THE DICTIONARY OF LOST WORDS
PIP WILLIAMS
Ballantine Books
$28.00 hardcover, available now
Rating: 4* of five
The Publisher Says: In this remarkable debut based on actual events, as a team of male scholars compiles the first Oxford English Dictionary, one of their daughters decides to collect the "objectionable" words they omit.
Esme is born into a world of words. Motherless and irrepressibly curious, she spends her childhood in the "Scriptorium," a garden shed in Oxford where her father and a team of dedicated lexicographers are collecting words for the very first Oxford English Dictionary. Young Esme's place is beneath the sorting table, unseen and unheard. One day a slip of paper containing the word "bondmaid" flutters to the floor. She rescues the slip, and when she learns that the word means slave-girl, she withholds it from the OED and begins to collect other words that have been discarded or neglected by the dictionary men.
As she grows up, Esme realizes that words and meanings relating to women's and common folks' experiences often go unrecorded. And so she begins in earnest to search out words for her own dictionary: The Dictionary of Lost Words. To do so she must leave the sheltered world of the university and venture out to meet the people whose words will fill those pages.
Set during the height of the women's suffrage movement with the Great War looming, The Dictionary of Lost Words reveals a lost narrative, hidden between the lines of a history written by men.
Based on actual events and combed from author Pip Williams's experience delving into the archives of the Oxford English Dictionary, this highly original novel is a delightful, lyrical, and deeply thought-provoking celebration of words and the power of language to shape the world.
I CHECKED THIS BOOK OUT FROM MY COUNTY'S LIBRARY SYSTEM. USE YOUR LIBRARY, FOLKS! THEY NEED US!
My Review: First, read his:
Some words are more than letters on a page, don't you think? They have shape and texture. They are like bullets, full of energy, and when you give one breath you can feel its sharp edge against your lip.
–and–
I often wondered what kind of slip I would be written on if I was a word. Something too long, certainly. Probably the wrong colour. A scrap of paper that didn't quite fit. I worried that perhaps I would never find my place in the pigeon-holes at all.
–and–
A vulgar word, well placed and said with just enough vigour, can express far more than its polite equivalent.
There is an immense gulf between thoughts and words...Esme, as a girl in the almost-all-male world of dictionary-obsessed dad Harry, discovers again and again that the ideas we robe in words aren't seen by those who hear them as we've made them in our minds. The factual world of making the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) presided over by Dr. James Murray is expanded to include a fictional word-mad girl-child whose run-ins with lying adults, oblivious adults, and peers without her ruling passion for The Words We Use are the meat of this delicious, if difficult to deal with at times, novel. Esme Nicholl does not spend her life the way Dr. Murray's typically Victorian daughters do. Her days are spent being educated at school; her afternoons with the men at the Scriptorium as they collate and pigeonhole and excise the tens of thousands of definitions and attestations through usage that arrive in Dr. Murray's home/workhouse from around the world. Careless dropping or deliberate deletion, it makes no never-mind to young Esme. She re-homes them in her treasure-chest, under a housemaid's bed, their shared secret.
The dropped words, Esme notices as her life gives her more analytical tools, are often words commonly used by, among, and about women and their activities. Her world is coming for her, bent on controlling her and bending her to its will. Her Godmother Edith, a factual person really nicknamed Ditte, is a very unconventional woman and a prolific contributor the OED. She's acted as a co-parent, in a limited way, to Esme; yet she fails her when Esme desperately needs her simply because Ditte doesn't live in Oxford, let alone in daily contact with Esme.
“Dr. Murray said you and Beth were proflitic contributors,” I said, with some authority.
“Prolific,” Ditte corrected.
“Is that a nice thing to be?”
“It means we have collected a lot of words and quotations for Dr. Murray’s dictionary, and I’m sure he meant it as a compliment.”
The relationship is pretty tidily encapsulated there. Older mentor, not quite understanding the mentee but giving great guidance anyway; just not quite what was really needed. The words for things are centered; the denotations are generously given, while the connotations are left more or less to Esme's maturing brain to construct as best she can. She is, after all, equipped with well-designed tools...but no manuals to train their user in their best use.
In her word-collecting fever, Esme amasses much raw data, many denotations. Her goal for it remains unfocused until she realizes that the words' connotations give her the needed feminist perspective: she and her half of humanity are doomed to be controlled until they can participate in life as political actors instead of passive observers. Yes, she discovers Feminism and becomes a suffragette. And uses her life-long capacity to work with words to give sharp focus to her purpose.
If war could change the nature of men, it would surely change the nature of words.
–and–
“Words change over time, you see. The way they look, the way they sound; sometimes even their meaning changes. They have their own history.”
Something I wish people who fuss over neologisms and redefinitions would process. Things are growing or dying. There is no stasis in natural systems, and no homeostasis doesn't count...it is a finely balanced state but predicated on constant shifts and changes that must support a larger whole's proper, healthy functioning. Just like language...the words are always tip-tilting, reconfiguring themselves, shedding pieces and adding others; but the language as a whole lives and thrives and, broadly, remains the same. Only different.
It struck me that we are never fully at ease when we are aware of another's gaze. Perhaps we are never fully ourselves. In the desire to please or impress, to persuade or dominate, our movements become conscious, our features set.
That snapshot effect, the mask of Persona slid over a person's face, is what Esme is resisting as she rescues rejected and deleted words from the magisterial OED. Her women's words are the ones men most need, and are supremely reluctant, to hear. Esme's project, fictional of course, is the titular dictionary, with words like "menstruation" (simply too earthy and shuddersome for the frail little men making the OED) to "knackered" because it's vulgar and ugly when a more refined person could say "exhausted" or "listless." Esme thinks "bollocks to that" and spends her adulthood on the many pieces that must be moved around and reconfigured to make a society that can even properly think about a way to include women as adult beings.
And herein the reason I don't give this book a five-star warble of ecstasy...the passage of time. It doesn't. I'm herky-jerkyed into different stages of Esme and the world's life but the setting remains...internal. It's The Esme Show, instead of Truman; she's the star and no doubt. But there's a degree of alienation in that. Thank goodness there are so many dates to open chapters! Too bad they don't mean more. It's certainly true that we, in our daily rounds, don't think carefully about where the screens in the piston of our french-press coffeepot come from, or how and when to clean or replace them. But some sense of Esme's adjustments to the world around her, since her project is to effect true change upon it, would've helped me grasp the maturation parts of time's passage. I felt the lack of that connection keenly.
Esme's relationships were also a bit troubling to read for this reason. Lizzie, her female exemplar in residence, was a lower-class girl whose best hopes weren't as high as she's actually risen by working for the Murrays and becoming Esme's comadre. By rights she should be a dead young worn-out whore. So the way the privileged miss and the rough serving girl should practically leap off the page at me, right?
“Me needlework will always be here,” she said. “I see this and I feel…well, I don’t know the word. Like I’ll always be here.”
“Permanent,” I said. “And the rest of the time?”
“I feel like a dandelion just before the wind blows.”
–and–
My mother was like a word with a thousand slips. Lizzie’s mother was like a word with only two, barely enough to be counted. And I had treated one as if it were superfluous to need.
It's really the fate of most of us...we vanish into nothingness as soon as we assume room temperature. Ephemeral as life is, what I found wantimg in those perfectly lovely passages was the solidity of Life beating Esme with her own responsibility to and for the older but more vulnerable on a practical life-level woman.
Still and all, I'm so pleased that I read this wonderful story. I think it could have made more of an impact on me had some stylistic choices been made differently; that is always the way with making art, no one can create something as powerful and fully realized as this book is without making choices that won't work for everyone. I felt very strongly the aura of choices and decisions affirmatively, consideredly made at every turn. This is in no way a slapdash or ill-made work of fiction. Its real and its fictional characters are treated with equal gravitas. That the factual characters take up less screen time is a decision that the author and editor clearly planned carefully and executed deftly. I can offer no more heartfelt recommendation than "read this book soon." I *could* have, if certain other, less distancing, choices had been made, turned obnoxious pest and shouted at you to get the book NOW read it on the Jitney or in the Admiral's Club but just GET IT!!
But really, does it get that much better than this?
I thought about all the words I’d collected from Mabel and from Lizzie and from other women: women who gutted fish or cut cloth or cleaned the ladies’ public convenience on Magdalen Street. They spoke their minds in words that suited them, and were reverent as I wrote their words on slips. These slips were precious to me, and I hid them in the trunk to keep them safe. But from what? Did I fear they would be scrutinised and found deficient? Or were those fears I had for myself? I never dreamed the givers had any hopes for their words beyond my slips, but it was suddenly clear that no one but me would ever read them. The women’s names, so carefully written, would never be set in type. Their words and their names would be lost as soon as I began to forget them. My Dictionary of Lost Words was no better than the grille in the Ladies’ Gallery of the House of Commons: it hid what should be seen and silenced what should be heard.
Pip Williams: I salute you for writing a grown-up book for real, passionate readers.
