That's Joseph Wright the philologist (1855-1930), not the painter
(Joseph Wright of Derby).
Quite a remarkable life. Born in a Yorkshire village. Donkey-boy, bobbin-doffer, wool-sorter (a good job). Took night classes, made more
money by teaching other workers.
"By 1876 Wright had saved £40 and could afford a term's study at the University of Heidelberg. He walked to Heidelberg from Antwerp, a
distance of more than 250 miles (400 km), to save money." (Wiki)
Eventually completed his PhD at Heidelberg under the neo-grammarian
Herman Osthoff. Max Müller got him a job at Oxford, and eventually he succeeded Müller as Professor of Comparative Philology.
His great work, the English Dialect Dictionary (6 volumes, 1898-1905),
was (like OED), based mainly on written sources, with a lot of volunteer contributors. (England didn't get a proper dialect survey/atlas project
until after WWII.) It's available online from Internet Archive or the University of Innsbruck
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Wright_(linguist)
https://archive.org/search?query=creator%3A%22Wright%2C%20Joseph%2C%201855-1930%22%20dialect%20dictionary%20AND%20mediatype%3Atexts
https://eddonline4-proj.uibk.ac.at/edd/
JRR Tolkien knew Wright well at Oxford. A story he told later:
"Years before I had rejected as disgusting cynicism by an old vulgarian
the words of warning given me by old Joseph Wright. "What do you take
Oxford for, lad?" "A university, a place of learning." "Nay, lad, it's a factory! And what's it making? I'll tell you. It's making fees. Get that
in your head, and you'll begin to understand what goes on." Alas! by
1935 I now knew that it was perfectly true. At any rate as a key to
dons' behaviour." (from Tolkien's published letter)
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