So when Pope in The Dunciad neatly describes a row of owlish scholars—
A Lumberhouse of Books in ev’ry head,
For ever reading, never to be read
— the lumber-house he has in mind is not a moon-blond, plank-ranked lumberyard at all, as I used to think, but a “Lombard-house,” or a pawnshop. He wants us to understand that scholars are borrowing from the past, cashing in on and taking credit for things they don’t own. He hasn’t forgotten that he was himself born on or just off Lombard Street, so named because thirteenth-century Lombard pawnbrokers (cf., Longobardi, “long-beards”11) collected there to do business, replacing persecuted Jews. (Pepys called it “Lumber Street” in 1668; Wycherley spelled it “Lumbard Street” in 1675.)12 It is a street “still familiar to the public eye,” writes De Quincey in one of his essays on Pope, and important
first, as the residence of those Lombards, or Milanese, who affiliated our infant commerce with the matron splendours of the Adriatic and the Mediterranean; next, as the central resort of those jewellers, or “goldsmiths,” as they were styled, who performed all the functions of modern bankers from the period of the Parliamentary War to the rise of the Bank of England, — that is, for six years after the birth of Pope.…
Lumber seems originally to have meant possessions pawned to a Lombard, or money received in exchange for articles pledged to a Lombard; a lumber-room or lumber-house or lumber-office was a pawnbroker’s establishment, or, more broadly, a storeroom in a bank where a debtor’s possessions were held as collateral. During Pope’s childhood, there were several proposals for the founding of charitable, semi-public lumber-houses, on the model of church- or state-funded monts-de-Piété in Paris, Amsterdam, and Rome — one prospectus, circa 1708, entitled The New Lombard Houses, proposed to lend money “in a manner most cheap and easie to the Industrious Poor” at the rate of about 5 percent — nonetheless, pawnbroking remained a private enterprise in England. Elisha Coles’s long-running English Dictionary listed the various spellings in 1676:
Lombard, Lombar, Lum-, D
a bank for ufury or pawns, alfo as
Lombardeer
, an Ufurer or Broaker, fo called from the
Lombards, Longobards
, Inhabiting the hither part of
Italy
, and much addicted to Ufury.
(D. stands for “Dutch.”) The successor to Elisha Coles was Nathan Bailey; his Universal Etymological English Dictionary (1721) became, according to Gertrude Noyes, “the most popular and representative dictionary of the eighteenth century.”13 Its fourth edition appeared in 1728, the year of Pope’s first use of “Lumberhouse”; it has:
LOMBAR-
Houfe
[
of
lumpe
or
lompe
,
Du
a Rag] a Houfe in which feveral Sorts of Goods are taken in as Pawns: Alfo where they are expofed to Sale.
LOMBARD-
Street
[fo called, becaufe the Refidence of the
Lombards
, who were great Ufurers, &c.] a Street near the
Royal Exchange, London
.
This sense of lumber-house is obsolete now, although Brewer’s Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Phrase and Fable (1991) includes a related entry for LOMBARD: “An acronym for Loads of Money but a Real Dickhead.” Skeat’s Etymological Dictionary half seriously includes Minsheu’s onomatopoeic derivation from 1627: “Lumber, old baggage of houshold stuffe, so called of the noise it maketh when it is remoued, lumber, lumber, &c.” (Skeat comments: “If any reader prefer this fancy, he may do so.”) The Pocket Dictionary, or Complete English Expositor (“A Work entirely new, and defign’d for the Youth of both Sexes, the Ladies and Persons in Business”), published in 1753, defined Lumber as “Old, heavy, ufelefs furniture”; and Samuel Johnson, two years later, influentially but too narrowly defined it as Any thing ufelefs or cumberfome: any thing of more bulk than value, adducing a wonderful sentence from one “Grew,” who is, I assume, Nehemiah Grew (1641–1712), a plant-microscopist and Royal Societitian:
If God intended not the precife ufe of every fingle atom, that atom had been no better than a piece of
lumber
.
Johnson also gives Pope’s “lumber-house of books in ev’ry head” as an illustrative quotation — without, however, any hint of banking or brokering in his definition: the usurious sense of lumber had always been slightly slangy, and Johnson held “modern cant” in low regard. (He was “at all times jealous of infractions upon the genuine English language, and prompt to repress colloquial barbarisms,” said Boswell of him.)14 Latham’s dictionary, in 1866, sticks very close to Johnson’s definition: “Cumbersome matters of more bulk than value; old stuff.” Noah Webster’s An American Dictionary of the English Language (1828) also echoes Johnson:
LUM’BER, n. [allied to Sax. leoma, utensils, or to lump, clump, a mass, or Dan. lumpe, a rag; lumperie, trifles; Sw. lumpor, rags, old cloths; D. lomp; G. lumpen; Fr. lambeau. In French, lambourde is a joist.]
1. Any thing useless and cumbersome, or things bulky and thrown aside as of no use.
The very bed was violated—
And thrown among the common
lumber
.
Otway.
But Webster adds the woody meaning that was by then widespread in the U.S. and Canada:
2. In America, timber sawed or split for use; as beams, joists, boards, planks, staves, hoops and the like.
Webster was prone to fanciful etymology, and we should be careful not to be swept away by it; still, his hint that the American and (French-)Canadian logger’s meaning of lumber could be related to or influenced by the French word “lambourde” (joist) is more helpful than the entry in The Oxford Dictionary of English Eytmology (1966), which doesn’t attempt to explain the transatlantic shift of meaning at all; and it has more pith than the conjecture offered by Joseph T. Shipley, in his personable Dictionary of Word Origins (1945), which seems a little too neat: