Life and career
Elworthy spent much of his life in Wellington, Somerset, and found a field of study close to home. Local speech crossed the county boundary into Devon in ways that a standard dictionary could scarcely convey. His West Somerset Word-Book, published in 1886, ran to about nine hundred pages. He served on the council of the Philological Society and edited publications for the Somersetshire Archaeological and Natural History Society.
His work took him well beyond Somerset. In Spain and Italy he studied beliefs about harmful looks and the objects people carried for protection. In 1897 he presented a paper in Toronto comparing harvest customs. A magistrate and churchwarden at home, he was elected a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries in 1900.
Work and ideas
The Evil Eye (1895) brought many of those interests together. Elworthy traced the belief through carved figures, engraved images, gestures and charms. He could draw and engrave as well as describe an object, and the visual distinctions between a hand gesture, an amulet and a figure carved on a building mattered to his argument.
Some of the things he collected survive independently of his interpretation. The Pitt Rivers Museum records harvest trophies he donated from Devon, including corn objects from Belstone, Ashburton and West Down. Their documented origins give a local counterpart to the comparisons he made across countries in print.
