The Meaning of Everything

3

The General Officer Commanding

I have to state that Philology, both Comparative and special, has been my favourite pursuit during the whole of my life, and that I possess a general acquaintance with the languages and literature of the Aryan and Syro-Arabic classes—not indeed to say that I am familiar with all or nearly all of these, but that I possess that general lexical & structural knowledge which makes the intimate knowledge only a matter of a little application. With several I have a more intimate acquaintance as with the Romance tongues, Italian, French, Catalan, Spanish, Latin & in a less degree Portuguese, Vaudois, ProvencËal & various dialects. In the Teutonic branch, I am tolerably familiar with Dutch (having at my place of business correspondence to read in Dutch, German, French & occasionally other languages), Flemish, German and Danish. In Anglo-Saxon and Moeso-Gothic my studies have been much closer, I having prepared some works for publication upon these languages. I know a little of the Celtic, and am at present engaged with the Sclavonic, having obtained a useful knowledge of Russian. In the Persian, Achaemenian Cuneiform, & Sanscrit branches, I know for the purposes of Comparative Philology. I have sufficient knowledge of Hebrew & Syriac to read at sight the Old Testament and Peshito; to a less degree I know Aramaic Arabic, Coptic and Phenecian to the point where it was left by Gesenius.

(Letter of application for a post at the British Museum Library written by James Murray, to Thomas Watts, Keeper of Printed Books, November 1866. Murray's application was not successful.)

James Murray was very nearly appointed to direct the fortunes of quite another dictionary. In 1876 he was approached by the publishing firm of Alexander Macmillan, who had been hired to act as agents for the American house then known as Harper & Brothers. Harper were in an agitated condition over the stunning success that was currently being enjoyed in America by the firm of George Merriam, which had been making a small fortune by publishing Noah Webster's great American Dictionary of the English Language. They now wanted to create their own work to rival Webster's, and asked Macmillan to scout around in the salons of literary London to see if they could come up with a scholar who might be amenable to accepting the post as the new project's editor. Richard Morris, a schoolmaster and a member of Furnivall's Early English Text Society, thought immediately of Murray, the young Scot who was fast making a name for himself as philology's rising star. Macmillan approached Murray, and sounded him out.

Fortunately for the future of what would in due course become our Oxford English Dictionary, Murray turned down the Macmillan proposal—which came, he said, as `a bolt from the blue'. The book that Harper had in mind, he surmised, was too short, too wanting in significance and ambition. He thought the very minimum size of a new dictionary that might rival Webster was 5,000 pages—it might not even fit into 5,500. He drew up some sample pages—they involve the early words beginning with Car-, such as carabineer, caramel, carapace, and caravan—to demonstrate how large a comprehensive dictionary would have to be.

But Harper had done their sums in New York, and the suits of the day would not budge from the corporate view that all could be encompassed by no more than 4,000 pages. And that is where the negotiations stalled. Murray was certain that the grand confection of a dictionary that the Philological Society had in mind—though in truth, with all of Furnivall's talk of a Concise edition, and the project's general lack of momentum, he was not exactly sure what the Society was now wanting—was what the English language truly deserved. So he would prefer to wait, he said, for the big dictionary to get itself under way, and he would have no truck with anything of lesser standing.

It was not quite so simple, however. Murray was notoriously a ditherer when it came to making the bigger decisions of his life— as this one was most certainly to be. And yet as so often happened, it was his wife, Ada, whose own very trenchantly expressed views eventually prevailed upon him. He should not devote his life, she said, to achieving merely a number of smaller things, if by doing so he let slip the opportunity of achieving one thing that history would regard as truly great.

James Murray ¹ had been a precocious, rather solemn little boy. On the flyleaf of a copy of the Popular Educator, a magazine to which he subscribed in his early teenage years, he declared quite baldly: `Knowledge is power', and added to it (in Latin— with which, at fifteen, he was perfectly familiar, as he was also in French, Italian, German, and Greek) the motto `Nihil est melius quam vita diligentissima' (Nothing is better than a most diligent life). And even though the two best-known works about him were both written by relations—his son Wilfrid and his granddaughter Elisabeth, who might be suspected of having rather less than disinterested views of him, produced admiring biographies—his childhood does appear to have been quite exceptional.

He was omnivorous in his appetite for knowledge, quite catholic in his range of interests—he became an adept in the details of Roxburgh's geology and botany and wildlife, he took up mapping, he became an exceptional amateur astronomer (his younger brothers complained when James shook them awake to see the rising of Sirius, the time of which he had calculated and—to the family's sleepy exultation—correctly predicted), he cherished the fact that he had managed to befriend a local ancient who had been alive when Parliament proclaimed William and Mary joint sovereign in 1689, and he urged his mother to tell him over and over again how she first heard tell of the victory at Waterloo.

He volunteered at scores of nearby archaeological diggings— since Hadrian's Wall was only a few miles to the south, the ground was littered with lightly buried artefacts from Roman times. He became fascinated with the works of an obscure French writer named Théodore Agrippa d'Aubigné (he would read his works out loud to his fascinated family, translating into English as he did so). He learned how to bind books. He taught himself how to illuminate manuscripts with elegant little drawings, fleurons, and curlicues (learning in doing so that the room in which medieval monks would do such work was called a scriptorium—a word that would later come to haunt him). Though being far from a mechanical man, he once tried to invent water-wings by tying bundles of pond irises to his arms (but, being a life-long non-swimmer, nearly drowned after miscalculating their buoyancy, and only escaped by being dragged from the stream by friends hauling on his five-foot-long bow tie). He gave Latin names to the individual cows in the family's small herd of dairy cattle, and he taught them to respond to his calls. And when Louis Kossuth, the Hungarian nationalist, came on an official visit to Hawick in 1856, one of the 38 welcoming banners draped across the High Street declared, with precise Magyar perfection, `Jöjjö-el a' te orszagod!' The nineteen-year-old James Murray had thought it appropriate to welcome Kossuth appropriately, with `Thy Kingdom Come!'.

The Murray family was far too poor (though James's maternal grandfather had once been famed across Scotland for making the finest table linen of the day) for them to be able to afford to send this `argumentative earnest, naïve' young man to college of any kind, and so at fourteen James left school, to earn his own way. Three years later we find him teaching his local village schoolchildren, and three years later still doing the same, but for a halfway respectable wage, at a nearby subscription academy, where boys aged ten to sixteen were offered a rigorous education `on payment of one guinea a term'. He became a member of the Hawick Mutual Improvement Institute, then helped form the Hawick Archaeological Society and in due course gave his first lecture there, on `Reading, Its Pleasures and Advantages'. It was around this time, when he was in his early twenties, that he became fascinated by phonetics—learning more than 300 words in Romany, delighting in the mythical origins of the Scottish tongue and in the magic of Anglo-Saxon.

And then, crucially, Murray fell under the spell of the fascinations of philology, and in a fury of new enthusiasm—but one which, unlike Furnivall's, never dimmed—he pitched into a close study of the origins of Scottish dialects and the curiosities of Scottish pronunciation. He took a course on elocution in Edinburgh, and there—yet again, crucially for this story—he met the field's residing genius professor, Alexander Melville Bell. Bell taught him something of his brand new conception known as Visible Speech, a symbolic representation of every sound the human mouth was capable of making and, supposed Bell, the likely basis for a truly global language, a kind of facial Esperanto (and which, like Esperanto, never caught on).

He introduced James to his son, Alexander Graham Bell, with a historical nicety as a consequence. Since it has long been agreed that James Murray, one summer's afternoon in 1857, taught Alexander Graham Bell the basic principles of electricity (making for the boy an electric battery and a voltaic cell out of halfpennies and discs of zinc), it is said by admirers of Murray that he is in fact the true grandfather of the electric telephone, which the younger Bell was later to invent. The first prototype telephone ever made, in fact, was said for many years to lie in James Murray's Oxford attic—though this particular anecdote, involving as it does the curious fate of the instrument, belongs rather later in this story.

Melville Bell also introduced James Murray to the existence in faraway London of the Philological Society, and showed him papers that the organization was publishing. The visitor's interest was immediately piqued—and before long he had thrown himself into the study and had taken into his head, from a paper by Prince Louis-Lucien Bonaparte, a nephew of Napoleon's, the notion of translating biblical works into Scottish dialects. After complaining that all the earlier attempts that he had read had in his view been done very poorly and inaccurately, he eventually published his own rendering of the Book of Ruth into the language of Teviotdale. The book describing how he did this ² —Dialect of the Southern Counties of Scotland—was to be published in 1873, and it fully confirmed for James Murray a reputation that had begun to grow as early as the 1860s: that he was a philologist of the first water.

In 1861 he met and the following year married a local infantschool music teacher, Maggie Scott. Their wedding pictures ³ show the 25-year-old James to have been a tall, rather unkempt figure, with a bowed, almost simian appearance, with long arms that nearly brushed his knees, a ragged beard, ill-fitting and baggy clothes, and an expression that seems to mix distracted inattention with a vague apprehension of impending gloom, as turned out to be entirely appropriate.

Two years later the young couple had a baby girl they christened Anna—but she died soon afterwards of consumption, and Maggie fell ill enough for the doctors to propose (preposterously, given the Murrays' poverty) that she travel to the south of France to convalesce. Instead they went to a small house in Peckham, in south London—a marginally better climate than the Scottish Borders, the physicians agreed—and James Murray was obliged to set aside his intellectual pursuits and to take an uninteresting job at the headquarters of the Chartered Bank of India, Australia, and China. He would perch forlornly on a high stool in the Foreign Correspondence department in the very back of the office, wearing starched cuffs and an eye-shade, and write in ledgers in copperplate script while in the company of a host of wage-slaves and Lupin Pooters, all men quite devoid of intellectual curiosity or ambition.

Except that through all these travails he did not quite abandon his high-mindedness and his sense of an impending grand purpose. As Maggie slipped closer and closer towards her early death, James kept his intellect busied: he would speak to London policemen and try to determine, from their accents, from where they came; he studied Hindustani and Achaemenid Persian on his daily commute; he lectured on such topics as `The Body and its Architecture' before such groups as the Camberwell Congregational Church and his local Temperance League (he was a confirmed teetotaller). He learned how the Wowenoc Indians of Maine counted their sheep, and compared their peculiar brand of ovine numerology with that of the moorland farmers of Yorkshire. And, macabre though it may sound at this remove, he even took care to notice that as Maggie slipped into her deathbed delirium, she would cry out in the broad Scottish dialect of her childhood, abandoning in her misery the refined modulations of the classroom.

It cannot but have been a blessed release when Maggie Scott eventually died, though there is no doubt from his writings that James had loved and cared for her. Looking back on a time of evident desolation he would write: `A marriage, a birth, two deaths—all in three short years! … and I was left alone in London, doing uncongenial work.' And yet it was with an almost indecent alacrity that just a year after Maggie's funeral in Hawick, James Murray married for a second time.

Ada Ruthven, who would be his companion and helpmeet (and powerful antidote to his dithering) for the rest of his days, turned out to be a woman very much more in tune with his social and intellectual needs. Her father, George, had worked for the Great Indian Peninsular Railway—he and James Murray had indeed met on a train, where Murray found that his companion was, to his delight, an admirer of and sometime scholar devoted to the great German traveller and scientist Alexander von Humboldt. Sensing James's interest in the arcane that might not so stimulate all his hearers, George Ruthven added that his wife had long claimed to have been at school with Charlotte BronteÈ! It then seemed no more than logical, given Murray's evident fascination with these sensational revelations in a third-class railway carriage, that he should be invited home to meet the Ruthvens' daughter Ada—with the happy result that, in short order and as all concerned fondly hoped, the couple were duly married, and became wholly inseparable.

Together James and Ada produced six sons and five daughters. To underscore the formidable intellectual atmosphere that must have prevailed in the kindly-strict Murray household (Murray had an eye that could `both pierce and twinkle', a biographer remarked), it is worth noting how Wilfrid Murray catalogues the achievements of these children `in whose achievements James Murray took great pride':

Harold, the oldest son, Exhibitioner and First Class Graduate of Balliol, was author of the Oxford History of Chess (1913) and, at the time of his retirement, a Divisional Inspector under the Board of Education. Sir Oswyn, GBC, the fourth son, Scholar, triple First and Honorary Fellow of Exeter and Vinerian Law Scholar, was Secretary to the Board of Admiralty from 1917 until his death in 1936; Jowett, the youngest, was a Scholar and Triple First of Magdalen and became a Professor in the Anglo-Chinese College at Tientsin; the second, Ethelbert, was at his death in 1916 Electrical Engineer for North London in Willesden; the fifth, Aelfric (Wadham College), tookorders and became Vicar of Bishop Burton; the writer, also a Balliol Exhibitioner, was for 21 years Registrar of the University of Cape Town. Of the five daughters Hilda, the eldest, was a First Class Honours student at Oxford, Lecturer in English at Cambridge and Vice-Mistress of Girton College and has published several works; the second, Ethelwyn (Mrs. C. W. Cousins) was married to the Secretary for Labour of the Union of South Africa; the youngest, Gwyneth, (Mrs. H. Logan), a Girton First Class graduate, was married to a Canadian Rhodes Scholar who became Principal of the Prince of Wales Fairbridge Farm School in British Columbia; the remaining two, Elsie (Mrs. A. Barling) and Rosfrith, were both valued assistants for long periods on the Dictionary staff.

It was Murray's early friendship with Melville Bell in Edinburgh, and his later London encounters with the `cross-grained' phonetician Henry Sweet and the Cambridge mathematician Alexander Ellis, that first led him to the Philological Society, and eventually to his fateful encounter with Frederick Furnivall. It was in 1868 that Bell—who had moved down to London himself, to become a lecturer at University College—first invited Murray to St James's Square, initially to hear Ellis deliver a paper on his speciality, the development of English pronunciation. At the same time, seeing Murray's huge contentment at being among the members, he formally introduced him, thus allowing the Scotsman—who still at the time was toiling in the banking house—to join a literary corps d'élite, about two hundred strong, whose fascination with the English language in particular was to become of historic importance. Since Furnivall was the Society's sole Secretary, the two men met, and were duly impressed with one another from the very start. So impressed, in fact, that by May of the following year Murray had been elected a member of the Council—a position that he held until his death nearly half a century later.

A year later he had left the bank, and had returned to the more leisured and rewarding world of teaching, having won a post at Mill Hill School in what were in those days the leafy suburbs of north London. The years that followed, he later wrote, were his `Arcadian time, the happiest period of my life'. The school had given him a wonderfully comfortable house, which he named Sunnyside; his wife and family were in exceptional form, comforting and supportive despite the meagre wage that had been offered; he was pleasantly occupied by his immense raft of scholarly interests; and he loved teaching polite and intelligent children who had been selected to attend what remains one of the country's finer schools.

His pupils adored him, and took great pleasure in his unconventional teaching methods. `Dr Murray knows everything' became a watchword throughout the school. `His classes were always intensely interesting,' wrote one boy:

You never knew where you might arrive before the lesson was done. A nominal geography class might easily develop into a lecture on Icelandic roots, and we often tried to bring him backto the days when the Finnish landed on the shores of the Baltic, on occasions when we had not been given adequate time to the preparation of our set lesson. Then the tricks he could play with words! Such was his skill and knowledge that many of us firmly believed that by Grimm's law he could prove that black really was the same word as white; at least that was how it seemed to our poor intelligences.

He was troubled, however, by the simple fact that, however distinguished a philologist he might seem to be, and however celebrated a schoolteacher he appeared to have become, he felt a certain sense of ignominy mingling with his peers in the school common room because he still did not have a university degree. He in fact tried to win a degree at London University in 1871, a year after joining Mill Hill, but as his elderly father died while James was in the middle of his examinations, he was unable to complete them and only managed a humble pass degree, a kind of academic damnation with faint praise.

A campaign was promptly started to get him a proper one, though one that was honorary, requiring recognition rather than work. It was decided that a Scottish university would be the most appropriate for this Borders lad, and that of all the possible candidates, St Andrews would be the most stylish, but Edinburgh the most august. St Andrews had been criticized for having handed out too liberal a number of honorary degrees in recent years—and so Edinburgh, it was concluded, was the one. So a letter-writing blitz was begun.

It was far from difficult to write in fulsome terms of this most remarkably turned-out man. James Murray, wrote Frederick Furnivall, deserved to be granted a degree because he was `the first living authority on our Northern Dialects', a man who `if he lives, and I hope he will, long, will by a series of … books … do credit to the University that allies him to itself'. Prince LouisLucien Bonaparte chipped in with a supporting letter, as did Alexander Ellis and a score of other distinguished linguists and phoneticians. The university fretted for a while, and expressed its polite doubts: it was being asked to give an honorary doctorate of letters to a young man who was merely a schoolmaster, a former bank clerk and one who had left school at fourteen? To some of the elder brethren at what was Scotland's most esteemed academic establishment, this was a bit much.

In the end it was geology that came to the rescue—a drollery that would have amused William Whewell, one of the Philological Society's founders and a man who had expressed a firm belief that there were strong philosophical connections to be made between the historical development of words and of sedimentary rocks. In March 1874, when the Edinburgh University campaign was at its height, Murray had a chance meeting with Archibald Geikie, the professor of geology and a member of the University Senate. Geikie, later to become head of the British Geological Survey and a pioneer in work on evolution, remembered Murray's help as a youngster in solving various geological problems in the Teviot valley. He added his weight to the campaign, persuaded his fellow Senators—and James Murray became an Honorary Doctor of Laws with effect from 1 April. `It could not be All Fools Day when wise men do a wise deed,' exulted his brother Charles. `What an Easter egg! Hip Hip Hip Hurrah!' ⁴

And shortly thereafter, as if to confirm the wisdom of the Edinburgh award, Murray was invited by Thomas Baynes, the editor of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, to contribute the definitive essay on `The English Language' for the ninth edition. He had not been the first choice—Baynes had initially asked Thomas Arnold—but he was flattered to get the invitation. `A mere summary from you', wrote Baynes, in necessarily oleaginous tones, `would be of more value than a longer article from a writer of less authority.' Murray wrote twelve pages, a summary that remained a classic, long in print—certainly for as long as Britannica remained a work of authority, a role it relinquished only recently. Murray was asked to revise his article in 1895, and it duly became part of the celebrated 11th edition, surviving intact for decades beyond, with the result that our uneducated Teviotdale draper's son was to become, in essence, the established authority on the national language for several generations.

And then came the chance remark to Furnivall, during the frustrating days of searching for a replacement editor for the Philological Society's dictionary: `I rather wish I could have a go at it.'

By this time—it was March 1876—Murray was a rising star within the Society, was properly equipped for academe with his honorary Scottish LL D (plus his London University pass degree), and now, with his book on The Dialect of the Southern Counties of Scotland that had been published three years before and his Britannica article soon to be in the works, he had fully consolidated his reputation. He was, in other words, the ideal candidate. But for what? For the short Macmillan dictionary that was wanted by Harper in America? For a rather longer Macmillan dictionary that made use of the materials collected by Furnivall and Coleridge? Might Cambridge be interested? Or John Murray? Or what about the possibility that Oxford University Press might publish a dictionary for the Philological Society? More specifically, might not the project interest the Clarendon Press, the Oxford imprint which had been established a century before to produce the most learned of works, each of them so far a book `so impenetrably erudite that it was impossible to extract from it any passage likely to entice the non-specialist reader', as Peter Sutcliffe has it in his informal history? ⁵

Walter Skeat, a noted amateur philologist and Anglo-Saxon expert, approached the Syndics, as the governors were known, of the Cambridge University Press. Henry Sweet, who had excellent contacts at the Clarendon Press, was instructed by the Society to see if he could persuade the Delegates, as the Syndics' opposite numbers were called at Oxford, both to commit to the project and to cough up enough to pay an editor's salary. Five hundred pounds a year was the suggested sum. Cambridge said flatly no, and Oxford, though significantly without refusing point-blank, also balked.

So there was no option, at least at first, but to talk to Macmillan—though about a Macmillan-only project, not about the cut-price scheme that had been proposed by Harper and which Murray had so swiftly rejected. And so negotiations between the father-and-son Macmillan dynasty on the one hand and the Society on the other—with Murray at its head, acting both as lead negotiator and as editor-in-waiting—began. For almost a year they staggered along with what, at this distance, looks like extreme discomfort.

The discomfort all had to do with the projected book's great size. Long beforehand Murray had warned of the scale of what he was now openly calling `the Big Dictionary'. <sup>6</sup> It would, he wrote, `be far more enormous than one would suppose could possibly sell—far too large to be printed at anything but a frightful expenditure of money'. Macmillan, on hearing this dismaying news, tried every imaginable way to perform the arithmetic that would make economic sense—trying to persuade Murray to pare the book to its very bones, trying to pay almost nothing to those who would be employed in making the book, trying to suggest, as Furnivall had, a shorter version to act as an amuse-gueule for the reading public. But Murray—`Mr. Editor', Furnivall had taken to calling him— held firm.

Or at least, he seemed to. The trouble was that while Murray was preparing specimen pages (nine of them) for Macmillan to consider, Furnivall was at the same time dealing behind his back. He was dealing still with John Murray, he was dealing anew with Oxford, trying hard to find an alternate publisher with whose offer he could shame Macmillan into paying more. And it seems that Macmillan, eager to conclude an arrangement, would in fact have paid more, would have agreed to publish more or less the number of pages, to make the book more or less the size for which Murray was arguing. Except that they found out what Furnivall was up to—and they promptly exploded. `It is a pity', Alexander Macmillan wrote to Murray, `that [Furnivall's] pretty little ways should ever be intruded into serious business.' They pulled out of the entire deal. The only shred of politesse that emerged from the wreckage was a note from Macmillan's chief negotiator, sent personally to Murray, which said there was no doubt that the dictionary Murray had in mind would be published, would make an unassailable contribution to English scholarship, and would make Murray famous.

Even so. For a short while following the debacle with Macmillan, James Murray seems to have had some doubts, to have become more than a little discouraged. He began to toy with the idea of accepting the post as head of a boys' school in Huddersfield, somewhat closer to his family home. He complained openly to friends that the work of a lexicographer was far more tedious than he had supposed. And he grumbled further that in doing his work he felt bound by rules—principally Coleridge's now wretchedly didactic Canones Lexicographici—which he now felt were irrelevant to his purpose. He also felt personally cowed by Furnivall's brutal insistence and by his stubborn determination to get the Society's dictionary moving again.

Still, he refused to let the project go. Under Furnivall's urging the Society's dictionary team took a step backwards, and began to talk once again to the presses that had already turned them down. They found in very short order that the Syndics of Cambridge would have nothing at all to do with any project that had Furnivall associated with it. `Somehow he isn't believed in at the Universities,' wrote Walter Skeat. So Cambridge were out. (`The largest wrong decision in publishing history', wrote the Press's M. H. Black some years later, wondering how differently fortunes might have turned out had we today been familiar with the CED instead of the OED.)

John Murray then turned out to be furious with Furnivall too—he had demanded they repay an advance of £600 the Society had paid at the time of the very first negotiations. So they were non-starters too. The only serious and suitable publishing house that had not given an absolutely definitive no for an answer, therefore, was Oxford.

Henry Sweet, memorably rebarbative though he may have been, was the man who first started the ball rolling. He did so in April 1877 by writing formally (the legalisms all checked by his father, who was a solicitor) to Bartholomew Price, the Delegates' Secretary at Oxford. ⁷ He formally suggested that first the Clarendon Press assume responsibility for publishing the Dictionary—a work that would be based, as had always been hoped, on the treasure trove of Philological Society materials, the collection of tons of quotation slips that had been assembled (and to a bewildering and distressing extent disassembled once Furnivall began to exasperate everyone) from the armies of word-searching volunteers. Sweet argued that no matter how monumental the task might seem, it could make money: the 4,000-page Littré French dictionary that had recently been published in Paris at the price of £4 had sold a staggering 40,000 copies. And to guarantee that the Oxford dictionary would be at the very least as successful, Sweet went on to make his second formal suggestion—that James Murray, BA, LL D, senior member of the Philological Society, be appointed editor.

It was to be a full year before the decision was made. There were some doubters—Bartholomew Price first among them. He had been bothered over the delay in a long-promised work by Murray on Scottish texts, due in 1874 but now three years late. Could a man so slow in delivering this one relatively modest work be trusted to produce, on time, this much more formidable project? Then again, Max Müller, the renowned Orientalist and Sanskrit scholar, worried out loud that Murray might tend to concentrate more on the exotic words and overlook the more common, everyday terms.

Müller, seized of this idea, persuaded the Delegates to ask Murray to produce samples of commonplace words for which it was known that there were sub-edited materials (quotation slips that had been organized into their various meanings and senses) available. Murray agreed, did some experimenting, and came up with the words arrow, carouse, castle, and persuade. He wrote them up in the summer of 1877, and the Delegates looked at them and ruminated over their execution once they had begun the Michaelmas term. They pronounced themselves very much less than satisfied—with Müller in particular arguing endlessly with Murray over the etymology of one of the four words.

As if this were not bad enough, the Delegates then attacked Murray's plan for showing how each word should be pronounced, and attacked his plan for displaying the etymology—going so far as to suggest that the etymologies should be dropped entirely. This idea was germinated in part because Walter Skeat was in any case himself producing an Etymological Dictionary of English, making (in the Delegates' rather niggardly view) this particular feature unnecessary.

Furnivall, who had kept in the background until now, well aware of his unpopularity at Oxford and Cambridge, promptly turned himself into a Victorian Henry Kissinger. He raced up to Cambridge, persuaded Skeat to write to the Oxford Delegates insisting that they reverse their decision. (He also inquired once more whether Cambridge might like to publish, but was again rebuffed.) He then travelled to Oxford, bludgeoned Müller into relaxing his position, saw Henry Liddell, Dean of Christ Church and co-editor of the famous Greek-English Lexicon, ⁸ and told him that the dictionary team now had 393 volunteer readers at his disposal, that they should really be allowed to start work, and that James Murray was becoming weary with all the delays and with the somewhat loftily patronizing attitude that the Delegates seemed to be taking towards him. He took editors to lunch in London clubs. He wrote letters. He lobbied, persuaded, cajoled, entreated.

And all the while Murray himself was lost, deep in worried thought. Later he wrote to a friend: `My interest … was purely unselfish. I wanted to see an ideal Dictionary, & to show what I meant by one.'

The two weeks that spanned the last part of March and the beginning of April 1878 were, Murray would later write, `the most anxious fortnight my wife and I passed, or ever may'. He knew full well that Max Müller had voiced the Delegates' deep concern that `in an undertaking of this magnitude, in which one might almost say that the national honour of England is engaged, no effort should be spared to make the work as perfect as possible …' So there was little doubt that the Delegates would permit him to try to create an ideal, a perfect dictionary. But was he really up to it? Could he manage the work and do it as well as it needed to be done? Would he be able to muster the energy and the time and the intellectual resources necessary to complete a task that, all of a sudden, seemed so terribly daunting? The book would not be a mere academic text—it would be of national, perhaps even international, importance. It could turn out to be the standard work, the grandfather of all word-books, the world's unrivalled über-dictionary for what in time might well become the world's über-language. Was he, the untutored linen draper's boy from distant Teviotdale, truly the man to do it? He trembled, his confidence waning by the day, as he waited for the call.

It came, in the end, in late April—just as he was due to set out for an Easter in Somerset, where he had plans to interview a dialectician. He was minded to go; but friends advised otherwise, urged him that it would be prudent to cancel this particular West Country tour, and to report instead to Dean Liddell's rooms at Christ Church at 2.30 p.m. on Friday, 26 April 1878.

And so, nervous (having mugged up overnight on chemistry, the topic on which he felt himself the weakest), he duly travelled up from Mill Hill the night before, stayed with friends in what were then the rural surroundings of Park Town (now part of a hugely expanded city), and the next afternoon walked down the Banbury Road and Cornmarket and across Carfax and beneath Tom Tower, and climbed the staircase off the Peckwater Quadrangle to attend the Delegates in their lair, laying out for them his case for taking personal command of what was clearly to be the greatest lexicographical project ever to be attempted.

It must have been a daunting occasion. The men who assembled that week after Easter were as distinguished and intellectually rarefied a group as Oxford can ever have assembled. Liddell was there, presiding; the ever-sceptical Max Müller was at his side; the Regius Professors of both History and Ecclesiastical History were there—the former the great William Stubbs, who was credited with making history worthy of respectable academic pursuit in these muscularly philistine Victorian times; the University ViceChancellor, James Sewell, a high churchman of a formidably conservative bent; John Griffiths, Keeper of the University Archives; the classical scholar Edwin Palmer; Granville Bradley, a wellknown educationalist and Master of University College—and so on.

Yet in the event the encounter proved not to be in the slightest bit terrifying for any of the parties involved. They all appeared to like one another. The Delegates saw Murray as `docile, but dogged'—and were greatly relieved that he did not seem quite so unstable as Furnivall, nor as unpleasant as Sweet. They treated Murray well, and when he emerged back out on the street it was with an evident spring in his step. He stayed an extra night or two in Oxford, but wrote immediately to Ada back in Mill Hill:

Seen the great men—a very long and pleasant interview, increasing I thinkour mutual respect and confidence—but I don't thinkit decided anything or that we are much nearer a decision. Max Müller played first fiddle and talked as everybody's friend. It struckme that we were playing Congress ⁹ with myself as Russia, the Dons as England, Max Müller as Bismarck, and the result— nothing yet! Absit omen! But they are decent fellows and shook me very warmly by the hand at leaving as a man and brother.

It took one further full year before the deal was done—with the twelvemonth almost entirely devoted to wranglings about money. There were many explosions, most of them involving Furnivall. At one time he derided Bartholomew Price as a `mean old skunk-rat'. Then he became convinced that the Delegates themselves were a byword for `shiftiness and cupidity', or on another occasion men of `miserable parsimony and sharp practice', and essentially told them so. In one extraordinary speech he accused the Delegates—in most un-Victorian language—of wanting to `screw' the Society. Henry Sweet could get distempered, as well.

At one stage in the talks he forecast that Oxford simply wanted to take charge of the Society's materials, whereupon `Murray would be fired and some Oxford swell, who would draw a good salary for doing nothing, put in his place. I know something of Oxford,' Sweet said, ominously, `and of its low state of morality as regards jobbery and personal interest.'

But finally, on 1 March 1879, a deal was struck. Bartholomew Price sent the package of papers to Murray at Sunnyside, Mill Hill. It was a formal, ten-page contract between the Society and Oxford University Press. The intention behind the hard-won document was to produce what would be called A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles formed mainly on the Materials collected by the Philological Society and with the Assistance of many Scholars and Men of Science. The book was expected to be of some 7,000 pages, and work on it, fully funded by the Press at an estimated cost of £9,000, should take no more than ten years. The editor would indeed be James Murray ¹⁰ —by now fully-fledged as President of the Philological Society—and he would be paid an annual salary (the arrangement for its payment was excruciatingly complex, involving pounds per page-published, lateness penalties, and lump sum payments for subordinate staff) that amounted to around £500. As token of the completion of the year-long marathon of talks, Dr Price enclosed a cheque for £175, and a note which ended: `Let us all congratulate each other on having arrived at this resting place in our enterprise. Believe me to be with the best wishes for you in the large undertaking.'

Dr Price, like almost everyone else, had absolutely no idea how magnificently wrong was the forecasting. The Dictionary took not ten years to complete, but 54. The number of pages was not 7,000, but 16,000. And the cost of the entire project turned out not to be £9,000, but £300,000.

Not that James Murray was much better informed. In all the excitement and sanguine mood of the contract-signing day, he gaily supposed that he would be able to continue as a schoolmaster at Mill Hill and simply edit the Dictionary in his spare time. He did not reckon with the terrible undertow of all those hundreds of thousands of words that lay hidden, waiting to be included in the book that would eventually contain and compass them all. He was optimistic; the Philological Society was optimistic; Oxford was optimistic; and all of them, though they were essentially right in spirit to be so, and though their rosy view of lexical ambition was to be vindicated at the very end, were nonetheless at this moment in the saga, spectacularly unrealistic. This was all going to be very much more difficult than anyone could possibly have imagined.

Let us leave it to Samuel Johnson to offer his perspective, in paragraphs taken from the deservedly famous Preface to his own dictionary of the century before. Murray could almost recite these words by heart: he would later reproduce them, as if they had been carved in stone, in his first Preface to Volume I of his great book:

When first I engaged in this work, I resolved to leave neither words nor things unexamined, and pleased myself with the prospect of the hours which I should revel away in feasts of literature, with the obscure recesses of northern learning which I should enter and ransack; the treasures with which I expected every search into these neglected mines to reward my labour, and the triumph with which I should display my acquisitions to mankind. When I had thus inquired into the original of words, I resolved to show likewise my attention to things; to pierce deep into every science, to enquire the nature of every substance of which I inserted the name, to limit every idea by a definition strictly logical, and exhibit every production of art or nature in an accurate description, that my book might be in place of all other dictionaries whether appellative or technical.

But these were the dreams of a poet doomed at last to wake a lexicographer. I soon found that it is too late to lookfor instruments, when the workcalls for execution, and that whatever abilities I had brought to my task, with those I must finally perform it. To deliberate whenever I doubted, to enquire whenever I was ignorant, would have protracted the undertaking without end, and, perhaps, without much improvement; for I did not find by my first experiments, that what I had not of my own was easily to be obtained: I saw that one enquiry only gave occasion to another, that bookreferred to book, that to search was not always to find, and to find was not always to be informed; and that thus to pursue perfection, was, like the first inhabitants of Arcadia, to chase the sun, which, when they had reached the hill where he seemed to rest, was still beheld at the same distance from them. I then contracted my design, determining to confide in myself, and no longer to solicit auxiliaries, which produced more incumbrance than assistance; by this I obtained at least one advantage, that I set limits to my work, which would in time be ended, though not completed.

Perhaps no more eloquent a testament to the trials of a lexicographer—a man performing `the work of a poet at last doomed to wake'—has ever been written. James Murray chose these paragraphs as his set of guiding principles, words which seemed somehow designed by the Fates to inspire him, but also to remind and to warn him.

For he in his work now vowed absolute perfection, no matter that it involved the asking of uncountable questions, nor boundless quantities of time. He said to himself that in making this new work he would brook no expedience, he would take no short cut, he would turn away from no unsolved enigma, no unexplained mystery. James Murray vowed, in short, to complete the work that Samuel Johnson could only claim to have brought to an end that was convenient for himself and his small band of scriveners; that he would, eventually and once and for all, fix and enumerate and catalogue all of the English language, no matter if it seemed that he was thereby bound, endlessly, to be chasing the very same sun that Samuel Johnson had so signally failed to reach.