A story from the archives

Edith and Ellen Perronet Thompson were two of the most significant of the many voluntary contributors to the First Edition of the OED. They were also two of the most modest, seeking little praise or glory for their efforts. Edith (born in 1848) and Ellen Perronet (1857) were the only surviving children of Thomas Perronet Edward Thompson, a judge, and his wife Ellen Mary James. They were brought up in London, and lived there until 1872, when they moved to Wavertree in Liverpool, where their father was made Judge of Liverpool County Court. On his retirement in 1889 the family moved to Reigate Hill in Surrey, and later to Lansdown, Bath.

The sisters were both published writers. Edith Thompson became a historian of some note, and is best remembered for her History of England (1872), known affectionately by schoolchildren of the time as their ‘Edith’. Ellen became a novelist, publishing A Dragoon’s Wife: a romance of the seventeenth century in 1907. She also wrote several historical essays for The Gentleman’s Magazine. Together, they worked on, though never published, a biography of their grandfather, Thomas Perronet Thompson (1783–1869), a decorated army officer and an influential politician who was elected to the Royal Society in 1828. The sisters began working voluntarily for James Murray in around 1880, and were to make an enormous contribution to the Dictionary over a period of almost fifty years.

The OED archives contain many items of correspondence between the sisters and Murray, and, later, Charles Onions. The letters between Edith and Murray reveal a close friendship. In 1887 she sympathized with him about the daunting task he faced:

It is so very hard to be accurate even in a little, that I do indeed feel for your labours... I also condole with you on having reached that state of greatness in which people write you foolish & abusive letters. Why they will do so is strange; perhaps Carlyle’s ‘mostly fools’ is the explanation. Minute criticism that comes too late, is also grievous. However it shows that people read the Dictionary.

Murray’s regard for Edith’s work led him to offer her a job working alongside him in the Scriptorium in 1894. She declined, her letter stating a fear that she would ‘spend too much time over every single word’.

Together, Edith and Ellen supplied fifteen thousand handwritten quotations slips, and they provided thorough research on words that the editors were working on, often including pamphets, drawings, and other images in their correspondence. A letter from 1886 was sent with a sketch of Queen Victoria to illustrate a point about the word braid. Edith wrote:

I did not mean to say that a ‘braid’ was not plaited in part, but that practically the term braid was extended to the unplaited part of the tress, or lock, or band of hair. In this, which is very roughly copied from one of the ordinary pictures of the Queen in early days, I imagine that the hair on each side of the face would have been spoken of as ‘braids’.

Similarly, Edith’s notes on the word dishing were accompanied by Ellen’s drawings depicting the dishing of a wheel. Edith sent in a leaflet and postcard of the Bath Pump Room to illustrate the use of the term pump, and in 1905 Ellen sent Murray a letter in which she discussed Walter Scott’s use and spelling of the word perdue, along with a related pamphlet and slips.

In addition to supplying quotations and detailed research on particular words, from 1891 Edith was the sub-editor for the letter C, and we know that both sisters proof-read pages and pages of the Dictionary. In the ‘Preface to the Letter W’, for example, the bulk of the proof-reading was attributed to the sisters:

During the editorial progress of the letter, which began in 1919, outside help has been given in the reading of proofs by the Misses Edith and E. P. Thompson for the greater part of the letter.

The archives contain examples of many proofs annotated by both Edith and Ellen. There is one for the entry for pass from about 1904, for example, in which comments written by both sisters query, among other things, the sense allocation of several of the illustrative quotations.

Edith and Ellen did not always work alone. They often recruited family and friends to aid them in their research, as described in this letter of 1891:

No further satisfaction about conjobble. The two relations whom I have consulted deny all personal knowledge of the word, & say they never heard it.

Johnson marked conjobble as ‘a low cant word’ in his dictionary, which may explain the disinclination of these relations to associate themselves with the word. In a later letter, from 1904, Edith wrote of a discussion she had had with her aunt:

We—which at present is my Aunt Elise Thompson & myself—are quite clear that the house peers out of the trees not appears. But she thinks that it is you or I who really peer at it, & transfer our action to the house. I maintain that the house is personified as a live thing, with eyes that peer out. Low thatched cottages with the thatch arched like a great eyebrow over the small window, can, when seen in part, look very like some great creature with eyes.

This letter hints at the imaginative aspect of Edith’s nature. Her humorous side is apparent in another, in which she related how she jeopardized her local reputation in the name of lexicographical research on the terms eyebrow pencil and lip pencil:

I fear I have imperilled my character for seriousness by going about getting these things. The hairdresser’s is the place for them. At the first place they gave me, when I asked for an ‘eyebrow pencil’ the thing like a pencil-case—to be had in brown, chestnut, black, & also a reddish-brown which I did not see. They did not recognize the term lip pencil.

As the sisters got older, they continued to enjoy their work for the OED. A letter sent by Ellen to Onions in 1926 reveals how eager she was to continue working on the Supplement to the OED when work on the First Edition ended: ‘I should be very glad if there was more work to do for the dictionary for I rather feel ‘‘O’s occupation’s gone’’ without it’.

They seem, however, to have found it difficult to keep up with some of the changes taking place at Oxford University Press. A letter to Onions from Ellen in the same year concerns a new way of sending proofs. She wrote:

My elder sister is my elder sister so I can’t ask her to bother to open every Clarendon Press envelope... But she isn’t the Clarendon Press’s elder sister so one can’t ask them to alter their ways for her: and the Clarendon Press, so to speak, is your elder sister and you can’t ask them—and I ought to recognise that and not act like an old lady.

In an undated letter, written in very uncertain handwriting shortly before her death in 1929, Edith apologized for ‘having given trouble’ in mislaying some proofs, and for the delay in sending on some work due to her ongoing ill health. She lamented that ‘it is sad to be almost useless, but one cannot arrange these things’. The sisters died within a year of each other, and were both buried in Charlcombe, Bath, alongside their parents.

When Onions heard the news of Edith’s death, he wrote this note, published in the December issue of The Periodical, to acknowledge her enormous contribution to the OED:

Friends of the Dictionary who have followed its history from early days will appreciate the loss we have suffered through the death on 26 August of Miss Edith Thompson, who, if she had survived, would undoubtably have much enriched our supplement as she did most of the volumes of the main work.