The Meaning of Everything

5

Pushing through the Untrodden Forest

I think it was God's will. In times of faith, I am sure of it. I look back & see that every step of my life has been as it were imposed upon me—not a thing of choice; and that the whole training of my life with its multifarious & irregular incursions into nearly every science & many arts, seems to have had the express purpose of fitting me to do this Dictionary … So I work on with a firm belief (at most times) that I am doing what God has fitted me for, & so made my duty; & a hope that He will strengthen me to see the end of it … But I am only an instrument, only the means that He has provided, & there is no credit due to me, except that of trying to do my duty; Deo soli gloria.

(Letter from James Murray to the politician Lord Bryce,

15 December 1903)

Murray was sustained for the rest of his life by an illusion that time, however quickly it ran out, was on his side. For a moment in history the language had paused and come to rest. It could be seized and captured for ever.

(Peter Sutcliffe,

The Oxford University Press: An Informal History, 1978)

Inside the bundle delivered to the Scriptorium were a dozen copies of a flimsy but curiously heavy volume, which measured some twelve inches along its spine, was eight inches deep, and, with 352 half-uncut pages between its flimsy covers, was a little less than an inch thick. It was bound in an undistinguished, muddylooking off-white paper cover. Had it come from a later era, it might well have been mistaken for a telephone directory for a smallish city—Cincinnati, perhaps, or Nottingham, or Marseilles. But it was nothing so slight. This was a work that had been designed and made with immense care, its contents the consequence of years of scholarship and furrowed brows, and intended to have value for scores of generations to come.

Its title page, grandiloquent in tone but discreet in presentation, announced itself to the waiting world: A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles, Founded Mainly on the Materials Collected by the Philological Society. Edited by James A. H. Murray, LL.D., President of the Philological Society, with the Assistance of Many Scholars and Men of Science. Part I. A-Ant. Oxford: At the Clarendon Press. 1884. [All rights Reserved.]

It was in summary a slender, somewhat undistinguishedlooking paperback book. It looked as beggarly as it did—more a publisher's starveling, not at all like the more traditional Clarendon Press books, bound as they all were in dark blue cloth or in red morocco, with handsome fleurons stamped onto the spine in gold and with marbled endpapers and silk headbands and pagemarkers—because Oxford, perpetually strapped for cash, had insisted that it should.

The department of the University called the Oxford University Press—together with its more academically inclined offspring, the Clarendon Press—had long made the bulk of its money from the publishing of Bibles, hymnals, and prayer books. Its buildings in Walton Street in west Oxford, designed in 1827 to look as collegiate as possible, were divided (they merged in 1906) into the Bible Side and the Learned Side, the profitability of the former subsidizing the indulgent obscurities of the latter. The irony of the Bible Side's unconscious reliance on the marketplace of Mammon was noted by one historian of the Press, who wrote of the early nineteenth century: `Within the huge building the industrial revolution steamed and roared: ¹ an outward front of dignified piety advertised its evangelizing mission: a Bible in every home in Christendom.'

But by the nineteenth century, as the pace of learning and scientific discovery quickened and the pace and volume of production from the Learned Side expanded to keep up with it all, so the Delegates began to insist on a much higher rate of return from the books that were commissioned and made. The New English Dictionary, so immense a Learned Side publishing project, and one that seemed unlikely to offer up even a penny piece as return on the thousands of pounds of investment that the Press would be enduring for years, for decades (and how optimistic even those forecasts turned out to be!), ran the risk of proving an enormous financial trial for the Press, perhaps even a financial embarrassment for the University. Some kind of device was needed, some kind of publishing gimmick, that would make it possible for this one project to bring as much money back into the Press's coffers as could be managed, and as quickly as possible.

And so Oxford, in an unusual (though not unheard-of ) step, took a leaf from the peculiar way that magazines and newspapers were just then publishing new works by authors like Dickens and Trollope. These publishers were doing so in serial form, putting out a chapter a week, or a section a month, and permitting the reading public to spin out their buying over many months or years, keeping the costs down and in theory making everyone— the accountants most of all—content.

Oxford, a house of great dignity and gravitas, would never of course publicly countenance anything so vulgar. And yet the idea of publishing the Dictionary bit by bit had for the Delegates considerable commercial appeal. So as a means of priming the pump and allowing money to start flowing in to the great project as early as possible, the Press had demanded that the Dictionary be turned out in fascicles, sheaves of pages that were collected together to form distinct parts, but which could themselves be bound together later between hard covers and thus made into whole volumes.

This somewhat ordinary-looking and—at twelve shillings and sixpence, somewhat inexpensive ² —book was thus the first morsel of substance to have emanated from the works of Coleridge and Furnivall, the Philological Society, and James Murray. This was it—publication number one, a volume that included, to the best of the editor's knowledge, every single one of the English words that lay between and included A and Ant. It was woefully late—Oxford had expected (and indeed, the contract had specified) that publication would begin in 1882, and that once matters were in high gear, the Dictionary team would be able to churn out some 704 pages of completed work each year, almost two pages a day. Murray had done his gallant best—Jowett's interference notwithstanding—but at one stage, he wailed piteously to a friend that though he tried to meet a personal target of completing 33 words a day, `often a single word, like approve … takes ¾ of a day itself '.

However, the eventual appearance of the first fascicle did a great deal to buck up Murray, who was at the time—on the eve of his 47th birthday—feeling more than a little intimidated by the scale of the task ahead of him. A few weeks later he would refer to `the difficulty of pushing our way experimentally through an untrodden forest where no white man's ax has been before us'. But now, and here, there was the first appearance of a pathway through the confusing and unfamiliar thickets. It was, he told the scores of admirers who wrote in with congratulations, `my offering to the world, which must be taken on its merits and demerits and with the tolerance which is the mature fruit of culture. It will improve with age.'

The way that this first part of this great—and, as it happens, essentially ageless—book was organized, the way that the 8,365 words included in it were arranged and defined and otherwise dealt with, was to set the pattern for the future of the big Dictionary itself, the path that would eventually have an end. Maybe, Murray supposed, he would get there in ten or eleven years' time. The fact that it would take the 31 years left to him, and still not be completed, might not have dismayed him had he known the fate of the other great multi-volume European dictionaries that were under way at around the same time. Although Emile Littré's rather short Dictionnaire de la langue française took only a decade from publication of its first volume to the last—though 32 years from the conception of the plan—the Grimm brothers' Deutsches Wörterbuch, which was six times bulkier than its French equivalent, was begun in 1838 and fully finished only in 1961. If that was not long enough, the Dutch dictionary known as Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal was started in 1851 and completed in 1998, 147 years later. And a nineteenth-century attempt to fix the entire Swedish tongue between hard cover continues today into the twenty-first century, with scholars still stuck on the complexities of Swedish words beginning with the letter S.

The first fascicle, containing the 8,365 words which James Murray and his colleagues declared was the entire sum of the English words between A and Ant, was published in January 1884—27 years after Dean Trench's speech.

Murray's seemingly dilatory state was as nothing when compared to the molasses-in-January progress in the scriptoria over on the European mainland. And he eventually realized it when, some years later, he was able to write approvingly of the speed with which his own dictionary-making machine was functioning. `We have already overtaken Grimm, and have left it behind.' But that was in the future: just now, matters seemed to grind exceeding slow. These first 8,365 words had been won with the expenditure of Stakhanovite degrees of labour.

Before describing just what was in—and what was not in— Murray's first fascicle, a small but significant fact needs to be pointed out: something that will make rather more sense when we come to the very end, or least to the most modern part, of this story. A detailed textual analysis throws up in these very early parts of the Dictionary certain slight idiosyncrasies of style, a certain lack of consistency, a vague impression of (dare one say it?) raggedness that, while invisible to all but the most critical readers, suggests a degree of editorial hesitancy, an unease, a lack of complete confidence, a quite understandable sense of the editor perhaps not yet being fully into his stride. With the publication of each successive part, and, when in later years, whole volumes of the Dictionary appeared, so Murray's confidence and that of his colleague editors became, as one might anticipate, ever greater; the curious details and faint clues that occasionally give slight pause to those lexicographers who study the work's early parts vanished clear away. The early letters of the alphabet might fairly be said to be the dictionary equivalent of a `Friday car'—fashioned not quite as perfectly as were some of the later letters, in much the same way that a car made moments before everyone leaves for the weekend might not be quite as fine as that produced when the assembly line was working at its best.

All of which serves to explain why the editors of the third edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, working to Murray's template, decided at the end of the twentieth century to begin their work with the letter M, not A. That way two things would happen: their own unadmitted inconsistencies at the start of their labours would be balanced by the perfection of Murray's middle-alphabet work; and by the time they reached a point of what they considered `stability'—most probably the end of the letter R—and then turned to Murray's perhaps ever so slightly ragged A, their own system would be so firmly in place as to negate any shortcomings from the nineteenth century.

What we are talking about here is slight and subtle, idiosyncrasies that would pass unnoticed by almost all readers. But the reputation of the Dictionary centres about its majestic degree of accuracy and perfection: it was to obviate any possibility of a shortfall in standards that the new editors decided to begin their effort in the middle, and not at the beginning.

There were more than a thousand columns of type set out in Part I, and a total of 8,365 words. Murray separated these into three types. There were 6,797 instances of what he liked to call `Main Words', each of which in his considered judgement deserved a separate article—words like advance, to pluck one at random from the fascicle, which has an `article' that illustrates sixteen meanings for the verb form and ten for the noun, and which takes up very nearly a full page of the Dictionary. Then there were a further 570 `Combinations'—doubled-up words (to follow the chosen article to its end) like advance-guard, advance-party, and, peculiarly close to home in the case of James Murray, advance-proofs. And then another 998 entries, in those early days identified by being printed in smaller and fainter type, were deemed to be `Subordinate' words, which were cross-referenced to the Main Words—subordinates like advant, which is an obsolete version of the verb to advance, subordinate to and therefore cross-referenced to advance, and which was first used by the poet and translator George Chapman ³ in 1605.

Almost a third of the 6,797 Main Words—1,998 of them, to be exact—were now obsolete themselves. They were all well worthy of inclusion in the Dictionary, however, for heaven forfend that anyone might ever stumble across a printed word in a book no matter how old or obscure and not find it in the Dictionary—it must be remembered that it was the intended function of a work like this to capture the language in its entirety, remembering all the while that one man's dead word may yet be another's still alive.

A further 321 of the words found lying between A and Ant Murray deemed `foreign or imperfectly naturalized'. By that he meant they were not entirely English, in other words—rather more tied still to their origins in French, Italian or `East Indian', but more or less current in contemporary usage.

The first part's first word—once the four pages devoted to the simple letter A had been accounted for, and after the entry for an occasionally used means of spelling the long a, aa—was the obsolete word for a stream or a watercourse, the noun spelled in the same way, aa. There was just one quotation supporting its use, taken from `The Muniments (the deeds or official documents) of Magdalen College, Oxford', referring in 1430, and in a Norman-French-Latin hybrid tongue, to a widely used communal waste channel in the Lincolnshire marsh-town of Saltfleetby, as `le Seventowne aa'.

The first properly current word in the fascicle was aal, the Bengali or Hindi word for a plant similar to madder, from which a dye could be extracted for colouring clothes. One of Murray's readers had found the word in Andrew Ure's Dictionary of Arts, Manufactures and Mines, published in 1839, in a sentence that provided a nice example of a classic illustrative quotation: `He has obtained from the aal root a pale yellow substance which he has called morindin.' ⁴

Then, notwithstanding the objections of Benjamin Jowett's anonymous Delegate friend, the words aardvark and aardwolf are both included, with three quotations for the former and two for the latter: Murray had evidently seen off with quiet dispatch the lunacy of the idea of omitting such words. Aardvark is particularly lovingly chronicled, as the first familiar and properly English word in the book should perhaps be: it comes from the Dutch word aarde, meaning earth, combined with a series of Old English and Old High German forms of the Latin word porcus, a pig:

Murray's definition, suitably scholarly and concise, reads:

A South-African quadruped (Orycteropus capensis Cuv.) about the size of a badger, belonging to the insectivorous division of the Edentata, where it occupies an intermediate position between the Armadillos and Ant-eaters.

By chance, the fact of Murray writing this summary of the famous Cape Colonial earth-pig points up one of the short-lived eccentricities of the early days of the Dictionary, a personal foible of Murray's own which was to land him in no small amount of hot water. Although by coincidence and chance he writes in the definition the hyphenated phrase South-African, he does not in fact permit the word African to appear, as a headword, as a listed adjective, in his Dictionary. He tries to explain why in his Preface, and one can feel him squirming uncomfortably as he does so:

…the word African was one of the earliest instances in which the question of admission or exclusion arose with regard to an important adjective derived from a geographical proper name. After much careful consideration, and consultation with advisers, it was decided (perhaps by a too rigid application of first principles) to omit the word, as having really no more claims to inclusion than Algerian, Austrian or Bulgarian. But, when American was reached, some months afterwards, it was seen that Americanize and Americanism must of necessity be included, and that these (`with the Americanising of our institutions') could not be explained without treating American, and explaining its restricted application to the United States. American was accordingly admitted. Then the question arose, whether the exclusion of African was consistent with the inclusion of American; but the question came too late; African had been actually omitted, on its own merits.

Murray realized his misjudgement swiftly. He eventually over-ruled himself, and decided that African was after all to be included in the first Supplement, which would be published some five years after all the work on the Dictionary had been done in 1933. But its absence from Part I, and then again from the First Edition's Volume Iwhich was published in 1888 and which includes all of the 31,254 words that begin with A and B, is very noticeable. (It should by rights have been located between an obsolete word for `devour', afrete, and the word for `face-to-face', afront. There is otherwise no word listed that begins with the letters Afri-, and most decidedly not that which describes what once was known, from H. M. Stanley's popular book, as `the Dark Continent'. ⁵ ) It can be seen today as an error—or a wrong-headed judgement-call— which stands as mute testimony to the complexities of the decision-making which so stimulated, and yet so wearied, James Murray, as he steadily and manfully wound his way through the untrodden forests of the language. ⁶

Murray himself—a man never averse to revealing to all the trials of his task—offers in the Preface a snapshot of the difficulties involved in being so much of a pioneer:

Our attempts lay no claim to perfection; but they represent the most that could be done in the time and with the data at our command. The … direction in which much time has been consumed is the elucidation of the meaning of obscure terms, sometimes obsolete, sometimes current, belonging to matter of history, customs, fashions, trade or manufactures. In many cases, the only thing known about these was contained in the quotations, often merely allusive, which had been collected by the diligence of our readers. They were to be found in no dictionary, or, if mentioned in some, were explained in a way which our quotations evidently showed to be erroneous. The difficulty of obtaining first-hand and authoritative information about these has often been immense, and sometimes insurmountable. Ten, twenty or thirty letters have sometimes been written to persons who, it was thought, might possibly know, or succeed in finding out, something definite on the subject; and often weeks have passed, and `copy' advances into the state of `proof', and `proof' into `revise', and `revise' even into `final', before any results could be obtained. It is incredible what labour has had to be expended, sometimes, to find out facts for an article which occupies not five or six lines; or even to be able to write the words `Derivation unknown', as the net outcome of hours of research and of testing the statements put forth without hesitation in other works.

Elisabeth Murray, in her classic biography of her grandfather, recalls a lecture in which he listed a typical daily bout of letterwriting:

I write to the Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew about the first record of the name of an exotic plant; to a quay-side merchant at Newcastle about the Keels on the Tyne; to a Jesuit father on a point of Roman Catholic Divinity; to the Secretary of the Astronomical Society about the primum-mobile or the solar constant; to the Editor of The Times about a letter of the year 1620 containing the first mention of Punch [the beverage]; to a Wesleyan minister about the itineracy; to Lord Tennyson to ask where he got the word balm-cricket and what he meant by it, ⁷ to the Sporting News about a term in horse-racing, or pugilism; or the invention of the word hooligan in June 1898; to the Librarian of the Cambridge University Library for the reading of the first edition of a rare book; to the Deputy Keeper of the Rolls for the exact reading of a historical MSwhich we have reason to suspect has been inaccurately quoted by Mr. Froude; to a cotton manufacturer for a definition of Jaconet, or a technical term of cotton printing; to George Meredith to ask what is the meaning of a line of one of his poems; to Thomas Hardy to ask what is the meaning of a word terminatory in one of his novels; to the Editor of the New York Nation for the history of an American political term; to the administrator of the Andaman Islands for an exact reference to an early quotation which he has sent for the word Jute, or the history of Talapoin; to the Mayor of Yarmouth about the word bloater in the herring fishery; to the Chief Rabbi for the latest views upon the Hebrew Jubilee; to a celebrated collector of popular songs for the authorship of `We don't want to fight, But by Jingo if we do,' which gave his name to the political Jingo.

It is worth remembering that all of this correspondence had to be written by hand; and that the letters had, what is more, to be written twice. Although carbon paper had been invented by an Italian in 1806, its use for the making of copies of handwritten letters had not been perfected, and most courteous correspondents—like Murray, who was notably so, and who wrote in some kind of elegant copperplate—preferred the tribulations of simply writing everything out once again, of making a fair copy.

Many of the letters he wrote were to celebrated figures—Lord Tennyson preeminent among them. Once he had to write to Robert Browning, asking the meaning of the word apparitional. Browning's reply confused him, and in later years Murray was mildly scathing about the poet's constant use of words `without regard to their proper meaning'—a habit, Murray complained, that `added greatly to the difficulties of the Dictionary'.

Yet for all these vexing aspects of his work, the triumph of the first part of the Dictionary was plain to see. It was abundantly clear, even from this one small part, that what would eventually be published was the catalogue of a truly vast emporium of words. Here were the wonderful and the ordinary, cheek by jowl—acatalectic and adhesion, agnate and allumine, animal, answer, and ant. And by ant Murray did not only define the `social insect of the Hymenopterous order'—he included the prefix ant- as a contraction of anti-, and used in words like antacid, and the suffix -ant, attached to form words like tenant, valiant, claimant, and pleasant.

True, there were critics aplenty, and as soon as the work was published letters started trickling in to the Scriptorium, triumphantly listing earlier quotations than those used, or alleging (usually erroneously) that words had been missed out. Murray, a prickly man at the best of times, was extremely sensitive to any criticism. But his confidence in his work was clearly burgeoning—and it allowed him (or so a few fans of Murray like to think) the luxury of inserting within the scores of pages and definitions and quotations in that first fascicle one of the very few witticisms that is known to exist in the complete work.

When pressed, lexicographers involved in the making of the book remark that such humour as is to be found in the OED was placed there `only inadvertently', and so there almost probably was never any humorous intention on Murray's part—none, for instance, as there plainly was in the writing of the single-volume Chambers's Twentieth Century Dictionary of 1901, which had droll entries such as that for éclair: `a cake, long in shape but short in duration'.

Nonetheless, in this first fascicle of the Philological Society's work we find what some might regard as a classically Oxford sense of amusement when we encounter the following, buried in the second sense of the very rare noun abbreviator:

An officer of the court of Rome, appointed … to draw up the Pope's briefs …

Would James Murray have inserted that definition, heavily freighted with its double entendre, deliberately, and out of a sense of fun? Probably not: briefs meaning underwear did not come into use until 1933—in all likelihood its inclusion truly was inadvertent, reflecting only the splendid innocence of the utterly aloof. And yet Ilike to wonder. There are more than a few photographs of Murray wearing a decidedly impish grin behind his beard, and Ilike to imagine that, from time to time, this increasingly confident man allowed himself the pleasure of teasing his otherwise rather stern and exacting readership, just a little.

Many eminent figures read that first part of the great Dictionary. Some were admiring. A few of them carped. The Delegates—to Murray's chagrin, hurt, and disappointment—said nothing, offered no note of congratulation or encouragement. But there was one outsider who did read it, and who, moreover, did so with the greatest dispatch and eagerness. He was someone quite unknown to Murray: an outsider, an apparently unqualified critic with no track record in any of the lexical skills. He was, in fact, no more than a former corresponding clerk in a Sheffield cutlery firm, recently made redundant, a 39-year-old Nottinghamshire farmer's son named Henry Bradley. His reading of it changed everything.

On close scrutiny it would seem that Bradley's life and career to this point was in many respects rather like Murray's (except that Bradley had had far better than a rural Scottish village education—he had been at a grammar school in Chesterfield, a very traditional and well-regarded academy sited in the shadow of the curiously twisted spire of the town's Church of St Mary and All Saints ⁸ ). At the time of the publication of the Dictionary's first fascicle he was living in London and working as a freelance writer. He had been forced by impoverishment to take his previous job, and it was one that he didn't like (Bradley had counted shipments of spoons and knives that had been sent off to foreign clients, Murray had, prior to his schoolmastering days, written ledger entries for the foreign department of a bank). He had a sickly wife who needed to be moved to the warmer airs of the south (hence London, once the cutlers had sacked him). And, most importantly, he had an extraordinary and Murray-like aptitude for language.

And an aptitude, as it happened, for much, much more. Just as with James Murray—and, so it seems, with so many of the men and women involved in the dictionary project—Henry Bradley had a range of interests and a level of scholarship in each (except music—he could only recognize one tune, `God Save the Queen', and that he knew only because everyone stood up when it was played) that was almost unimaginable. He had taken only fourteen days to learn Russian, it was said—`with no help but the alphabet and a knowledge of the principles of Indo-Germanic philology'. He also had an uncanny ability to read a book when it was upside down. He had learned to do this, he said, by looking at the Bible perched on his father's knees while he sat before the family reading prayers; it was a facility which, once learned, he was never to lose.

A friend once stumbled upon some of Bradley's childhood notebooks, which, he noted, included :

facts of Roman history, scraps of science, lists of words peculiar to the Pentateuch or Isaiah, Hebrew singletons, the form of the verb to be in Algerine, Arabic, bardic and cuneiform lettering, Arabisms and Chaldaisms in the New Testament, with vocabularies that imply he was reading Homer, Virgil, Sallust and the Hebrew Old Testament at the same time. In another group the notes pass from the life of Antar ben Toofail by `Admar' (apparently of the age of Haroun Arrashid) to the rules of Latin verse, Hakluyt and Hebrew accents, whereupon follow notes on Sir William Hamilton and Dugald Stewart and a translation of parts of Aeschylus' Prometheus …

Henry Bradley, a remarkable linguist and amateur lexicographer, first came to Murray's attention after writing a two-part critique of the first fascicle. He soon joined the staff as an assistant, and was appointed joint senior editor—though still doffing his cap to Murray—in 1896.

This dauntingly learned early middle-aged man, understandably weary of clerking in Sheffield, arrived in London, along with his fragile wife Eleanor and their four children, at the end of 1883. They took rooms in Fulham, on the Wandsworth Bridge Road, and Bradley started pounding the pavements in search of freelance writing assignments. Before long he befriended a man named J. S. Cotton, who then ran an elegant weekly magazine (thirteen shillings a year, published every Saturday) called the Academy.

In every sense the journal was a perfect outlet for the talents of a figure like Bradley. It was styled A Weekly Review of Literature, Science and Art—it was kept mercifully free of the canting irrelevancies of politics—and it usually ran to sixteen or twenty pages. A typical issue might have a dozen book reviews, a number of theatrical notices, and columns filled with delicious arcana—essays on the latest developments in France (`160,000 francs subscribed for a statue of Gambetta at Cahors') and America (`Matthew Arnold reportedly taking elocution lessons in Andover, Maine, to prepare himself for an American tour'), jottings on scientific advances (`new fossils discovered in the Bagshot Beds to the south of London'), philological studies (`fresh information on the number of Greek words in the Karlsruhe Priscian No. 132'), and countless other oddities besides.

In early February 1884 Cotton called Bradley to his offices on Chancery Lane and handed him a single copy of Part Iof James Murray's New English Dictionary, suggesting that the cutlery clerk might like to try to write a five-column review of it, both to test his abilities of comprehending so complex a book and then to see if he might be capable of organizing some sensible thoughts about it.

Bradley took the thick slab of printed pages back to Fulham, exultant at the chance. He had not fully moved in: he had only a tea-chest in his living room to use as a desk; but he nonetheless wrote his review and handed it in within days. Cotton found it far too long—but quite fascinating, and extraordinarily well written. Rather than return it to Bradley to cut it down—Victorian editors were more lenient about allotting space than their counterparts today—he decided he would divide it into two parts. These duly appeared, edited in double-quick time, in the issues of Saturday 16 February and Saturday 1 March.

The appearance of the notice—written as it was by a hitherto quite unknown figure, by someone well outside the philological priesthood—provoked an instant small sensation. It was an essay that in due course changed Bradley's life—plucking him from the tiresome trajectories of freelancing into the highest realms of academe and establishment. It was an essay that in due course changed James Murray's life too. And it changed—most happily—the fortunes of the Dictionary, like almost no other event before or since.

The most notable characteristic of Bradley's review was that it managed to be admiring and yet neither slavish nor sycophantic in its admiration. To be sure, there was no doubt that Bradley liked the book: `the present specimen affords every reason to hope that the skill of Dr Murray and his assistants will prove equal to the arduous task which lies before them,' he said in his first paragraphs. It could be confidently asserted, Bradley continued, `that if the level of excellence achieved in this opening part be sustained throughout, the completed work will be an achievement without parallel in the lexicography of any living language'.

He used the essay to work his way in detail through the design and structure of the book. Nothing much was quoted before what Murray chose as the linguistically epoch-changing year of ad 1150—when standard English had finally wrested itself free from the strictures of Anglo-Saxon—this, Bradley noted with singular approval. The pages were far more elegantly designed, he said, than the typographic `chaos' of M. Littré's French dictionary. Murray had been much more sensible in his relatively economical use of quotations—he had been wise not to pile on simply repetitious examples, as Littré had done (we can feel the anti-Gallic gorge rising in Bradley's throat), and he cited, in a sideswipe at the Frenchman, his `twenty-three numbered senses of eau'—which just had to be an `over-refinement, which is rather confusing than helpful'.

He was not entirely enamoured, however, of some of the lesser details of Murray's work. He chided the editor gently for somehow failing to include all the phrases with which he, Bradley, was familiar—why was the phrase acting edition not included? What about free agent, for example? Where was alive and kicking? The idiomatic nature of the phrase old age was not explained, and Bradley could not fathom why. And as for Murray's habit of including a very large number of quotations from the two or three years before publication—what, pray, was the point? `It seems to savour too much of “bringing the work down to the latest date” '—a phrase which critics of Bradley's essay might think was a piece of verbal clumsiness for `bringing it up to date', until we learn (from the modern OED) that the phrase up to date did not itself become current until around 1888, four years after Bradley wrote his review.

There were other cavils. Bradley wondered if it was right to remark that the word anemone signified `daughter of the wind', since the Greek suffix was not, he said with the casual confidence of one who knew, `exclusively patronymic'. The first syllable of alpaca was probably not Arabic, as Murray had written—and Bradley went on to argue why it was much more likely, in fact, to be Spanish. Nor was the Academy's essay entirely sure that it was wise of Murray to quote himself (from the Mill Hill school magazine) using the word anamorphose; warming to this theme, and slightly facetiously, Bradley then wondered whether Murray might do likewise in Part II, when it came to the word aphetize, a favourite word of Murray's, and one he was often heard to use when making speeches devoted to etymology and philology. ⁹

All told, the 4,500-word review, with its broad and measured praise and its cleverly detailed and quietly stated criticism, was very evidently the work of a figure of rare intelligence and judgement. The tone of the piece seems to have been unaffected by Bradley's obvious delight at seeing the book in print at last, and by his expectation that it would, when completed, be a masterpiece. It was, in short, just the kind of review that any intelligent editor might dream of—and it had a singular impact on James Murray.

It made him want, all of a sudden, to accomplish two related things. He wanted to find out who on earth this unknown and mysterious writer for the Academy was. And once he had found that out, he wanted to hire him. A man of his evident perspicacity, and fondness for the book, should be taken on to help. So Murray wrote from Mill Hill to Fulham, commended and thanked Bradley for his review—and then without further ceremony began to ask him a number of complex problems of etymology of words that began with B. Bradley wrote back, unfazed and helpful; and in June he wrote to Murray asking whether, in the event of some vacancy in the Scriptorium, there might be a place for him on the staff. The job had to be full-time, and salaried, he said: he had a wife and four children, and the life he could live on the proceeds of freelancing was a modest one indeed. He needed a sense of security.

And in due course, Henry Bradley did indeed join the staff of the Dictionary. He eventually presided over vast numbers of pages, becoming the most critically important of Murray's colleagues. In time, with Murray's death, he succeeded him as senior editor. Yet history has perhaps been less kind to him than he deserves: fate has consigned him to remain permanently memorialized in Murray's shadow, and his reputation, by comparison with that of Murray, has never been able truly to flourish. More of the details of his work belong to the next chapter: suffice to say here that his nearly 40-year connection with the Dictionary began modestly enough, with Mr Cotton's invitation in February 1884 to write an experimental book review for his small London literary magazine. The story of what then befell Henry Bradley should serve as encouragement for today's writers, one might think, and prompt them to consider the possibilities and opportunities that might yet come from the vagaries of the freelance life.

There was one unanticipated reward for Murray, one that was specifically timed to coincide with the appearance of Part I. Henry Hucks Gibbs had been working behind the scenes for the past year, trying to persuade the government, no less, to help alleviate Murray's troubling personal financial position. (Furnivall, Trench, and Prince Louis-Lucien Bonaparte had added their support to the campaign as well.) And in the end, it worked. At the beginning of 1884 Gladstone, the Prime Minister, even though he was then deeply embroiled in the nation-gripping saga involving General Gordon of Khartoum, ¹⁰ agreed to award the editor a pension from the Civil List—even though the List was a body set up in the late seventeenth century to pay the costs of the Royal Family and high officials of the government, like judges and ambassadors. The idea of paying the editor of a book was eccentric, to say the least—but Gladstone was clearly sufficiently impressed with the worth of what Murray was doing to persuade Queen Victoria to make an exception.

I am directed [the Downing Street private secretary wrote] to acquaint you that having given further consideration to the question of affording you additional aid in the work upon which you engaged of editing the New English Dictionary, he has received the Queen's approval to his recommendation that you should be granted a pension from the Civil List of £250 a year. He hopes that this proposal may be agreeable to you, and he wishes you all success in your important task.

Murray was thrilled, and wrote back to Gladstone saying that he accepted happily, though not for himself, but for his staff—the number of which he would now be able to increase. Hucks Gibbs added to his improving state by setting up an Indemnity Fund in Murray's name, to which others of his admirers contributed. And Oxford, too, chipped in, by revising its budget to make a total sum of £1,750 available each year. Of that sum, £1,175 would cover the wages of up to eight assistants. Seventy-five pounds would go for postage and stationery. And fully £500 would be earmarked for the editor—which meant that, together with the subvention from the Civil List, Murray would earn the not-so-trifling sum of £750 a year. Back in 1879 it had been suggested that he might be earning one pound for every page of the book: if he could keep to the Oxford target of 700 pages each year, then he would indeed be earning just what had been forecast, back when he had first signed the contract to start his work.

There were, however, two conditions applied to the seeming generosity of the Press. First of all, Murray had to agree that, were he to find himself falling short of producing 704 pages a year—two fully finished fascicles of 352 pages each—he would be obliged to hire a second senior editor, someone who would, in the pecking order, enjoy essentially the same standing and authority as himself. Murray agreed—hoping, if matters did demand it, that his new-found friend Henry Bradley would become available. And secondly, said Oxford—if the new funds were to be forthcoming, then James Murray would have to give up his schoolteaching in Mill Hill, and he would have to move himself and the entire dictionary operation to the city of Oxford, where logic and expediency had long suggested it should be shifted. The New English Dictionary, and all of its staff, together with its shelves of reference books, its hierarchy of desks and tables, its suites of pigeon-holes, and, most important, its ever-growing tonnage of quotation slips, should be removed in short order to a new location 56 miles to the west, to Oxford.

James Murray had been expecting this requirement for some time, and he was barely troubled by it. His response—or, at least, a response that coincided with the request—came with his inclusion of a quotation in the next part of the Dictionary that was as celebratory as it was entirely invented.

He was working on the word arrival, in the sense of `one that arrives or has arrived'. His new (and ninth) daughter, Rosfrith Ada Nina Ruthven Murray, happened to be born on 5 February 1884, just a week after the birth of Part I, and as he was dealing with arrival, he inserted into the proofs of the Dictionary the sentence the new arrival is a little daughter. He had done this once before, when Elsie Mayflower was born in May 1882, when he was working on A: he inserted into the list of illustrative quotations as fine a child as you will see.

In time Elsie Mayflower began to work on the Dictionary (and when she was eighteen, so did Rosfrith Ada Nina—despite her left-handedness, which made for some early difficulties). Elsie worked for her father for most of the rest of his life. The quotation announcing her birth survives in the OED to this day.