Harvesting England's ancient treasure: dialect lexicography and the Philological Society's first plans for a national dictionary

The various lexicographical projects and concepts usually identified as contributing to the context from which the New (later Oxford) English Dictionary eventually emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century include: existing comprehensive English dictionaries such as those by Johnson and Richardson (to which the formation of the Philological Society's Unregistered Words Committee of 1857—the body which began to collect evidence for the Dictionary—was explicitly a response); the "historical principle" embodied in Franz Passow's Handwörterbuch der griechischen Sprache (which was explicitly invoked as an inspiration by the Dictionary's first editor); and the Romantic idea of language as an embodiment of national identity (to which Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm gave lexicographical expression in their Deutsches Wörterbuch, perhaps the Dictionary's most obvious European forerunner). One strand of influence which has largely been overlooked is the tradition of compiling glossaries of regional dialects; among participants in this tradition an enthusiasm developed during the early nineteenth century for a national dictionary of "provincialisms," for which a methodology of cooperative research by a large group of contributors was envisaged which strikingly prefigured the methodology adopted for the collection of evidence for the New English Dictionary. This paper examines this tradition and its influence on the Dictionary, specifically in relation to recently discovered evidence of just such a national dictionary project which the Philological Society embarked on over a decade prior to the formation of the Unregistered Words Committee in 1857.