Ebullient, unembarrassable and the model for Rat in The Wind in the Willows – Mr Slang introduces the remarkable lexicographer Frederick Furnivall…
Fink, Frith, what next? asked John Halliwell. Two F-words, we must have another. So here he is: Frederick Furnivall (1825-1910), bearded, pink-tied, vegetarian, oarsman, controversialist, muscular Christian socialist, midwife of learned societies, and one of the founding fathers of the OED. If, in terms lexicographical, James Murray was standard English, then Furnivall was slang. No one could have been more different from Murray, the self-effacing, auto-didact Scottish dominie, than Furnivall, an ebullient, outgoing, often embarrassing but seemingly unembarrassable figure. The lexicographer has varied roles: there are madmen, there are professors, and there was Frederick Furnivall. Space does not permit full disclosure. I offer three aspects of this eminent Victorian’s life lexicographical.
The Wives
Compared with at least the public image of the Victorian scholar, let alone that of the lexicographer of any age, Furnivall’s is of a distinctly flesh-and-blood human being. His private life was conducted with as much energy as his public undertakings. In 1862 he appalled his middle-class peers by marrying Eleanor Dalziel, better known as Lizzy and the sister of a student teacher at the Working Men’s College. Dismissed by Furnivall’s contemporaries as a ‘pretty lady’s maid’, she combined wifely duties with those of a dictionary-maker’s amanuensis. In fact Lizzy was no maid and the real scandal was the discrepancy between hers and Furnivall’s age. It had also been noticed that Lizzy and Furnivall had been, as one biographer discreetly puts it, ‘inseparable’ long before they were married. None of which worried Furnivall. A determined proponent of women’s rights, he accepted no constraints on Lizzy’s freedom of action. Nor, of course, his own. In 1882 he left Lizzy and began an affair with a new young woman. This time his inamorata really had been a lady’s maid and was now his own secretary and an accomplished Shakespearian: Teena Rochfort-Smith. Furnivall was fifty-seven, she was just twenty-one. Poor James Murray was so shocked at this news that when he received a letter revealing the entanglement he stuck stamp paper over the signature of the correspondent who had delivered the news. Furnivall, predictably, laughed off such pieties and in 1883 moved Teena into his house. The continuing presence there of his first wife did not, apparently, worry him. She, less sanguine, soon departed. The new affair was to be tragically short-lived. A real-life Miss Havisham, Teena was burnt to death when a lighted match flared up, ignited her dress and she was unable to douse the flames. Less sympathetic observers noted that the match was of the type known as ‘Domestics’.
The Water
Furnivall loved rowing. He went sculling every Sunday and founded his own rowing club, its members exclusively young and female. As a friend of Kenneth Grahame, who became secretary of the New Shakspere [sic] Society (F. Furnivall, prop.), Furnivall took him sculling and was the first person to encourage the bank-clerk to consider creative writing. Among the results was The Wind in the Willows, in which Furnivall is seen in the character of the Water Rat, a figure, like himself, with a passion for boats and the river. Grahame also imbued his character with a little of Furnivall’s linguistic appetites. As Mole, Badger, Rat and Toad prepare to drive the stoats and weasels from Toad Hall and an emotional Toad declares that ‘We learned ’em!’, Rat is quick to correct him: ‘We taught ’em’, he explains, is the proper phrase.
The War
No-one liked a feud more than Furnivall. As another biographer pointed out, ‘He never understood or attempted to understand the quality of tact. It was a species of dishonesty. What he held to be true, was to be upheld in the face of all opposition, with unfaltering directness and clarity; what he held to be false was denounced with Athanasian intensity and resolution.’ Thus his clash with Algernon Charles Swinburne. Swinburne, whose other brush with lexicography came in his relations with the slang collector John Camden Hotten, for whom the poet wrote various works of flagellant pornography, took exception to Furnivall’s role as doyen of the New Shakspere Society. In 1876 he clashed with him over a piece dealing with various technicalities in the metre of Henry VIII, a play attributed in part to Shakespeare, but not included in the First Folio. The pair swapped letters and the matter seemed to die, but so loathsome did the poet find the society that he composed two parodies of ‘The Newest Shakespeare Society’ and published them in April 1876. In 1877 Furnivall hit back, questioning Swinburne’s knowledge of Chaucer. Swinburne promptly characterised the New Shakesperians as ‘dunces’ and ‘churls’ and singled out their leader as ‘the most bellicose bantam-cock that ever defied creation’. By 1879 the combatants were in full cry. Swinburne mocked those ‘dunces [who] accept and circulate as gold the current brass of German pedants’ and attacked the ‘indecorous nakedness of their undraped absurdity’. Furnivall, sorely tried, abandoned all restraint. Writing in the Spectator he told Swinburne ‘to teach his grandmother to suck eggs’ and added that his ear was ‘a poetaster’s: hairy, thick and dull’. He sent Swinburne’s friends a succession of libellous postcards and went back to the roots of his enemy’s name to call him ‘Pigsbrook’. Where Furnivall looked to Anglo-Saxon, Swinburne preferred Latin. Furnivall became ‘Brothel-dyke’ (from the Latin fornix and vallum). He wrote scatalogical anti-Furnivall verses in which he attacked ‘Fartiwell and Co.’ and the ‘Shitspeare Society’. A denunciation of Furnivall as ‘tipsy’ misfired: Furnivall had been a teetotaller for forty years; Swinburne’s excessive drinking was well-known.
The row had faded by the mid-1880s: the protagonists, presumably, were exhausted, and Edmund Gosse wondered how seriously Furnivall had ever really taken it. Undoubtedly he had acted, Gosse said, ‘like a man demented’; what one had to wonder was how genuine his act had ever been. Furnivall, the born controversialist, revelled in trouble for its own sake. It is quite likely that some of his squibs and rejoinders were simply a means of prolonging the fun.
[adapted from Chasing the Sun: Dictionary-makers and the Dictionaries They Made, pub. 1996 and due in ebook later this year]
They don’t make ’em like that any more.
I just had to go and look up ‘Poetaster’
Poetaster, like rhymester or versifier, is a contemptuous name often applied to bad or inferior poets. Specifically, poetaster has implications of unwarranted pretentions to artistic value. The word was coined in Latin by Erasmus in 1521.
The faults of a poetaster frequently include errors or lapses in their work’s meter, badly rhyming words which jar rather than flow, oversentimentality, too much use of the pathetic fallacy and unintentionally bathetic choice of subject matter.
The three Fs are fascinating characters, Jonathon, Furnivall most of all. If fate had planted him in the 21st Century, he would have been Twitter’s greatest star with about five million followers, each eagerly awaiting the next tweet from ‘Brothel-dyke’; for surely that’s what he would have called himself just to upset the likes of Swinburne.
It’s interesting that Furnivall, founder of the Early English Text Society, and Director had, in the early years of the 20th Century, a W A Dalziel as Hon. Sec. of the Society. Would this have been Eleanor’s brother? If so, how did that relationship work after Furnivall’s treatment of Eleanor? I mean, moving in the ill-fated Teena when the first Mrs F was still in residence was pushing it a bit. I suppose pragmatism won out.
Furnivall and Ruskin – in matters sexual, polar opposites? John Batchelor in John Ruskin, No Wealth But Life states ‘In the collapse of Ruskin’s marriage to Effie, Furnivall took his side, and he remained loyal to Ruskin for the rest of his professional life.’ Perhaps surprising that Furnivall, on the face of it, so knowing of female physiology would support Ruskin. Perhaps he had tried to help: “Look John, once a month women menstruate; it’s not a big deal. Even I have to hang about waiting for a couple of days. And pubic hair? Forget about those bloody statues in Florence and Venice. It’ll drive you mad!”
Jonathon, fine introduction to the fornicating free-wheeling Furnivall, in my mind I read it as the voice of Leonard Sachs “Ladies and Gentlemen for your edification I give you our own, our very, very own willy-waving wordsmith, the one and only Freddie Furnivall.” As the gavel crashes to the lectern the Leeds audience rise as one and stand, lost in ovation and Victorian schmutter.
As the curtain rises for the finale Freddie leads the singing….
Come, come, come and make eyes at me
down at the Old Bull and Bush,
Da, da, da, da, da,
Come, come, drink some port wine with me,
Down at the Old Bull and Bush,
Hear the little German Band,
Da, da, da, da, da,
Just let me hold your hand dear,
Do, do come and have a drink or two
down at the Old Bull and Bush.
Is it permissible for a chap, in later life, to have and read his favourite childhood story, oh yes it is. Wind in the Willows, complete with it’s own demonym set, the river bankers. Never has hot buttered toast been better described: toad whilst in the nick.
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