The Warden of English: The Life of H.W. Fowler

3.5 stars, Metaphorosis reviews

Summary

A brief biography of Henry Fowler, the author of classic reference book Fowler's Modern English Usage.

Review
One of the great joys of growing up in a lexically-minded family was encountering Fowler's Modern English Usage,* and enjoying it to such an extent that my parents thought a copy a suitable gift for a 15 year old boy, as indeed it was. Fowler is always opinionated, sometimes wrong, always entertaining. To choose an example at random, so far back as 1926, he was commenting on use of ‘pollster' and contrasting it with psephologist (one who analyzes elections), a word that sadly has not survived so well as its more coarse forebear. I had a great time, then and now, opening Fowler to any page, reading a word's description and either acknowledging Fowler's sagacity or having a lively (if one-sided) argument with him. In any case, Fowler was and is my top-ranked book about words, surpassing even the full OED. If you enjoy words, his book is remarkably fun.

Despite that, it somehow never occurred to me to explore Fowler as a man. It is only recently, reading Simon Winchester's The Professor and the Madman, that it occurred to me to do so. In that book about a contributor to the OED, he mentioned in his acknowledgements Jenny McMorris, and her book about Fowler. I promptly ordered a copy (only available in print form), and have now read it with enjoyment. Winchester provides a fairly pointless and easily skipped introduction.

The first three or so chapters of McMorris' book are dreadful. She attempts to present Fowler's large family of sibling, but appears to have absolutely no plan for doing so. The book jumps around from person to person and time to time with no real attempt at cohesion; it's extremely difficult to follow and extremely uninteresting. But don't give up! Once the bulk of the relatives are disposed of and Henry settles into a more solitary and more word-oriented life, the pace picks up.

It's clear from the start that, much like Winchester in his book, McMorris is working from limited sources – there's a lot of “Fowler must/would/could have...” – but she also does a better (if less organized) job of this than Winchester; you never feel she's simply making things up without saying so. At the same time, she does have access to some of his letters and those of colleagues, and works them into the book fairly nicely.

The surprise to me – although made clear in the prefaces to my own copy of Fowler's – is how much other lexicographical work Fowler did. He spent much of his working life working for the Oxford press, and they fairly soon became eager to keep him on – as well as willing to pay him much more than he was willing to accept.

Beyond his dictionary work, Fowler frankly doesn't sound that much fun. He was, for the time, a fitness nut, shy, and fairly straightlaced. He was stoic to a high degree and seldom complained - even losing an eye with barely a word. Yet he was also flexible – a committed atheist, he supported his wife's churchgoing habit without pause - and loving, taking good care of her when she was ill. She, in turn, seems not to have minded much that he was incapable of asking for money; they appear to have lived somewhat comfortably, but precariously – especially during the period when he and his brother (middle-aged men at best) went off to WWI, a poor idea that wasted Henry's time and effectively killed his brother and close colleague.

I give this book 3.5 stars, tending toward 4, not so much for the quality of the presentation as for the interest of the subject. Past the very rocky first few chapters, this book is well worth your time if you enjoy words and have encountered Fowler's Modern English Usage. If the first applies but the second does not, I urge you to get a copy of Fowler's, but with the following caveat.

* My first copy of Fowler's is of the second edition (1968, though mine is from a 1980 printing), and this is the version I strongly advise buying, if you're buying it for love of words. If you want a pure reference book, you can get the third edition 1996), edited by R.W. Burchfield (of the OED). This latter is probably the more useful philological work, but has also had all the joy stripped out of the entries. It's useful, but I've never once read it for fun.

PS McMorris mentions, and sometimes relies on, a biography written by close Fowler friend George Gordon Coulton. It seems hard to find, but I may pick it up as well.