The Dictionary of Lost Words(123)
1901 Queen Victoria dies. Edward VII becomes King.
1902 The newly established Australian Parliament passes the Commonwealth Franchise Act 1902, enabling all adult women to vote at Federal elections or stand for Federal Parliament (except those who are ‘aboriginal natives’ of Australia, Africa, Asia and the Pacific Islands).
1903 Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) formed, led by Emmeline Pankhurst.
1905 WSPU begin militant campaign, including civil disobedience, destruction of property, arson and bombings.
1906 The term suffragette is applied to militant suffragists.
1907 Elizabeth Perronet Thompson publishes A Dragoon’s Wife.
1908 Adelaide woman Muriel Matters chains herself to the grille of the Ladies Gallery in the House of Commons as part of a protest organised by the Woman’s Freedom League (WFL), a non-militant suffrage organisation.
1909 Marion Wallace Dunlop is the first gaoled suffragist to go on hunger strike – many will follow.
1909 Charlotte Marsh, Laura Ainsworth and Mary Leigh (née Brown) are force-fed in Winson Green Prison, Birmingham.
1913 Jan 8, ‘Battle of the suffragists’. A peaceful procession of suffragist societies in Oxford is disrupted by an anti-suffrage crowd.
1913 June 3, the Oxford boathouse is burned down. Four women are seen fleeing, three in a punt, one along the road. Non-militant suffragists condemn the action and collect money for laid-off workers.
1914 War with Germany is declared.
1914 Sixty-three men from the Oxford University Press march out of the grounds to report for duty.
1914 The First Battle of Ypres.
1915 The Battle of Festubert.
1915 The Battle of Loos.
1918 End of World War I.
1918 The UK coalition government pass the Representation of the People Act, enfranchising all men over the age of twenty-one, and women over the age of thirty who meet minimum property qualifications.
1928 The UK conservative government passes the Representation of the People (Equal Franchise) Act, giving the vote to all women over the age of twenty-one on equal terms with men.
In 1901, the word bondmaid was discovered
missing from the Oxford English Dictionary.
This is the story of the girl who stole it.
Motherless and irrepressibly curious, Esme spends her childhood in the Scriptorium, a garden shed in Oxford where her father and a team of lexicographers are gathering words for the very first Oxford English Dictionary. Esme’s place is beneath the sorting table, unseen and unheard. One day, she sees a slip containing the word bondmaid flutter to the floor unclaimed. Esme seizes the word and hides it in an old wooden trunk that belongs to her friend, Lizzie, a young servant in the big house. Esme begins to collect other words from the Scriptorium that are misplaced, discarded or have been neglected by the dictionary men. They help her make sense of the world.
Over time, Esme realises that some words are considered more important than others, and that words and meanings relating to women’s experiences often go unrecorded. She begins to collect words for another dictionary: The Dictionary of Lost Words.
Set when the women’s suffrage movement was at its height and the Great War loomed, The Dictionary of Lost Words reveals a lost narrative, hidden between the lines of a history written by men. It’s a delightful, lyrical and deeply thought-provoking celebration of words, and the power of language to shape our experience of the world.