AUTHOR OF DICTIONARY.

Auckland Star, Volume LVIII, Issue 226, 24 September 1927, Page 36

AUTHOR OF DICTIONARY.

ONCE KILL APPRENTICE. ENGLISH DIALECT RECORDED.

A portrait has recently been hung in the village school of Thackley, near Bradford, Yorkshire, of a man who, as a small boy, worked in a Yorkshire mill at a salary of 3/6 per week, and who has now a world reputation as the author of the classic English Dialect Dictionary. The famous man is Dr. Joseph Wright, emeritus professor of comparative philology at Oxford. The small boys who will gaze upon his picture to-day in the village school arc a good deal more fortunate than the little boy who is now able to write after his name a long list of university distinctions, for Dr. Joseph Wright never knew w\at it was to have a whole day's schooling; and until he reached the age of 15 years he was unable to either read or write. To-day he is one of the most honoured men at Oxford, and certainly the most interesting of them all. Joseph Wright was born in a oneroom cottage at Thackley, and now resides in a beautiful house with a magnificent garden. On the entrance gate is* inscribed the name "Thackley" in honour of hie native village. The slates on the roof and the flagstones forming the walk were taken from the quarries on the moors near his old home. Joseph Wright's father died, leaving the mother with four young children when Joseph was quite young. For several months the family lived in Clayton Workhouse. At the early age of six Joseph Wright went to work in a stone quarry, his "job" being to go to and from the blacksmith's shop with the men's tools in a donkey cart. His' salary was 1/6 per week from the owner of the quarry and one penny each from the labourers. The hours of work were ten each day, and Joseph held on to the job for a year. His mother then took him to Sir Titus Salt's mill at Saltaire, where he became a "doffer," and all the schooling he ever had was at the mill school provided by the owner. During the Franco-German War, Joseph Wright taught himself to read; his text-books were the Bible and "The Pilgrims' Progress." Later he taught himself French, German, Latin and Greek, and at the age of 20 he began to teach others. In the only bedroom of the family's cottage at Windhill, he taught reading and arithmetic every evening, and charged the pupils two pence each per week; owing to lack of chairs the class eat on the bed. By the time he was 21 he had saved £40, and with this attended a fourteen weeks' course at Heidelberg University. Then he returned to England, passed the London matriculation, went on teaching, and in time saved enough to return to Germany, where he remained and studied for six years.

Dr. Wright commenced his great dictionary in 1895, and completed the work ten years later. It contains 100,000 dialect words. At the end of the ten years there were 2,000,000 separate slips in the workroom which the University Press had provided for Dr. Wright and his staff of trained assistants. The work was commenced entirely at his own risk, but when the parts began to appear honours were showered upon him, and in 1899 he was granted a civil life pension of £200 per year in recognition of his great work.