Frederick James Furnivall

Frederick James Furnivall (4 February 1825 – 2 July 1910), one of the co-creators of the New English Dictionary, was an English philologist.

He founded a number of learned societies on early English Literature, and made pioneering and massive editorial contributions to the subject, of which the most notable was his parallel text edition of the Canterbury Tales. He was one of the founders of and teachers at the London Working Men's College and a lifelong campaigner against what he perceived as injustice.

Frederick James Furnivall was born at Egham, Surrey, the son of a surgeon who had made his fortune from running the Great Fosters lunatic asylum. He was educated at University College London and Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where he took an undistinguished mathematics degree. He was called to the bar from Lincoln's Inn in 1849 and practised desultorily until 1870.

In 1862 Furnivall married Eleanor Nickel Dalziel (born ca. 1838 —died 1937). Some authors describe her as a lady's maid, which would have been a socially unusual match at the time, although her social status is disputed. Some time before 1866, Furnivall lost a child, Eena, whom he described as "my sweet, bright, only child". He lost his inheritance in a financial crash in 1867. When he was 58, he separated from Eleanor and their one surviving son to continue a relationship with a 21-year-old female editor named Teena Rochfort-Smith. Two months after his formal separation from Eleanor, in 1883, Rochfort-Smith suffered serious burns while burning correspondence in Goole and died.

Furnivall was one of the three founders and, from 1861 to 1870, the second editor of the Oxford English Dictionary. Despite his scholarship and enthusiasm, his stint as editor of the OED nearly ended the project. For a dictionary maker he had an unfortunate lack of patience, discipline and accuracy. After having lost the sub-editors for A, I, J, N, O, P & W through his irascibility or caprice, he finally resigned. He continued, however, to provide thousands of quotations for the dictionary until his death. OED editor James Murray said of Furnivall: "He has been by far the most voluminous of our 'readers', and the slips in his handwriting and the clippings by him from printed books, and from newspapers and magazines, form a very large fraction of the millions in the Scriptorium."

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