Herbert Coleridge was a steady and a Christian man, and he had well-developed—but, as it happened in the end, lexicographically quite unacceptable—views on the kinds of word that should not be in the Dictionary. He asked the Philological Society, for example, to exclude mock words like devilship since in this one case `it was never intended by its author for general circulation or adoption'. The Society members politely disagreed, and voted that such words should indeed be placed in the book (devilship is there, with a quotation, and not a humorous one, from 1644), and that only laboured and unused puns like hepistle and shepistle should be proscribed. (Both are rightly absent, though herstory—the feminist equivalent of history—is first quoted 8from 1970.)
In mid-April 1861 he asked Trübner to print a fewpages as specimens—the page that showed the words Affect-Affection was regarded as the best. When he was halfway through working on a second `basis for comparison', of those words beginning with letters between E and L, he was caught in a sudden spring rainstorm as he walked to St James's Square. He sat damply through a meeting of the Philological Society, and the next day, being thin and frail, caught a chill. He was taken back to his rooms, his friends watched aghast as the chill turned to consumption, and on the quintessentially English date of 23 April—both the Feast of St George and the birthday of Shakespeare—he died. He was just 31 years old.
It is said that his final words were `I must begin Sanskrit tomorrow'. This seems a charming but somewhat improbable suggestion, given the section of the alphabet upon which he was working and the nature of the work he was bent on completing. But the story remains, indicative of the young man's learning, but hardly a memorial to his work on the book. The only other memorial (his plan for a three-part dictionary did not survive him, nor did his plans to have Messrs Trübner be the publishers, and his idea of having quotations going back only to 1250 was abandoned too, with the present Dictionary sporting illustrations from as far back as the ninth century) was the handmade set of 54 oaken pigeon-holes. These are still in existence, dusty and neglected in a museum in Oxford. Their dimensions proved woefully inadequate, and they were soon to be replaced by a set more than 40 times as large (and yet which in due course themselves proved to be just as niggardly too).
Herbert Coleridge had found it difficult to imagine that he would ever need to find room for the 100,000 quotations that he thought were likely to be used as the basis for the Dictionary. In the event, his successors had recourse to use the better part of six million, and no set of pigeon-holes known to man could ever have accommodated all of them.
Two years after Coleridge's death, Dean Trench returned to Ireland to take up the post of Archbishop of Dublin. The inchoate dictionary project, then no more than a barely formed mess of papers and file folders on a dead man's desk, was then handed over to the third member of the founding trinity—an amazing scholar-gypsy of a man who would be intimately associated with the project for the next half century, but whose early involvement led very nearly to disaster and abandonment.
He was Frederick James Furnivall, and though perhaps the most anodyne remark ever made about him was that `to tobacco and alcohol he was a stranger through life' he was an eccentric of the fullest flower—or, as the DNB puts it with exquisite tact, he `showed a characteristic impatience of convention and an undisciplined moral earnestness'. His long life was frequently mired in scandal, he was a man given to the oddest of short-lived enthusiasms. Of all the leading players in this saga, the boisterous Frederick Furnivall remains among the most colourful, most memorable, and deservedly best loved.
His critics—and they were legion—made much of the fact that his father ran (and made a fortune from so doing) a private lunatic asylum in Egham, in Surrey. He was an indifferent mathematics student at Cambridge, and is best remembered there and later for his fondness for sculling, the solitary sport he always thought far superior to rowing (though he had made the Trinity Hall rowing club's first eight), and which he pursued as a hobby all his life. He then became a student at Lincoln's Inn, and in due course (and without much enthusiasm) he became a lawyer.
But his first passion remained sculling. He was sufficiently dedicated to the sport, and with his inherited fortune insulating him from the need to pay too much attention to legal work, that he took time to design a special outrigger for his boat, to form sculling clubs, to inveigh against clubs that forbade working men from taking part, and, most vocally of all, to protest against the then general ban on allowing women on the water. He was inordinately fond of the ladies; and in his middle years he liked to recruit pretty waitresses from the Aerated Bread Company's teashop in Hammersmith with a view to teaching them the delights of his chosen sport. There are sepia photographs of him grinning impishly, surrounded by a group of very well-proportioned (and evidently rather cold) shopgirls in their close-fitting sculling tops, and others of him speeding along the river, a pretty girl behind him, with his long white beard flowing in the wind, the two of them a picture of goatish contentment.
Coleridge was succeeded by the scandalous, irrepressible but entirely lovable Frederick Furnivall, whose caprices and poor judgement very nearly caused the collapse and abandonment of the entire enterprise.
One of the girls, an Oxford Street waitress named Blanche Huckle, from whom (after racing up the stairs two at a time `like a young boy') he invariably ordered `weak coffee, rusks and butter', wrote in a memorial volume published after his death, that `Furney' was `one of the kindest gentlemen I have ever met'. He would regularly `invite several of us girls to a picnic up the river', she added, and he would bring presents to the cafeÂ, most often `two pairs of stockings for each of us'.
Such images led many to suppose Furnivall a bit of a rascal— and indeed, he confirmed his membership of a flexible moral universe by committing the doubly unpardonable sin of first marrying his very young lady's maid, Lizzy Dalziel, and then, after she had borne him two children and had become, as he sawit, `indolent and dull', cruelly abandoning her. He left her, when he was 58, for a girl 37 years his junior, his dazzlingly pretty and intellectually vibrant 21-year-old secretary named Teena Rochfort-Smith. So appalled was one correspondent on receiving word of this affair that `he immediately stuck stamp-paper over the signature of the writer who gave him the news'. Vivat, Victoria! (Sadly, fate sawto it that Teena was not able to bring Furnivall happiness for very long. She was burned to death in Goole, in Yorkshire, after a flaming match-head broke off while she was trying to destroy some letters. It was a scant two months after her lover had obtained a formal separation from his wife.)