The Meaning of Everything

6

So Heavily Goes the Chariot

Only those who have made the experiment know the bewilderment with which the editor or sub-editor, after he has apportioned the quotations for such a word as above … among 20, 30 or 40 groups, and furnished each of these with a provisional definition, spreads them out on a table or on the floor where he can obtain a general survey of the whole, and spends hour after hour in shifting them about like pieces on a chess-board, striving to find in the fragmentary evidence of an incomplete historical record, such a sequence of meanings as may form a logical chain of development. Sometimes the quest seems hopeless; recently, for example, the word art utterly baffled me for several days; something had to be done with it; something was done and put in type; but the renewed consideration of it in print, with the greater facility of reading and comparison which this afforded, led to the entire pulling to pieces and reconstruction of the edifice, extending to several columns of type … those who think that such work can be hurried, or that anything can accelerate it, except more brain power to bear on it, had better try.

(James Murray,

Presidential Address to the Philological Society, 1884)

It was Benjamin Jowett of Balliol who first formally suggested that James Murray should move full-time up to Oxford. Yes, Jowett, the infuriating, arrogant, self-regarding, and yet quite unspeakably brilliant martinet whose interference in the early stages of the Dictionary's planning very nearly caused Murray to resign. By now, however, the two men had more or less settled their differences—Henry Hucks Gibbs had seen to that—and were, despite all early appearances to the contrary, fast becoming the very best of friends. And Murray, despite his self-evident fondness for Mill Hill School and the increasingly well-oiled machinery of his little Scriptorium, accepted that it was mightily inconvenient for him to live so far away from where his Dictionary was being typeset, printed, and published.

However fast the ice might be melting between Murray and Jowett, the fact is that the mills of Oxford themselves grind exceeding slow, and it took some months of negotiation and argumentation about money—and reams of correspondence with the always annoying Frederick Furnivall, who was not at all keen to see Murray taken away from him and his own headquarters in Primrose Hill—before everything was agreed. Jowett had made his first suggestion of the move in the autumn of 1883; Murray was not to shift until the summer of 1885.

Mill Hill School bade him a heartfelt farewell at a ceremony in that year's Foundation Day. The little iron hut that had served as the first Scriptorium was presented by Murray as his valedictory gift, and after the Old Boys raised the necessary cash, it was moved from the Murrays' garden to the grounds of the main school itself. It was to be a reading room for the boys, Murray said, a memento of his mastership among them, ¹ and a place where, especially on the Sabbath he still held dear, they could enjoy peace and time for reflection. And as a pleasing coda for the departing family, Harold Murray, the oldest son, who was a senior pupil at the school, distinguished himself in appropriate fashion by carrying off most of that year's academic prizes.

In short order Murray managed to find a house, an ideal house in fact, for Ada and himself and his (thus far nine) children in Oxford. It was a substantial and newly built structure in brick and Cotswold stone, set on the east side of the Banbury Road at the very edge of town (Oxford City's old boundary stone can still be seen in the front garden wall). There were open fields to the north, the University Press half a mile away by foot (a little longer on Murray's infamous Humber tricycle, which he pedalled furiously all around town) to the west, the Bodleian Library and the colleges (the house was built on St John's College land) a short step to the south. It was in most ways ideal—with plenty of room for the family's children, books, and lumber, and with a garden of a size that was perfect for recreation, relaxation, and privacy.

He named it `Sunnyside'—both after his first home back down in Mill Hill and also because, at least once noon had passed, it had been built on the sunny side of the north-bound street. It still stands, at No. 78—home now to an eminent anthropologist who has taken the greatest of care to memorialize the three astonishingly productive decades that James Murray spent there, <sup>2</sup> not least by placing an extremely rare first edition of the Dictionary in what was once Murray's dining room, purely as `a sentimental gesture'.

`Sunnyside'. The house on Banbury Road, Oxford, where Murray worked on the OED, an endeavour now memorialized by a blue plaque beside the famous pillar-box that was erected—to the gratitude both of Murray and of Sunnyside's current owner—by the city's Post Office.

James went first, along with the older children, the bulk of the furniture, and the family's collection of pet doves. Ada remained for a while with the younger children and the family cat, and supervised the assistants in their dismantling of the Scriptorium, collecting all the papers and books into 40 tea-chests. She grumbled in a letter to James about the hardness, the coldness, and the loneliness of the marital bed, though, and by mid-June she had joined her husband in Oxford, to begin what was to turn out a long and generally contented life in the comfortable penumbra of academe.

However pleasant a home for Murray and his family, Sunnyside turned out not to be an ideal headquarters for the making of the Dictionary. There was only enough room for the eleven Murrays, let alone for the assistants—eight of them, eventually—who were required for the project. So it was decided that a new Scriptorium had to be built—and this proved initially something of a trial. St John's College—acting wisely, since the Banbury Road was then and remains an exceptionally pleasantlooking thoroughfare—would not permit Murray to put up his monstrous-looking corrugated iron structure in the front garden. It had to go behind the house—so long as the next-door neighbour, the Vinerian Professor of English Law, Albert Dicey, did not object.

But Professor Dicey did object, and strenuously. In his short history of the University Press, Peter Sutcliffe writes that, to an astonished Murray, Albert Dicey was `a raving lunatic … the absent-minded professor incarnate [who] gibbered and stared at him across the garden wall'. The DNB is somewhat kinder, explaining that Dicey had `a lack of control over his muscles which hampered him in childhood and, indeed, throughout life'. He was far from mad, insists the author of the article, but rather had `a lovable simplicity of character and a lively wit', and once told his students that it was `better to be flippant than dull'. One can imagine that a flippant, witty man with poor muscle control might well seem something of a tall order for the punctilious and rather shy Scotsman to accept as his next-door neighbour.

The second Scriptorium, established the back garden of Murray's Oxford home soon after he moved in 1885, had a far more elaborate arrangement for filing slips.

A tidal wave of complaining letters promptly swamped the unsuspecting Murray, with Dicey insisting that the planned iron hut would ruin his view. And so modifications were made: the hut was sunk three feet below garden level, and the large pile of clayey debris from the excavation was turned into a hillock on which Ada Murray planted flowering shrubs (it still stands in the anthropologist's garden, though the Scriptorium has been replaced by a sunken garden and a limestone plaque on the garden wall). Murray had his own views as to why Dicey had insisted on his halfburying his building: it was so that `no trace of a place of real work shall be seen by fastidious and otiose Oxford'.

But though the Murrays and the Diceys later became firm friends, the legacy of the arguments remained: the Oxford Scriptorium, 50 feet long and fifteen wide, not only was deemed ugly (`like a toolhouse, a washhouse or a stable', said a passer-by, sniffily); because it had been built in a three-feet-deep trench, it was cold, damp, and positively unsanitary. On many a winter's day Murray and his colleagues were forced to sit with their feet in boxes filled with newspapers, to protect them from the chill and the draughts, and more than a few times Murray caught cold, and several times contracted pneumonia. He no longer sat, elevated, on a dais, as he had in Mill Hill: his only sign of authority in Oxford was that his stool was a little taller than those supplied to his assistants. So he was afflicted by the piercing cold just like everybody else—a melancholy note which gave Furnivall more ammunition with which to attack the Oxford move: the `horrid corrugated den' that had been dug into the Sunnyside back garden was quite unsuitable, he said, for the nationally important work on which Murray and his assistants were engaged.

Despite Furnivall's carping, and despite Murray's own dejection at having to leave the teaching he loved and to reconcile himself to becoming, and probably for the rest of his days, a lexicographer—Samuel Johnson's `harmless drudge', he had cause to remember bitterly—there was one development that somewhat sweetened the pill. Benjamin Jowett directed the full force of his charm on the Murray family, and made sure that the Balliol College of which he was Master was always available as a comfortable sanctuary.

`Welcome to your own College,' Jowett proclaimed, grandiloquently, when James and Ada arrived to dine at his High Table on the first June Sunday of their residence. He later arranged for Murray to be granted an Honorary MA—rather less for any dignity it bestowed than for the right it conferred to make use of the Bodleian Library. The friendship that developed between the two men because of gestures like these turned out to be an enduring one—so much so that when a boy, the tenth Murray child, was born in 1886, he was given Jowett as his third Christian name, and with the names Arthur Hugh before it, in memory of two of Jowett's closest friends. ³

And as with Balliol, so with the Oxford Post Office, which, in a gesture it would be hard to imagine today, tried to make Murray's life a little easier. As soon as he was settled at Sunnyside, engineers came and erected a bright red pillar box on Banbury Road, right outside his front gate. It was recognized that the editor sent immense volumes of post each day, and the local postmaster wanted to make sure that it was as convenient as possible for him to do so. ⁴

Congeniality and collegiality and pillar boxes and the Christiannaming of children were one thing, all part of the consummate pleasantness of the move to so civilized a city as Oxford. The number 704 was quite something else, however, and was the principal reason that, despite his outwardly agreeable situation, James Murray was wretchedly miserable during the first few years of his time in the city.

The number 704 was engraved on his heart in those first years, it seems. For this, as mentioned, was the number of pages of completed dictionary that Murray was expected—contractually expected, the Press liked to remind him—to produce for them each and every year. If he managed that—if he managed to give Oxford enough material for them to publish two finished fascicles of 352 pages each year—it was calculated that there was an outside chance that the complete work might be finished before all who were presently working on it were safely in their graves.

But Murray was finding it ever more difficult to complete 704 pages a year, or anything like it. The job was simply far too complex—and his own quest for absolute perfection so timeconsuming and demanding—to undertake at the rate that he, and Oxford, in the heady early days of the project, had thought might be reasonable. True, now that he was free from the demands of schoolteaching, he could give an extra twenty or so hours each week to dictionary work. But even this was not enough—and the money made available by the Press would not allow him to employ more than a handful of assistants. So as the work became ever more complex, as the press of words became ever more intolerable, Murray began to fall short of his contracted targets by ever wider margins.

As if this were not enough, it was becoming abundantly clear that the sales of the Dictionary parts were not going nearly as well as had been expected. Part I had sold only about 4,000 copies— the sales estimate had suggested ten times as many—and when Part II, Anta-Battening, was published in November 1885, it sold only 3,600. However friendly Henry Bradley's review in the Academy might have been, his words were not exactly persuading legions of readers to rush out and slap down twelve shillings and sixpence for a fascicle. This sombre fact was now exercising those in the Press who took the increasingly fashionable view—first adumbrated by Jowett—that its first business was not so much to publish fine books, but to make money, and to survive commercially.

One might have supposed Murray would have been exultant to see the second part complete. He wrote his Preface at the Oxford Scriptorium ⁵ in September. `This part completes the letter A, and extends nearly to the end of Ba-,' he reported, sounding, if not smug, then at least moderately well satisfied. Of the 9,135 words that the soft-bound book contained—words that brought the total in the Dictionary's first two parts to well over 15,000, more than a third of the number of words in the whole of Johnson's dictionary of a century before—some were exceptionally difficult. The prefix anti-, for example, occupied 42 columns of the completed book, back spread over 24 columns, and words such as as, at, art, ask, bail, band, bank, and bar proved complicated because of their `multitudinous ramifications of meaning': the task of determining their mutual relationships had `hardly been more intricate than that of exhibiting the results'. In addition, words that begin with Ba- turned out to have fearfully difficult etymologies—`among the most obscure in the language'—and that slowed them down as well.

But he was sanguine in his forecast. `I hope that the result of my removal to Oxford, and of the labours of the much larger staff of assistants with which the liberality of the Delegates of the Clarendon Press has furnished me, will be to make it possible to produce the following parts of the Dictionary at much shorter intervals, and that we may reach the end of Part III, finishing B, early in 1886.'

It was either very tactful or very cunning of Murray to mention in his Preface what he liked to call the generous liberality of the Press. The Press saw it rather differently: it was only a most reluctant liberality, and a liberality of which, in the lofty judgement of the official History of the University of Oxford written a century later, the Dictionary was during the 1880s the most chronically needy recipient. `What makes our chariot go so heavily is the fact that it is always carrying the dead weights of scores and scores of matters which no-one will nerve themselves to finish,' wrote the Delegates' Secretary. It must have been crystal clear to Murray as he wrote those words—gratefully, or with tongue in cheek—that his project must have seemed a dead weight, and that there was not the slightest chance he would ever make his deadline.

Nor did he. Part III, which inched the alphabet forward only as far as bozzom—and so did not `finish B', not by a long chalk— was due to appear in April 1886. In March, however, it was found that only a paltry 56 pages of its contracted-for 352 had been sent from final proof stages and into the hands of the printers. In the end the part was not to be published in the spring of 1886, nor anywhere near: it was a full year later, in March 1887, when it did appear; and the Part IV that did indeed complete B—and thus the first 1,240-page actual volume of the book, A-Byzen—was finished as late as June 1888.

Murray blamed much on the enormous difficulties involved in dealing with specific words—such as the `terrible' word black, and its scores of derivatives, which took his best assistant, the Revd C. B. Mount, fully three months of non-stop work. <sup>6</sup> As if the lexicographic trials were not enough, there was always the `intolerable trouble about assistants'. Murray said that he kept trying to recruit suitable people, but found in almost every case, after each had worked no more than a week, that he or she (usually he) was completely useless. One of them, despite having an Oxford MA, was found to be, in Murray's uncharacteristically dyspeptic report, `an utter numb-skull … a most lack-a-daisical, graspless fellow, born to stare at existence'.

But few were persuaded to listen to this litany of gripes. Many critics were coming to regard Murray's complaints as a querulous whining; and a considerable number of subscribers, those who had paid ready money to get their hands regularly on the Dictionary parts as they tumbled hot off the presses, were getting restless, their disappointment palpable, their annoyance recorded in evermore angry correspondence. Bookshops who had placed regular orders stopped placing more, and cancelled those already in place. The Athenaeum, a journal which had always been supportive, wondered if the endless wait for the first parts of the work suggested that it might not be finished in the lifetime of most readers, if ever. Certainly it supported the desire for perfection—but if the risk was then `the unattainability of zyc,' <sup>7</sup> might it not be sensible to cut corners, just a little? Delegates recorded their `great anxiety' at the situation. It was indeed a truly dreadful time for Murray, and for the Dictionary.

Each one of the early ages of the Dictionary has its mascot of a villain—there was Frederick Furnivall making mayhem and scandal during the first decade, and then Benjamin Jowett, interfering and pettifogging, when the first part was about to appear. Now, once Murray had moved up to Oxford, there came a new problem in the shape of the Secretary to the Delegates who had been appointed in 1884 as successor to Bartholomew Price: he was a Balliol man whose appointment had been engineered by the meddlesome Jowett, and he was named Philip Lyttelton Gell. Not one history of this man, who in essence ran the Press for the thirteen years up until 1897, is kindly: he was widely seen as an unpleasant, idle, incompetent, and quarrelsome, and was nearuniversally loathed.

He was also an outsider, something the English of the time generally did not care for. He had not read Greats—which was then, and remains, the University's heavily loaded by-name for the study of classics—but history, and though he had achieved a First, in the view of the Press scholars even this was clearly not credential enough. He had come from a London-based publishing firm, Cassell, and had no experience of the curious ways of publishing in Oxford. Moreover, his election had been rushed through, sneakily, during the summer holidays by a Jowett who was determined to get his way, to put his own man to run the Delegates, and thus allow Jowett to have a discreet hold on the Press, for what he arrogantly considered would be the good of all.

Gell chivvied Murray endlessly and at times most cruelly. He disagreed totally with Murray's approach, and could not fathom why, despite the increased money being paid to the project, despite the additional assistants who had been hired, and despite the move to Oxford, progress was so glacially slow. In his view Murray was to blame, and Murray alone. He began to harass him, yapping and snapping at his heels like a sheepdog, badgering him to produce more, finish more, send more completed pages down for printing.

In 1886 Gell insisted that Henry Bradley be brought in to help with the letter B—a move that initially flummoxed Murray, who had no experience in delegating work, and would brook no rival to his own authority. Yet Bradley's inclusion in the project made no discernible difference at first—perhaps because he was still based in London, and was initially given work by Murray which an ordinary assistant could do just as well. In the first six months after his appointment progress actually slowed—only fifteen pages were completed, less than five per cent of what had been targeted and outlined in the contract of 1879.

The intractability of Bwas a nightmare in more ways that one. Gell had wrongly assumed that Bwould be no more difficult than A—that it would, like all consonants, produce a slew of words that would be lexically and etymologically far simpler than any words headed by a vowel. Everyone expected that Q, for example, would be a simple letter, and that S would be formidably difficult. But B—surely it should be easier than A, at the very least. Yet this turned out not to be the case: Bhad many more words of far greater complexity and age than anyone had ever dared to imagine: it was just desperately unfortunate that at the very time the Press was beginning to complain at the slowing of the project, the very letter on which the editor was working turned out, unanticipatedly, to be among the most difficult of all to fathom.

Murray was now in the direst of straits, at his wit's end, and in a letter to Gell he begged for mercy:

I wish from the bottom of my heart that I could do without your money, and honestly give you what you would consider a commercial equivalent for it. It is an embittering consideration for me that while trying to do scholarly work in a way that scholars may be expected to appreciate, circumstances place me commercially in the position of the beÃte noire of the Clarendon Press, who involves them in ruinous expenditure.

When Bwas finally done with, there was no congratulation: Gell and the Press maintained a stony silence. Murray—who was now in his 50s, and who had taken only two weeks off in the past three years, was on the verge of breaking down. Gell insisted—the only moment of humanity anyone remembers him displaying— that he take a short break; but he then swiftly reverted to type by overruling Murray's plea that the Scriptorium be closed down for a fortnight in August, when even the English sun made working inside the corrugated iron box like roasting in an oven. His staff went away on their own holidays, leaving him alone to contemplate an `accumulation of proofs, revises, 2nd revises, finals … to say nothing of the pile of letters etc. a yard deep … so appalling that I feel inclined to sit down and weep'.

But then the overlooked, derided, and unmemorialized Philip Lyttelton Gell introduced what posterity would show was his master stroke. In November 1887, with progress down to the merest trickle—a single sheet of the Dictionary produced between May and June, a fresh forecast showing that Part IV might well take four years to finish, instead of the six months previously agreed—he demanded that Henry Bradley be promoted from being a London-based assistant editor to being a full-time (and in due course Oxford-based) senior editor. He insisted further that Bradley should have his own staff and offices, and that the two men, Murray and Bradley, should take independent responsibility for producing one part of the Dictionary every year from now on.

Murray was initially thrown off balance by the news. Gell tried his best to get Murray on side, by arranging first that Bradley produce a specimen sheet for him, and for Murray to approve it—so that Murray could be certain that Bradley was capable of working well independently. But Gell's was only a momentary lapse into geniality: within days of the appointment he was publicly threatening that the pair must produce a pair of parts per year, or else. Murray countered by insisting there be no lowering of standards: if Gell insisted on his cutting corners, then he might have to resign.

But he did not resign; and with the benefit of long perspective, it appears now that it was Gell's cruelly and tactlessly implemented reforms that did, in the end, permit the Dictionary to turn the corner that it had perforce to turn in order to survive. Even today Gell is seen by admirers of Murray as having been his lifelong enemy and his potential nemesis. But perhaps he was more sinned against than sinning, for the fact remains that when Gell assumed the leadership of the Press, the Dictionary—`the dead weight that made the chariot go so heavy'—was headed for certain disaster and for probable death; when he left the Press during Victoria's Jubilee year thirteen years later, there was no doubt that the Dictionary was in rude good health, that Murray was firmly in charge, that the project was one that would continue to completion, and that it now enjoyed the blessings of Oxford, the monarchy, and the nation, all rolled into one.

It took longer than expected for Bradley to set up an Oxford office—he lived for almost the first decade of his appointment in Clapham, and worked in a room provided for him by the British Museum. He came to Oxford only when he was needed, and by train. Furnivall was highly critical of this arrangement, regarding it as unseemly that a man of Bradley's delicacy was `rattling his nerves to pieces in incessant railway journeys'.

When he finally did consent to come, in 1896, it was not at the Scriptorium that he worked, but in the Old Ashmolean Building in central Oxford, a classically designed and roomy structure next door to Christopher Wren's magnificent Sheldonian Theatre, in the very beating heart of the University. A later admiring biographer noted that this unassuming and always available man had no need of elaborate paraphernalia, but set himself up before a plain deal table, `without a drawer'. Many years would pass before this changed; his assistants, thinking it more proper for an editor to have a kneehole desk, arranged a whip-round and presented one to him.

Despite the origins of his appointment, it swiftly transpired that Bradley himself as well—to whom the completion of the entirety of the letter E was entrusted as his first editorial mission— became the frequent target of Gell's scourgings, which continued mercilessly so long as this irrepressible martinet remained the Delegates' Secretary. Bradley was in no temper to deal with it, and in consequence fell ill—he was in many senses less durable than Murray, which Murray's admirers put down to the tenacity and durability of the Scots temperament—and he had to go off to Norway for three months' sanctioned leave.

By the time Henry Bradley became a full-time senior editor in 1896, he set up shop in the Old Ashmolean Building: his first task, the editing of E, was accomplished there.

Yet inch by column inch, the work went on—with everyone looking on in wary amazement, everyone waiting for someone to resign, for someone to pull the plug, for someone to go mad. Slowly, very slowly the parts emerged. C to Cass, then Cast to Clivy, Clo to Consigner, Consignificant to Crouching, and then with the addition of the relatively small number of words between Crouchmass and Czech, C was all done, by 1893. While he was working on Cu- the ever-cheerful Walter Skeat tried to encourage Murray by inviting him up to Cambridge. `I could find enough talk to cumber you. You could come by a curvilinear railway. Bring a cudgel to walk with. We have cutlets in the cupboard, & currants and curry & custard & (naturally) cups … say you'll cum!'

When C was all done, it was realized that it had been, said Murray, `a typical letter'. (It had also the virtue that the beginning and end words of the parts were generally recognizable to most intelligent readers. The fact that so many of the Bwords had been wholly unfamiliar—battentlie, for example, byzen, bozzom—tempted some critics to say that Murray was so slow simply because he was searching out obscurities, and was moreover doing so deliberately, to annoy and obfuscate. The relative simplicity of the top-and-tail words of his C fascicles suggested otherwise, suggesting that he was dealing with the varied ordinariness of an extraordinary language—and so that particular objection, at least, could be withdrawn.)

Walter Skeat was exultant at its completion. He wrote a ditty, both to cheer up Murray and to give a fillip to Bradley, who was at the time labouring in solitude down in Clapham on the immense complexities of E. The poem, like so many written to celebrate parts of the Dictionary, is fairly execrable:

Wherever the English speech is spread,

And the Union Jack flies free,

The news will be gratefully, proudly read

That you've conquered your A, B, C.

But I fear it will come

As a shock to some

That the sad result will be

That you're taking to dabble and dawdle and doze,

To dolour and dumps, and—worse than those—

To danger and drink,

And—shocking to think—

To words that begin with D-.

D duly came and went, successfully—and the letter E, on which Bradley had been cutting his teeth, was incorporated into the same volume, so that both men shared the honours of the title page. When they counted, there were found to be 13,478 main words beginning with D, but only 9,249 that started with E. (S is by far the largest letter of the alphabet, by which it is meant that words beginning with S are the most numerous in the lexicon, occupying two full volumes of the Dictionary. C is the second largest letter, with almost as many words as are begun by A and Bcombined. The smallest letter sections are—in order—X, Z, Y, Q, K, J, N, U, and V. E is a moderate letter, sitting at around the middle of the league table.)

Murray was never happy with the way the Dictionary initially covered E. It is perhaps not that he regarded himself as in anything but good-humoured competition with Henry Bradley—he was almost equally unhappy with the way that he himself had managed A. ⁸ He wrote to Walter Skeat, his trusted confidant, that E was so poor because

the Delegates were in such a hurry to get Mr. Bradley on, to show that he could (as they thought) work twice as fast as I, that he had neither the practice, the knowledge of the weakness of the Philological Society slips, nor the resources of the Scriptorium to help him … I have always said that the letter ought to be done again. A is not quite so unsatisfactory because I had been working provisionally for a year when I began to print it, and had learned how much had to be done to supplement the slips … It was a pity to start Bradley so.

If there was a certain waspishness about the last remark, it rarely showed itself more outwardly than this. Murray and Bradley invariably got on well. It was Murray and Gell who were so frequently at daggers drawn.

And the daggers continued to be flashed from time to time, as slowly, imperceptibly slowly, the Dictionary got onto its feet. New schemes were implemented—bonuses to encourage the staff, smaller-sized fascicles published more often to keep the subscribers and booksellers on side, and a firm agreement on how much more comprehensive the new Dictionary was going to be than was Webster, which up to this point was regarded, if somewhat disdainfully by the Oxford men, as the high-water mark of the lexicographers' art.

The row over the `Webster ratio' consumed much time and energy during the 1890s. Everyone agreed that the new Dictionary (with the words Oxford English Dictionary now appearing, as they did first on the loose paper cover of a fascicle in 1894, and then on the title page of all volumes after Volume III) was superior in all ways to Webster—not least in the number of quotations offered and the number of senses and meanings that were discerned from them. But more comprehensive meant much bigger—and the question that bothered Gell and his commercially minded colleagues was essentially: how much bigger?

There was little anyone could do about the additional number of headwords that Murray and Bradley were determined to include: between A and Age, for example, Murray identified almost twice as many headwords as were to be found in Webster. There was simply no possibility that a dictionary like the OED could possibly economize by dropping words altogether—and to be fair, not even the most philistine critic of the OED ever thought this should happen.

But economy could be won by limiting the number of quotations, by simplifying the explanations of etymology, and by curbing prolixity in definitions. Murray tried this, and while he was working on A, managed to keep a ratio of six of his pages to one of Webster's, which most thought manageable. But gradually, as his enthusiasm for the project increased, so did his page ratio. By the letter Bhe was running at seven to one; by C, eight to one; and a number of delegates began to accuse him and Bradley— particularly Bradley, who seemed to be especially undisciplined in this regard—of `systematically neglecting' the limits which had been informally imposed on him, of keeping to about six to one, and certainly no more than seven. The Delegates who warned the editors of their profligacy did, however, agree to an increase in the overall size of the OED: it could, they said, be published at 12,900 pages total, which was more than half as many pages again as had been agreed back in 1884.

Throughout all these rows and dramas, James Murray kept threatening his resignation; Oxford kept implying that it would suspend publication; Bradley was told he would be fired unless he contained himself; whole years went by without volumes appearing; and the project—though it had begun to sputter into life in the early 1890s—seemed mired once again, or to be running out of fuel, or on fumes, or into brick walls. The metaphors for the imagined fate of the OED in those years are many and various.

But, as before, it never did die. It kept itself alive, just—and then two things happened in quick succession. First, the news of the rows and the threats spilled out into the daily papers; second, in a perhaps not unconnected development, Philip Lyttelton Gell was summarily dismissed, and everything, suddenly, became a very great deal better.

The press—the Saturday Review, specifically, was most detailed in its commentary—got hold of the story in April 1896. Oxford, the papers said, was planning to suspend publication of the Dictionary, because of money troubles, because of the indisciplined fractiousness of its senior editors, because of the unexpectedly vast complexity of the language that the immense book was seeking to catalogue and to fix.

The Review immediately professed its stunned astonishment: to close down the OED would be nothing less than `a national calamity … an indelible disgrace to the University'. The Press was vilified, accused of philistinism and greed. Murray, by contrast, was transformed overnight into a noble and lonely hero, a man battered by the parsimony of a ragged army of crabbed, shortsighted, and money-obsessed zealots. And in consequence letters poured in to the Scriptorium—a building from which, on Gell's specific orders, members of the public had lately been excluded— all of them supporting Murray and Bradley in what was perceived to be their indomitably honourable quest.

Such was the outburst of public feeling that Gell had to reverse his decisions. All of them were suddenly remade, whether they were the most trivial of his instructions—passers-by were from henceforward most welcome once again to drop in to see how Murray was working, though `Hush, please!' if the old man had a furrowed brow—to the most serious—the Webster ratio could from henceforward be more or less what the editors decided it should be. Seven to one, eight and three-quarters to one—whatever it took was, all of a sudden, just fine. It was up to the editors to run their Dictionary; Oxford just had to accept that in the short term, it probably never would make money. Thus far it had cost £50,000; and thus far it had sold enough to bring in £15,000. It would take more than a change in the Webster ratio and a ramping-up of the production schedule to close a gap such as this.

No—it was the long term that counted, and the reputation of the University. Once that philosophical hurdle was cleared, once this extraordinary sea change was effected, a new sense of purpose, direction, and energy could and did begin to infuse the project.

And as symbol of the new ideals, Gell was indeed dismissed. The Dictionary parts that appeared in his final year of employment—Distrustfully-Doom, Doom-Dziggetai ⁹ —sounded peculiarly ominous. The fascicles were made in smaller parts now, appearing more frequently, not necessarily in alphabetical order, but in the order of their completion. There was an ordered disorder to the making of the Dictionary in these newly exuberant days, and slowly, everyone began to allow a sense of sunny optimism to prevail, a sense much missed for far too long.

And even the life of poor Philip Lyttelton Gell was made marginally more easy. He was dismissed after he had fallen ill and while he was convalescing in the south of France—he was simply told not to come back to work. A friend (one of a precious few, by all accounts) tried to cheer him up by suggesting that there was no fate so enviable `as to be unjustly ªsackedº in a civilized country'; and Gell himself expressed some relief that he was no longer bound up with all the rows that had attended his time at the Press. When he had joined, he recalled, the Press was

in a medieval muddle, with no telephones, no speaking tubes, no typewriters … Do you recall the monotony of the old Press type, and the traditional Clarendon Press page, and all the efforts you made to equip the Press with the variety of Type which has lifted up its Typography up to its present level? … that `dead-lift' required to modernize the Press would not have to be faced twice … It took a good deal out of all concerned.

Gell left behind him a legacy of distemper and dismay such that all connected with the Press sought actively to erase him from Oxford's collective memory. When he died in 1926 he was not even given the dignity of an entry in the Dictionary of National Biography—he was not even short-listed, so venomous was the feeling towards him by almost all of those he touched. All that Gell could do from the Derbyshire stately home to which he retired was to point to the `enormous stride' which separated the condition of the Press when he left it from its state when he had joined it back in 1883—the year when Benjamin Jowett, as he said of his sponsor, `first stirred the fire and set us all running'.

He could point to that, and if he chose, he could point to the Dictionary, a work that was now on the very brink of being accepted as a lustrous achievement and as a permanent monument to scholarship—or, in words that were written just as Gell was shamefacedly making his exit, was likely to be revered for being `not the least of the glories of the University of Oxford'. At this remove, the hapless Philip Lyttelton Gell seems deserving of at least some small credit, a muted acknowledgement that his time at Oxford was not entirely misspent.

Notes

[2] Murray's already-mentioned childhood friendship with Alexander Graham Bell—Bell had been best man at Murray's wedding to Ada—continued to flourish when Murray lived in Oxford, with the consequence that after Bell had invented the first working telephone he presented it to Murray in gratitude for teaching him about acoustics and electricity back in their younger Edinburgh days. Murray found the wood-and-bakelite arrangement somewhat uninspiring, and consigned it to an attic. In the 1980s the present occupant of 78 Banbury Road found himself at the AT&T Museum in New Jersey, where the curator was bemoaning the fact that Telephone Number One had never been found. A search of the Oxford attic turned up nothing; but the elderly gentleman who had bought the house from Murray's widow was found, and reported that during the Second World War soldiers had been billeted at the house and, during one exceptionally frigid winter, had used all available bits of rubbish they could find in the attic as firewood. If this story is to be believed, the world's first telephone appears to have gone up in smoke, to keep a party of ice-cold infantrymen from freezing. Back

[3] Benjamin Jowett and Balliol College might have been close to Murray—the University, however, was not and never really would be. Oxford in Victorian times was a highly exclusive body, upper-class, rigorously classical in its intellectual bent, and unashamedly Church of England. James Murray was, on the other hand, the son of a provincial draper, had interests in European philology, and was an unabashed Congregationalist. He also had the terrier-like Frederick Furnivall constantly interfering on his behalf—anonymous letters to the local press his speciality—and annoying the grandees of the University by doing so. For all of these reasons, and despite his august position as editor of the greatest of all English-language dictionaries, he was never offered a University position, not even in an honorary capacity. He kept a dignified silence about having to endure the cold shoulder, other than to remark in passing, two years before his death, that he was `to a great extent only a sojourner' in Oxford, never truly a part of the fabric of the place.Back