There were also plenty of linguistic advisers—towering figures of scholarship to whom Murray and Bradley would write on the finer points of their various specialities. James Platt was one such—a polymath and ghost story writer who knew scores of languages and once famously declared that the first twelve tongues were always the most difficult, but having mastered them, the following hundred should not pose too much of a problem. He helped Murray divine etymologies from obscurer languages of Africa and the Far East. Marie-Paul-Hyacinthe Meyer, who had worked on the documents relating to the Dreyfus affair, helped with medieval French and ProvencËal (which Murray spoke quite well anyway); the antiquarian Frederick Elworthy, a great friend of the Murray family who lived in Somerset, assisted with archaic West Country and Cornish dialect words; and Henry Yule, well known to any fan as one of the editors of the endlessly fascinating collection of Hindustani terms known as Hobson-Jobson, 14 assisted in matters Oriental. Professor H. R. Helwich of Vienna copied out, with barely believable assiduity, all of the Cursor Mundi (the most quoted work in the OED) and the Destruction ofTroy. And a Mr and Mrs A. Caland, who lived in Holland, fell out with one another over the work: Mr Caland said his interest in the book was the one thing that kept him alive. His wife would only speak through gritted teeth of what she called `that wretched dictionary'.
There were many Americans, Fitzedward Hall and W. C. Minor aside. Dozens flocked to the side of Murray and his team, in part because of the energies of Francis March, whom Murray had appointed head of the American reading programme in 1879. In addition to the readers, most of whom have vanished into obscurity, there are grand figures like George Perkins Marsh, who was an environmentalist before it was fashionable to be so, the man who introduced the camel into the Wild West (to the rather limited degree that it has been introduced) and, confusingly, the first American readers' coordinator in the very early days of the project, and whose role was taken over by the so-similarlynamed Francis March; Albert Matthews and C. W. Ernst of Boston, who sent in thousands of examples of peculiarly American uses and phrases, while Ernst was a diligent scholar in medieval Latin; and William Dwight Whitney, the chief editor of the enormous Century Dictionary, against which Murray's dictionary was constantly being measured. Job Pierson, a librarian and Presbyterian minister from Ionia, Michigan, was one of the most energetic readers: he contributed some 46,000 quotations in 1888 alone—good enough to make this chapter's epigraph, but nowhere near as productive as the man who heads it, Thomas Austin Jr. of Hornsey and Oxford, a man who also managed to edit a volume entitled Two Fifteenth-Century Cookbooks, and who fell ill with a nervous disorder—Victorian middle-class shorthand for madness—while doing so.
Sons of gardeners and college servants, daughters of chemists and boat-builders, ministers in all churches known to Christian (including that of Pitsligo, Banffshire) and to infidel, criminal and company and constitutional lawyers, schoolmasters from Holland and Birmingham and California and from all points between, doctors responsible for every part of body, mind, and animal, scholars of Welsh and Greek, Aramaic and Chaldean, Icelandic, Persian, Slavonic, and English place names, elderly divines, young and muscular civil engineers, theatre critics, one ophthalmic surgeon (James Dixon, author of Diseases ofthe Eye, 1855), mathematicians, men who were antiquarians, naturalists, surgeons (and one man—Joseph Fowler of Durham—who was all three), businessmen, novelists (including Beatrice Harraden, who wrote the breathless Ships that Pass in the Night, became a suffragette, and went on to write The Scholar's Daughter, involving much derringdo among a cast of lexicographers), phoneticians, bibliographers, an iron merchant-cum-antiquarian named Richard Heslop who gave Murray advice on mining and iron-forging terms, botanists, aldermen, naval historians, geologists and geophysicists, jurists, palaeographers, Orientalists, diplomats, museumkeepers, surgeons, soldiers (W. C. Minor was both, of course), climbers ( John Mitchell was killed while climbing, to Murray's `unspeakable grief'), zoologists, grammarians, patent officers, organists, runic archaeologists, fantasists, anthropologists, men of letters, bankers, medievalists, and Indian administrators—these and a thousand more professions and pastimes occupied those men and women who otherwise devoted hours, weeks, perhaps even years of their time to read for Murray and Bradley, and later for Craigie and Onions. The range of interests of these hundreds was prodigious; their knowledge was extraordinary; their determination was unequalled; and yet their legacy—aside from the book itself— remains essentially unwritten. Only their names, in long lists in the volumes, the parts, and the sections, exist to make some readers stop and wonder for a moment—just who were these people?
One last half-answer to the question comes from a clue that is to be found in every single part of the great book, from that which begins with A right through to that which finishes with zyxt. The clue is the existence in each one of the Prefaces of one recurring name: Thompson.
`The following readers have contributed most largely to the materials,' it says in the Appendix to the Preface of Volume I, its first part published in 1884, `Miss E. Thompson and Miss E. P. Thompson, Wavertree, Liverpool, 15,000.' `In the revision and improvement of the work in the proof stage [of the letter O] continuous and indefatigable help has been rendered by the Misses E. P. and Edith Thompson of Landsdown, Bath.' `During the editorial progress of the letter W, which began in 1919, outside help has been given in the reading of proofs by the Misses Edith and E. P. Thompson.' `The material for X, Y, Z passed through the hands of a voluntary sub-editor, the Rev. J. Smallpeice, in 1882-4,' says the Preface to the final volume, published in 1928. `The first proofs have been read by the Misses Edith and E. P. Thompson.'
We know where these two ladies settled over the years— Liverpool, Reigate, and Bath. We know from other references that the (usually only initialled) younger sister was in fact called Elizabeth Perronet Thompson. We know that Edith Thompson was obsessively secretive and determined to remain as anonymous as possible. She seemed to shiver with excitement on occasion during her correspondence with James Murray—and when she ventured, as she very seldom did, some personal opinion, she hoped that Murray would not regard it as remiss. `If it is, treat it as confidential.' We know that there was an interesting correspondence involving either the word pace or the word gait, with charming diagrams to illustrate the way in which horses of different breeds arrange their legs when moving. We know that the ladies were found to be so competent that they were asked to sub-edit, and did so for all the letters following C. We also know that Edith wrote a highly popular, well-regarded and long-in-print History ofEngland in 1873, 15 and that young Elizabeth wrote an exquisitely tame bodice-ripper of a novel set in the seventeenth century and entitled A Dragoon's Wife.
We know these things, but we do not really know why so many people gave so much of their time for so little apparent reward. And this is the abiding and most marvellous mystery of the enormously democratic process that was the Dictionary—that hundreds upon hundreds of people, for motives known and unknown, for reasons both stated and left unsaid, helped to chronicle the immense complexities of the language that was their own, and that they dedicated in many cases—such as the Thompson sisters did—years upon years of labour to a project of which they all, buoyed by some set of unfathomable and optimistic notions, insisted on becoming a part. The Thompson sisters of Liverpool, Reigate, and Bath, living an otherwise blameless and unremarkable (though moneyed) suburban life in three most ordinary English towns, left no greater memorial than the work they performed for the greatest literary enterprise of history. They became footnotes in eight-point Clarendon type in a preface to a volume of that enterprise. That was truly their only reward—and yet in all likelihood they, and scores of others like them, surely wanted no other.