The Liar's Dictionary

In the nineteenth century, Swansby House in London employed over a hundred lexicographers, all beavering away in the vast premises. Each worker, famously, was gifted a regulation Swansby House leather attaché case, a regulation Swansby House dip ink pen and Swansby House headed notepaper. God knows who bankrolled this operation, but they certainly appreciated uniform brand identity. The prevailing myth is that these lexicographers were corralled fresh from university, recruited for well-funded positions to bring about the British encyclopaedic dictionary. I thought about them occasionally, these young bucks probably younger than me, plucked from their studies and put to work on language in this same building over a century ago. They were under pressure to bring out the first edition before the Oxford English managed it, because what are well-defined words and researched articles if they are not the earliest to be acknowledged as great? David Swansby’s great-grandfather presided over the operation from the mid 1850s. He had the forename Gerolf, which always struck me as worth another round of spellchecking. His heavily bearded, patrician portrait hangs in the downstairs lobby of the building. The word be-whiskered was made for such a face. Gerolf Swansby looked like his breath would be sweet. Not bad breath, just not good. Don’t ask me why I would think that or could possibly guess just by looking at a portrait. Some things just are possible to know to be true for no good reason.

I had been on this internship for three years. On my first day, I was given a rundown of the company’s history on my tour of the building. I was shown the portraits of its initial subeditors and funders who had vied to keep the business going both before and after the wars. It all began with Prof. Gerolf Swansby, a wealthy man who seemed to attract unctuous funding for his lexicographical enterprise. By the late nineteenth century, he had accumulated enough for building works to commence at an address overlooking St James’s Park. The property was built for purpose, and for its time was state-of-the-art, designed by architect Basil Slade and fitted with features such as a telephone, electric lift and synchronome master clock which used electrical impulses to ensure that all clocks in the building kept uniform time. Prof. Gerolf Swansby named the building after himself. The ‘state-of-the-art’ lift was designed in order to go down to the basements of the building which housed huge metal steam presses, bought and installed from the outset by David Swansby’s be-whiskered great-grandfather to sit in readiness for the dictionary to be completed A–Z and go to print. From the beginning, the enterprise haemorrhaged money.

Before a single edition of the Dictionary was printed, before they had even reached the words beginning with Z, work came to an abrupt halt. All this early, costly industry on Swansby’s Encyclopaedic Dictionary was interrupted when its lexicographers were called up and killed en masse in the First World War. Every day I walked past a stone memorial to these young men on the side of Swansby House, their names chiselled alphabetically into its marble index.

The unfinished dictionary, its grand hopes for a newly ordered world truncated, potential never fully realised, was considered an appropriate memorial to a generation cut short.

I get that. It makes me feel deeply uncomfortable, for various reasons, but I get it. The dictionary exists in an incomplete published form as a sad, hollow, joyless joke.

The original presses were melted down to make munitions for the World War. On my tour of the premises, I just nodded at this detail. My mind was solely on the fact that I would finally be making a living wage.

David and I worked in shabby offices on the second floor of Swansby House. Given its prime location close to St James’s Park and Whitehall and its wonderful period details and space, the lower floors and large hall of the building were leased out as venues for launches and conferences and weddings. It was all kept pretty plush and impressive for visitors, and David employed various freelance events managers to add marquees and banners and floristry according to various clients’ various tastes. The uppermost storey was not open for events – while downstairs was kept spick and span, its brass fittings polished daily and dust kept at bay, the abandoned higher floors above our offices were untouched and unused. I imagined there must be enough dustsheets up there to keep a village of ghosts in silhouettes, with cobwebs hanging from the rafters as thick as candyfloss. Occasionally I heard the scuttle of rats or squirrels or unthinkable somethings running above my office ceiling. Sometimes this caused plaster to drift down onto my desk. I did not mention it to David. He never mentioned it to me.