Henry Spencer Ashbee owned the largest collection of pornography and erotica in the world. Born in 1834, he began collecting clandestine material as a teenager and eventually amassed so much that he had to store it in a dedicated bachelor pad at Gray’s Inn, where he would invite fellow pornophiles to peruse the collection every Saturday. Ashbee’s unorthodox hobby went further: he sent in words related to genitals, pornography and bondage to the fledgling Oxford English Dictionary (OED) to be included in its pages.
Ashbee was one of thousands in the late 1800s who answered the OED’s global call to send in terms – along with examples of how the words were used in books and newspapers – for inclusion in the dictionary. The ambitious crowdsourcing project was “the Wikipedia of the 19th century”, says Sarah Ogilvie, whose book, The Dictionary People, profiles a selection of those who contributed terms.
The volunteers were a motley crew. Along with Ashbee, there was Eleanor Marx (Karl’s daughter), as well as vicars, murderers, doctors, astronomers, nudists and vegetarians. Most contributors had seemingly little in common, yet “many of them were on the margins of academia, and they were amateurs and autodidacts,” says Ogilvie. “This may have been an opportunity for them to take part in a project attached to a prestigious university” and be “part of an academic setting that they were otherwise denied access to”.
Ogilvie discovered the volunteers’ identities by accident. In 2014, she was killing time in Oxford while waiting for a visa for a new job in the US, and she had spent the week visiting her favourite spots in the city that had been her home for 14 years. As a lexicographer who had both worked on the OED as an editor and written her doctorate on its history, she decided it was only right to pay one last visit to the dictionary’s archives. Opening a box from one of the shelves, she found something she had never seen before: a small black book tied with a cream ribbon, with a disintegrated spine and discoloured pages.
“I recognised the handwriting of James Murray, who was the longest-serving editor of the OED. Then I noticed that he had written down all the names and addresses of these people. And then I thought, Oh my goodness, these might be the people who sent him in slips,” says Ogilvie. She was immediately “curious and intrigued”, and initially wanted to find out about each person – a process which took about six years. “In my seventh year, I was like, OK, stop the madness, stop the research, now you actually have to tell this story.”
Several of the volunteers that Ogilvie chose to feature in the book suffered from severe mental illness; indeed, three of the four contributors who sent the most slips to Murray spent time in mental asylums (the fourth also had an asylum connection, as an administrator). The top contributor, Thomas Austin Jr, sent 165,061 slips across a decade. “Was it their madness that drove them to do so much dictionary work, or was it the dictionary work that drove them mad?” asks Ogilvie in the “L for Lunatics” chapter.
Ogilvie was “really struck” by one volunteer in particular: John Dormer, who began sending in slips as a teenager and ended up contributing 20,665 words. Murray instantly recognised Dormer’s intelligence, and assigned him “painstaking” tasks, including sorting through hundreds of thousands of slips and identifying gaps in their examples. Seventeen years into his dictionary work, Dormer was home alone one Christmas, having lost his wife a month earlier, and was subediting words beginning with “So-” when he began to hear voices. He became convinced that his neighbours were boring holes in the walls and trying to shoot him. He took a revolver from his desk and went outside, “and all we know is that he was arrested,” says Ogilvie. Dormer was admitted to Croydon Mental Hospital. Following his release, he never sent another slip to Murray.
Researching the volunteers threw up continual surprises for Ogilvie. She was surprised by how many women contributed to the dictionary at a time when many were denied tertiary education. She was surprised by how many volunteers were not from the scholarly elite. And she was not expecting so many Americans to have contributed; the OED is generally considered a “quintessentially British text and product”, but it was in fact a “global project”.
Many volunteers contributed words that had originated outside of Europe. William Minor, an American army surgeon who primarily read travellers’ tales, sent in words such as pilau, pagoda, cockatoo and khan. Minor is the subject of the “M for Murderers” chapter, having shot a man, but he was found not guilty on the grounds of insanity and imprisoned at a Berkshire asylum. There, Minor suffered from hallucinations of sexual assault, and one day in December 1901, taking the knife he used to open leaves of antique books, he opened his trousers, “held his penis and tied a tourniquet around the base of it, and, with all his surgeon’s precision, cut it off,” writes Ogilvie. He survived, and by the time he stopped sending slips in 1906, he had become the fourth-highest contributor, having submitted 62,720 words.
Ogilvie says that she remains “intrigued by the challenges” of writing dictionaries, and in particular the “impossibility” of describing words and meanings in an “objective way”. By the time the OED was finally completed in 1928, 70 years after the crowdsourcing project began, the contributions of 3,000 volunteers had been woven into the dictionary’s 414,825 entries. Speaking at a dinner celebrating its completion, prime minister Stanley Baldwin said of the book: “If ever a work was destined for eternity, that is it.”
• The Dictionary People by Sarah Ogilvie is published by Chatto & Windus (£22). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges apply
