บุคคลเฟรเดอริก โทมัส เอลเวิร์ทีFrederick Thomas Elworthy

Elworthy came to writing late. A woollen manufacturer's eldest son, schooled privately at Denmark Hill, he made his first name as a dialect scholar: "The Dialect of West Somerset", published for the English Dialect Society by Trübner between 1875 and 1886, in two volumes with a grammar and a word-book.

Then he turned to the eye. "The Evil Eye: an account of this ancient and widespread superstition", John Murray, 1895, gathered what he had seen on the road — the coral horn in Naples, the hand, the crescent, the amulets sold at street barrows — and set them beside Roman and Greek material. "Horns of Honour", the same publisher, 1900, took the horn on its own. He drew, and he drew well; the plates are his.

His obituarist in the Dictionary of National Biography wrote that in the course of those travels he made "perhaps the finest collection of charms, amulets, and such-like trinkets in existence". That sentence is the record of a whole period's vocabulary, and this atlas prints it as a quotation rather than borrowing it. Elworthy's own subtitle does the same work. The word he put on his title page is the verdict the book starts from, and everything inside is described by somebody who had already decided what the practice was.

Inference — what survived the framing is the evidence. Elworthy recorded which object was sold on which street, what a seller said it did, and what shape it took in one town against the next; those observations are still checkable and are still cited, including in this atlas, wherever a Mediterranean charm needs a dated nineteenth-century sighting.

His 1895 and 1900 books are out of copyright and circulate freely as scans, which keeps both the observations and the vocabulary in wide reach. The Pitt Rivers Museum's 'The Other Within' project, by Alison Petch, carries a biographical page on him as one of the collectors behind English ethnographic holdings.