Sons of gardeners and college servants, daughters of chemists and boat-builders, ministers in all churches known to Christian (including that of Pitsligo, Banffshire) and to infidel, criminal and company and constitutional lawyers, schoolmasters from Holland and Birmingham and California and from all points between, doctors responsible for every part of body, mind, and animal, scholars of Welsh and Greek, Aramaic and Chaldean, Icelandic, Persian, Slavonic, and English place names, elderly divines, young and muscular civil engineers, theatre critics, one ophthalmic surgeon (James Dixon, author of Diseases of the Eye, 1855), mathematicians, men who were antiquarians, naturalists, surgeons (and one man — Joseph Fowler of Durham — who was all three), businessmen, novelists (including Beatrice Harraden, who wrote the breathless Ships that Pass in the Night, became a suffragette, and went on to write The Scholar's Daughter, involving much derring-do among a cast of lexicographers), phoneticians, bibliographers, an iron merchant-cum-antiquarian named Richard Heslop who gave Murray advice on mining and iron-forging terms, botanists, aldermen, naval historians, geologists and geophysicists, jurists, palaeographers, Orientalists, diplomats, museum keepers, surgeons, soldiers (W. C. Minor was both, of course), climbers (John Mitchell was killed while climbing, to Murray's unspeakable grief), zoologists, grammarians, patent officers, organists, runic archaeologists, fantasists, anthropologists, men of letters, bankers, medievalists, and Indian administrators — these and a thousand more professions and pastimes occupied those men and women who otherwise devoted hours, weeks, perhaps even years of their time to read for Murray and Bradley, and later for Craigie and Onions. The range of interests of these hundreds was prodigious; their knowledge was extraordinary; their determination was unequalled; and yet their legacy — aside from the book itself — remains essentially unwritten. Only their names, in long lists in the volumes, the parts, and the sections, exist to make some readers stop and wonder for a moment — just who were these people?
* * *
We know these things, but we do not really know why so many people gave so much of their time for so little apparent reward. And this is the abiding and most marvellous mystery of the enormously democratic process that was the Dictionary — that hundreds upon hundreds of people, for motives known and unknown, for reasons both stated and left unsaid, helped to chronicle the immense complexities of the language that was their own… They became footnotes in eight-point Clarendon type in a preface to a volume of [the greatest literary enterprise of history]. That was truly their only reward — and yet in all likelihood they, and scores of others like them, surely wanted no other.
(The Meaning of Everything, 212-215)
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