It was 12 May 1860—and though most of those involved thought their work would come to fruition within the following decade, it was in fact to be 68 years and three weeks from that starting date before the great work finally saw the light of day. The Rules were in place, the team was assembled, and now, that late spring day, the clock had finally started ticking.
2
The Construction of the Pigeon-Holes
I believe that the scheme is now firmly established … and I confidently expect … that in about two years we shall be able to give our first number to the world. Indeed, were it not for the dilatoriness of many contributors, I should not hesitate to name an earlier period.
(Herbert Coleridge, first editor of
The New English Dictionary, 30 May 1860)
The great fact … is, that the Dictionary is now at last really launched, and that some forty pages are in type, of which fortyeight columns have reached me in proof.
(James Murray, third editor of
The New English Dictionary, 19 May 1882)
Almost 22 years separate this pair of laconic announcements, more than two decades dividing wish from fulfilment, man's hopeful proposal of the plan from cool disposal of it by God or the Fates. Those who were so eagerly hoping for the Dictionary to appear were obliged to endure what was, by any standards, a long, long wait. The first years of the project were, in short, a most frustrating time. They were years marked by periods of hesitation and uncertainty, by outbursts of anger, threats of abandonment, frustrated argumentation, and (in one case) untimely and inconvenient death. Only in the later years, once a proper sense of organization had finally gripped the near-foundering project, were there any signs of progress and real achievement.
What in those early years was familiarly known as `the Philological Society's Dictionary' had in essence three founding fathers—Chenevix Trench, Herbert Coleridge, and Frederick Furnivall. They were men of strikingly different backgrounds and attitudes, united only by their fondness and fascination for the language; 1 their variety of styles lent much, of both benefit and disbenefit, to the early workings of what, it fast became clear, was going to be a most formidable enterprise.
Richard Chenevix Trench came from a distinguished Irish clerical family, 2 was intellectually stellar enough to have been made a member of the Cambridge Apostles at Trinity, and was, at first, an unstinting admirer of Spanish literature. While still a youngster he seems to have been briefly infected with a heady sense of idealism: he flitted off to Spain to fight as a volunteer for the liberal insurrectionary Jose Torrijos, participating in a valiant attack on Cadiz—returning to London unscathed but apparently deeply embarrassed. It was, so far as one can tell from his admiring biographers, the only time in his life that he displayed the merest trace of foolhardiness, levity, or frivolity. As his family expected of him, Trench promptly entered the Church of England on his return home, and casting all romantic notions aside for good, duly progressed up the ecclesiastical ladder with efficiency and dispatch. He first became a deacon at Norwich Cathedral, went briefly back to Ireland to help famine victims as a curate in the parish of Cloughjordan, Co. Tipperary, then took up the post of curate in Colchester, and subsequently became perpetual curate of Curbridge, in the see of Winchester. It was during the six years that he spent here in Hampshire that he developed his reputation as a scholar, a liberal-minded reformer (becoming a fast friend of William Wilberforce, the great anti-slavery campaigner), a poet and—most significantly in this context—a philologist. He lectured widely on the nature and origins of the language, and, being a quick study, published three popular and well-regarded short books during the 1850s, The Study of Words, English Past and Present, and A Select Glossary. 3 After a curiously extended delay he joined the (by nowfifteen-year-old) Philological Society in 1857—having been elected Dean of Westminster the year before—and for a while ran the Unregistered Words Committee for the Society from his official residence just beside Westminster Abbey. 4 He then, as already mentioned, gave the two-part lecture on the shortcomings of existing dictionaries at the London Library in November 1857, which set in motion the plan for creating the great newreplacement. Once the Society agreed on the idea, he promptly formed two committees—one on etymology, one on word history and literature—and for a while ran these, also, from Dean's Yard.
But before long the relentless press of his diocesan work proved too time-consuming, and within a few short months he told his colleagues that he could no longer continue: from henceforward, he said, work on the new book would continue under the editorship of Herbert Coleridge—and all correspondence on the matter would pass to him, at his elegant four-storey pale yellow mansion on the east side of Regent's Park, Chester Terrace. There have been many addresses associated over time with the making of the Dictionary: No. 10 Chester Terrace, London NW, is in all probability the one that most properly can lay claim to being its birthplace.
The man who was technically the book's first editor, Herbert Coleridge (though he is rarely identified as such in most of the official publications), was far from being a middle-aged divine: at the time of the founding of the Philological Society he was just twelve years old, and when Trench made his Guy Fawkes Day speech, a mere 27. He had been elected to the Society that same February, swiftly impressing all around him with his curiously precocious erudition: he won a stunning double first degree in classics and mathematics at Balliol College, he had become a barrister, he was quite ostentatiously obsessed with the byways of philology, most notably with the finer points of Sanskrit, the languages of Norway and Finland, and the dialects of Iceland. He had a small annuity, which allowed him to indulge his philology more keenly than his law.
The first editor was Herbert Coleridge, only 27 years old, a grandson of the poet. He was a scholarly and sickly figure, and had sent the first sample pages to press when he caught a chill and died, a year into the project.
As soon as he had won entry to the Philological Society Coleridge started writing papers for its well-regarded Transactions—a first essay on the nature of the diminutive formed by the addition of -let (he wondered why, for instance, a small river was called a rivulet, and not a riverlet ), and another on the Latin words ploro and exploro. His very evident erudition (and the fact that he was the grandson of the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge) attracted Dean Trench's attention; and when Trench felt pressed by his churchly duties to bowout of the day-to-day running of the project, it was to the ever-eager young man that he first turned. Such files as the Unregistered Words Committee had collected were promptly shipped from Dean's Yard to Chester Terrace, and the dictionary work began anew, under the captaincy of a younger man.
Younger, but not fitter, Herbert Coleridge turned out to be a sickly figure, plagued by what was once called consumption but which nowadays is more generally known as pulmonary tuberculosis. The image of him that filters down through the years is of a workaholic, rarely straying from his chambers, poring unhealthily over his correspondence, his lists of words and his organizational plans, while he coughed and vomited and wheezed and in alarmingly short order grew ever weaker and weaker.