Above all, the unpaid, volunteer readers. It has to be remembered that this was a dictionary that relied, quite centrally and pivotally, on its amassment of readers, on the hundreds upon hundreds of readers who were cajoled into action by the public exhortations of the editors, and who then supplied the slips and presented the quotations that revealed the meanings that were ultimately to be defined in the thousand of pages of the Dictionary. Their names are all recorded in the prefaces and introductions and acknowledgements; there are lines upon lines, paragraphs upon paragraphs of names, lists of old-fashioned names that look likely to be sonorous if read out loud, like those of Beachcomber's `Huntingdonshire Cabmen', the famous Daily Express column, and fascinating to behold in print—and yet at the same moment in some strange way mysterious, tempting of speculation, and utterly intriguing.
Who could not first be mesmerised and then intrigued by any list that included the names, for example, of Professors Johann Strom and S. Bugge of Christiania; Gudbrandr Vigfusson of Oxford; the Norroy King of Arms; Professor Julius Zupitza of Berlin; the Very Reverend the Dean of Canterbury; Eduard Sievers of Halle (formerly of Tübingen); the Hon. Whitley Stokes; and W. Sykes, Esq., MRCS, of Mexborough? What, for instance, of such as W. Beck, author of The Draper's Dictionary; of Professor Axel Kock, of Lund; of Prince Louis-Lucien Bonaparte; of R. H. Davies, Esq., of the Apothecaries Hall; of J. A. Kingdon, Esq., Late Master of the Grocers' Company: P. L. Sclater, Esq., FRS, Secretary of the Zoological Society; and of the frequently mentioned but little-known spinster, Miss Lucy Toulmin Smith?
These were the grandees (a tiny fraction of them: the lists went on for columns), the fully established figures from whom Murray and Bradley and the other senior editors sought intellectual succour and enlightenment—and for most of them there are entries in directories and obituaries in newspapers which speak at length of their achievements and renown. But it is the less well-known, the more anonymous helpers who present an even more fascinating face—a raft of personalities whose collective portrait tells us something of the times when this book was assembled, and of the kind of men and women who were content to devote their lives and waking hours to helping with its assembly.
So, to repeat the question—who exactly were these people? Where did they all come from? What did they do? How and why did they become involved, and how did they know so much that they felt able to make so memorable a contribution to so extraordinary a work?
It is perhaps easiest to explain about the people in just the same way that the Dictionary explained about its words—by way of illustration. Two men in particular offer a portrait of the extremes with which Murray and his colleagues found they had to deal.
One—perhaps the man who is today best known to those who are captivated both by the mechanics of lexicography and by the curious personalities of those who find its disciplines and details so attractive, and so who eagerly signed on as volunteer contributors for Murray's great work—is a man whose name sounds more like that of an institution than of a sentient being: Fitzedward Hall.
He was an American, he was colourful, and he was by all accounts exceptionally difficult. He was also perhaps the most steadfast of all Murray's volunteer helpers, devoting at least four hours of every day for twenty years, mainly to examining and critically reading the Dictionary proof sheets. Murray praised him unceasingly for his `voluntary and gratuitous service to the English language'—and yet never once met him.
It is the strangest story. Fitzedward Hall was born in Troy, New York, in 1825. Twenty-one years later, as he was about to begin studies at Harvard, his father demanded he instead board an eastbound clipper ship and sail from Boston to Calcutta, to try to find his elder brother, who had absconded. The ship promptly foundered in a typhoon in the Bay of Bengal, and Hall was washed ashore. He made his way up the Hooghly River to the British Indian capital and, having no vessel on which to sail home (nor any brother—he never found him) decided to stay awhile, and learn languages. He became fluent in Hindustani, Bengali, Sanskrit, and Persian, and made a respectable income translating into these languages books written in English, as well as in French, Italian, and modern Greek, all of which he spoke fluently.
After three years in Calcutta he moved to the holy city of Benares, on the Ganges—now Varanasi—and taught Sanskrit at the local government college, and then became an Inspector of Schools, a senior position in the Imperial government of the day. He got himself into all manner of scrapes—he narrowly avoided death when a dynamite ship blew up beside his house, and he was caught up in the Indian Mutiny of 1857, 1 and spent seven months besieged in a fort. But he survived, married well (the daughter of a colonel in the British Indian army), and came to live in England— taking up a post as Professor of Sanskrit and Indian Jurisprudence at King's College, London, taking a position at the India Office, and being awarded the degree of Doctor of Civil Law at Oxford. All seemed set fair for Dr Hall to pursue from now on a life of dignified and estimable scholarship.
Except that then, in 1869, when in quite another circle the Dictionary was just bestirring itself, he became embroiled in an almighty row. We do not know the specifics, other than that it involved another philologist well known to Murray and his colleagues, Theodor Goldstücker, who taught Sanskrit at University College. The upshot was disastrous for Halclass="underline" he was dismissed or suspended from his various posts, thrown out of the Philological Society, and accused (unfairly, as it happens) of being a drunkard and a foreign spy, morally unsound, and an academic charlatan. The viciousness of disputes in the rarefied world of academia can on occasion be legendary, and irreversible, and this dispute evidently was one of those. Hall fled with his family to a remote cottage in the village of Wickham Market, in East Anglia; a year later his own family left him, and he remained for the rest of his life a hermit, rarely emerging from his cottage for the better part of the next 32 years. He discovered the potential for work with the Dictionary, and the unquestioningly sympathetic attitude of Murray—who minded little of the personal trials or failings of a helper, so long as he helped—in 1881, just two years after Murray's appointment. From that moment onward he wrote every single day, with quotations, clippings, suggestions—and then with sheet after sheet of proofs, corrected, changed, closely read and carefully parsed, just as Murray wanted. On those few occasions Hall fell ill, Murray was frantic:
The everyday wish which I have from visitors to the Scriptorium, or correspondents on the subject ofthe Dictionary, is `May you live to see Zymotic'; that wish, I most heartily transfer to you, for I really dread to think of the falling-off in our work, which the failure of your help would mean. It is true that you have spoken of leaving materials at my disposal, but alas! how little worth are the best materials without the master-mind that knows how to use them, and make them useful.
And so Hall recovered, and went on helping—`I have to record with deepest gratitude', Murray wrote at the end of D, `our obligations to you for your superb help, which has so enriched the 3 volumes now finished, and to express with trembling the earnest desire that you will be able to give us your help for a long time to come.'