The Correspondence of John Stephen Farmer and W. E. Henley on Their Slang Dictionary, 1890-1904 (review)

Reviews1 75 The Correspondence ofJohn Stephen Farmer and W. E. Henley on Their Slang Dictionary, 1890-1904. 2003. Damián Atkinson. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press. Pp. xxxvi + 164. $109.95. T JL ? "??e second half of the nineteenth century brought forth an amazing number of lexicographers, most of them from humble backgrounds and nearly all self-educated. The best remembered of these is James Murray (1837-1915) who acquired his middle names and honorary doctorates as he emerged from a clerkship at a bank to be the great and tireless force behind the creation of The OxfordEnglish Dictionary (OED) . Nearly as famous was Joseph Wright (1855-1930), editor of the massive English DialectDictionary, but in his youth a wool-sorter. Both of diem in their maturity lived in Oxford, and both were seen as prodigies (rather than colleagues) by dons who arose to eminence by the more conventional route through a university education. Both Murray and Wright are remembered, not only for their dictionaries but also through the affectionate biographies composed by members of their families (Murray [1978]; Wright [1932]). A tier, or perhaps two, below them in die ranks of lexicographers are James Piatt and John Farmer. Piatt (1861-1910) was an extraordinary character living humbly in London and corresponding incessandy with James Murray . He knew more than a hundred languages, and in the memoir written by his brother, we find his view that learning the first dozen languages is difficult but the ones after that come easy. Piatt would haunt Victoria Station looking for people who looked somehow foreign. Finding one, he would approach to discover if the person spoke a language not known to him. His wife regularly found him in the sitting room of their humble flat soaking up a new language. Murray paid him remarkable tributes in die prefaces to the fascicles; for instance , in that to volume 5, he declared his special debt to "Mr. James Piatt, junior, of 77 St. Martin's Lane, London, whose researches have enabled us to give the exact history of many words from far-off languages." Among the OED entries in which he is credited by name are those for bonduc, kinkajou, and quagga. James Piatt,Jr., seems to have been a clerk, though his brother was too delicate to be specific about his occupation. Even more mystery has shrouded the history ofJohn Stephen Farmer, a lexicographer called by the late Gershon Legman "a mysterious and enigmatic figure" (Farmer and Henley 1966, lvi) . Within twenty years of Farmer's death, Legman published queries in the literary newspapers hoping to learn more about him. He discovered very little: [A]Il that I ever learned — from a man who got it from a clergyman who lived in the same town in England as Farmer (Amersham, Buckinghamshire?) — was that "he was very peculiar , believed in the occult, never had any money, and lived with a woman to whom he was not married." As biography, that will hardly do. (Farmer and Henley 1966, lvii). 1 76Reviews Remarkably enough, everything in this second-hand account is quite right. Farmer did live toward die end of his life in Amersham, though he moved to Essex and died there on January 18, 1916. And there's more. Now comes Damien Atkinson with a detailed life of Farmer in the introduction to a collection of correspondence devoted to Slang and Its Analogues . Farmer was born in 1854 in Bedford, the child of a plumber and glazier. By the time Farmer was in his teens, his father had given up his trade and become a City Missionary in London for the Methodists. The son described himself in 1899 as "privately educated but mainly self taught" (xvix). His earliest literary employment was as a secretary to Quentin Hogg (1845-1903), a philanthropist and editor of the Polytechnic Magazine. Farmer's independent editorial and journalistic work was first devoted to spiritualism, both in books and in serials like Light: AJournal Dedicated to the Highest Interests ofHumanity, Both Here and Hereafter, a publication of the London Spiritualist Alliance. He was active as a member of this and various other of die flourishing societies devoted to the occult. That he...