Podcast Transcript
Pip Williams “The Dictionary of Lost Words”
SPEAKERS
Nicole Abadee, Pip Williams
Nicole Abadee 00:05
Hello, I'm Nicole Abadee and I write about books for good weekend. Welcome to the Books, Books, Books podcast in which I interview the best writers from Australia and overseas about their latest book. Thank you for joining me. Before we begin, I would like to acknowledge the country where I live and work and from where I'm joining this conversation, the lands of the Gadigal people of the Eora nation. I pay my respects to their elders past and present to the elders of all communities and cultures across Australia, and to leaders of the future. You can listen to this podcast all of the episodes at nicoleabadee.com.au or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Today, I'm delighted to welcome Australian writer Pip Williams to Books, Books Books, to speak about her debut novel, "The Dictionary of Lost Words," which has been something of a lockdown sensation selling over 150,000 copies and winning a number of awards. It was published in March 2020. Just as the first lockdowns began by Affirm Press. I'd like to say that this is a very special episode of Books, Books Books. This is a session that was due to take place live at the Byron Writers Festival in August 2021. Very, very sadly, the festival was cancelled due to Covid but I am thrilled to be able to present this interview as a part of the Books, Books, Books podcast series. Before becoming a full time writer, which I might say was largely in part due to the phenomenal success of this novel, Pip was a social researcher studying how people live their lives and what makes lives good. "The Dictionary of Lost Words" is Pip's third book and first novel, and it's based on her original research in the Oxford English Dictionary archivewhich you are going to hear a little bit about later. International rights have been sold into multiple territories and the book has been published in the US and the UK, in April 2021. Pip's book has had rave reviews here and overseas. It has sold a phenomenal 150,000 copies. It's appeared in national bestseller lists and it's won the following literary awards; The Indie Book Awards it Won both Book of the Year and Best Debut for 2021. It won the MUD Literary Prize for Debut Fiction, the ABIA General Fiction Book of the Year. New South Wales Premieres Literary Awards People's Choice Award 2021, the ABA Nielsen Booksellers Choice - Adult Fiction Book of the year 2021, and it's been shortlisted and long listed for other awards as well. Acclaimed Australian writer Geraldine Brooks has said this about "The Dictionary of Lost Words" "Pip Williams has spun a marvelous fiction about the power of language to elevate or repress it is at once timely, and timeless." It's absolutely wonderful to have you here today on books, books books.
Pip Williams 03:06
Oh Nicole I haven't, I haven't had anyone summarise everything quite like that and I have to admit, I'm a bit teary now. It's been yeah, it's been an incredible 18 months, really. So thank you so much for I don't know, the honour that you give the book in that introduction. And before we start, I was I was just hoping to acknowledge the lands that I'm actually talking to you from so I wrote this book on Kaurna Country and also Peramangk country. And they are the original storytellers of the place where I come from. So Kaurna is the Adelaide Plains and Peramangk people are the traditional owners of the Adelaide Hills and it's it's a great honour to be able to acknowledge this and to know who these people were, and in the case of Kaurna, to understand that so many of the words that were once lost are now being found for those peoples. And, you know, that's kind of what this book is about.
Nicole Abadee 04:19
Thank you, Pip. Would you like to start by reading a short extract for us?
Pip Williams 04:23
I'd love to so I'm reading right from the beginning. This is the prologue and it's February 1886. Before the lost word, there was another, it arrived at the scriptorium in a secondhand envelope, the older address crossed out, and Dr. Murray, Sunnyside, Oxford, written in its place. It was da's job to open the post and mine to sit on his lap like a queen on her throne and help him ease each word out of its folded cradle. He'd tell me what pile to put it on and sometimes he'd pause cover my hand cues and guide my finger up and down and around the letters, sounding them into my ear. He'd say the word and I would echo it, then he tell me what it meant. This word was written on a scrap of brown paper, its edges rough where it had been torn to match Dr. Murray's preferred dimensions. Da paused, and I readied myself to learn it. But his hands didn't cover mine. And when I turned to hurry him, the look on his face made me stop. As close as we were, he looked far away. I turned back to the word and tried to understand without his hand to guide me, I traced each letter. What does it say? I asked, Lily. He said, like Mama, like Mama. Does that mean she'll be in the dictionary? In a way? Yes. Will we all be in the dictionary? No. Why? I felt myself rise and fall on the movement of this breath. A name must mean something to be in the dictionary. I looked at the word again. Was mama like a flower? I asked. Da nodded the most beautiful flower. He picked up the word and read the sentence beneath it. Then he turned it over, looking for more. It's incomplete, he said. But he read it again his eyes flicking back and forth, as if he might find what was missing. He put the word down on the smallest pile. Dad pushed his chair back from the sorting table. I climbed off his lap and readied myself to hold the first pile of slips. This was another job I could help with and I love to see each word find its place among the pigeon holes. He picked up the smallest pile and I tried to guess where mama would go. Not too high and not too low, I sang to myself. But instead of putting the words in my hand, da took three long steps toward the fire grate and threw them into the flames. There were three slips. When they left his hand, each was danced by the draft of heat to a different resting place. Before it had even landed, I saw Lily begin to curl. I heard myself scream as I ran towards the grate. I heard da bellow my name. The slip was writhing I reached in to rescue it, even as the brown paper charred and the letters written on it turned to shadows. I thought I might hold it like an oak leaf, faded and winter crisp. But when I wrapped my fingers around the word, it shattered. I might have stayed in that moment forever but da yanked me away with a force that winded. He ran with me out of the scriptorium and plunged my hand into the snow. His face was ashen. So I told him it didn't hurt. But when I unfilled my hand, the blackened shards of the word was stuck to my melted skin. Some words are more important than others. I learned this growing up in the scriptorium. But it took me a long time to understand why.
Nicole Abadee 08:11
Thank you. Could you start by telling us what your novel is about?
Pip Williams 08:17
So "The Dictionary of Lost Words" is a novel that weaves fact and fiction. So the fact that is woven through this novel is the compilation of the first Oxford English Dictionary. And this was a project that was begun in 1858. And completed in 1928, a 17 year project to collate all the words of the English language, present and past into what ended up being 12 massive volumes of words, it was a project that they thought would take 10 years, but took 70 and had a number of of Chief Editors, but the most the most celebrated is James Murray, he really got the project up and running. And and it was it was really his baby for most of his the second half of his adult life. And within that scaffold if you if you like I've woven the story of a little girl called Esme, what I wanted to know, really was do words mean different things to men and women? And if they do, is there a chance that something is missing in the way that we've defined our language, our English language? I could have explored this in a way like a social scientist. I could have just done the historical research and tried to answer this question and in fact, the reason I came up with the question at all was because I had read Simon Winchester's, book The Surgeon of Crowthorne, which was a fascinating bit of nonfiction about this project, but at the end of it by, I was left with this impression that it was a very male project. But most importantly, the data I suppose that that was used to define words had to be text. So words had to be written down in order to end up in the dictionary. The lexicographers collected sentences in which words have been used in order to develop definitions. Now, the the literature that they were looking at, literature, scientific journals, manuals, textbooks, you name it, most of that was written by men, particularly prior to the 20th century.
Nicole Abadee 10:44
When you read The Surgeon of Crowthorne, your impression was that the whole endeavor was very male. Just tell us a little bit about that, who is involved in the process? And, and the fact that all of them really were men.
Pip Williams 10:57
Yeah, of course. So, essentially, like most things, in the Victorian era, the people who were the movers and shakers of the world were men, and, and the dictionary was no different. So the editors of the dictionary were all men. The the dictionary, the idea for the dictionary actually came about at a meeting of the London Physiological Society, which was all men, and not just any men. They were men who had to, they were men who had particular social standing and degrees, usually from Oxford and Cambridge. So even Dr. Murray, Dr James Murray, who eventually became the editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, found it difficult to become a member of this society because he was just a humble school teacher from Scotland. He didn't have the same social standing or education, as these men who were proposing a new dictionary, a dictionary that would improve on Samuel Johnson's much more thorough dictionary than those that had gone before but also still quirky, and and, you know, lacking in substance, I suppose. And so this was a very elite group of men to begin with. And then all of the editors, the lexicographers, the people who were paying for the dictionary, which was the delegates of Oxford University Press, every single one of them was a man. And not, like I said, just any man, they weren't equally represented, men weren't equally represented in these in these groups of people either. They were well educated, upper class and middle class men.
Nicole Abadee 12:46
And Pip there were other participants as well. Could you tell us about the role of volunteers and they were, they were mainly men.
Pip Williams 12:52
Yes. So James Murray, the reason that the dictionary ever really got off the ground was because James Murray sent out a call to the general public, to send in examples of how words have been used in books and the volunteers were the people from all around the globe, really, who sent in little slips of paper with words and example sentences. And the majority of these volunteers were men, partly because a lot of them were scholars themselves, or good readers had big libraries and so on. There were, there were many women who were volunteers and sent words in and some of those women, I honour, in, in this book, one in particular, Edith Thompson, but by and large, the people involved were men, but most importantly, the words had been written by men.
Nicole Abadee 13:43
And why did that concern you, Pip?
Pip Williams 13:46
So it concerned me initially, as a social scientist, the data was biased. You know, it's kind of like, if if we ran the census, which we all participated in recently, and we only sent it to men. And then we made decisions about the experience of living in Australia based on the experiences of the men who filled out the census. It's exactly the same problem. We were defining the language based on data that had been gathered by men and written by men. And I, I had to assume that that meant that the dictionary and the words and the way they've been defined was biased towards men's experience. And this came as a huge shock to me because I looked at the dictionaries on my bookshelf and, and suddenly, in a flash, I realised that they were not the objective arbiters of truth that I had always thought they were. It also made me question other texts as well actually encyclopedias, maps, even you know also atlases also sorts of things that originated 100, 200, 300 years ago and, and you know, the foundation of these texts that we think are objective. Those foundations started in Victorian times when women and other people, working class people, migrants, you know, Indigenous people really had no voice, no say, and no representation.
Nicole Abadee 15:27
So in your book, as you said, you have a mixture of fictional characters and those who are based on real life people. Let's start by talking about the, your main protagonists the, the fictional Esme. So she's born in 1881. When we first met her in 1886, she's a little girl aged five, and she's the one whose voice you were reading in when you read that extract before. Tell us a little bit about Esme, what do we know about her?
Pip Williams 15:54
So Esme is motherless and that's quite important to the story, though, I have to admit, I didn't realise at the time how important it really was. But Esme is motherless, she's an only child and because of that fact, her father, who is a lexicographer, in the scriptorium, working on the Oxford English Dictionary, is allowed to bring her to work. So the scriptorium is one of our it's one of those beautiful facts that is just a gem for a historical fiction writer. The scriptorium was a corrugated iron shed in the front yard of James Murray's house in Oxford. Apparently, it was freezing cold in winter, and hot in summer because it was just an iron, a garden shed. It was large enough, though, to house probably about eight lexicographers and assistants who were working with Dr. Murray, on collating the English language and it's walls were lined with bookshelves containing old dictionaries and other reference books, but also pigeon holes. And the pigeon holes were, as you can imagine a sort of, the pigeon holes that might be in a staff room in a school or something. They were designed specifically to hold the slips of paper that held the words and example sentences. They were exactly the right size for these slips of paper. And there were hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of these pigeon holes packed with slips of paper 1000s and 1000s of words
Nicole Abadee 17:36
Mostly received from volunteers Pip?
Pip Williams 17:38
Yes, oh, almost all of them received from volunteers. Some of them would have been solicited, particularly from experts, but all of them have been sent in by, you know, by volunteers in that people weren't paid to collect these words and write the sentences down. But I think for many people, it became a wonderful hobby, actually, because you can see in the volumes, James Murray, actually, thanks, all the, not all the volunteers, but the volunteers who sent in large numbers of words and sentences. And when I say large numbers, I mean, 1000s and 1000s, of words and sentences. And so for some people, this was their life, really. And, and, in fact, you know, when I say their life, decades of their life was dedicated to volunteering for this, this Oxford English Dictionary, and if you like for, for the preservation of the English language, and Esme grows up in this place that is full of words and words to her are tangible, and I hope that that's what you got from the reading that I gave that, you know, that very first word that I suppose is the catalyst for Esme's concern for words, there was this one word that represented her mother, Lily and it was thrown into the flames. And for, from that moment on, words become tangible, fragile things for Esme.
Nicole Abadee 17:40
And Esme in fact starts collecting words, and I'd like you to tell us about the first word that she finds, how she comes across it and what she does with it.
Pip Williams 18:52
So the very first word that Esme finds, or that finds her is the word "bondmaid" and bondmaid means slave girl. And the interesting thing about bondmaide and again, another one of those little, you know, nuggets of gold from the history from the archives, bondmaid really did go missing from the Oxford English Dictionary. In fact, James Murray, James Murray tried to convince absolutely everybody who, who knew about this missing word that it was the only word that ever went missing. According to him it was almost impossible for words to be misplaced or lost. And the fact that this one was was an anomaly. I beg to differ having now done the research and having a bit of an understanding of the process, I think there are many ways a word might have been lost. And my book explores that to some extent, but this very first word, there is no explanation for how it was lost. The original slip with the definition was never found, though, of course, a new one was made and put into the supplement that was published in in the 30s. But the very first dictionary, A and B, the very first volume, I have a copy, actually, that my partner gave me for my birthday. And the first thing I did, of course, was look for that word bondmaid, and it is not there. It is definitely missing.
Nicole Abadee 20:54
Someone writes to Dr. Murray to tell him that that word's missing.
Pip Williams 20:57
That's right. So the volume was published in 1888. But James Murray didn't find out about this missing word until 1901, when a member of the public wrote a letter asking why it wasn't there, when bondman was there, you know, other related words were in the dictionary but not bondmaid. And that letter itself has also gone missing I think but there's reference to it. It was it was archived in a way. So it's receipt was archived, and its content, in general was noted. But the letter I haven't been able to find and so that was something else I could make up
Nicole Abadee 21:36
That was then the kernel of this story with Esme wasn't it. So in your story, how does Esme get hold of this word? And what does she do with it?
Pip Williams 21:44
Yes, so because we don't know how it was lost, I could make it up. And I've put Esme underneath the sorting table in the scriptorium. So like you said she was about four or five years old, very small. Her job was to once she'd helped her dad was to stay quiet and out of the way. And so she would stay under the sorting table. And every now and then slips of paper would fall from the sorting table. And this one fell from the edge of the sorting table and into her lap. And because nobody bent down to claim it, she kept it. And she asked her one and only friend in the world, Lizzie, who was the maid in the big house, which was James Murray's house, she asked Lizzy if Lizzie could look after it. And Lizzie gave her an empty trunk, which she kept under her bed. And this trunk becomes Esme's Dictionary of Lost Words and she starts collecting other slips of paper that have fallen, not being claimed or have been neglected or discarded on purpose. She collects them and she keeps them in this trunk under Lizzie's bed.
Nicole Abadee 22:54
As she gets older, we see her year by year in there with her father in the scriptorium watching everyone. And then from the time she's 17, she asks if she can actually be her father's assistant. And as the years passed, we see her being given greater and greater responsibilities working with her father, in the scriptorium. One day she hears her friend Lizzie use an unfamiliar word or in fact, she's heard her use it a few times the word knackered. What does she decide to do with that word?
Pip Williams 23:25
So knackered is a word that I have also heard it through the generations of my of the women in my family, so I know it's an old word. And when I talk to people I know other people have this same experience of this word. And what Esme decides to do is take a slip of paper that had that had been sent in by a volunteer but was incomplete. So when they're incomplete, they they get sort of reused, they cross out what was on one side and they reuse the slip of paper. She turns it over and she writes knackered on the top of this slip of paper, and then she writes the sentence that Lizzie has used in order to help define it. And under that Esme provides a sort of tentative definition using Lizzie's Meaning, if that makes sense.
Nicole Abadee 24:22
She does it in the same way that the words are done that she's seen it done in the scriptorium in relation to words that have been sent in by volunteers.
Pip Williams 24:31
That's exactly right. She does it in exactly the same way. And interestingly, she also does it on the back of a slip that was for the word listless, and the word listless, she realises is similar to knackered but not quite the same and what she realizes in that moment is that this word knackered which is not in the dictionary, she looks it up, it has not been included. What she realizes is that this is a word that is used by people who work really Hard in physical labour, and the people who work really hard in physical labour, at the end of the day, they feel like a worn out horse, like they're good for nothing but the knackery. And this is she realizes that this is an experience that's different to tired or listless. And it's an experience of the working class. And she wonders if this is why the word doesn't get included, or hasn't been written down, because the people who feel knackered don't write and like Lizzie, many of them are illiterate, in fact, and so she writes this word on a slip and it's the first time anything Lizzie has ever said, has been written down. And from then on she she gets the idea to collect other words, particularly from women. And she asks Lizzie to help her with that.
Nicole Abadee 25:52
She says, doesn't she you are saying that she realizes that, that there are words that haven't been included, because they're their words used by working class people who aren't involved in writing the dictionary. But then as you say, she realizes something more particularly and she asks, "Do you think there are some words that only women use or that apply to women specifically?" and as you say, she then starts setting about collecting new words, mainly from women that have never been written down. Where does she get those words from? Where does she find them?
Pip Williams 26:22
So she finds them in the places where working women exist. So in particular, the covered market, which is a real place in Oxford, which has, you know, all of those sort of food sellers and stalls selling various things, but there's one, one little stall in particular that she likes to visit. And although Lizzie tries to dissuade her from this because the owner of this store, which is really two rickety crates, set up with flotsam and jetsam, but that, Mabel, the store holder has has just gathered from the Thames at low tide. She is the poorest of the poor, she's the she's one of the most undesirable people in Oxford, really. She's, she's old, her teeth are missing, she smells, her hair's falling out and she used to be a prostitute in her younger years. And she she has one of the most colourful languages that Esme, in particular, has ever heard, and also that Lizzie has ever heard. And Lizzie tries to protect Esme if you like, from from Mabels potty mouth and tries to steer her away but Esme is is intrigued and and she wants to know these words that Mabel uses, she wants to understand them. And so as well as as gathering words from other people, Mabel becomes the person, Mabel represents many of the women that Esme collects words from.
Nicole Abadee 27:59
And I have to ask you what are some of the words that she learns from Mabel you might want to use a abbreviated form for one of them.
Pip Williams 28:08
So it's nice In fact, Lizzie comes up with the abbreviated form in my in my story. Lizzie calls it the C word and and the way that Mabel, Mabel uses it in a Limerick, actually, and and the Limerick uses the word as a euphemism, not as an insult. So in in order for Mabel to help Esme understand what this word really means because it's bandied about as an insult a vulgar insult. Yeah, it's actually used as an insult often to apply to a man especially today. Today we throw this word usually at men back then it, Mabel uses it towards towards a woman. But originally, so this word, the reason it's interesting, and the reason it's in my book isn't just for a sort of bit of kind of, you know, shock value. It's in my book because it's one of the oldest words in the English language that's been written down. And it actually satisfied every single criteria for inclusion in the Oxford English Dictionary. And yet, James Murray is the one that excised it from the dictionary. He's the one that decided it would not go in because it was too vulgar. And this was actually a little out of character for James Murray, who was more likely to include words like this than many of the other people who were paying for it, who often asked for these words to be taken out. Who often said things like and I've seen letters where this has been the case, they they say things like "we shouldn't be encouraging the use of these words," so that they're all, they are admitting to their power in creating a dictionary and defining the language.
Nicole Abadee 30:01
And imposing their moral judgment,
Pip Williams 30:03
Exactly.
Nicole Abadee 30:04
As a form of selection criteria.
Pip Williams 30:06
Yes, exactly. And in this instance, James Murray agreed, and he left the word out, even though he was pretty dedicated to his scientific method of inclusion. And the reason that this bothered me in particular was because the word has not always been a vulgar insult. It was a euphemism, it was slang for a woman's body part. And in, in keeping with the Oxford English Dictionary as a history of the English language, in particular, it's it's devastating and a travesty that it was left out because because then people didn't have access to the origins of the word, they didn't have access to its original meaning and definition and use amongst the working class.
Nicole Abadee 30:58
Can I just ask you to explain that Pip? you make that point that there's something unique about the Oxford English Dictionary that sets it apart from other dictionaries, in that it is it is actually a historical text. Could you explain that?
Pip Williams 31:11
Yes, so unlike Macquarie, or the Collins dictionary, which gives you a word and its current definition, what the Oxford English Dictionary does is it gives you a word and the various definitions that word may have, because some words have various definitions. And then it gives you examples of how the word has been used throughout history dating back to the very first instance that that the lexicographers confined of that word. Now, if the C word had been included in that first dictionary, then the very first example of its use might have been a street sign in in London, because that's the first time that we know of that it was written down. And that was in around 1250, around that time in the 13th century. And so in a more literary sense, it was used by Chaucer and other writers of the time as a euphemism for a woman's body part. And so there's plenty of evidence of this word, dating back hundreds of years. And what the Oxford English Dictionary does, usually for a word is it allows you to, to read back over the history of that word to see how it's changed, depending on its circumstances, depending on who was using it at the time, and how, which is actually incredibly fascinating and very informative. And it was especially for me, writing this book. Esme starts collecting these words, she meets Mabel who's a great source of words, of the kind we've just discussed. And a lot of other words that Esme hasn't heard before.
Nicole Abadee 32:54
What does is made do with this? So she she writes the word down, and then she writes a sentence using the word, attributing it to the person who she's learned from, what does she do with those slips? What would she really liked to do with them.
Pip Williams 33:08
So what she really wants to do? Well, initially, she just collects them out of curiosity. And often this is how things start, this is how my books started, I started reading things out of curiosity. And eventually you collect enough information to tell a story of some kind. And in Esme's case, it's not to tell a story, but it's to document words that she knows are not going to be in the official dictionary that she's helping to compile at this stage. She knows these words will never be in there. But she thinks they're important. And by by giving them importance by writing them down in a way that they haven't been written down before, and attributing them to people who often can't read them, and have never had anything about, never had their name written down before and what she's doing is validating the language of these women. And what she wants is, in her heart of hearts, what she wants is to create an alternative dictionary, a dictionary of women's words, that recognizes the language and the meanings of words that women use.
Nicole Abadee 34:17
So this gets Esme thinking about a whole lot of things. And one of the things she asked her father is why is it that Dr. Murray won't include words that aren't written down? What's the answer?
Pip Williams 34:29
The answer or the answer, It's multi, there's a it's multi fold really. The answer is that some words don't stick to the tongue and are never written down because they are transient. And we have words like that. And in fact, dictionary, lexicographers are still making those decisions. Is this a word that's going to stick? Or is it just a fad that is really going to last a season if you like, does it deserve to be in in the dictionary. And, and so these decisions are constantly being made. But other words are one of the problems with with the Oxford English Dictionary in the very first volumes is that so many people were illiterate at that time. And, and so many people didn't have access to the means of publication. So even though women were writing and wanted to publish, they often didn't have access to the structures that would allow them to publish. And, and because of this many, many words, that might have been coined by women, or the working classes just were never written down. And because they're not written down, there's no evidence for them. It's, you know, in a court of law, these same things happen, you know, there's no tangible evidence for something and so therefore, it, we are to assume it doesn't exist. Or we can't test it, we can't test its veracity, we can't test its validity. If it's not written down. It's from a social scientists point of view, it's a, it's a failure of imagination. It's a failure of creativity, I suppose. If if something has to be written down, particularly at that time, then it's, then the dictionary is never going to be a complete record of the English language, past and present. It's only ever going to be partially a record of the English language.
Nicole Abadee 36:28
And that's what you found at the end of the research that you did for this novel. You found that the dictionary was I think the words you used were flawed and gendered. And there's a there's a lovely example that Esme challenges her father on this and says, it will, "what do you mean, why do the words have to be written down?" and she thinks of the various words that she's learned at the market and she says at one point, "well, that means that a word used by the greengrocer won't be included? But when Charles Dickens uses a word like jobtrotty" I have to say, I hadn't heard of before, "that will be included"
Pip Williams 37:03
And in fact, was. So jobtrotty. And there's a number of words like this.
Nicole Abadee 37:07
Is that sill in the dictionary PIP? It's not one I'd heard before,
Pip Williams 37:10
It's still in the dictionary, because just because they won't take words out. So jobtrotty got into the dictionary, because Dickens wrote it, essentially. That that is the reason.
Nicole Abadee 37:21
That's the only piece of evidence for its existence. Yes, it's the only time, it was only ever used once and it was only ever used by Dickens and it was never used again, as far as I know, except when people like us talk about Dickens writing the word jobtrotty. There are other words like this, and they're called nonce words. So they actually, James Murray did give them a category of their own. I don't know if nonce is short for nonsense, but if you look them up in the dictionary, they'll have nonce next to them. And it's an acknowledgement that they were kind of coined, especially for a particular text by a particular author, but they still got in.
Pip Williams 38:43
That's right, it had no history whatsoever. But another word that was on the same page, which I saw, when I looked at the proof pages of the dictionary, they've been typeset. And they were used, you know, to proofread. And editors would go through them and make decisions, just like an editor would today, you know, well, we need to get rid of some words from this page. What are we going to get rid of, and they put a big line through another word, which was literately. Now that word was coined by a Mrs. Griffith. That's how she's identified in a novel that she wrote. So it gives you the name of the novel and the author and usually the author has two names their first and last name, but in this case, it just has Mrs. Griffith. So she doesn't even get her own name. In the dictionary, she gets her husband's name. And, and she had coined this word, and it was defined as something that is written in a literary way. Makes perfect sense. And it's even a word that we might recognise, because in fact, it eventually did go into the dictionary, but not until, I think It's either 19 I've got two dates in my mind 1993 or 2001. And I know this because I spoke to one of the lexicographers who currently works at the Oxford English Dictionary and I told him about this, these two words, and he couldn't believe that literately was not in that first dictionary, and he
Nicole Abadee 40:20
Does that has anything to do with the gender of the person who used it?
Pip Williams 40:23
Possibly. Absolutely. And just like in you know, newspapers and journals today, the you know, there are decisions made when you need to cut down on content, and subconsciously, there's gender bias. Now, Colleridge was far more famous than Mrs. Griffith and they both had five lines, interestingly, exactly the same number of lines on this page. And a big line was drawn through Mrs. Griffiths word and exercise was printed next to it. I don't know whose handwriting it was. But But someone had excised it and so it and I checked the dictionary, it didn't get into the final version, and it didn't get into the 1989 second edition, either.
Nicole Abadee 41:09
I know that you made two visits to the archives at Oxford University. Would you like to tell us a little bit about the research involved?
Pip Williams 41:16
Yeah, well, I'm sure it's obvious. I just loved it. I loved everything about it. I love that I got to stay at both times at two different colleges. During the summer, they they rent the rooms out as a bed and breakfast. So I stayed at Mordern College the first time and Brasenose College, the second. Both 15th century colleges unbelievable. And then I walked around Oxford. I because Oxford has is unusual in that it's never been damaged in war. So it wasn't bombed during World War Two, for instance., so it's ancient streets and buildings are still all intact. And so I could walk the streets, that Esme walked, I could touch the stone buildings that Esme might have touched, I can go into the churches that she might have gone into and, and I had access to Oxford University Press and to the archives. And the archivists there are incredibly generous. They, they let me sit there all day, they would bring out boxes and boxes of slips, or, or proof pages, they would show me around the press, and they've got a lovely museum there that shows you how the printing process used to work and, and how they used to set the type and, and I can touch those little pieces of metal, that Gareth the compositor in, in this, in this story would have touched, and I can use the you know, the little bits of equipment that he would have used and and you know not, not only is the, is the archive important because of what you do see and touch and read in the archive. But it's also important for what's missing. And, and so, you know, one of the things that I found was not there were sometimes records of the women.
Nicole Abadee 43:13
I want to hear about that. Let's talk about one of the women who you did find some information about and that's Edith Thompson. So she features in your book, as she's called Aunty Dit. And she's...
Pip Williams 43:28
Dita.
Nicole Abadee 43:29
Dita Yes. And she's Esme's godmother, so she is based on the real person, Edith Thompson. What do you, what do we know about her? What did you uncover in your research about the real Edith Thompson? Who was she and what was her role in relation to the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary?
Pip Williams 43:48
Okay, so I'll tell you two things, and you can, you can decide for yourself whether she's been adequately acknowledged in history. Edith Thompson started off as a volunteer sending in words with sentences. She did this from the very first letter A to the very last Z, so she was a volunteer for the dictionary for 45-50 years of her life. Not only did she send in words, she was such a valued volunteer that she was asked to proofread pages she was asked to find definitions of particular words, or uses. She was asked, she would have been asked sometimes to create tentative definitions for words. This is the work of a lexicographer. In her own right she was a what you might call an amateur historian, but good enough to have written the History of England textbook that was used, and multiple editions were printed over many, many years, was used in high schools throughout the UK. And in fact, I think in Canada. She was assistant to a real in inverted commas historian and she wrote a biography of her grandfather who was, who was a parliamentarian and in fact, an advocate for universal suffrage at the time. And there's there's a lovely word universal, it didn't actually include women, but included men of all races and creed. That's what universal meant back then. And so she, she's an incredible woman. And yet, if you go online and look for any information about her, there's about half a page of information written about Edith Thompson, and it's because she was the biographer of her grandfather. So I can't even find anything about her writing this History of England. That's, that's a line in in various things but there's, there's no detail about that. And she represented for me, I suppose, many of the women who worked on the dictionary. Other women include women who are in the story, Ross Frith and Elsie Murray are Daughters of James Murray, and Eleanor Bradley. And they were paid to work on the dictionary, and all three of those women worked on the dictionary for most of their adult life.
Nicole Abadee 46:14
How hard was it to find written information about them?
Pip Williams 46:18
Oh there is none, practically none, other than in reference to their fathers, and to the fact they worked at the dictionary. When I went into the archives, I found more, I found, for instance, evidence of them on a pay sheet. And of course, they were right down the bottom, they got paid the least. I found evidence of them through letters. So the archives at Oxford University Press contain many, many, many letters between Edith Thompson and James Murray. And they're wonderful and she had an incredible sense of humour. She would often draw the the worksheet, so if a word that she was sending in some information about was a physical object, she would draw it and try to explain how it worked. So that the lexicographers could define it better. She would tell stories about how difficult it was or how demeaning it was to go into a hairdressers and and find out what a lip pencil was. "And, and you know, they must think me terribly frivolous because I was asking about all the colours etc." Things like this. So I got to know a little of her character through her letters. And but really, I had some biographical information, but really very little else. And I think the thing that made me want to keep her in my story as Edith Thompson, I didn't give, I didn't give her a pseudonym in that she is Edith Thompson in the book and Eesme gives her the nickname Dita, and that was my way of solving that ethical conundrum of fictionalising a real human being. I decided that because she really had been so neglected in the official history, her name does not appear as often as it should. In the official history. I didn't want to excise her from this story. I really wanted to use her real name, but to acknowledge that I fictionalised half of her existence in this story, I call her Dita when she is in correspondence or interaction with the fictional characters in this story.
Nicole Abadee 48:35
Pip I want to ask you a lovely anecdote that you retell with a photograph at the end, I think about the dinner that was held in 1928 to celebrate the completion of the Oxford English Dictionary and who was included in that dinner and who wasn't? Could you tell us that story?
Pip Williams 48:54
Yes. So okay, this was one of those moments in the archives that, you know, was kind of painful, overwhelming, and also incredibly exciting, because in terms of my book, when I was in the archives, I came across the seating arrangement for the dinner that celebrated the final publication of the final words of the Oxford English Dictionary. Now, this dinner was held in 1928, in Goldsmith's Hall in London, and it was presided over by the Prime Minister, and various other, you know, high ranking people. 150 people were invited to eat in the hall to celebrate the dictionary. And they included people who had worked on the dictionary, you know, for decades, lexicographers assistants, and so on. They included newspaper editors who'd been covering the story of the dictionary. They included people who'd worked on the dictionary maybe for decades or maybe just for a few months, like Tolkien, for instance. JRR Tolkien was invited because he worked on the dictionary for 18 months after the war. It included people that knew people who worked on the dictionary school teachers, etc. But it did not include a single woman. Even though like I said, Edith Thompson, Eleanor Bradley Ross Frith Murray, Elsie Murray had worked on the dictionary paid and unpaid for 40 years each of their life. But three of these women, Edith, Eleanor, and Ross Frith were invited to sit in the balcony of Goldsmith's Hall and watch the men eat.
Nicole Abadee 50:45
And were given a copy of the menu outline.
Pip Williams 50:48
That might be me fictionalising that bit, I don't, I'm assuming they would know what the menu was, if they were watching them eat. They would have seen the champagne flow, the caviar, the turtle soup. I have the menu. So I know what they ate. I know what they drank. This is the wonderful thing about an archive, you know, you can't make this stuff up. They really did eat turtle soup. And, and I've got the proceedings as well. So, you know, I know what the prime minister said about this book and I know that he thanked all the men involved. So you know, this, this is just an example of how women have been excised from history, you know, and they've been excised from the celebrations of the effort that has gone into all sorts of historical moments that they've been part of, and yet they haven't been even invited to the celebration.
Nicole Abadee 51:44
It's a perfect allegory, isn't it that they're there as bystanders? Not participants?
Pip Williams 51:48
Yeah, that's that's exactly right, even though they were participants, even though EdithThompson probably created many of the definitions that are in the dictionary.
Nicole Abadee 51:59
Pip you said that at the beginning of your research for the novel, you wanted to find out these two things? Do words mean different things to men and women? And if they do, does it matter that the dictionary was, this dictionary, was developed by men? What were the answers that you came to? Was the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary infected by bias?
Pip Williams 52:19
Yes, and not just gender bias, class bias, and racial bias. There are definitions in that first volume of the Oxford English Dictionary or that first edition, that, you know, would, would just shock you. The way that people of color, people from col, you know, colonised countries are described in the dictionary. I know that these, many of these while they never take a word out, in the process of updating the dictionary, the lexicographers are also updating the entries that are clearly gendered or racist. And rightly so because that's the other wonderful thing though, about these paper additions, is that, not only do they tell us how a word was defined at a particular moment in time, but the definition itself and some of the descriptors that are used, they tell us about the people who were defining them. They tell us what the values of those people were. And that's what for me, as a novelist, and in this book, I found incredibly fascinating, but also why I would defend the, the preservation of these old documents. I would not want, it's one of the things that worries me about a digital, a digital only, you know, edition, third edition, one of the things that worries me is that digitally, we can always update things. And we don't necessarily keep the history of that thing.
Nicole Abadee 54:10
Is that what's happening Pip, though? I know, I know that they're working on a new edition. Is it to be a digital edition?
Pip Williams 54:16
They're not sure they think it will be so big that it might only be digitally available. Yes. So that is the the current thinking. So it's it's not clear yet whether there will be a hard paper edition. It might just be digital. But for me the problem is, as a, I'm not a historian, but as a novelist or as a researcher or speaking on the behalf of historians, what you then might lose, is that that sort of that information that's between the lines.
Nicole Abadee 54:51
Yes. So insight into the mindsets of those that are writing the definition.
Pip Williams 54:55
That's right. That's right. You know, one very small example is in the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, they have the word pants, as in trousers. And, you know, not an offensive word at all as far as we know, but it's defined as a vulgar abbreviation of pantaloons used in America. So that's how it's defined. And that tells us so much about the person defining it, rather than about the people using that word pants. Because I don't think Americans at the time thought it was vulgar. But the English did.
Nicole Abadee 55:31
Pip I want to just end by looking at this idea of the new addition, being prepared. And I've seen you talking, I think it's outside this book somewhere else, saying that you have hope for the future of the this latest edition of the Oxford Dictionary and you said that our modern lexicographers are documenting their language in a way that was not possible for James Murray and his team. Could you just end by telling us a little bit about that? What are they doing differently? And what's the significance of that?
Pip Williams 56:02
So there are a number of things that are different and I am a fan of the Oxford English Dictionary. As much as I think that original one was gendered, it was also extraordinary, as so many projects are, and we have to keep building on on these things and improving them. That's that's what we do. As humans, we evolve. And the dictionary is evolving in many ways. And one of those ways is by having many, much more diversity on the staff. They have had a woman editor now but only one I think. So. You know, there's room for improvement but of course, they've got a lot of women lexicographers, as well as like lexicographers from various backgrounds. Of course, this is still an endeavour of the educated classes. But slang is probably much more available and much more acknowledged as real words and so more slang words I suspect are getting into the dictionary. But the most important change is that literacy has improved since that first dictionary, and also the ways we communicate. So there are many more ways that men, women, the working classes, people from migrant populations, people from colonised countries, people around the globe who speak English, there are many more ways that we can communicate including Facebook and Twitter and text and these are examples of written words. And they are being accessed by the lexicographers who are creating the definitions of the words that we are using now.
Nicole Abadee 57:43
And one example that you give that is that in 2019, their words climate emergency and climate strike, were words of the Year for the Oxford and the Collins Dictionaries, respectively.
Pip Williams 57:54
That's right. That's right. And they were words that were coined by young people, in particular, and sometimes written on their skin. And we have visual representation of that, you know, that could never have happened. So you know, in the same way, 100 years ago, last year, Oxford English Dictionary couldn't come up with a single word, they came up with a list that had about 50 words in it because COVID has created a whole new lexicon, which is just wonderful. And I think one of the ones I love the most is anthropause, which is this, this moment in human evolution this pausing of, of, you know, time, which I think is lovely. And of course, there's so many Covid, Covidiot, that is in the dictionary, you know, so I think what they're demonstrating is that they are shedding that desire to only include words that they think people should use.
Nicole Abadee 59:01
Also looking at a broader spectrum of evidence.
Pip Williams 59:04
That's right. And that's the thing about the English language and James Murray acknowledged this right from the beginning. The English language is an ever evolving thing. You cannot pin it down. And from the moment they printed the very first words, A to Ant, he started to collect words for a supplement. So he knew right from the start, that they would always be a little bit behind. And they always will.
Nicole Abadee 59:30
Pip, thank you so much for talking to me today. Thank you Byron Writers Festival for bringing us together. Let's hope that next year, you and I will certainly see each other and that wonderful festival, we'll be back on foot, bigger and brighter than ever before. And Pip, congratulations on the extraordinary success that you've had with this book, releasing a debut novel, into a pandemic is pretty challenging, and the accolades that you've received the prizes that you've received. The book sales a testament to what a fabulous book it is. So congratulations and thank you for talking to me today.
Pip Williams 1:00:07
Thank you so much, Nicole, and thank you for giving me the time to talk about it and to everyone who's read it. I'm so grateful.
Nicole Abadee 1:00:20
Thank you for listening to Books, Books, Books. If you liked what you heard in this episode, please go to my website, nicoleabadee.com.au. To listen to all the episodes and find out more about the podcast you can also find me Nicole Abadee on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, and look for my reviews in Good Weekend. You can subscribe to Books, Books, Books at Apple podcasts, Spotify, Google and all the usual places. It would be lovely if you could go to any of these platforms and give a rating or review. Thank you. I look forward to talking books with you again soon.