Pip Williams, The Dictionary of Lost Words, is an engaging, entertaining historical fiction. It invents a twisting story of how women’s words and experience were lost, added and reimagined in the Oxford English Dictionary. The novel’s greatest strength, however, is the reservoir of real histories of that great book of reference, known to every writer in the English language, the O.E.D.
Pip Williams, Dictionary of Lost Words
The Dictionary of Lost Words is set against the backdrop of the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary. It follows the journey of Esme Nicoll, a young girl growing up at the feet of the makers of the O.E.D. She curates her personal cache of neglected words, deemed by the editors to be unworthy for inclusion, the dictionary of lost words. While Esme explores neglected and repressed reaches of the language, she confronts societal limitations on women. Yet she also identifies gaps in those social barriers through which creative possibilities of imagination and social arrangements can emerge. The novel retells this footnote in the history of the O.E.D. with authenticity and empathy. It is an intriguing narrative, with humour and thoughtful reflections on the power of words to shape cultural perceptions. Which words do we remember or discard, and why? And how do the meanings of words hold our imaginations or our lives captive?
The story centres on one lost word in particular, bondmaid. Esme found this word written on a slip in the Scriptorium in which the O.E.D. was made. The editor of the dictionary had rejected this word as too vulgar. Its expression of women’s servitude was perhaps too blunt. Esme stole the slip on which the word was defined, and it became the first deposit in her secret cache, her dictionary of lost words. It also became a paradoxical word of liberation and pride for the household servant who Esme befriended, and who accompanied her through most of her life’s tribulations. In some ways, Esme herself became a bondmaid, in service to the dictionary, both the Oxford and her own dictionary of lost women’s words. She suffered and flourished in her service, and passed on these lost words, her experience and the alternative dictionary to a later generation of women. Bondmaid becomes one of the final words of the book.
I very much enjoyed Dictionary of Lost Words, and read it briskly over a summer holiday. Without any spoilers, the novel has a surprising and engaging conclusion that reflects on the interweaving of Australia and Britain, men and women, class and language, official and underground language, and the enigmatic persistence of certain interests across generations. Thanks very much to the Substack subscriber who suggested the book to me.
Histories of the Oxford English Dictionary
Pip Williams wrote her book from real history, and that made it a stronger story than a mere fiction. She included an author’s note at the end that acknowledged her sources, and included a short chronology of the making of the O.E.D. A fuller account of the editions of the O.E.D. is available at the new O.E.D. website.
It began in 1857 with a committee’s call to replace Samuel Johnson’s 18th century dictionary. It became an enterprise with the appointment of its great visionary entrepreneur of philology, James Murray, in 1879. Nine years later, the first full volume (A-B) was published. The last in the series of twelve volumes was published in 1928, thirteen years after Murray’s death. Revisions, supplements and shorter versions followed. The Second Edition of the full dictionary in twenty volumes was published in 1989, on the cusp of the internet age. From 2000, the Third Edition has been progressively published to the online edition, to which most serious libraries subscribe.
Of course, the history of dictionaries is much broader than English or the O.E.D. and may well be the subject of another history unknown yet to me. The first European dictionary, the Tesoro de la lengua castellana o Española, written by Sebastián de Covarrubias, was published in Spain in 1611. It led in 1694 to a similar project in France, the Dictionnaire de l’Académie Française, which began long before the O.E.D. and continues to this day. The nationalism and education systems of the 19th and 20th centuries stimulated many more such projects, as language moved from its fluid oral forms to its fixed, if disputed, printed meanings.
Williams acknowledged three important sources for her work:
Lynda Mugglestone, Lost for Words: the Hidden History of the Oxford English Dictionary (2005)
Peter Gilliver, The Making of the Oxford English Dictionary (2018), and
Simon Winchester, The Surgeon of Crowthorne: A Tale of Murder, Madness and the Oxford English Dictionary (1999); titled The Professor and the Madman in the US.
I have not read Mugglestone or Gilliver, but Winchester’s book is a gem that any reader of the Burning Archive would love.
Simon Winchester, The Surgeon of Crowthorne
The Surgeon of Crowthorne: A Tale of Murder, Madness and the Oxford English Dictionary narrates the intertwined lives of two seemingly unrelated men, Dr. W.C. Minor, an American Civil War veteran confined to an asylum, and Dr. James Murray, the primary editor of the Oxford English Dictionary. The book explores the unlikely collaboration between the mentally troubled Minor and Murray in the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary. Minor became one of the O.E.D.’s most prolific volunteer contributors, despite his confinement and sometimes cruel treatment by the late Victorian British mental health system.
The Surgeon of Crowthorne was rightly praised for its skilful storytelling and meticulous research. Simon Winchester's vividly portrayed the process behind the Oxford English Dictionary. He gave a humane, sensitive account of Minor's mental illness and Murray’s appreciation of his mind. Winchester received accolades from both literary critics and general readers alike, and the book became a bestseller. I read it and loved it twenty years ago. It instigated Pip Williams’ fascination with the hidden stories of the O.E.D., while leaving many other stories to be told, including the words and experiences left out of the dictionary and recovered in Williams’ novel.
The Madman and Professor, (Film)
Winchester’s book was made into a film that might suit readers looking for some visual story-telling.
The Professor and the Madman (2019) is a cinematic adaptation of Simon Winchester's book, using its American title. Starring Mel Gibson as Professor James Murray and Sean Penn as Dr. W.C. Minor, the film portrays well Murray’ struggles with the British aristocratic establishment and Minor's experiences in the barely adequate early mental health institutions of the 19th century.
The movie had legal battles that prevented the film being shot in Oxford itself, and caused further litigation between Gibson and the producers. Nevertheless, Gibson and Penn bring Winchester’s story to the big screen quite charismatically. Although there are some deviations from Winchester’s book and the historical record (e.g. crosswords appear in the movie, well before their first printing in 1924), the film is a visually compelling portrayal of this intriguing story of dictionaries, ambition and madness.
The mystery of the O.E.D. for writers
These stories carry a personal layer of meaning since James Murray, the foundation editor of the O.E.D. was a distant relative of mine. But even without that familial connection, the stories of this most famous of English dictionaries are intriguing. The Oxford changed the Anglophone world’s relationship to language, during the peak period of power of the Anglophone world, from late Victorian Britain to America’s unipolar moment.
I presume from my own experience that every writer in English knows of the O.E.D. Perhaps Americans veer towards Webster’s, and a few nationalist Australians prefer the Macquarie; but surely most of the Anglophone world were taught to consult the Oxford first. They may not have consulted the full O.E.D., and only knew it in the form of the Concise Oxford. I myself frequently still consult my two-volume edition of the Shorter Oxford Dictionary. Many fewer times I have consulted the full printed edition at major public or university libraries. Shamefully, I admit, it was only yesterday that I searched the complete online edition available to all the world on the internet.
There I found for the word that is at the heart of the Dictionary of Lost Words, bondmaid. Eight quotations using bondmaid were displayed, including from Tyndale’s Bible (1526), Shakespeare (Taming of the Shrew), Walter Scott and Pearl Buck, one of the few women winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature before World War Two.
Rather like Noah’s Ark, the O.E.D. has become a generous saviour of language, and a digital defence against the flames of cultural oblivion, the ever-present danger of losing words, stories of the world, and a sense of the past. The O.E.D. is therefore a an international treasure of the Burning Archive.
I do encourage readers to bookmark the O.E.D. site. It will provide you with a better source of reference than Wikipedia or dictionary.com. It will give you a little thrill of erudition.
And that makes for a fine tip for the life of the mind this week. Bookmark the O.E.D. website in your web browser, and spend some time exploring all those lost words.
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