The Surgeon of Crowthorne

by Simon Winchester

  The Library had moved there twelve years before, from cramped quarters on Pall Mall. The new building was tall and capacious, and although today it is filled to bursting with many more than a million books, back in 1857 it had only a few thousand volumes, and had plenty of space to spare. So its committee decided early on to raise extra money by renting out rooms, though only, it was decreed, to societies whose adherents were likely to share the same lofty aims of scholarship as did the Library itself, and whose members would be able to mingle happily with the aristocratic, and often staggeringly snobbish, gentlemen who made up the Library’s own membership rolls.

  Two groups were chosen: the Statistical Society was one, the Philological Society the other. It was at a fortnightly meeting of the latter, held in an upstairs room on that chill Thursday evening, when words were spoken that were to set in train a most remarkable series of events.

  The speaker was the Dean of Westminster, a formidable cleric by the name of Richard Chenevix Trench. Perhaps more than any other man alive, Dr Trench personified the sweepingly noble ambitions of the Philological Society. He firmly believed, as did most of its 200 members, that some kind of divine ordination lay behind what seemed then the ceaseless dissemination of the English language around the planet.

  God – who in this part of London society was held to be an Englishman – naturally approved the spread of the language as an essential imperial device; but He also encouraged its undisputed corollary, which was the worldwide growth of Christianity. The equation was really very simple, a formula for undoubted global good: the more English there was in the world, the more God-fearing its peoples would be. (And for a Protestant cleric there was a useful subtext: if English did manage eventually to outstrip the linguistic influences of the Roman Church, then its reach might even help bring the two Churches back into some kind of ecumenical harmony.)

  So even though the Society’s stated role was academic, its informal purpose, under the direction of divines like Trench, was much more robustly chauvinist. True, earnestly classical philological discussions, of obscure topics like ‘sound-shifts in the Papuan and Negrito dialects’ or ‘the role of the explosive fricative in High German’, did lend scholarly heft to the Society, which was all very well. But the principal purpose of the group was in fact improving the understanding of what all members regarded as the properly dominant language of the world, and that was their own.

  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 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 the early parties got under way.

  Like the fire-frightened housemaids who hurried back down to the servants’ entrances of the great houses near by, the old philologists, cloaked against the chill, scuttled through the gloom. They were men who had long since grown beyond 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 bit taxing. 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 the few dictionaries then in existence suffered from a number of serious shortcomings – grave deficiencies from which 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 encyclopaedia 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 (and died three years later).

  Since there was no phrase until the late seventeenth century, it follows that there was essentially no concept either, certainly not at the time that Shakespeare was writing: a time when writers were writing furiously, and thinkers thinking as they had rarely done 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 Marlowe or Nashe, Francis Drake, John Donne or Ben Jonson, Walter Ralegh, Izaak Walton or Martin Frobisher or any of their other learned contemporaries could consult.

  Consider, for instance, Shakespeare’s writing of Twelfth Night, which he completed some time 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 does 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 be able to have answered.

  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, where could he go to look up the question? 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 would a playwright of Shakespeare’s time look up any word?

  One might think he would want to look things up all the time. Am not I consanguineous? he writes in the same play. In the next scene he talks of thy doublet of changeable taffeta. He then says: 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, becoming an occasional Mrs Malaprop?

  The questions are worth posing simply to illustrate what we would now think of as the profound inconvenience of hi
s 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, 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 and linguistic and lexical conveniences available at all.

  It is perhaps difficult to imagine so creative a mind as Shakespeare’s working without any lexicographical reference book 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; yet 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. 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 St 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. Almost twenty years later a man named John Withals put out A Shorte Dictionarie for Yonge Begynners in both languages, but with the words arranged not alphabetically but by subject, 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 wanted 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 know when he died in 1616, his want remained stubbornly unfulfilled. Others were to remark on the apparent lack as well. Shortly before Shakespeare’s death his friend John Webster wrote The Duchess of Malfi, incorporating a scene in which the Duchess’s brother Ferdinand imagines that he is turning into a wolf, ‘a very pestilent disease… They call lycanthropia’. ‘What’s 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 a first half-hearted 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 last, each boasting of superior value in the educating of the uneducated (among whom were counted the women of the day, who enjoyed little schooling compared to the men).

  For all of 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 books of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries 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 and ribbons and scarlet velvet Rhinegraves. So words like adminiculation, cautionate, deruncinate and attemptate are placed in the vocabulary too, each duly catalogued in the tiny leather books of the day; yet they were words meant only for the ears of the high-flown, and were unlikely to impress Cawdrey’s intended audience of ladies, gentlewomen and ‘unskilful 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 vnready her Mistris’, while parentate is ‘to celebrate ones parents funerals’. Or else the creators of these hard-word books put forward explanations that were complex beyond endurance, as in a book called Glossographia (1656) 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 38,000 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 her influence now beginning to flourish in the world – with daring sailors like Drake and Ralegh and Frobisher skimming the seas, and 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 and arms and law. It was displacing French and Spanish and Italian, and the courtly languages of foreigners; it needed to be far better known, fa
r better able to be learned properly. 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, dedicatingitselfto maintaining ‘Italian’ culture, even though it would be three centuries before there was a political entity called Italy. But there was a dictionary of Italian produced by the Accademia in 1612: the linguistic culture was alive, if not the country. In Paris the Cardinal de Richelieu had established the Académie Française in 1634. The Forty Immortals – rendered in more sinister fashion as simply ‘The Forty’ – have presided over the integrity of the tongue with magnificent inscrutability to 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 their 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 of 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 of them between 1721 and 1782, all best-sellers). 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: