The story of Joseph Wright (1855–1930) begins in Thackley, a village north-east of Bradford in West Yorkshire. When he was six, he got a job driving a donkey-cart, carrying tools belonging to the stone-workers in nearby Shipley. The job, which stretched from seven in the morning till five at night, involved taking the tools to the nearest blacksmith’s to be sharpened, and then bringing them back. It earned him eighteen pence a week, and he got an extra penny bonus from each quarryman.
A year later, his mother took him to a cotton mill – at the time, the largest one in Europe – which had been built by the philanthropic manufacturer Sir Titus Salt in 1853. Salt had created a model village for his workers which (being on the River Aire) he called Saltaire. Joseph was taken on half-time as a doffer in the spinning department. A doffer, according to the English Dialect Dictionary, was ‘a boy or girl employed in a factory to remove the full bobbins from the throstle-frame [a spinning machine whose sound reminded people of a throstle – a song-thrush] and replace them by empty ones’. This was no menial task, as there were 144 spindles on each frame, and over 16,000 on all the machines in the vast spinning shed (637 ft/194 m long). He worked from 6 until 12.30 each morning, which meant an early start, as the mill was two miles from his home.
The other half of Wright’s day was spent in a school that the enlightened Titus Salt provided for the children. It was the only school Wright ever attended, and – as he reflected later – it didn’t teach him a great deal. He later wrote in John o’ London’s Weekly (15 May 1926): ‘When I left school, I knew very little more than when I first went. I knew the alphabet, and had a smattering of elementary arithmetic, and I could recite, parrot-like, various Scriptural passages, and a few highly moral bits of verse; that was almost precisely the extent of my educational equipment after three or four years of schooling. Reading and writing, for me, were as remote as any of the sciences.’ But, as he also liked to recall, the mill gave him a strong sense of local dialects, for the men came from all around the area.
He left Saltaire when he was thirteen and worked at a mill in Shipley, graduating to the more specialized work of wool-sorting, and stayed there for seven years. It was here, during his dinner-hour, that he taught himself to read and write, using just two books: the Bible and Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. His education progressed with a weekly purchase of Cassell’s Popular Educator magazine, which became, as he put it, his ‘constant companion’. Two or three evenings each week he went to a local night-school, where he began to learn French and German. By the time he was twenty, he had taught himself Latin and learned shorthand.
He might have stayed a wool-sorter indefinitely, but in 1876 the mill had a temporary closure, so he used this as an opportunity to move on. Through his mill-work, along with some income from running a small night-school of his own, he had saved £40 – enough to pay for a term at a university. He chose Heidelberg, in Germany. On his return, he found work in Windhill as a schoolteacher, but his language interests motivated a return to Heidelberg in 1882, and there he began his studies as a philologist, eventually gaining a doctorate. He joined the university in Oxford in 1888, and produced a string of publications, culminating in his masterwork, the six-volume English Dialect Dictionary, published between 1898 and 1905, which he financed himself.
In later life Wright had to get used to eye-catching newspaper headlines – such as ‘From Donkey-boy to Professor’ – whenever he carried out a public engagement. Certainly, there is no other linguistic story quite as dramatic as the one in which an illiterate quarry-boy and mill-worker becomes a professor of comparative philology at Oxford University.