was from these ideas that the OED developed — and also an important Dictionary of Scots by John Jamieson, which used quotations in much the same way as the OED does. All of these together fed into the idea of the OED, and I would say John Considine’s chapter tells that story very well. And there’s an awful lot else in the Oxford Handbook of Lexicography which is worth reading as well. This is something that Hans Aarsleff talks about. It’s partly the idea of the language as the embodiment of the ‘spirit of a nation.’ People became interested in the idea of studying where this idea of ‘German-ness’ comes from and I think people had the same idea about English. It was both an interest in the idea and also patriotism. You could make it a great national project and certainly the OED, or the New English Dictionary, as it was originally called, was promoted by its supporters as a great, national, patriotic work. Ah, but then they become English. It’s a real mongrel language. English has drawn on so many strands of so many different languages."

"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."