The book ‘Liddell and Scott’ is the go-to Greek-English lexicon for anyone English speaking who is learning Ancient Greek. It doesn’t matter whether it is Attic Greek, that used by the Athenians such as the tragedian Sophocles, or Homeric Greek from a few centuries earlier, used in the Iliad and Odyssey. Each entry has a definition and examples of when and how it is used in a text. I first came across ‘Liddell and Scott’ in Virginia Woolf’s A Sketch of the Past. A friend – at my request – bought me Woolf’s autobiographical account of her teenage years in the late 19thC for my 18th birthday. Woolf describes the few hours when between 10am until 1pm when she, as an upper middleclass Victorian woman, had some time for themselves:
I mounted to my room: spread my Liddell and Scott upon the table and settled down to read Plato, or to make out some scene in Euripides or Sophocles for Clara Pater or Janet Case.*
Of course, Woolf had the privilege of having that time while – as she mentioned – the maid carried out the household chores.
Inspired by Woolf and as I wanted to read the poets Sappho and Homer in the original Greek, I started learning Greek once a week at lunch time. A teacher took pity on me and a few others when we pleaded to do ancient Greek. Although a state school, Canon Slade had been a grammar and we dusted off decrepit ‘schoolboy’ textbooks from the 1930s. Shortly after I requested an ‘Intermediate’ Liddell and Scott when I was awarded a school prize for English Literature. A year later and studying Ancient Greek at university, I had access to the multiple volumes of the full lexicon in the library, but my own copy was and is well used.
It was only when doing postgraduate research that I found out who Liddell and Scott were. Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott met at Oxford and worked on the lexicon in the 1830s and 40s. It was first published in 1843, selling 3,000 copies, and went through another nine editions by 1900, selling thousands more. My ‘Intermediate’ version is based on the 1883 7th edition, which was printed from electroplates that have been re-used ever since. In this post I mainly write around Liddell, better known as Dean Liddell of Christ Church College Oxford and best known as the father of Alice Liddell, who inspired Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. For me, though, that book is the least interesting thing about the summer in 1862 when Carroll was telling those stories to Alice and her sisters. During that same summer Mary Severn Newton was staying with the Liddells at Christ Church. While there she painted a portrait of Lorina Liddell (née Reeve), Liddell’s wife and mother of their 10 children. In the late 1830s Mary's husband Charles Thomas Newton had been student at Christ Church College with Liddell as his personal tutor and they remained close ever since.
There is a great deal of information about Alice Liddell but very little about her mother, bar that she severed the connection with Carroll in 1863. Some writers (and AiW fans) have accused her of social snobbery over not letting one of her daughters marry him. Frankly, I wouldn’t let him anywhere near my daughter. Liddell became engaged to Lorina Reeve in 1845 and left the monastic fellowship of Oxford for Headmaster of Westminster School so he could marry the following year. There they had the first five of their children, though, being in central London close to the Thames, it was not very sanitary. Having nursed pupils, Lorina almost died of fever in 1848 and was in a coma for ten days. Five years later, two of their sons had scarlet fever and the youngest James Arthur died – his mother was not allowed near him to nurse him, in likelihood as she had only had Alice in 1852 and may have been pregnant with Edith who was born in 1854. Liddell ‘watched him alone’, writing in a letter to his mother that Lorina ‘must not go near him’:
I am sitting by him now, while the nurse goes out to get a little air, and every quick drawn breath goes to my heart. One does not know how much one loves them, till a time like this comes. (Thompson, 1899: 129)
In happier times Liddell appears to have been a hands-on father – far removed from the stereotype of the remote Victorian – and even after he returned to Christ Church in 1855 ‘tried to be with his children as much as possible’ (Thompson, 1899: 249). The emotional life of Victorian men and women is far more complex than that depicted by the Bloomsbury Group such as Woolf and Lytton Strachey.
Lorina ‘endeared herself in a thousand ways’ to the school and played a role in the school play at Westminster. I read this passage out as part of an afternoon of celebration of my former Master’s dissertation tutor Professor Fiona Mackintosh at Oxford last Friday:
The actors in the annual play owed her [Lorina Liddell] a special debt of gratitude for the pains and taste which under the guidance of Sir Charles Newton [Mary’s husband], she had expended on the due arrangement of their classical dresses; and those of them who had acted female parts for the lessons she had taught them as to their gait, restraining their stride within feminine limits, and teaching them the management of their arms. (Thompson, 1899: 133).
On Friday I joked about wanting to know how to manage my arms and Fiona’s ‘fast stride’, but there is a serious point here. We laugh at the idea of a ‘feminine’ gait and stride 125 years after that was written (170ish after the time it took place), so, it is unlikely that 2,500 years ago Ancient Greek women, or even men dressed as women, moved in the same way as mid Victorian women, or even public school boys dressed as women. Can we even define feminine or woman across these periods of time?
Liddell and Scott define γuνή*** (gynae – the root of gynaecology) as a ‘woman’, with a second substantive (i.e. an independent meaning) as a ‘housekeeper’ or ‘lady of the house’. Then second as a wife, opposite to Parthenos (maiden / virgin) and as a female who has borne a child. Then third as a mortal, opposite to a goddess.
Beyond the accusations of snobbery or social climbing there are few traces of Lorina Liddell at Oxford in that I’ve read so far. Of Mary’s portrait of her there is, as yet, no trace. There are these ‘Balliol rhymes’ of doggerel to do with Oxford gown politics:
I am the Dean, and this is Mrs Liddell; She is the first and I the second fiddle.
Clearly, Lorina Liddell was perceived as moving beyond a female sphere or the Dean as gynnis; a 'womanly man'. After all, his own lexicon defines a woman as a housekeeper second, which was a definition understood by the men the lexicon was produced for. And I wish I knew Ancient Greek better to know if those were the main uses of gyne. Instead, I return to A Sketch of the Past and read:
A girl had no chance against its [Society’s] fangs. No other desires - say to paint, or to write – could be taken seriously.
Woolf is using hyperbole to make her point against late Victorian society and her own family, who moved in Society with a capital S. The number of women I have recently found (by accident) from the mid 19thC who did write, translate, paint or draw for money rather undermines that point. But they are in the corners of rooms that are not their own. In an unpublished fragment of a biography of Mary by her sister, Mary is said to be in stress at the time of painting Lorina Liddell’s portrait: ‘she speaks of being unable to sleep, and says that if she does sleep it is no rest, as she has a sensation of painting and working all the time’.**** I hope to look for that letter soon and bring her, and may be Lorina, a little more out of the shadows.
*Clara Pater (the academic and writer Walter Pater’s sister) and Janet Case where Woolf’s Greek tutors.
** Julia Margaret Cameron was Virginia Woolf's aunt.
*** And this is ‘ladies’ Greek’ as I cannot get the hang of typing accents on the keyboard – see Elizabeth Barrett Browning Aurora Leigh.
**** Claudia Gale, A Victorian Artist
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