The Meaning of Everything

2

The Construction of the Pigeon-Holes

I believe that the scheme is now firmly established … and I confidently expect … that in about two years we shall be able to give our first number to the world. Indeed, were it not for the dilatoriness of many contributors, I should not hesitate to name an earlier period.

(Herbert Coleridge, first editor of

The New English Dictionary, 30 May 1860)

The great fact … is, that the Dictionary is now at last really launched, and that some forty pages are in type, of which fortyeight columns have reached me in proof.

(James Murray, third editor of

The New English Dictionary, 19 May 1882)

Almost 22 years separate this pair of laconic announcements, more than two decades dividing wish from fulfilment, man's hopeful proposal of the plan from cool disposal of it by God or the Fates. Those who were so eagerly hoping for the Dictionary to appear were obliged to endure what was, by any standards, a long, long wait. The first years of the project were, in short, a most frustrating time. They were years marked by periods of hesitation and uncertainty, by outbursts of anger, threats of abandonment, frustrated argumentation, and (in one case) untimely and inconvenient death. Only in the later years, once a proper sense of organization had finally gripped the near-foundering project, were there any signs of progress and real achievement.

What in those early years was familiarly known as `the Philological Society's Dictionary' had in essence three founding fathers—Chenevix Trench, Herbert Coleridge, and Frederick Furnivall. They were men of strikingly different backgrounds and attitudes, united only by their fondness and fascination for the language; ¹ their variety of styles lent much, of both benefit and disbenefit, to the early workings of what, it fast became clear, was going to be a most formidable enterprise.

Richard Chenevix Trench came from a distinguished Irish clerical family, ² was intellectually stellar enough to have been made a member of the Cambridge Apostles at Trinity, and was, at first, an unstinting admirer of Spanish literature. While still a youngster he seems to have been briefly infected with a heady sense of idealism: he flitted off to Spain to fight as a volunteer for the liberal insurrectionary Jose Torrijos, participating in a valiant attack on Cadiz—returning to London unscathed but apparently deeply embarrassed. It was, so far as one can tell from his admiring biographers, the only time in his life that he displayed the merest trace of foolhardiness, levity, or frivolity. As his family expected of him, Trench promptly entered the Church of England on his return home, and casting all romantic notions aside for good, duly progressed up the ecclesiastical ladder with efficiency and dispatch. He first became a deacon at Norwich Cathedral, went briefly back to Ireland to help famine victims as a curate in the parish of Cloughjordan, Co. Tipperary, then took up the post of curate in Colchester, and subsequently became perpetual curate of Curbridge, in the see of Winchester. It was during the six years that he spent here in Hampshire that he developed his reputation as a scholar, a liberal-minded reformer (becoming a fast friend of William Wilberforce, the great anti-slavery campaigner), a poet and—most significantly in this context—a philologist. He lectured widely on the nature and origins of the language, and, being a quick study, published three popular and well-regarded short books during the 1850s, The Study of Words, English Past and Present, and A Select Glossary. ³ After a curiously extended delay he joined the (by nowfifteen-year-old) Philological Society in 1857—having been elected Dean of Westminster the year before—and for a while ran the Unregistered Words Committee for the Society from his official residence just beside Westminster Abbey. ⁴ He then, as already mentioned, gave the two-part lecture on the shortcomings of existing dictionaries at the London Library in November 1857, which set in motion the plan for creating the great newreplacement. Once the Society agreed on the idea, he promptly formed two committees—one on etymology, one on word history and literature—and for a while ran these, also, from Dean's Yard.

But before long the relentless press of his diocesan work proved too time-consuming, and within a few short months he told his colleagues that he could no longer continue: from henceforward, he said, work on the new book would continue under the editorship of Herbert Coleridge—and all correspondence on the matter would pass to him, at his elegant four-storey pale yellow mansion on the east side of Regent's Park, Chester Terrace. There have been many addresses associated over time with the making of the Dictionary: No. 10 Chester Terrace, London NW, is in all probability the one that most properly can lay claim to being its birthplace.

The man who was technically the book's first editor, Herbert Coleridge (though he is rarely identified as such in most of the official publications), was far from being a middle-aged divine: at the time of the founding of the Philological Society he was just twelve years old, and when Trench made his Guy Fawkes Day speech, a mere 27. He had been elected to the Society that same February, swiftly impressing all around him with his curiously precocious erudition: he won a stunning double first degree in classics and mathematics at Balliol College, he had become a barrister, he was quite ostentatiously obsessed with the byways of philology, most notably with the finer points of Sanskrit, the languages of Norway and Finland, and the dialects of Iceland. He had a small annuity, which allowed him to indulge his philology more keenly than his law.

The first editor was Herbert Coleridge, only 27 years old, a grandson of the poet. He was a scholarly and sickly figure, and had sent the first sample pages to press when he caught a chill and died, a year into the project.

As soon as he had won entry to the Philological Society Coleridge started writing papers for its well-regarded Transactions—a first essay on the nature of the diminutive formed by the addition of -let (he wondered why, for instance, a small river was called a rivulet, and not a riverlet ), and another on the Latin words ploro and exploro. His very evident erudition (and the fact that he was the grandson of the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge) attracted Dean Trench's attention; and when Trench felt pressed by his churchly duties to bowout of the day-to-day running of the project, it was to the ever-eager young man that he first turned. Such files as the Unregistered Words Committee had collected were promptly shipped from Dean's Yard to Chester Terrace, and the dictionary work began anew, under the captaincy of a younger man.

Younger, but not fitter, Herbert Coleridge turned out to be a sickly figure, plagued by what was once called consumption but which nowadays is more generally known as pulmonary tuberculosis. The image of him that filters down through the years is of a workaholic, rarely straying from his chambers, poring unhealthily over his correspondence, his lists of words and his organizational plans, while he coughed and vomited and wheezed and in alarmingly short order grew ever weaker and weaker.

His accomplishments made under these trying circumstances, though they are widely forgotten today, are far from trivial. With the help of a committee he drewup the Canones—the Rules—by which the three-part dictionary he envisaged might be created. He divided the books that were to be read into three groups—those appearing between 1250 and the publication of the first English NewTestament in 1526; those published between 1526 and Milton's death in 1674; and those printed between then and 1858, when the project was formally set under way. He also found in the famed Nicholas Trübner a printer and publisher ⁵ —a rather premature arrangement, even the most optimistic might think—who would be able to perform the intricate work that a dictionary, with its countless typefaces and foreign languages and phonetic alphabets, required.

In addition Coleridge organized the first small army of volunteer readers—he wrote around to schools and universities and members of the Society and their friends, and within a year managed to find no fewer than 147 men (and a small number of women) who happily agreed to help find quotations showing a variety of words in contexts that the editor should find illustrated their various meanings and senses. But their ardour quickly cooled. Of these first 147, the editor reported dejectedly in May 1860, only some 89 were still working—the early enthusiasm of the other 58 (he dismissed them as `hopeless') had clearly evaporated.

Coleridge was brutally frank about the quality of the survivors, and coldly invoked a lexicographical version of the triage: Class I, into which he placed some 30 men, were `first-rate'; fifteen belonged to Class II, being only `of inferior merit'; and the other 44 were lumped into Class III, `not having produced sufficient work to be able to judge'. But matters looked up again when Coleridge found an American, the Honorable George Perkins Marsh of Burlington, Vermont, who readily agreed to mastermind a transatlantic search for illustrative quotations of wanted words. He impressed Coleridge as first-rate from the very start.

Marsh was himself was a fascinating character—a Puritan aristocrat, wealthy from his dealings in wool and railways, fluent in twenty languages, sent as a diplomat to Istanbul, in later life a renowned environmentalist, and for all his career sufficient of a scholar to have Coleridge select him, from all the Americans that he knew, to be the ideal leader of the dictionary effort in America. By the time Marsh died in Florence in 1882 it was said that he had assembled a large group of distinguished Americans to help him with the project—fulfilling Coleridge's early promise that the title of an English dictionary was `no longer strictly applicable', since the book could nowinclude linguistic peculiarities from well beyond Albion's shores. Little remains to record howmuch effort Marsh actually made, though the fact that American contributions to the later development of the Dictionary have always been prodigious, suggests that he did leave a legacy of some kind.

Coleridge also made the very first list of words that he thought should be included—he took the material, the illustrative quotations that had been sent in by his 89 volunteer readers, to Chester Terrace, and arranged them alphabetically, according to the words to which they referred. He called these organized lists his `basis of comparison'—since he would read through the various quotations and compare the way that the target word was used in each of them, so that he could compare their various meanings and senses and find out for himself which were essentially the same and which were different, and if different, whether profoundly or subtly so. It was by way of this non-judgemental, descriptive, and manifestly non-prescriptive way that meanings were eventually discerned, and the definitions written. It is perhaps easiest to explain by offering an example. Because of some gaps in the early archives of the Dictionary, it is difficult to be certain which submitted quotations were actually worked upon by Herbert Coleridge himself. We do knowthat he worked for more than a year on words that began with the letters A to E, and that to a lesser degree he began to sift through words beginning with the letters F to L. Within that first group we know also he asked Messrs Trübner to prepare some sample pages (somewhat prematurely, critics said), the most successful apparently being those for the words between Affect and Affection. It might be worthwhile looking here.

Some few of the words in the sample pages—affectationist for example, `one who indulges in affectation or artificiality'—have only a single meaning. But most of other words have many more meanings—as, for instance, the word three further down the alphabetical line, affected. By reading the quotations submitted by volunteer readers for this one word, any good lexicographer who was working on proper historical principles would be able to recognize and discern several different shadings of meaning.

For instance, a quotation (and these that followwere indeed all received at Chester Terrace, and were eventually included in the Dictionary) such as `He is too picked, too spruce, too affected, too odde', which comes from Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost, suggests the meaning `full of affectation; non-natural or artificial in manner; pretentious; affecting airs'. On the other hand, if the editor found, as in Milton's 1649 work Eikonoklastes, the phrase `A work assigned rather than by me chosen or affected', he would knowthat affected here meant something quite different—in this case, `sought after, aimed at, desired'. And yet again, if another volunteer reader found in the Daily Telegraph and submitted to Coleridge a report allowing that `the accused was mentally affected, her father and three of her aunts having all been insane', he would recognize a third meaning, `tainted, distempered, diseased'.

This is not to say that an editor, having read these three quotations, would instantly come up with three meanings for the word. He would want many more quotations—five or ten at the very least—to confirm that one meaning was indeed different from another, that each of them had some persistence in the literature, and was not just the result of carelessness, or a malapropism. Which is why the work of a lexicographer is, as Samuel Johnson had famously said, so much harmless drudgery.

A microscopically close reading of all the literature would thus throwup as many meanings as were ever intended for any particular word (there are a total of eighteen definably different meanings and senses for affected)—whereupon Coleridge, or his successors, would make note of them, ponder the best way of writing a definition for each, gather in the etymologies and variant spellings and pronunciations, and have everything laid down in type, before moving on to the next word (in this case, affectedly).

To reiterate: Coleridge sawas his principal job the discovery of as many historically recorded uses as he and his volunteers could find of each of the words destined for the Dictionary; and from the comparisons he made of howeach word had been used over time, he would work out which meanings were which, and arrange his dictionary accordingly. Moreover Coleridge, just like his colleagues ⁶ and successors, and in deference to the ideas of Dean Trench and to the Canones he and his committee had written, stuck gamely to the basic principle of the project: that the more quotations that could be found, the more easily the subtle differences between the (possibly) myriad usages and meanings of any single word could be identified. This is howhistorical dictionaries are made: not as difficult a task today, perhaps—but Coleridge and those around him were pioneers, and every step of the process was new to him and to all who tried to help.

To help him in arranging the words and the quotation slips ⁷ — the crucially important pieces of paper that would be the project's building blocks—Coleridge had a carpenter build for him, in oak, a small suite of pigeon-holes, to hold and permit the alphabetical arrangement of the various quotation slips that his volunteers sent in. The arrangement which he designed was six square holes high, nine across—giving him a total of 54 pigeon-holes, with some 260 inches of linear space that were thought sufficient to hold comfortably between 60,000 and 100,000 of the slips. No greater number could Coleridge ever imagine his having to deal with. When they were all filled with quotation slips, he was heard to tell his fellowphilologists, then and only then would it be time to start proper editorial work on the big dictionary.

Herbert Coleridge was a steady and a Christian man, and he had well-developed—but, as it happened in the end, lexicographically quite unacceptable—views on the kinds of word that should not be in the Dictionary. He asked the Philological Society, for example, to exclude mock words like devilship since in this one case `it was never intended by its author for general circulation or adoption'. The Society members politely disagreed, and voted that such words should indeed be placed in the book (devilship is there, with a quotation, and not a humorous one, from 1644), and that only laboured and unused puns like hepistle and shepistle should be proscribed. (Both are rightly absent, though herstory—the feminist equivalent of history—is first quoted ⁸from 1970.)

In mid-April 1861 he asked Trübner to print a fewpages as specimens—the page that showed the words Affect-Affection was regarded as the best. When he was halfway through working on a second `basis for comparison', of those words beginning with letters between E and L, he was caught in a sudden spring rainstorm as he walked to St James's Square. He sat damply through a meeting of the Philological Society, and the next day, being thin and frail, caught a chill. He was taken back to his rooms, his friends watched aghast as the chill turned to consumption, and on the quintessentially English date of 23 April—both the Feast of St George and the birthday of Shakespeare—he died. He was just 31 years old.

It is said that his final words were `I must begin Sanskrit tomorrow'. This seems a charming but somewhat improbable suggestion, given the section of the alphabet upon which he was working and the nature of the work he was bent on completing. But the story remains, indicative of the young man's learning, but hardly a memorial to his work on the book. The only other memorial (his plan for a three-part dictionary did not survive him, nor did his plans to have Messrs Trübner be the publishers, and his idea of having quotations going back only to 1250 was abandoned too, with the present Dictionary sporting illustrations from as far back as the ninth century) was the handmade set of 54 oaken pigeon-holes. These are still in existence, dusty and neglected in a museum in Oxford. Their dimensions proved woefully inadequate, and they were soon to be replaced by a set more than 40 times as large (and yet which in due course themselves proved to be just as niggardly too).

Herbert Coleridge had found it difficult to imagine that he would ever need to find room for the 100,000 quotations that he thought were likely to be used as the basis for the Dictionary. In the event, his successors had recourse to use the better part of six million, and no set of pigeon-holes known to man could ever have accommodated all of them.

Two years after Coleridge's death, Dean Trench returned to Ireland to take up the post of Archbishop of Dublin. The inchoate dictionary project, then no more than a barely formed mess of papers and file folders on a dead man's desk, was then handed over to the third member of the founding trinity—an amazing scholar-gypsy of a man who would be intimately associated with the project for the next half century, but whose early involvement led very nearly to disaster and abandonment.

He was Frederick James Furnivall, and though perhaps the most anodyne remark ever made about him was that `to tobacco and alcohol he was a stranger through life' he was an eccentric of the fullest flower—or, as the DNB puts it with exquisite tact, he `showed a characteristic impatience of convention and an undisciplined moral earnestness'. His long life was frequently mired in scandal, he was a man given to the oddest of short-lived enthusiasms. Of all the leading players in this saga, the boisterous Frederick Furnivall remains among the most colourful, most memorable, and deservedly best loved.

His critics—and they were legion—made much of the fact that his father ran (and made a fortune from so doing) a private lunatic asylum in Egham, in Surrey. He was an indifferent mathematics student at Cambridge, and is best remembered there and later for his fondness for sculling, the solitary sport he always thought far superior to rowing (though he had made the Trinity Hall rowing club's first eight), and which he pursued as a hobby all his life. He then became a student at Lincoln's Inn, and in due course (and without much enthusiasm) he became a lawyer.

But his first passion remained sculling. He was sufficiently dedicated to the sport, and with his inherited fortune insulating him from the need to pay too much attention to legal work, that he took time to design a special outrigger for his boat, to form sculling clubs, to inveigh against clubs that forbade working men from taking part, and, most vocally of all, to protest against the then general ban on allowing women on the water. He was inordinately fond of the ladies; and in his middle years he liked to recruit pretty waitresses from the Aerated Bread Company's teashop in Hammersmith with a view to teaching them the delights of his chosen sport. There are sepia photographs of him grinning impishly, surrounded by a group of very well-proportioned (and evidently rather cold) shopgirls in their close-fitting sculling tops, and others of him speeding along the river, a pretty girl behind him, with his long white beard flowing in the wind, the two of them a picture of goatish contentment.

Coleridge was succeeded by the scandalous, irrepressible but entirely lovable Frederick Furnivall, whose caprices and poor judgement very nearly caused the collapse and abandonment of the entire enterprise.

One of the girls, an Oxford Street waitress named Blanche Huckle, from whom (after racing up the stairs two at a time `like a young boy') he invariably ordered `weak coffee, rusks and butter', wrote in a memorial volume published after his death, that `Furney' was `one of the kindest gentlemen I have ever met'. He would regularly `invite several of us girls to a picnic up the river', she added, and he would bring presents to the cafeÂ, most often `two pairs of stockings for each of us'.

Such images led many to suppose Furnivall a bit of a rascal— and indeed, he confirmed his membership of a flexible moral universe by committing the doubly unpardonable sin of first marrying his very young lady's maid, Lizzy Dalziel, and then, after she had borne him two children and had become, as he sawit, `indolent and dull', cruelly abandoning her. He left her, when he was 58, for a girl 37 years his junior, his dazzlingly pretty and intellectually vibrant 21-year-old secretary named Teena Rochfort-Smith. So appalled was one correspondent on receiving word of this affair that `he immediately stuck stamp-paper over the signature of the writer who gave him the news'. Vivat, Victoria! (Sadly, fate sawto it that Teena was not able to bring Furnivall happiness for very long. She was burned to death in Goole, in Yorkshire, after a flaming match-head broke off while she was trying to destroy some letters. It was a scant two months after her lover had obtained a formal separation from his wife.)

This extraordinary, `embarrassing but unembarrassable' man—`[this] kind, selfless, patriotic humanitarian … [this] dedicated literary detective, collating, annotating, transcribing, deciphering and editing so that all Englishmen might read the literature of their noble forefathers … [this] volatile, impulsive, meddling, cantankerous literary warmonger … [this] undiplomatic, unconventional individualist in corduroy trousers and pink-ribbon tie', as a biographer put it—promptly took on the work that Coleridge's death had bequeathed to him. Technically he was a practising solicitor—though far more interested in philology, socialism, and girls—and so at first all the dictionary work was passed from Chester Terrace first to his law office on Ely Place, and later to his house in St George's Square, off Primrose Hill. In May 1862—a year after Coleridge's death—a friend ⁹ recorded meeting Furnivall at work:

Found him in a strange dingy room upstairs; the walls & floor and chairs strewn with books, papers, proofs, clothes, everything— in wondrous confusion; the table spread with a meal of chaotic and incongruous dishes, of which he was partaking, along with `Lizzy' Dalziel, the pretty lady's maid whom he has educated into such strange relations with himself, and for whose sake he has behaved so madly to Litchfield & others of his best friends; & her brother, a student of our College. After the meal, which lasted from 7 to 9, all four of them set to work, arranging and writing out words for the Philological Dictionary, of which Furnivall is now Editor in place of poor Herbert Coleridge. `Missy', as F. calls the girl, is his amanuensis and transcribes: takes long walks too with him and others, of ten and twenty miles a day; which is creditable to her; and indeed she seems a quiet and unassuming creature.

There is no doubting either Furnivall's genius, his energy, or his scholarship. He was blessed with friends who luxuriated in his many talents: Alfred, Lord Tennyson was close, as were Charles Kingsley, John Ruskin, William Morris, and Frederick Delius. And the banker-writer Kenneth Grahame, who shared Furnivall's enthusiasm for sculling, eventually succeeded in writing his friend into The Wind in the Willows, a book which Furnivall had encouraged him to write. He cast him as the Water Rat, a cunning and ever-keen creature imbued with a properly rattish pedantry. `We learned 'em!' says Toad. `We taught 'em!' corrects Rat.

But what was seriously wanting in Furnivall, in his now enforced role as dictionary editor, was any sustained sense of organization or self-discipline. He was dedicated and enthusiastic, true; and there was much early optimism about his appointment. `I am very glad you are able to undertake the dictionary,' wrote Hensleigh Wedgwood, still stunned by Coleridge's early death, `which must otherwise have gone to pot.' Elisabeth Murray, the granddaughter of the man who would eventually succeed Furnivall, admitted the man's `impressive' sustained enthusiasm—but at the same time she could see that his was a much misdirected enthusiasm, and that he was sorely lacking both in patience and in an acknowledgement of a great need— extraordinary in a dictionary-maker—for accuracy.

His problem, so far as the Dictionary was concerned, is perhaps best illustrated by his indefatigable and inexplicable need to found societies. Between 1864 (when he should have been hard at work on the book) and 1886, he founded no fewer than seven of them: the Early English Text Society, the Chaucer Society, the Ballad Society, the NewShakspere Society (whose members clung to the old spelling of the Bard's name), the Wyclif Society, the Browning Society, and the Shelley Society. His involvement with the Philological Society began early on in his life, in 1847, not long after it was founded. He became its joint secretary in 1853—and later, as mentioned, one of the trinity of good men on the Society's Unregistered Words Committee.

In addition to all of the duties and responsibilities that stemmed from so much belonging, Furnivall was a deeply committed socialist and (until his later agnosticism set in), a somewhat enthusiastic Christian, and a keen believer in the right of bluecollar labourers to enjoy the benefits of a full education. His involvement with the London Working Men's College, which had been set up to take care of such needs, took up much of his time as well. He took up long-distance cycling, and would spend weekends touring southern England with his new labouring friends. He fought gamely against any injustice he perceived was visited on workers—on one occasion leading a deputation of angry ballastheavers to Downing Street, and on another selling some of his own books to help pay the legal fees of some vexed wood-cutters.

And if all this were not enough diversion, Furnivall also managed to get himself involved in a series of the most dreadful spats and arguments, fights that would have sapped the energy of many a lesser man. The most celebrated of these fights was with the poet Algernon Charles Swinburne. It all began in 1876 with a technical dispute over the metre of lines in a play, Henry VIII, that had once been loosely attributed to Shakespeare. It smouldered for some years, then burst out into the open, and in a torrent of abuse: Swinburne called Furnivall `the most bellicose bantam cock that ever defied creation'; Furnivall countered by accusing the poet of having `the ear of a poetaster, hairy, thick and dull', and played with the origins of his name, restyling him as `Pigsbrook'. Swinburne in turn looked up the origins of Furnivall's name, and rendered it into `Brothel-dyke', and his gatherings `Fartiwell and Co.' or `The Shitspeare Society'. This undignified feud lasted for six miserable and exhausting years (great fun for all spectators, of course). It stirred up tidal waves of a lasting enmity directed at both men. And it must have had a singularly damaging impact on Furnivall's more important tasks.

The inevitable consequence was that under Frederick Furnivall's direction, work on the Dictionary in the years following Coleridge's death, staggered, stalled, and then very nearly died itself. Furnivall was 36 when he took over the job. He assumed it would take him until he was just over 40 to complete it. And so he began in earnest, assembling yet more reading lists, gutting yet more books for quotations, taking on newarmies of volunteers: `Fling our doors wide!' he wrote, exhorting readers to send in ever more, `all—not one, but all—must enter!'

He next arranged (once Trübner had lost interest, or the firm's contract had lapsed, or both) for the much-revered house of John Murray ¹⁰ to agree to take on the task of publishing the book. He tried to persuade the firm of his seriousness of purpose by proposing they first publish a Concise version of the book, which, he promised, could be ready in three years or less. In addition he hired a newrank of employee—the sub-editor, he was called, a fairly new term borrowed from the newspaper industry—who would undertake (without pay: Furnivall was at first most persuasive) the lexicographical grunt-work that Furnivall regarded himself as too grand to perform.

But despite the burst of initial enthusiasm, little was to come of anything. The Concise English Dictionary never got out of the starting gates—John Murray called Furnivall a `h'arbitrary gent', and pulled out of talks. Volunteer readers, infuriated by Furnivall's short attention span and his caprices of fascination, began deserting the programme in droves. Sometimes it was simply Furnivall's irascibility that scared them away. `Next time,' he wrote to one, testily, `will you be good enough to copy out each passage on a separate half-sheet of notepaper? All your former ones I shall be obliged to have cut up and pasted on larger pieces of paper.' (At least this particular volunteer did not commit what some—though not Furnivall—regarded as the heresy of cutting up the books he was reading, and pasting the quotation onto the slip. Many was the time when sub-editors would receive slips with valuable sixteenth-century black-letter cuttings stuck onto them, evidence of a book nowruined by lazy lexicographic vandalism.)

But sub-editors too, daunted by the huge number of quotation slips that had arrived by the sackful during the volunteers' more productive days, started abandoning ship as well. And though Furnivall did, as he had promised, successfully oversee the making of the third part of the Basis of Comparison, for the letters M to Z, it was not long before the Philological Society itself began to get cold feet too.

A steadily decreasing official enthusiasm for the project begins to make itself evident in the Society's journal, the Transactions, as the years of Furnivall's editorship continued. In the beginning the journal's pages were filled with exuberant and confident reports of the `tremendous progress' and `great strides' and `significant achievements' that were being realized by the project's managers, as quotation slips were being solicited, shades of meaning determined, definitions written, entire letters ticked off the list. But slowly, towards the end of the 1860s, the purpose begins to falter. The year-end assessments of progress became shorter, their language less robust, the showof optimism less evident. By 1872 Furnivall was forced to report to his masters that `progress in the Dictionary has been so slight that no fresh report in detail is needed'.

Books and papers held by the volunteers—many of them had been sent volumes from the Philological Society's library, which they would use to do their research—were now being returned by readers too exasperated, weary, or disenchanted to go on. Before long the lobby of Furnivall's house at No. 3 St George's Square was `cumbered with boxes and bundles of every size and form'; in 1879 more than two tons of papers were sent in as the wholesale abandonment of the project proceeded. Moreover, it was now clear that other disenchanted volunteers had simply left their papers and their books where they stood—had consigned them to lumber rooms, taken them away on holiday and left them behind in faraway hotels and boarding houses, dumped them in rubbish bins, lost them. By the mid-1870s, the work of thousands had been dispersed across half the world like wind-borne pollen: if the project ever were to be revived, it would take an immense amount of diligent searching to bring it all together again.

But it was worse than that. A terminal crisis was looming. `The general belief', wrote an editor at the Athenaeum, `is that the project will not be carried out.' If the great dictionary project was to continue, it would require the appointment of a far more organized, less volatile, and better-tempered leader at its helm.

The Society was already recognizing this as early as 1874, when its President, the mathematician Alexander Ellis, wailed that he thought the body `less fitted to compile a dictionary than to get the materials [for it] collected'. Then again a year later the sub-editor who had worked on the letter F (and who had supervised a second series of specimen pages, on the words Fa ¹¹ to Face), the Reverend George Wheelwright, suggested, in a briskly worded pamphlet, that Furnivall make up his mind about the future of the scheme.

He should, the cleric said, promptly find a neweditor, assure everyone that they were not on `a Fools chace which should end only in a general fiasco', and by so doing bring to an end `the intolerable suspense under which we all groan'. Wheelwright had spent ten years of his life dedicated to the Dictionary: he was not about to see it fail without someone, somewhere, making an effort to save it.

As early as 1871—three years before his Society became publicly exasperated, four before Wheelwright's outburst—Furnivall himself had come to appreciate howhopeless he was at running the project, and had tried to find a replacement. He knewhe had lost sub-editors who had initially agreed to supervise the words beginning with the letters A, I, J, N, O, P, and W—leaving fully one quarter of the alphabet uncovered—and he wrote that he was now bound to look `for a fresh editor for the whole work'.

He had first approached Henry Sweet, a notoriously rude phonetician who was later used by George Bernard Shaw as a model for Henry Higgins in Pygmalion—later the play and film My Fair Lady. But Sweet had turned him down flat. Furnivall then approached Henry Nicol, another eminent and rather calmer philologist, who was amenable to the idea, and rather flattered. But when he looked at the size of the task ahead he reminded himself that he was chronically unwell, and in any case too busy with other tasks—and so Furnivall had to look elsewhere. It was fully four years later that he at last came upon the man who would pull the project back from the brink, and propel it to its ultimate success. It began with a chance remark made to him at a Philological Society meeting. It ended with Furnivall concluding decisively that the man who had made the remark would, could, and indeed should be the ideal candidate for the post of new editor. He began immediately to work `like a busy spider', as he later put it, spinning the web that would eventually ensnare his candidate and keep him tightly enmeshed in the Byzantine complexities of the English language for the rest of his days.

The man was James Augustus Henry Murray. What he had said to Furnivall, when he learned of the difficulties the Secretary was having in finding a new editor for the Dictionary, was simple, no more in essence than, `I rather wish I could have a go at it.' He had not intended the remark to be taken seriously. After all, he was no more than an amateur philologist, interested in whiling away his evenings musing on the origins of dialect. He was 38 years old, a former bank clerk who was by now employed rather more happily as a teacher at the Mill Hill School in north London. He was a lowland Scot, a linen draper's son, from the Teviotdale village of Denholm, near Hawick, in Roxburghshire. He had been brought up in rural isolation, his family unmoneyed, his life unsophisticated, his future unpromising. `I am a nobody,' he would write in later years, when fame had begun to creep up on him. `Treat me as a solar myth, or an echo, or an irrational quantity, or ignore me altogether.'

But there was no ignoring him, for James Murray was in all ways—and in particular, in intellectual ways—unforgettably remarkable. He was remarkable even in an age that produced a disproportionate share, or so it seems today, of exceptionally clever men. He has a reputation still as a towering figure in British scholarship. He was Calvinist in his spiritual outlook, polymathic in his interests and his competences, forbidding in his appearance—a fiery red beard lent him the air of faint bellicosity—and he was all too casually aware of the combined effect that these formidable attributes of looks and brains had on those around him. He radiated a magisterial air of righteous authority—rather, as it turned out, as the dictionary that he would make would also radiate in its own time.

And he, at long last, was the man who would make all the difference.