Surprising literary ventures | 24 September 2008

Using the Oxford Junior Dictionary (1979), by Philip Pullman

Before Lyra, before polar bears and His Dark Materials, and before his first children’s book, Count Karlstein, in 1982, Philip Pullman was a lowly drudge in the very humblest halls of lexicography. Pullman in fact spent his earliest career in teaching, working at various Oxford middle schools before moving in 1986 to Westminster College, where he taught B. Ed. students. In 1979 he did some jobbing work for Oxford University Press and produced the booklet at hand, Using the Oxford Junior Dictionary (his name appears only on the inside cover, though he is the sole author). It is the usual fare for small learners of English, with puzzles, mazes, games and jokes, and a selection of jaunty section headings such as ‘Vampire Stew’, ‘Savage Seagull’, ‘Writing about Wrecks’ and ‘Useful Nostrils’. It is an innocuous enough start for the author famous for his outspokenness on educational topics (in a speech of 2003 he described English-teaching in schools as ‘profoundly vulgar … coarse and stupid and cruel’) and the man named by Peter Hitchens in the Mail on Sunday as ‘the most dangerous author in Britain’.