Margaret Atwood’s Virago suffixes

Margaret Atwood has a short essay in A Virago Keepsake to Celebrate Twenty Years of Publishing, one of twenty contributions to this slim and enjoyable volume from 1993.

In the essay, ‘Dump Bins and Shelf Strips’, Atwood describes her introduction to Virago Press in the mid-1970s when it occupied ‘a single room in a crumbling building on one of the grubbier streets in Soho’. To reach it you had to climb ‘several flights of none-too-clean stairs’, past ‘a lot of men in raincoats hanging around’.

The following passage, completing the climb, is notable for several reasons, one of which is the variable suffixation:

Dr Johnson’s House in London

On a recent trip to London I visited 17 Gough Square, better known as Dr Johnson’s House. Samuel Johnson compiled his great Dictionary of 1755 in this tall Georgian building, and I’ve always wanted to visit. As I’m currently writing a column on the subject (ish), the timing was apt.

On my way there I passed a Furnival Street and wondered if it was named after another lexicographer – but that Furnivall has two l’s in his name, so I guess not.

The house is ‘one of a very few of its age to survive in the City of London, and the only one of Johnson’s eighteen London homes to have done so’, Henry Hitchings writes in his terrific book Defining the World (aka Dr Johnson’s Dictionary). Here’s the plaque outside:

Upstairs, a stained-glass window of Johnson overlooks the square: