The Preservation of Lost Words as Legacy in The Dictionary of Lost Words

The Thematic Claim

In The Dictionary of Lost Words, Pip Williams frames preservation as a moral act. The novel's central claim is that words excluded from official records—because they come from women, servants, or oral speech—carry the lives and experiences of the people who used them, and that saving those words is a way of honoring voices the institution would otherwise erase. The act of preservation becomes a legacy: Esme's trunk, her handmade dictionary, and ultimately her daughter's inheritance all function as counter-archives that outlast the official record and reach future generations.

The novel opens with a child learning that some words are more important than others (Prologue, February 1886). The entire narrative is Esme's slow, painful journey toward understanding why—and her lifelong effort to correct the imbalance she witnessed as a child.

The Prologue: A Burned Word and a Lesson in Value

The Prologue establishes the thematic stakes. Esme, a young child sitting on her father's lap in the Scriptorium, watches as a slip bearing the word lily—her mother's name—arrives in the post. Da explains that a name must mean something to be in the Dictionary, and the slip is incomplete, lacking a full quotation. When Da throws three slips into the fire grate, Esme screams and reaches into the flames to rescue the burning paper. The slip chars and shatters in her hand; the blackened fragments stick to her burned skin.

This scene is the novel's founding image of loss and preservation. The word lily is not merely a word—it is her mother's name, a connection to a woman Esme barely remembers. Its destruction is a physical wound. The burned fragments embedded in her skin suggest that the loss of words is not abstract; it marks the body. Esme's instinct to reach into fire to save a word foreshadows her entire life's work: she will spend decades rescuing words that the dictionary's gatekeepers deem unworthy.

The lesson Da imparts—that some words matter more than others—is the novel's central problem. Esme does not accept this hierarchy; she spends her life testing it. The Prologue also introduces the slip system itself, the material culture of the dictionary. Words arrive on scraps of paper, are sorted into piles, and either find a place in the pigeon-holes or are discarded. The physicality of the slips—torn brown paper, second-hand envelopes, rough edges—matters. These are not abstract entries; they are objects with histories.

The Trunk: Building a Counter-Archive

The trunk under Lizzie's bed becomes Esme's private archive. In May 1887, Esme catches a slip with the word bondmaid as it falls from the sorting table. She keeps it, and Lizzie helps her hide it. The trunk, engraved with The Dictionary of Lost Words in a child's hand, grows over the years into a collection of slips that the official dictionary rejected or never received.

The bondmaid slip is the seed of this counter-archive. It is a word that should have been in the dictionary—a reader writes to Dr. Murray in August 1901 to point out that bondmaid is missing, noting that its male equivalent was adequately referenced. The word's absence is not accidental; it reflects a systematic bias. The dictionary records the experiences of men, and words tied to women's labor and status slip through the cracks.

Esme's collection method is significant. In May 1902, she begins deliberately collecting words that are not in the dictionary—words like knackered, which she hears in Lizzie's kitchen and the Covered Market. She cuts slips from blue bond paper that once belonged to her mother Lily, reserving them for beautiful words. She asks Lizzie to help her collect words from everyday speech, insisting that they are just as important as the words Dr. Murray and Da collect. Lizzie's resistance—they are just words we use because we don't know anything better—reveals the internalized shame that comes from being excluded from the official record. Esme's project is not just about collecting; it is about revaluing what the institution has devalued.

The trunk is a symbol of this counter-archive. It is hidden under Lizzie's bed, kept safe by a woman whose own words would never appear in the dictionary. It is a secret, subversive collection that grows alongside the official dictionary. When Esme retrieves it in August 1901, she finds the bondmaid slip at the bottom—the first word she ever saved. The trunk's contents are not random; they are a deliberate record of what the dictionary left out.

The Inheritance: Legacy Passed to the Next Generation

The novel's final movement transforms the trunk from a personal collection into a family legacy. In November 1928, after Esme's death, Ditte (Edith Thompson) sends the trunk to Megan, Esme's daughter, who was given up for adoption. Ditte's letter explains that Esme was bereft at the thought of the trunk not reaching Megan, and that Ditte has kept it safe for years. The trunk contains the Dictionary of Lost Words, a leather-bound volume titled Women's Words and Their Meanings, letters, suffrage pamphlets, theatre programmes, and hundreds of slips—each with a word and a quotation, many attributed only to a woman's name.

The epilogue, set in Adelaide in 1989, completes the arc. Megan Brooks, now a professor emeritus, delivers a lecture titled The Dictionary of Lost Words at the Australian Lexicography Society convention. She places a single frail slip on the lectern—the bondmaid slip, presumably—and prepares to speak. The lecture's framing is significant: the speaker before her discusses the Kaurna language, noting that because the language was written down by missionaries, it is possible that Kaurna people will speak it again. This parallel makes explicit what the novel has argued all along: preservation is not a neutral act. It is a choice about whose words deserve to survive.

Megan's inheritance is not just a collection of papers; it is a responsibility. The trunk arrives with Ditte's offer to answer questions about Esme, and Megan's decision to open it—after sitting with it for hours, reading and rereading Ditte's letter—is an act of acceptance. She sorts the contents, reads each slip, and eventually carries the legacy forward into her academic career. The novel's final image—Megan at the lectern with the bondmaid slip—suggests that the preservation project has succeeded: the lost word has found an audience.

Complexity and Contradiction

The novel does not present preservation as an uncomplicated good. Several tensions complicate the theme.

First, Esme's own collection is selective. She saves words that matter to her—words from Lizzie's kitchen, from the Covered Market, from her own experience. She throws away doubles and keeps only what she finds meaningful. The counter-archive is not a complete record; it is a personal one. This mirrors the official dictionary's own selectivity, raising the question of whether any preservation project can be truly inclusive.

Second, the novel acknowledges the limits of written preservation. Lizzie's words are oral; they exist in speech, not on paper. Esme's project of writing them down is an act of translation that changes them. The Kaurna example in the epilogue makes this explicit: the language was recorded by missionaries who fashioned meanings that might be understood by others, a process that inevitably distorts. Preservation preserves something, but not everything.

Third, there is the question of who gets to decide what is preserved. The official dictionary's editors are men; Esme's counter-archive is a woman's project. But Esme herself is not a neutral collector—she is a middle-class woman with access to the Scriptorium, and her collection reflects her own biases. The novel does not resolve this tension; it leaves it open.

Finally, the trunk itself is both a gift and a burden. Megan's initial rage—she screws up Ditte's letter—suggests the weight of inheriting someone else's life's work. The trunk is a legacy, but it is also a demand: to open it, to read it, to carry it forward. The novel's ending, with Megan at the lectern, suggests she has accepted this burden, but the cost is visible in her lined face and her admission that what she is about to say has taken her a lifetime to understand.

Study Questions and Answers

1. How does the Prologue establish the novel's central tension around preservation?

The Prologue shows Esme watching her father discard a slip bearing the word lily—her mother's name—because it is incomplete. When she reaches into the fire to rescue it, the paper shatters in her hand, and the blackened fragments stick to her burned skin. This scene establishes that words carry emotional and personal weight beyond their dictionary definitions, and that the official process of selection is also a process of destruction. Esme's physical wound becomes a lifelong reminder that some words matter more than others—and that she will not accept this hierarchy passively.

2. What role does the bondmaid slip play in Esme's preservation project?

The bondmaid slip is the first word Esme saves, caught as it falls from the sorting table in May 1887. It is a word that should have been in the dictionary—a reader later writes to Dr. Murray to point out its absence—but it was lost. The slip becomes the seed of the trunk collection and remains at the bottom of the trunk when Esme retrieves it in August 1901. In the epilogue, Megan Brooks places a frail slip on the lectern during her lecture, suggesting that the bondmaid slip has become the emblem of the entire preservation project.

3. How does Lizzie's character complicate the theme of preservation?

Lizzie is both a source of lost words and a skeptic of Esme's project. She provides words from her own speech—words like knackered—but initially resists Esme's request to help collect them, saying they are just words we use because we don't know anything better. Her internalized shame reflects the damage done by exclusion from the official record. At the same time, Lizzie keeps the trunk safe under her bed for years, protecting Esme's collection even when Esme is away at school. She embodies both the value of the words and the difficulty of believing they matter.

4. What does the epilogue's Kaurna language example add to the theme?

The epilogue opens with a speaker at the lexicography convention noting that Kaurna words were recorded by German missionaries in the 1830s and 1840s, and that because they were written down, it is possible that Kaurna people will speak it again. This example extends the novel's argument beyond the English dictionary: preservation is a way of keeping languages and cultures alive, even after they have been suppressed. It also acknowledges the complexity of preservation—the missionaries fashioned meanings that might be understood by others, a process that changes what is preserved.

5. How does the novel address the contradiction that preservation is always selective?

The novel does not resolve this contradiction; it dramatizes it. Esme's collection is personal and selective—she saves words that matter to her and discards doubles. The official dictionary is also selective, but its selections reflect institutional bias. The Author's Note makes this explicit: the first edition was flawed and gendered but extraordinary, and the OED remains a work in progress. By showing both the official and the personal archives as incomplete, the novel suggests that preservation is never neutral—it is always a choice about whose words deserve to survive.