Frederick Furnivall

Frederick Furnivall was a leading philologist, organizer of the early Dictionary project, and a decisive influence on James Murray. His life joined formidable scholarly energy to conduct that alienated colleagues and collaborators: he helped set the Dictionary in motion and devised practical systems for handling its evidence, yet could not keep its volunteer readers at work. His long association with Murray and the project endured to his final months, when a word under review mattered to him even as he faced a fatal illness.

Scholar and public character

Furnivall was secretary of the Philological Society and, in the book’s description, a half-mad scholar-gypsy. His contemporaries’ assessments were sharply divided. Critics called him a clown, an ass, a scandalous dandy and a fool; some also invoked the private lunatic asylum maintained by his father in the house where Furnivall had grown up. Those labels sat beside a substantial scholarly reputation and an intense commitment to mathematics, Middle English and philology.

His unconventional public life was not incidental to that reputation. He was a Socialist, an agnostic and a vegetarian, and abstained from alcohol and tobacco. He was also an enthusiastic athlete, especially devoted to sculling. He designed a slender racing boat and taught young waitresses recruited from the ABC tea shop in New Oxford Street how to row it quickly. A 1901 photograph places him among eight members of the Hammersmith Sculling Club for Girls, with a stern Victorian matron standing behind them. The scene captures a social provocateur as well as a man absorbed by boats and company.

Furnivall’s flirtatiousness and personal conduct brought more serious censure. Many regarded his marriage to a lady’s maid, followed by his abandonment of her, as socially reprehensible. Editors and publishers refused to work with him; complaints included his lack of tact and discretion, his unrestrained speech, and controversies provoked by his opposition to religion and class distinctions. Yet he also moved among celebrated writers and scholars, including Alfred Lord Tennyson, Charles Kingsley, William Morris and John Ruskin. Kenneth Grahame, a fellow sculler who worked at the Bank of England, made Furnivall the model for the Water Rat in The Wind in the Willows. His capacity to attract both devotion and disapproval was part of his influence, not a separate curiosity from it.

Influence on James Murray

Murray’s friendship with Furnivall proved more consequential to his career than Furnivall’s mentorship of Grahame. Murray came into contact with him after publishing a study of the dialect of the southern counties of Scotland in 1873. By then, the work had established Murray’s scholarly standing; Furnivall’s friendship and sponsorship, alongside Murray’s connections with Henry Sweet and Alexander John Ellis, helped turn that standing into a role in the Dictionary’s making.

Murray’s biographer described Furnivall as “stimulating and persuasive, often meddlesome and exasperating, always a dynamic and powerful influence, eclipsing even James in his gusto for life”. The description conveys a relationship built not on quiet collegiality but on an energy capable of urging, distracting and shaping another scholar. Furnivall’s sponsorship helped lead to Murray’s invitation to Oxford on 26 April 1878, where he met the Delegates of the Oxford University Press at Christ Church, Oxford. The invitation marked a consequential step from Furnivall’s personal influence to Murray’s leadership of the Dictionary.

Furnivall was also a prominent advocate for women’s admission to Oxford. At a dinner held in Murray’s honour, he spoke on what he considered the university’s heartless attitude toward admitting women. The episode joined two recurring aspects of his public character: his willingness to challenge established institutions and his close association with the young women he recruited for rowing. His advocacy did not erase the period’s social inequalities, but it made his presence at a formal celebration of the Dictionary more than ceremonial.

Building the Dictionary—and losing momentum

Furnivall’s work on the project began before Murray’s appointment. The Philological Society had created an Unregistered Words Committee six months before Richard Chenevix Trench’s famous speech on the deficiencies of English dictionaries. Furnivall served with Trench and Herbert Coleridge on the committee, which initially planned a supplement covering words absent from dictionaries already in print. As searches uncovered far more material than such a supplement could contain, the Society moved toward the larger ambition of a wholly new dictionary. It formally adopted that plan on 7 January 1858.

Furnivall then issued a call for volunteer readers, allowing them to choose among three historical periods: 1250 to 1526, 1526 to 1674, or 1674 to the present. The divisions reflected the belief that English had developed through distinguishable historical trends. The scale of the response exceeded expectations: more than six million slips eventually arrived, while the early hope of producing a first saleable section within two years proved far too optimistic. The project’s estimates of the work, time and money required were badly mistaken.

After Herbert Coleridge’s early death, Furnivall took over and brought his characteristic energy to the task. He proposed inserting assistants between volunteer readers and the editor. They would check incoming slips for accuracy and value, sort them into bundles, and place them in pigeon-holes. The editor could then retrieve the quotations for a particular word, select those useful to the entry, and establish the earliest recorded use alongside later evidence of changing meanings. This system gave the expanding collection a working procedure: a word’s history could be assembled from dated examples rather than treated as an abstract definition alone.

The machinery, however, could not solve the problem of sustaining the people who supplied its material. Furnivall failed to keep hundreds of volunteers engaged. Readers stopped sending slips; some returned their books and papers, and in 1879 alone the returned material weighed two tons. The Dictionary stalled under the weight of its own ambition. Furnivall’s reports to the Society grew shorter as his sculling excursions grew longer. His contribution was therefore double-edged: he developed a method for processing an immense collaborative archive, but the project under his direction lost the readers on whom that archive depended.

The last words and the unfinished work

Furnivall knew from the beginning of 1910 that he was dying, though he continued to scull at Hammersmith and send Murray daily packages of words and newspaper clippings. His illness did not displace his attention from the Dictionary. In a letter, his first concern was tallow catch, a Shakespearean word Murray had recently defined and sent to him for approval. Furnivall congratulated him on the definition, which described a very fat man as “a tub of tallow”, before turning elliptically to the grim prognosis his doctor had given him. He reported that he expected to disappear within six months and regretted that he would not live to see the Dictionary completed, while expressing confidence that completion itself was certain.

Murray had also urged him to inspect the exceptionally long entry TAKE, intended for Volume XI, while there was still time. Furnivall did so before laying aside his work. He died in July 1910, within weeks of the SS Minnetonka’s departure from London carrying William Chester Minor back to America. The Dictionary remained unfinished, as Furnivall had feared he would not live to see it completed.

Furnivall’s death also shadowed Murray’s own expectations. Murray was only beginning the vast work on the letter T; it occupied him from 1908 until 1913. On finishing it, he estimated that the Dictionary might be complete by his eightieth birthday, four years later. Neither that timetable nor Murray’s hope of reaching eighty came to pass. Furnivall’s final attention to TAKE thus stands at the meeting point of their shared labour: the work continued, but neither man would see its completion.