Walker’s Dictionary
Dictionary, dik’shun-a-re. s. a book containing the words of any language, a vocabulary.
Of course, you can catch them [words] and sort them and place them in alphabetical order in dictionaries. But words do not live in dictionaries; they live in the mind.
Virginia Woolf, ‘Craftsmanship,’ 1937.
Although Virginia Woolf’s father, Sir Leslie Stephen, was a principal reader for the Oxford English Dictionary, its volumes did not live in her library. Instead, it was her copy of the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English that is faded from use, as Rowena Fowler suggests in a dazzling essay on Woolf and lexicography. Woolf’s other English dictionaries were a Webster and a pocket-sized 1869 copy of Walker’s. My copy of Walker’s Critical Pronouncing Dictionary is slightly earlier, from 1827, and printed in Boston, but I’ll take any connection I can get to Virginia Woolf.
John ‘Elocution’ Walker was an eighteenth-century Englishman who did his level best to insure the ‘proper’ pronunciation of the language; no matter where in the Commonwealth it was spoken, Walker insisted that the English accent should sound like an elite Londoner’s. His pronunciation dictionaries included a system of numbers and diacritics to emphasis vowel length and syllable stresses. One-line definitions seemed almost an afterthought [def. reflection after the act].
These books underlined Woolf’s commitment to living language. In a 1937 essay, “Craftsmanship,” which she delivered on-air for the BBC, Woolf doesn’t practice any dictionary worship. No idle browsing, nor reaching for antiquarian words, like Auden. But, her accent is a textbook example of Received Pronunciation English, also described as BBC English, because it was identified in 1922 as the broadcasters’ chosen diction. It was the Walker’s of its time: the English of cultured Londoners [def. the act of cultivation; art of improvement and melioration].
Woolf’s language on the page is much more distinctive, but as she emphasized in “Craftsmanship,” this is more a result of how words cling together, than of her minting new ones or time-traveling for old ones. Woolf seems to shake up all the words she has to see where they land, cross-pollinating them, as when she describes eyes “ajar,” or portmanteauing them, as in “scrolloping.” [def. Fanciful formation by Virginia Woolf, probably combining scroll n., lollop v., etc.]
In “Craftsmanship,” Woolf anthropomorphizes words; she values them for their recalcitrance, their fickleness and outright resistance. A dictionary habit would tame them. Writing would be like hunting in a zoo. She said:
We pin them [words] down to one meaning, their useful meaning, the meaning which makes us catch the train, the meaning which makes us pass the examination. And when words are pinned down they fold their wings and die.
Something has most definitely taken up residence in my dictionary, though I don’t think it died there. It did leave behind its wings, somewhere near the definition of ‘unkennel’ [def. to drive from its hole].
The dictionary’s owner, John Henry Eames, also left something of himself behind: a couplet clipped from a verse by Thomas Moore, the Irish writer and Lord Byron’s biographer. Doubtless, Walker wouldn’t have approved of Moore’s accent.
Good night, good night, and is it so?/ And must I from my Rosa go?
The song appears in a book of popular ballads published in 1828. Perhaps it was the melody that ferreted itself away in John Henry’s book-fed memory. Or, perhaps the name was meaningful? His bookmark holds the place from [reg — rei] and [rel — rem]. On these pages:
Remember, to bear in mind; to put in mind
Remembrance, recollection; memorial
Oh Rosa! Say good night once more,
And I’ll repeat it o’er and o’er,
‘Till the first glance of dawning light
Shall find us saying still good night.
…
And still ‘Good night,’ my Rosa say —
But whisper still ‘a minute say;’
And I will stay, and every minute
Shall have an age of rapture in it!
We’ll wing the hours with soft delight,
And murmur, as they pass, ‘Good night!’
The year after Woolf gave the BBC presentation, she set to work on her own dictionary supplement, but as Rowena Fowler notes, Woolf “gave up after two words. The third entry is simply a question mark, a lexical gap representing ‘A word for those who put living people into books.’”
John Henry never married.
