Farmer, John S., and William E. Henley

John Stephen Farmer and William Ernest Henley were unusual collaborators in the production of their prodigiously comprehensive and detailed thesaurus of English slang, compiled remarkably, in the last years of the Victorian era. Their vast work Slang and Its Analogues Past and Present: A Dictionary, Historical and Comparative, of the Heterodox Speech of all Classes of Society for More than Three Hundred Years. With Synonyms in English, French, German, Italian, etc. appeared in seven volumes from 1890 to 1904. (It has subsequently been reissued as A Dictionary of Slang .) J. S. Farmer (1845?–1915?), an independent American scholar, did most of the editorial work, later assisted by W.E. Henley (1849–1903), a noted poet, man of letters, and flamboyant personality, the original of Long John Silver, the pirate of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883).

Although slang dictionaries of various sorts have been published since the 1560s, Farmer and Henley’s was of a completely different order of magnitude from anything that preceded it, and has never been surpassed in coverage. It follows the historical method, “taking the whole period of English literature from the earliest down to the present,” separating the senses, listing them chronologically and supporting them with quotations, about 100,000 in number. It naturally incorporates most of the material from the previous canting and underground dictionaries, but adds a vast volume of its own, including a substantial amount of American coverage and synonyms from the major European languages.

Such a work obviously faced major difficulties in circumventing the strict Victorian laws against obscene libel, the legal category that the Act of 1857 had introduced. Since the Oxford English Dictionary was already in production and facing a similar situation, Farmer wrote to the Editor of the OED , James Murray (June 3, 1891) explaining his problems: “I have had no alternative but to bring an action of breach of contract against my first printers, which breach they admit, but plead justification on ground of obscenity of such words as range themselves under ‘C’ and ‘F’.” Farmer requested that a letter Murray had written to him on “his own difficulties” might be used in the action, concluding: “I am in a small way fighting your own battle in advance.” (The OED was then in the process of publishing the letter ‘C’.) As he later wrote to Murray (July 23, 1890), his policy was “where the examples are coarse , to deal with them decently, and have generally wrapped up my explanation in language ‘not understanded’ of the people” (i.e., Latin).

As it turned out, the OED omitted the most egregious of the “four-letter” words, which left Farmer and Henley with a problem. However, since their work was “printed for subscrib- ers only,” it was in a different category of publication. Furthermore, they used an ingenious ploy, exploiting the thesaurus format to their own advantage by choosing unusual and euphemistic headwords, such as Monosyllable and Greens , instead of the problematic four-letter words. Thus the entry for Greens begins: “TO HAVE, GET, or GIVE ONE’S GREENS, verb phr. (venery).—to enjoy, procure or confer the sexual favour. Said differently of both sexes.” This is an amusing and illuminating juxtaposition of a coarse basic idiom and Victorian euphemism. There follows an astoundingly vigorous collection of more than 600 synonyms for copulation, from the most explicit, such as “up to one’s balls,” to more humorous metaphors such as “the mattress jig,” “beard-splitting,” “tail-twitching,” and “among the cabbages,” followed by a further selection of idioms from Continental languages. That for Monosyllable (the vagina) is about twice as extensive. Although fuck and cunt are listed, they both have quite short entries. The work took slang lexicography into a totally new dimension.