The Visual Significance of Edward Dwelly's Dictionary
There are very few books that one can call ‘great’ without fear of contradiction. Dwelly’s Illustrated Gaelic Dictionary is one of them. The title page of the first edition is pictured here. A century after its publication, it not only remains in print, but it has an active and enthusiastic readership. The enthusiasm it evokes indicates that it is something more than just a good dictionary. It has an encyclopaedic quality. It opens to the reader not just a language but a culture. And just as an encyclopeadia takes images for granted as part of its discourse, so also with Dwelly’s Dictionary. His interdisciplinary curiosity led him to complement words with images wherever he was able. It is a pity that we use the term philology so little. It seems appropriate to Dwelly, for he was more than a lexicographer, he was a lover of the logos, in all its forms whether verbal or visual. So although Dwelly has made a word-book, it is a word-book that is sensitive to the significance of the image.
Just as anthropologists can arrive from outside the culture that they seek to reveal, so also with Dwelly. He was proud of a strong infusion of Welshness in his family, but he was himself born a Londoner, and his family name is linked with Somerset not Scotland. He was thus an English thinker with a Welsh and West Country edge, an edge that would open for him the possibilities of Celtic cultures. But the key point is that he was a genius. There is no other appropriate description for him. If one were to attempt to define genius it would be something to do with the significance of what is conveyed and the doggedness with which it is conveyed. For Einstein what was conveyed was the implacable constancy of the speed of light in the face of the mutability of matter, for Dwelly it was the possibility of a whole culture at one’s fingertips. Both men knew the value of craft, but where Einstein saw craftsmanship as part of the apprenticeship of the visual thinker, Dwelly used his own craft skills to solve the problem of not being able to find a publisher for his dictionary. Dwelly not only compiled his dictionary, he typeset it and printed it as well. He was thus a man of hand and eye as well as of voice.
Just as anthropologists can arrive from outside the culture that they seek to reveal, so also with Dwelly. He was proud of a strong infusion of Welshness in his family, but he was himself born a Londoner, and his family name is linked with Somerset not Scotland. He was thus an English thinker with a Welsh and West Country edge, an edge that would open for him the possibilities of Celtic cultures. But the key point is that he was a genius. There is no other appropriate description for him. If one were to attempt to define genius it would be something to do with the significance of what is conveyed and the doggedness with which it is conveyed. For Einstein what was conveyed was the implacable constancy of the speed of light in the face of the mutability of matter, for Dwelly it was the possibility of a whole culture at one’s fingertips. Both men knew the value of craft, but where Einstein saw craftsmanship as part of the apprenticeship of the visual thinker, Dwelly used his own craft skills to solve the problem of not being able to find a publisher for his dictionary. Dwelly not only compiled his dictionary, he typeset it and printed it as well. He was thus a man of hand and eye as well as of voice.