His accomplishments made under these trying circumstances, though they are widely forgotten today, are far from trivial. With the help of a committee he drewup the Canones—the Rules—by which the three-part dictionary he envisaged might be created. He divided the books that were to be read into three groups—those appearing between 1250 and the publication of the first English NewTestament in 1526; those published between 1526 and Milton's death in 1674; and those printed between then and 1858, when the project was formally set under way. He also found in the famed Nicholas Trübner a printer and publisher 5 —a rather premature arrangement, even the most optimistic might think—who would be able to perform the intricate work that a dictionary, with its countless typefaces and foreign languages and phonetic alphabets, required.
In addition Coleridge organized the first small army of volunteer readers—he wrote around to schools and universities and members of the Society and their friends, and within a year managed to find no fewer than 147 men (and a small number of women) who happily agreed to help find quotations showing a variety of words in contexts that the editor should find illustrated their various meanings and senses. But their ardour quickly cooled. Of these first 147, the editor reported dejectedly in May 1860, only some 89 were still working—the early enthusiasm of the other 58 (he dismissed them as `hopeless') had clearly evaporated.
Coleridge was brutally frank about the quality of the survivors, and coldly invoked a lexicographical version of the triage: Class I, into which he placed some 30 men, were `first-rate'; fifteen belonged to Class II, being only `of inferior merit'; and the other 44 were lumped into Class III, `not having produced sufficient work to be able to judge'. But matters looked up again when Coleridge found an American, the Honorable George Perkins Marsh of Burlington, Vermont, who readily agreed to mastermind a transatlantic search for illustrative quotations of wanted words. He impressed Coleridge as first-rate from the very start.
Marsh was himself was a fascinating character—a Puritan aristocrat, wealthy from his dealings in wool and railways, fluent in twenty languages, sent as a diplomat to Istanbul, in later life a renowned environmentalist, and for all his career sufficient of a scholar to have Coleridge select him, from all the Americans that he knew, to be the ideal leader of the dictionary effort in America. By the time Marsh died in Florence in 1882 it was said that he had assembled a large group of distinguished Americans to help him with the project—fulfilling Coleridge's early promise that the title of an English dictionary was `no longer strictly applicable', since the book could nowinclude linguistic peculiarities from well beyond Albion's shores. Little remains to record howmuch effort Marsh actually made, though the fact that American contributions to the later development of the Dictionary have always been prodigious, suggests that he did leave a legacy of some kind.
Coleridge also made the very first list of words that he thought should be included—he took the material, the illustrative quotations that had been sent in by his 89 volunteer readers, to Chester Terrace, and arranged them alphabetically, according to the words to which they referred. He called these organized lists his `basis of comparison'—since he would read through the various quotations and compare the way that the target word was used in each of them, so that he could compare their various meanings and senses and find out for himself which were essentially the same and which were different, and if different, whether profoundly or subtly so. It was by way of this non-judgemental, descriptive, and manifestly non-prescriptive way that meanings were eventually discerned, and the definitions written. It is perhaps easiest to explain by offering an example. Because of some gaps in the early archives of the Dictionary, it is difficult to be certain which submitted quotations were actually worked upon by Herbert Coleridge himself. We do knowthat he worked for more than a year on words that began with the letters A to E, and that to a lesser degree he began to sift through words beginning with the letters F to L. Within that first group we know also he asked Messrs Trübner to prepare some sample pages (somewhat prematurely, critics said), the most successful apparently being those for the words between Affect and Affection. It might be worthwhile looking here.
Some few of the words in the sample pages—affectationist for example, `one who indulges in affectation or artificiality'—have only a single meaning. But most of other words have many more meanings—as, for instance, the word three further down the alphabetical line, affected. By reading the quotations submitted by volunteer readers for this one word, any good lexicographer who was working on proper historical principles would be able to recognize and discern several different shadings of meaning.
For instance, a quotation (and these that followwere indeed all received at Chester Terrace, and were eventually included in the Dictionary) such as `He is too picked, too spruce, too affected, too odde', which comes from Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost, suggests the meaning `full of affectation; non-natural or artificial in manner; pretentious; affecting airs'. On the other hand, if the editor found, as in Milton's 1649 work Eikonoklastes, the phrase `A work assigned rather than by me chosen or affected', he would knowthat affected here meant something quite different—in this case, `sought after, aimed at, desired'. And yet again, if another volunteer reader found in the Daily Telegraph and submitted to Coleridge a report allowing that `the accused was mentally affected, her father and three of her aunts having all been insane', he would recognize a third meaning, `tainted, distempered, diseased'.
This is not to say that an editor, having read these three quotations, would instantly come up with three meanings for the word. He would want many more quotations—five or ten at the very least—to confirm that one meaning was indeed different from another, that each of them had some persistence in the literature, and was not just the result of carelessness, or a malapropism. Which is why the work of a lexicographer is, as Samuel Johnson had famously said, so much harmless drudgery.
A microscopically close reading of all the literature would thus throwup as many meanings as were ever intended for any particular word (there are a total of eighteen definably different meanings and senses for affected)—whereupon Coleridge, or his successors, would make note of them, ponder the best way of writing a definition for each, gather in the etymologies and variant spellings and pronunciations, and have everything laid down in type, before moving on to the next word (in this case, affectedly).
To reiterate: Coleridge sawas his principal job the discovery of as many historically recorded uses as he and his volunteers could find of each of the words destined for the Dictionary; and from the comparisons he made of howeach word had been used over time, he would work out which meanings were which, and arrange his dictionary accordingly. Moreover Coleridge, just like his colleagues 6 and successors, and in deference to the ideas of Dean Trench and to the Canones he and his committee had written, stuck gamely to the basic principle of the project: that the more quotations that could be found, the more easily the subtle differences between the (possibly) myriad usages and meanings of any single word could be identified. This is howhistorical dictionaries are made: not as difficult a task today, perhaps—but Coleridge and those around him were pioneers, and every step of the process was new to him and to all who tried to help.
To help him in arranging the words and the quotation slips 7 — the crucially important pieces of paper that would be the project's building blocks—Coleridge had a carpenter build for him, in oak, a small suite of pigeon-holes, to hold and permit the alphabetical arrangement of the various quotation slips that his volunteers sent in. The arrangement which he designed was six square holes high, nine across—giving him a total of 54 pigeon-holes, with some 260 inches of linear space that were thought sufficient to hold comfortably between 60,000 and 100,000 of the slips. No greater number could Coleridge ever imagine his having to deal with. When they were all filled with quotation slips, he was heard to tell his fellowphilologists, then and only then would it be time to start proper editorial work on the big dictionary.