The Meaning of Everything

by Simon Winchester

  Coleridge was brutally frank about the quality of the survivors, and coldly invoked a lexicographical version of the triage: Class I, into which he placed some 30 men, were `first-rate'; fifteen belonged to Class II, being only `of inferior merit'; and the other 44 were lumped into Class III, `not having produced sufficient work to be able to judge'. But matters looked up again when Coleridge found an American, the Honorable George Perkins Marsh of Burlington, Vermont, who readily agreed to mastermind a transatlantic search for illustrative quotations of wanted words. He impressed Coleridge as first-rate from the very start.

  Marsh was himself was a fascinating character—a Puritan aristocrat, wealthy from his dealings in wool and railways, fluent in twenty languages, sent as a diplomat to Istanbul, in later life a renowned environmentalist, and for all his career sufficient of a scholar to have Coleridge select him, from all the Americans that he knew, to be the ideal leader of the dictionary effort in America. By the time Marsh died in Florence in 1882 it was said that he had assembled a large group of distinguished Americans to help him with the project—fulfilling Coleridge's early promise that the title of an English dictionary was `no longer strictly applicable', since the book could nowinclude linguistic peculiarities from well beyond Albion's shores. Little remains to record howmuch effort Marsh actually made, though the fact that American contributions to the later development of the Dictionary have always been prodigious, suggests that he did leave a legacy of some kind.

  Coleridge also made the very first list of words that he thought should be included—he took the material, the illustrative quotations that had been sent in by his 89 volunteer readers, to Chester Terrace, and arranged them alphabetically, according to the words to which they referred. He called these organized lists his `basis of comparison'—since he would read through the various quotations and compare the way that the target word was used in each of them, so that he could compare their various meanings and senses and find out for himself which were essentially the same and which were different, and if different, whether profoundly or subtly so. It was by way of this non-judgemental, descriptive, and manifestly non-prescriptive way that meanings were eventually discerned, and the definitions written. It is perhaps easiest to explain by offering an example. Because of some gaps in the early archives of the Dictionary, it is difficult to be certain which submitted quotations were actually worked upon by Herbert Coleridge himself. We do knowthat he worked for more than a year on words that began with the letters A to E, and that to a lesser degree he began to sift through words beginning with the letters F to L. Within that first group we know also he asked Messrs Trübner to prepare some sample pages (somewhat prematurely, critics said), the most successful apparently being those for the words between Affect and Affection. It might be worthwhile looking here.

  Some few of the words in the sample pages—affectationist for example, `one who indulges in affectation or artificiality'—have only a single meaning. But most of other words have many more meanings—as, for instance, the word three further down the alphabetical line, affected. By reading the quotations submitted by volunteer readers for this one word, any good lexicographer who was working on proper historical principles would be able to recognize and discern several different shadings of meaning.

  For instance, a quotation (and these that followwere indeed all received at Chester Terrace, and were eventually included in the Dictionary) such as `He is too picked, too spruce, too affected, too odde', which comes from Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost, suggests the meaning `full of affectation; non-natural or artificial in manner; pretentious; affecting airs'. On the other hand, if the editor found, as in Milton's 1649 work Eikonoklastes, the phrase `A work assigned rather than by me chosen or affected', he would knowthat affected here meant something quite different—in this case, `sought after, aimed at, desired'. And yet again, if another volunteer reader found in the Daily Telegraph and submitted to Coleridge a report allowing that `the accused was mentally affected, her father and three of her aunts having all been insane', he would recognize a third meaning, `tainted, distempered, diseased'.

  This is not to say that an editor, having read these three quotations, would instantly come up with three meanings for the word. He would want many more quotations—five or ten at the very least—to confirm that one meaning was indeed different from another, that each of them had some persistence in the literature, and was not just the result of carelessness, or a malapropism. Which is why the work of a lexicographer is, as Samuel Johnson had famously said, so much harmless drudgery.

  A microscopically close reading of all the literature would thus throwup as many meanings as were ever intended for any particular word (there are a total of eighteen definably different meanings and senses for affected)—whereupon Coleridge, or his successors, would make note of them, ponder the best way of writing a definition for each, gather in the etymologies and variant spellings and pronunciations, and have everything laid down in type, before moving on to the next word (in this case, affectedly).

  To reiterate: Coleridge sawas his principal job the discovery of as many historically recorded uses as he and his volunteers could find of each of the words destined for the Dictionary; and from the comparisons he made of howeach word had been used over time, he would work out which meanings were which, and arrange his dictionary accordingly. Moreover Coleridge, just like his colleagues 6 and successors, and in deference to the ideas of Dean Trench and to the Canones he and his committee had written, stuck gamely to the basic principle of the project: that the more quotations that could be found, the more easily the subtle differences between the (possibly) myriad usages and meanings of any single word could be identified. This is howhistorical dictionaries are made: not as difficult a task today, perhaps—but Coleridge and those around him were pioneers, and every step of the process was new to him and to all who tried to help.

  To help him in arranging the words and the quotation slips 7 — the crucially important pieces of paper that would be the project's building blocks—Coleridge had a carpenter build for him, in oak, a small suite of pigeon-holes, to hold and permit the alphabetical arrangement of the various quotation slips that his volunteers sent in. The arrangement which he designed was six square holes high, nine across—giving him a total of 54 pigeon-holes, with some 260 inches of linear space that were thought sufficient to hold comfortably between 60,000 and 100,000 of the slips. No greater number could Coleridge ever imagine his having to deal with. When they were all filled with quotation slips, he was heard to tell his fellowphilologists, then and only then would it be time to start proper editorial work on the big dictionary.

  Herbert Coleridge was a steady and a Christian man, and he had well-developed—but, as it happened in the end, lexicographically quite unacceptable—views on the kinds of word that should not be in the Dictionary. He asked the Philological Society, for example, to exclude mock words like devilship since in this one case `it was never intended by its author for general circulation or adoption'. The Society members politely disagreed, and voted that such words should indeed be placed in the book (devilship is there, with a quotation, and not a humorous one, from 1644), and that only laboured and unused puns like hepistle and shepistle should be proscribed. (Both are rightly absent, though herstory—the feminist equivalent of history—is first quoted 8from 1970.)

  In mid-April 1861 he asked Trübner to print a fewpages as specimens—the page that showed the words Affect-Affection was regarded as the best. When he was halfway through working on a second `basis for comparison', of those words beginning with letters between E and L, he was caught in a sudden spring rainstorm as he walked to St James's Square. He sat damply through a meeting of the Philological Society, and the next day, being thin and frail, caught a chill. He was taken back to his rooms, his friends watched aghast as the chill turned to consumption, and on the quintessentially English date of 23 April—both the Feast of St George and the birthday of Shakespeare—he died. He was just 31 years old.<
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  It is said that his final words were `I must begin Sanskrit tomorrow'. This seems a charming but somewhat improbable suggestion, given the section of the alphabet upon which he was working and the nature of the work he was bent on completing. But the story remains, indicative of the young man's learning, but hardly a memorial to his work on the book. The only other memorial (his plan for a three-part dictionary did not survive him, nor did his plans to have Messrs Trübner be the publishers, and his idea of having quotations going back only to 1250 was abandoned too, with the present Dictionary sporting illustrations from as far back as the ninth century) was the handmade set of 54 oaken pigeon-holes. These are still in existence, dusty and neglected in a museum in Oxford. Their dimensions proved woefully inadequate, and they were soon to be replaced by a set more than 40 times as large (and yet which in due course themselves proved to be just as niggardly too).

  Herbert Coleridge had found it difficult to imagine that he would ever need to find room for the 100,000 quotations that he thought were likely to be used as the basis for the Dictionary. In the event, his successors had recourse to use the better part of six million, and no set of pigeon-holes known to man could ever have accommodated all of them.

  Two years after Coleridge's death, Dean Trench returned to Ireland to take up the post of Archbishop of Dublin. The inchoate dictionary project, then no more than a barely formed mess of papers and file folders on a dead man's desk, was then handed over to the third member of the founding trinity—an amazing scholar-gypsy of a man who would be intimately associated with the project for the next half century, but whose early involvement led very nearly to disaster and abandonment.

  He was Frederick James Furnivall, and though perhaps the most anodyne remark ever made about him was that `to tobacco and alcohol he was a stranger through life' he was an eccentric of the fullest flower—or, as the DNB puts it with exquisite tact, he `showed a characteristic impatience of convention and an undisciplined moral earnestness'. His long life was frequently mired in scandal, he was a man given to the oddest of short-lived enthusiasms. Of all the leading players in this saga, the boisterous Frederick Furnivall remains among the most colourful, most memorable, and deservedly best loved.

  His critics—and they were legion—made much of the fact that his father ran (and made a fortune from so doing) a private lunatic asylum in Egham, in Surrey. He was an indifferent mathematics student at Cambridge, and is best remembered there and later for his fondness for sculling, the solitary sport he always thought far superior to rowing (though he had made the Trinity Hall rowing club's first eight), and which he pursued as a hobby all his life. He then became a student at Lincoln's Inn, and in due course (and without much enthusiasm) he became a lawyer.

  But his first passion remained sculling. He was sufficiently dedicated to the sport, and with his inherited fortune insulating him from the need to pay too much attention to legal work, that he took time to design a special outrigger for his boat, to form sculling clubs, to inveigh against clubs that forbade working men from taking part, and, most vocally of all, to protest against the then general ban on allowing women on the water. He was inordinately fond of the ladies; and in his middle years he liked to recruit pretty waitresses from the Aerated Bread Company's teashop in Hammersmith with a view to teaching them the delights of his chosen sport. There are sepia photographs of him grinning impishly, surrounded by a group of very well-proportioned (and evidently rather cold) shopgirls in their close-fitting sculling tops, and others of him speeding along the river, a pretty girl behind him, with his long white beard flowing in the wind, the two of them a picture of goatish contentment.

  Coleridge was succeeded by the scandalous, irrepressible but entirely lovable Frederick Furnivall, whose caprices and poor judgement very nearly caused the collapse and abandonment of the entire enterprise.

  One of the girls, an Oxford Street waitress named Blanche Huckle, from whom (after racing up the stairs two at a time `like a young boy') he invariably ordered `weak coffee, rusks and butter', wrote in a memorial volume published after his death, that `Furney' was `one of the kindest gentlemen I have ever met'. He would regularly `invite several of us girls to a picnic up the river', she added, and he would bring presents to the cafe, most often `two pairs of stockings for each of us'.

  Such images led many to suppose Furnivall a bit of a rascal— and indeed, he confirmed his membership of a flexible moral universe by committing the doubly unpardonable sin of first marrying his very young lady's maid, Lizzy Dalziel, and then, after she had borne him two children and had become, as he sawit, `indolent and dull', cruelly abandoning her. He left her, when he was 58, for a girl 37 years his junior, his dazzlingly pretty and intellectually vibrant 21-year-old secretary named Teena Rochfort-Smith. So appalled was one correspondent on receiving word of this affair that `he immediately stuck stamp-paper over the signature of the writer who gave him the news'. Vivat, Victoria! (Sadly, fate sawto it that Teena was not able to bring Furnivall happiness for very long. She was burned to death in Goole, in Yorkshire, after a flaming match-head broke off while she was trying to destroy some letters. It was a scant two months after her lover had obtained a formal separation from his wife.)

  This extraordinary, `embarrassing but unembarrassable' man—`[this] kind, selfless, patriotic humanitarian … [this] dedicated literary detective, collating, annotating, transcribing, deciphering and editing so that all Englishmen might read the literature of their noble forefathers … [this] volatile, impulsive, meddling, cantankerous literary warmonger … [this] undiplomatic, unconventional individualist in corduroy trousers and pink-ribbon tie', as a biographer put it—promptly took on the work that Coleridge's death had bequeathed to him. Technically he was a practising solicitor—though far more interested in philology, socialism, and girls—and so at first all the dictionary work was passed from Chester Terrace first to his law office on Ely Place, and later to his house in St George's Square, off Primrose Hill. In May 1862—a year after Coleridge's death—a friend 9 recorded meeting Furnivall at work:

  Found him in a strange dingy room upstairs; the walls & floor and chairs strewn with books, papers, proofs, clothes, everything— in wondrous confusion; the table spread with a meal of chaotic and incongruous dishes, of which he was partaking, along with `Lizzy' Dalziel, the pretty lady's maid whom he has educated into such strange relations with himself, and for whose sake he has behaved so madly to Litchfield & others of his best friends; & her brother, a student of our College. After the meal, which lasted from 7 to 9, all four of them set to work, arranging and writing out words for the Philological Dictionary, of which Furnivall is now Editor in place of poor Herbert Coleridge. `Missy', as F. calls the girl, is his amanuensis and transcribes: takes long walks too with him and others, of ten and twenty miles a day; which is creditable to her; and indeed she seems a quiet and unassuming creature.

  There is no doubting either Furnivall's genius, his energy, or his scholarship. He was blessed with friends who luxuriated in his many talents: Alfred, Lord Tennyson was close, as were Charles Kingsley, John Ruskin, William Morris, and Frederick Delius. And the banker-writer Kenneth Grahame, who shared Furnivall's enthusiasm for sculling, eventually succeeded in writing his friend into The Wind in the Willows, a book which Furnivall had encouraged him to write. He cast him as the Water Rat, a cunning and ever-keen creature imbued with a properly rattish pedantry. `We learned 'em!' says Toad. `We taught 'em!' corrects Rat.

  But what was seriously wanting in Furnivall, in his now enforced role as dictionary editor, was any sustained sense of organization or self-discipline. He was dedicated and enthusiastic, true; and there was much early optimism about his appointment. `I am very glad you are able to undertake the dictionary,' wrote Hensleigh Wedgwood, still stunned by Coleridge's early death, `which must otherwise have gone to pot.' Elisabeth Murray, the granddaughter of the man who would eventually succeed Furnivall, admitted the man's `impressive' sustained enthusiasm—but at the same time
she could see that his was a much misdirected enthusiasm, and that he was sorely lacking both in patience and in an acknowledgement of a great need— extraordinary in a dictionary-maker—for accuracy.

  His problem, so far as the Dictionary was concerned, is perhaps best illustrated by his indefatigable and inexplicable need to found societies. Between 1864 (when he should have been hard at work on the book) and 1886, he founded no fewer than seven of them: the Early English Text Society, the Chaucer Society, the Ballad Society, the NewShakspere Society (whose members clung to the old spelling of the Bard's name), the Wyclif Society, the Browning Society, and the Shelley Society. His involvement with the Philological Society began early on in his life, in 1847, not long after it was founded. He became its joint secretary in 1853—and later, as mentioned, one of the trinity of good men on the Society's Unregistered Words Committee.

  In addition to all of the duties and responsibilities that stemmed from so much belonging, Furnivall was a deeply committed socialist and (until his later agnosticism set in), a somewhat enthusiastic Christian, and a keen believer in the right of bluecollar labourers to enjoy the benefits of a full education. His involvement with the London Working Men's College, which had been set up to take care of such needs, took up much of his time as well. He took up long-distance cycling, and would spend weekends touring southern England with his new labouring friends. He fought gamely against any injustice he perceived was visited on workers—on one occasion leading a deputation of angry ballastheavers to Downing Street, and on another selling some of his own books to help pay the legal fees of some vexed wood-cutters.