Growing up in Oxford in the 1880s, Esme is a happy little girl although she has lost her mother young, because she is loved and looked after by her father and other kind friends. Her father’s work is assisting in compiling a dictionary, cross checking words and the consensus of their use and meanings. Esme is introduced to this work very young and grows up in the Scriptorium (actually, just a garden shed) where this work takes place, playing and studying in there. Her father explains words to her, and many of the explanations reveal how many layers lie behind the words and associations of words. When Esme, who is babysat sometimes by 13 year old Lizzie (who is just 8 years older than Esme, but takes care of Esme faithfully all their lives) finds out that Lizzie is ‘in service’, she asks her father whether she will herself be in service when she grows up.
“I waited. He took a deep breath and the thinking lines between his eyebrows got deeper. ‘Lizzie is fortunate to be in service, but for you, it would be a misfortune.’ […] Service means different things to different people, Essy, depending on their position in society’ “(p12).
Esme then asks if the Dictionary would have all the different meanings of service, and her father says they will search together. The first part of the novel is very much about a child unpacking the meaning of the world through words, as she grows and encounters new situations and new ideas, and learns the words for those.
Esme’s father and other assistants work as a team under Dr Murray, one of the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary, the definitive version at that time of what words mean and which are received into the dictionary to be recorded. This team compile ‘slips, which contain definitions of words and usage in a sentence. Slips are written and researched and cross-checked by them and also sent to them from people everywhere. The ‘slips’ are all made the same size for optimal storage, 6 by 4 inches. Slips were sent to volunteers because not all of them had blank paper available,
“slips cut from newspaper, old shopping lists, used butcher’s paper (a brown stain of blood blooming across the words) and even pages torn from books” (p104).
Esme loves these slips she grew up with, and even steals some of them.
“Each slip had its own personality, and while it was being sorted there was a chance the word contained would be understood. At the very least, it would be picked up and read. Some slips were passed from hand to hand, others were the subject of long debate and sometimes arow. For a while, every word was as important as the one before it and the one after it…” (p104).
As she grows up, Esme begins to understand the power of these slips, or rather, the power of editing the Dictionary and the selection of slips to be included. She notices that the Dictionary only contains words with textual sources, not oral, and most words are from books written by men.
“Words define us, they explain us, and, on occasion, they serve to control or isolate us. But what happens when words that are spoken are not recorded? What effect does that have on the speaker of those words?” (p358).
Esme begins to collect words not found in books but used by ordinary people in the marketplace, for instance. She also begins to collect women’s words, which have long gone unrecorded. In her life, she collects enough to compile a dictionary of lost words.
As she comes of age, Esme is slowly drawn into the suffrage movement by her friends. Esme grows up in a time when the conventions of women’s barriers are beginning to break down. With an unconventional and doting father, and minus a mother, Esme anyway has a rather less restricted and far freer lifestyle than most young women of her class or time (1880s onwards). She is given a lot of love and support and leniency, far more, I am guessing than most young people of her age and station in life. So this is quite a happy book, because Esme is well treated and many of the characters in the novel are kindly, intellectual, liberal minded. It is a novel largely without villains. Esme’s griefs largely come from ordinary sorrows (loss of love ones), and from World War I.
The novel is told charmingly, creating the feel of the period (start of the 20th century), with its social expectations humming gently in the background but usually not imposed on Esme. Yes, true, she is not given a formal education, and even Dr Murray’s daughters who are educated at universities and have degrees conferred, are not allowed to graduate. Yes, only the male contributors to the dictionary are celebrated in a big meal on the final publication of the Oxford English Dictionary (1928), where they could not dine with the men,
“There was some to-do about our presence, owing to our sex, but it was thought only right that, even though we could not dine with the men, we should at least be allowed to witness the speeches” (p348).
These are women who have given their whole lives in some cases, to the work of compiling the dictionary, and contributed for decades, and in no lesser ways than the men, in one case, since 1884, but still not recognised. As Esme put it,
“she had always been a bondmaid to the Dictionary. It owned her, she said. Even after she left, it defined her. Still, despite these shackles, she was not afforded even a balcony view” (p349).
Although the suffrage movement is very central to the story, politics is not the driving force of this novel. It is words that Williams delights in, their many meanings, the way they are used, by whom they are used, how we add to their understanding as we experience life, and experience those words. Esme understands the injustices of class and gender through the exclusion of words and voices in the dictionary. Much as the author, Williams, does, who poses these 2 questions to herself, which began this book:
“Do words mean different things to men and women? And if they do, is it possible that we have lost something in the process of defining them?” (p361).
And as Williams researches, she finds an absence of women recorded in the making of the Dictionary, given all the editors, assistants, most of the volunteers were men, and most of the evidence for how words were used in literature, manuals, newspaper articles, were written by men, making the Dictionary a very “male endeavour”, which meant the first edition of the dictionary “was biased in favour of the experiences and sensibilities of men. Older, white, Victorian-era men at that” (p362). The novel corrects this imbalance a little, by writing women into this endeavour of compiling a dictionary, with fictionalised accounts since there was a paucity of records about the women, unsurprisingly, but with real life male characters, for most part.
Overall, it is a nice read, not particularly intense, surprisingly light for a novel with these feminist topics at its heart, but quite charming for those interested in words and the meanings of words. It is surprising then, to find in the author’s note at the end, that Williams says she has a love hate relationship with words and dictionaries, given she had trouble spelling,
“but when you can’t spell, the dictionary can be an impenetrable thing” (p361)
She is not wrong, and this novel does flag up how a dictionary is not a neutral thing, but contains its own power dynamics and biases woven into it, even as it projects objectivity and universalisms.
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