Fixing Babel: An Historical Anthology of Applied Lexicography ed. by Rebecca Shapiro (review)

Rebecca Shapiro and Jack Lynch deserve great credit for the conceptualization, and in Shapiro’s case the realization, of a fascinating and ambitious project. Fixing Babel brings together in chronological order thirty-eight prefatory pieces to dictionaries published between the early seventeenth and the early nineteenth centuries, plus Samuel Johnson’s The Plan of a Dictionary of the English Language (1747), inserted in its appropriate place in the sequence. The first item is the preface to A Dictionarie in English and Latine for Children, and Yong Beginners (1602), a revision by William Clark (or Clerk) of John Withals’s earlier A Shorte Dictionarie, for Beginners (1562). The last is the preface to Noah Webster’s An American Dictionary of the English Language (1828). In between can be found prefatory material for a range of dictionaries including “hard word” dictionaries (Bullokar, Cockeram), etymological dictionaries (Bailey, Scott), pronouncing dictionaries (Buchanan, Walker), synonym dictionaries (Trusler, Piozzi), spelling dictionaries (Dyche, Johnston), and slang dictionaries (Grose). Each text is preceded by a short biography of the lexicographer, the details in which are acknowledged to be drawn mostly from the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, and critical comment and exposition on the book. For understandable reasons of space, these are necessarily brief but would form a good starting point for more detailed exploration. (It adds to the interest to be reminded, via the index, of the degree to which individual lexicographers were aware of each other’s work, as when the index entry for “Barclay, James” includes the subentries “definitions from Johnson” and “synonyms from Trusler.”) The critical apparatus sensibly includes a separate section in which full titles of the dictionaries cited are given—some of these are dauntingly long, with James Barclay’s A Complete and Universal English Dictionary (1774) taking up almost a full page. The book contains a detailed and in the main very helpful index. The book’s own prefatory material includes a short foreword by Jack Lynch and a much fuller introduction by Shapiro, together with a note on the editorial method. A short list of planned illustrations of title pages on page xxix seems not to have been implemented.

Any publisher or editor today, laboring over the introduction to a dictionary, entertains well-founded doubts as to whether the dictionary-user will even glance at the pages. Shapiro acknowledges this, referring to Sidney Landau’s reflections in Dictionaries: The Art and Craft of Lexicography (2001) on the current role of prefatory material: “Today, as Sidney Landau has observed, front matter has evolved into a promotional vehicle for the editor or publisher” (xiii). Shapiro makes a strong case for matters having been different in the period covered by Fixing Babel. An editor then could be confident of a literate and even scholarly audience ready to engage with the theory of lexicography as well as to make use of the actual dictionary. As she writes,

When lexicography was a nascent field and dictionaries were being developed as reference tools, readers and scholars took note of dictionary front matter. Opportunities to write to a larger public have been rare for lexicographers and only in their dictionaries have they had a chance to address their primary audience directly; in addition to reflecting changes in the language, lexicographers recognized that dictionaries could instrumentally influence the language of their users.

(xiv)

Shapiro points out that a number of the source dictionaries are unlikely to be readily accessible. This at once makes the collection especially valuable and raises a question: with less accessible texts, how likely is it that the interested reader who may benefit from the preface is unlikely to be able to access the text to which the introduction relates? In fact, many of the texts relevant to this volume are available online from Google Books or through online databases at research libraries, where they can be consulted while reading Fixing Babel. This is likely to...