The Professor and the Madman

by Simon Winchester

  Sixty members were assembled at six o’clock on that November evening. Darkness had fallen on London soon after half past five. The gas lamps fizzed and sputtered, and on the corners of Piccadilly and Jermyn Street small boys were still collecting last-minute pennies for fireworks, their ragged models of old Guy Fawkes—soon to be burned on bonfires—propped up before them. Already in the distance the whistles and crashes and hisses of exploding rockets and Roman candles could be heard, as early parties got under way.

  Like the fire-frightened housemaids who hurried back down to the servants’ entrances of the great houses nearby, the old philologists, cloaked against the chill, scuttled through the gloom. They were men who had long since outgrown such energetic diversions. They were eager to get away from the sound of explosions and the excitement of celebration, and repair to the calm of scholarly discourse.

  Moreover, the topic for their evening’s entertainment looked promising, and not in the least taxing. Doctor Trench was to discuss, in a two-part lecture that had been billed as of considerable importance, the subject of dictionaries. The title of his talk suggested a bold agenda: He would tell his audience that those few dictionaries that then existed suffered from a number of serious shortcomings—grave deficiencies from which both the language and—by implication—the empire and its church might well eventually come to suffer. For those Victorians who accepted the sturdy precepts of the Philological Society, this was just the kind of talk they liked to hear.

  The “English dictionary,” in the sense that we commonly use the phrase today—as an alphabetically arranged list of English words, together with an explanation of their meanings—is a relatively new invention. Four hundred years ago there was no such convenience available on any English bookshelf.

  There was none available, for instance, when William Shakespeare was writing his plays. Whenever he came to use an unusual word, or to set a word in what seemed an unusual context—and his plays are extraordinarily rich with examples—he had almost no way of checking the propriety of what he was about to do. He was not able to reach into his bookshelves and select any one volume to help: He would not be able to find any book that might tell him if the word he had chosen was properly spelled, whether he had selected it correctly, or had used it in the right way in the proper place.

  Shakespeare was not even able to perform a function that we consider today as perfectly normal and ordinary a function as reading itself. He could not, as the saying goes, “look something up.” Indeed the very phrase—when it is used in the sense of “searching for something in a dictionary or encylopaedia or other book of reference”—simply did not exist. It does not appear in the English language, in fact, until as late as 1692, when an Oxford historian named Anthony Wood used it.

  Since there was no such phrase until the late seventeenth century, it follows that there was essentially no such concept either, certainly not at the time when Shakespeare was writing—a time when writers were writing furiously, and thinkers thinking as they rarely had before. Despite all the intellectual activity of the time there was in print no guide to the tongue, no linguistic vade mecum, no single book that Shakespeare or Martin Frobisher, Francis Drake, Walter Raleigh, Francis Bacon, Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Nash, John Donne, Ben Jonson, Izaak Walton, or any of their other learned contemporaries could consult.

  Consider, for instance, Shakespeare’s writing of Twelfth Night, which he completed sometime at the very beginning of the seventeenth century. Consider the moment, probably in the summer of 1601, when he has reached the writing of the scene in the third act in which Sebastian and Antonio, the shipwrecked sailor and his rescuer, have just arrived in port and are wondering where they might stay the night. Sebastian considers the question for a moment, and then, in the manner of someone who has read and well remembered his Good Hotel Guide of the day, declares quite simply: “In the south suburbs at the Elephant/Is best to lodge.”

  Now what; exactly, did William Shakespeare know about elephants? Moreover, what did he know of Elephants as hotels? The name was one that was given to a number of lodging houses in various cities dotted around Europe. This particular Elephant, given that this was Twelfth Night, happened to be in Illyria; but there were many others, two of them at least in London. But however many there were—just why was this the case? Why name an inn after such a beast? And what was such a beast anyway? All of these are questions that, one would think, a writer should at least have been able to answer.

  Yet they were not. If Shakespeare did not happen to know very much about elephants, which was likely, and if he were unaware of this curious habit of naming hotels after them—just where could he go to look the question up? And more—if he wasn’t precisely sure that he was giving his Sebastian the proper reference for his lines—for was the inn really likely to be named after an elephant, or was it perhaps named after another animal, a camel or a rhino, or a gnu?—where could he look to make quite sure? Where in fact would a playwright of Shakespeare’s time look any word up?

  One might think he would want to look things up all the time. “Am not I consanguineous?” he writes in the same play. A few lines on he talks of “thy doublet of changeable taffeta.” He then declares: “Now is the woodcock near the gin.” Shakespeare’s vocabulary was evidently prodigious: But how could he be certain that in all the cases where he employed unfamiliar words, he was grammatically and factually right? What prevented him, to nudge him forward by a couple of centuries, from becoming an occasional Mr. Malaprop?

  The questions are worth posing simply to illustrate what we would now think of as the profound inconvenience of his not once being able to refer to a dictionary. At the time he was writing there were atlases aplenty, there were prayer books, missals, histories, biographies, romances, and books of science and art. Shakespeare is thought to have drawn many of his classical allusions from a specialized Thesaurus that had been compiled by a man named Thomas Cooper—its many errors are replicated far too exactly in the plays for it to be coincidence—and he is thought also to have drawn from Thomas Wilson’s Arte of Rhetorique. But that was all; there were no other literary, linguistic, and lexical conveniences available.

  In the sixteenth century in England, dictionaries such as we would recognize today simply did not exist. If the language that so inspired Shakespeare had limits, if its words had definable origins, spellings, pronunciations, meanings—then no single book existed that established them, defined them, and set them down. It is perhaps difficult to imagine so creative a mind working without a single work of lexicographical reference beside him, other than Mr. Cooper’s crib (which Mrs. Cooper once threw into the fire, prompting the great man to begin all over again) and Mr. Wilson’s little manual, but that was the condition under which his particular genius was compelled to flourish. The English language was spoken and written—but at the time of Shakespeare it was not defined, not fixed. It was like the air—it was taken for granted, the medium that enveloped and defined all Britons. But as to exactly what it was, what its components were—who knew?

  That is not to say there were no dictionaries at all. There had been a collection of Latin words published as a Dictionarius as early as 1225, and a little more than a century later another, also Latin-only, as a helpmeet for students of Saint Jerome’s difficult translation of the Scriptures known as the Vulgate. In 1538 the first of a series of Latin-English dictionaries appeared in London—Thomas Elyot’s alphabetically arranged list, which happened to be the first book to employ the English word dictionary in its title. Twenty years later a man named Withals put out A Shorte Dictionarie for Yonge Beginners in both languages, but with the words arranged not alphabetically but by subject, such as “the names of Byrdes, Byrdes of the Water, Byrdes about the house, as cockes, hennes, etc., of Bees, Flies, and others.”

  But what was still lacking was a proper English dictionary, a full statement of the extent of the English tongue. With one single exception, of which Shakespeare probably did not kno
w when he died in 1616, this need remained stubbornly unfulfilled. Others were to remark on the apparent lack as well. In the very same year as Shakespeare’s death, his friend John Webster wrote his The Duchess of Malfi, incorporating a scene in which the duchess’s brother Ferdinand imagines that he is turning into a wolf, “a pestilent disease they call licanthropia.” “What is that?” cries one of the cast. “I need a dictionary to’t!”

  But in fact someone, a Rutland schoolmaster named Robert Cawdrey, who later moved to teach in Coventry, had evidently been listening to this drumbeat of demand. He read and took copious notes from all the reference books of the day and eventually produced his first halfhearted attempt at what was wanted by publishing such a list in 1604 (the year Shakespeare probably wrote Measure for Measure).

  It was a small octavo book of 120 pages, which Cawdrey titled A Table Alphabeticall…of hard unusual English Words. It had about 2,500 word entries. He had compiled it, he said, “for the benefit & help of Ladies, gentlewomen or any other unskilful persons, Whereby they may more easilie and better vnderstand many hard English wordes, which they shall heare or read in the Scriptures, Sermons or elsewhere, and also be made able to vse the same aptly themselues.” It had many shortcomings; but it was without doubt the very first true monolingual English dictionary, and its publication remains a pivotal moment in the history of English lexicography.

  For the next century and a half there was a great flurry of commercial activity in the field, and dictionary after dictionary thundered off the presses, each one larger than the next, each boasting of superior value in the educating of the uneducated (among whom were counted the women of the day, most of whom enjoyed little schooling, compared to the men).

  Throughout the seventeenth century these books tended to concentrate, as Cawdrey’s first offering had, on what were called “hard words”—words that were not in common, everyday use, or else words that had been invented specifically to impress others, the so-called “inkhorn terms” with which sixteenth- and seventeenth-century books seem well larded. Thomas Wilson, whose Arte of Rhetorique had helped Shakespeare, published examples of the high-flown style, such as that from a clergyman in Lincolnshire writing to a government official, begging a promotion:

  There is a Sacerdotall dignitie in my native Countrey contiguate to me, where I now contemplate: which your worshipfull benignitie could sone impenetrate for mee, if it would like you to extend your sedules, and collaude me in them to the right honourable lord Chaunceller, or rather Archgrammacian of Englande.

  The fact that the volumes concentrated on only the small section of the national vocabulary that encompassed such nonsense might seem today to render them bizarrely incomplete, but back then their editorial selection was regarded as a virtue. Speaking and writing thus was the highest ambition of the English smart set. “We present for you,” trumpeted the editor of one such volume to would-be members, “the choicest words.”

  So, fantastic linguistic creations like abequitate, bulbulcitate, and sullevation appeared in these books alongside archgrammacian and contiguate, with lengthy definitions; there were words like necessitude, commotrix, and parentate—all of which are now listed, if listed at all, as “obsolete” or “rare” or both. Pretentious and flowery inventions adorned the language—perhaps not all that surprising, considering the flowery fashion of the times, with its perukes and powdered periwigs; its rebatos and doublets; its ruffs, ribbons; and scarlet velvet Rhinegraves. So words like adminiculation, cautionate, deruncinate, and attemptate are placed in the vocabulary too, each duly cataloged in the tiny leather books of the day; yet they were words meant only for the loftiest ears, and were unlikely to impress Cawdrey’s intended audience of ladies, gentlewomen, and “unskillful persons.”

  The definitions offered by these books were generally unsatisfactory too. Some offered mere one-word or barely illuminating synonyms—magnitude: “greatness,” or ruminate: “to chew over again, to studie earnestly upon.” Sometimes the definitions were simply amusing: Henry Cockeram’s The English Dictionarie of 1623 defines commotrix as “A Maid that makes ready and unready her Mistress,” while parentate is “To celebrate one’s parents’ funerals.” Or else the creators of these hardword books put forward explanations that were complex beyond endurance, as in a book called Glossographia by Thomas Blount, which offers as its definition of shrew: “a kind of Field-Mouse, which if he goes over a beasts back, will make him lame in the Chine; and if he bite, the beast swells to the heart, and dyes…. From hence came our English phrase, I beshrew thee, when we wish ill; and we call a curst woman a Shrew.”

  Yet in all of this lexicographical sound and fury—seven major dictionaries had been produced in seventeenth-century England, the last having no fewer than thirty-eight thousand headwords—two matters were being ignored.

  The first was the need for a good dictionary to encompass the language in its entirety, the easy and popular words as well as the hard and obscure, the vocabulary of the common man as well as that of the learned house, the aristocrat, and the rarefied school. Everything should be included: The mite of a two-letter preposition should have no less standing in an ideal word list than the majesty of a piece of polysyllabic sesquipedalianism.

  The second matter that dictionary makers were ignoring was the coming recognition elsewhere that, with Britain and its influence now beginning to flourish in the world—with daring sailors like Drake and Raleigh and Frobisher skimming the seas; with European rivals bending before the might of British power; and with new colonies securely founded in the Americas and India, which spread the English language and English concepts far beyond the shores of England—English was trembling on the verge of becoming a global language. It was starting to be an important vehicle for the conduct of international commerce, arms, and law. It was displacing French, Spanish, and Italian and the courtly languages of foreigners; it needed to be far better known, far better able to be properly learned. An inventory needed to be made of what was spoken, what was written, and what was read.

  The Italians, the French, and the Germans were already well advanced in securing their own linguistic heritage, and had gone so far as to ordain institutions to maintain their languages in fine fettle. In Florence the Accademia della Crusca had been founded in 1582, dedicated to maintaining “Italian” culture, even though it would be three centuries before there was a political entity called Italy. But a dictionary of Italian was produced by the Accademia in 1612: The linguistic culture was alive, if not the country. In Paris, Richelieu had established the Académie Française in 1634. The Forty Immortals—rendered in perhaps more sinister fashion as simply “the Forty”—have presided over the integrity of the tongue with magnificent inscrutability until this day.

  But the British had taken no such approach. It was in the eighteenth century that the impression grew that the nation needed to know in more detail what its language was, and what it meant. The English at the close of the seventeenth century, it was said, were “uncomfortably aware of their backwardness in the study of their own tongue.” From then on the air was full of schemes for bettering the English language, for giving it greater prestige both at home and abroad.

  Dictionaries improved, and very markedly so, during the first half of the new century. The most notable of them, a book that did indeed expand its emphasis from mere hard words to a broad swathe of the entire English vocabulary, was edited by a Stepney boarding-school owner named Nathaniel Bailey. Very little is known about him, other than his membership in the Seventh-Day Baptist Church. But the breadth of his scholarship, the scope of his interest, is amply indicated by the title page of his first edition (there were to be twenty-five between 1721 and 1782, all bestsellers). The page also hints at the quite formidable task that lay ahead of any drudge who might be planning to create a truly comprehensive English lexicon. Bailey’s work was entitled:

  A Universal Etymological Dictionary, Comprehending The Derivations of the Generality of Words in the English tongue, ei
ther Antient or Modern, from the Antient British, Saxon, Danish, Norman and Modern French, Teutonic, Dutch, Spanish, Italian, Latin, Greek and Hebrew Languages, each in their proper Characters. And Also A brief and clear Explication of all difficult Words…and Terms of Art relating to Botany, Anatomy, Physick…Together with A Large Collection and Explication of Words and Phrases us’d in our Antient Statutes, Charters, Writs, Old Records and Processes at Law; and the Etymology and Interpretation of the Proper Names of Men, Woman and Remarkable Places in Great Britain; also the Dialects of our Different Counties. Containing many Thousand Words more than…any English Dictionary before extant. To which is Added a Collection of our most Common Proverbs, with their Explication and Illustration. The whole work compil’d and Methodically digested, as well as for the Entertainment of the Curious as the Information of the Ignorant, and for the Benefit of young Students, Artificers, Tradesmen and Foreigners…

  Good the volumes and the effort may have been, but still not quite good enough. Nathaniel Bailey and those who tried to copy him in the first half of the eighteenth century labored mightily at their task, though the task of corralling the entire language became ever larger the more it was considered. Yet still no one seemed intellectually capable, or brave, or dedicated enough, or simply possessed of enough time, to make a truly full record of the entire English language. And that, though no one seemed able even to say so, was what was really wanted. An end to timidity, to pussyfooting—the replacement of the philologically tentative by the lexicographically decisive.