The Meaning of Everything

4

Battling with the Undertow

The writer of a dictionary rises every morning like the sun to move past some little star in his zodiac; a new letter is to him a new year's festival, the conclusion of the old one a harvest home.

(Translated from Jean Paul Richter's Levana, 1807)

There are two beginnings to every year,' says an old Irish proverb. The Oxford English Dictionary had the first of its beginnings in 1861. And now, with James Murray's formal appointment in 1879 as editor, it was having its second almost twenty years later. But it was not quite so simple, getting matters under way again after so long a period of quietude.

First, there was the small matter of what everyone called quite simply `the slips'. These were the quotation slips, the morsels of paper on which the brief—but to a dictionary editor absolutely essential—pieces of information that had been gleaned from all those years of volunteer reading of the core books of English literature, of the newspapers ¹ and learned journals and railway timetables and technical manuals and navigational almanacs and collections of belles lettres besides. Within the sentences that were written onto these slips, and which were waiting to be sifted and sorted and discovered by dictionary editors, lay all the subtle and not-so-subtle shades of meaning and sense of the various words that the quotations illustrated.

There were said to be something like two million of these slips already collected, tied together in rough order, no doubt covered in dust and lint, curled and yellow, and perhaps even crumbling themselves with age and decrepitude. It was already twenty years since Herbert Coleridge had begun to amass them at his house on Chester Terrace, and fifteen or so since Frederick Furnivall had entreated his scores of readers to `copy and burrow' in the literature, to write out the slips, and to send them in to him to St George's Square. Some were therefore very old indeed, and by now a good number of those gentle readers who had collected them had perhaps not survived to see them put to use.

Many of those worthies whom Furnivall had appointed as subeditors for individual letters had taken away their bundles of slips for sorting; and when Furnivall's attention settled on one of his other enthusiasms—Amazonian scullers from Hammersmith teashops, for example, or practising with early English balladeers, or setting up Working Men's Clubs—many had stopped working on them, had squirrelled them away somewhere, and everyone involved had forgotten about them.

Most of the slips were simply half-sheets of white writing paper, each of them (if properly filled in by the volunteers who submitted them, though not all complied) with the headword—or the catchword, or the lemma, as it is now generally known—at the topleft, the date and author and precise source of the quotation that contained it written below, and then the quotation itself, either in full or in what the rules were pleased to call an `adequate form'. Two million of such slips, weighing the better part of two tons, were in existence.

But where in God's name were they? To begin work properly on his dictionary, Murray needed to find them, and given that the contract clock was running, he needed to find them fast. Frederick Furnivall, it will be remembered, had entirely lost the will and concentration that was necessary to run the project, and had quite frankly lost track of all the scores of volunteers, the hundreds of thousands of slips, the pages of schedules and proofs and specimen pages and type designs and other details of dictionary assembly, such that the entire enterprise under his care had been reduced to a sorry shambles of decay and desuetude.

The slips were the most important asset of Furnivall's legacy, such as it was. His headquarters had been in Primrose Hill. James Murray's were now in Mill Hill. The tons of slips had perforce to be moved across the outer villages of London town—if only, that is, they could be found.

In anticipation of Murray's editorship, a somewhat embarrassed Furnivall had already been scratching his head and wondering where the missing sub-editors and thus his missing slips might be. Come the spring of 1879, when the final contracts were exchanged with Oxford, and with James Murray champing at the bit, he made a big push—and slowly but surely, from the recesses of the scholarly universe, many of the packages of slips began to come to light.

First, he sent a van with everything that had accumulated in his own house. The van was late—`things must be got away from here on Friday, as my wife is coming home from the seaside'—but eventually, after he had found a willing local man (but he demanded that Murray pay him) who piled into his cart everything that Furnivall had stacked in his hallway, the load was dispatched. Along with it came a note, suitably cryptic, which hinted at the state of affairs Murray was in short order to discover (and also, in the chiding italicized passage that is included, reminded the new editor why so many people found Frederick Furnivall a meddling and cantankerous old fool):

You'll want a Secretary and Sorter at first besides H, ² in preparing the A work for you. You shd have all the A slips pickt out first, they're in packets, except such as are in the 2 or 3 G. Eliot packets whose slips want written catchword … I hope you have, or very soon will have your whole room shelved. It is the only plan of keeping the slips easily accessible and moveable.

You've never acknowledged receipt of any of the little Dicty packets I've posted to you. Pray don't treat stranger contributors so, or they'll put it down to indifference or rudeness. Have some receipt Post Cards or forms printed, & let H. acknowledge the receipt of everything …

Some of the outer slips have got torn, &'ll need mending. You've probably laid in a supply of gum.

Once the carrier had dumped the enormous pile, Murray ferreted around in it for a few hours and then stood back—professing himself shocked and appalled by the condition of it all. There were boxes of slips, neatly arranged, to be sure. But some of the subeditors had put their hundredweight collections of papers into hessian ³ sacks, and then left them to rot. Murray found a dead rat in one of these, and then in another a live mouse with her family, all of the creatures contentedly nibbling away at the paper, making bedding for themselves out of years worth of lexical scholarship. Many of the sacks had been left in dampbasements and stables for ages, and their contents were dampand mouldy. The writing had in many cases faded, or else was so illegible that Murray said it would have been far better for them to have been written in Chinese, since he could always obtain the services of a translator.

One sub-editor had delivered his slips in a baby's bassinet; another—responsible for headwords beginning with I—had left his in a broken-bottomed hamper in a long-empty vicarage in Harrow. Furnivall had tried to keepa list of the addresses of all those to whom he had entrusted slips, but his minuscule address book (bound in wrinkled brown leather with a white paper label stuck to its side—infuriatingly he remembered it all too well) had gone missing, and the two men had the devil's own time tracking the various men who, if still alive, had a fair chance of still retaining the papers. But even that wouldn't have been entirely useful, since many sub-editors had died or moved (a large number of vicars, for example, were already venerable when Coleridge made contact back in the 1850s), leaving behind them piles of slips `to tender mercies of indignant tenants or grasping landlords', as Murray was to write.

By the early summer of 1879 the severity of the situation seemed all too clear. The letter H was missing in its entirety, as was the slightly less important Q and Pa. The slips for G were very nearly burned with the household rubbish when one Mrs Wilkes turned out the house in the wake of her husband's death.

And yet in fact things turned out to be—at least in these three instances—not so bad after all. H was found in Florence—it had been given to the American businessman and diplomat George Perkins Marsh, who took the slips to Italy and then found that his eyesight was too poor to work on them any more, and left them in his villa in the Tuscan hills. Q turned upin the English Midlands town of Loughborough, in the care of one J. G. Middleton, who thought the project had been abandoned. And Pa (Furnivall could never explain how it came to be separated from the entirety of P-Py) was found in a stable in County Cavan, where some of the slips had already been used for lighting fires. The Mr Smith to whom the relatively small selection of slips ⁴ had been entrusted was an Irish clergyman who had been obliged to quit his living on the disestablishment of the Irish church, and had then died; his brother had taken charge of them and in due course handed them over to a complete stranger for what was laughably supposed to be safe keeping. It was from this stranger's stable that the housemaids mistook the slips for spills. Not all of the Pa slips were burned, but it took fresh volunteers many months of hard reading to replace the quotations that had been lost in a succession of Cavan hearths.

The sub-editor for the letter O also proved to be something of a nuisance. He was called W. J. E. Crane, and he lived in Brixton, and it was there that he resolutely kept hold of his slips, being obtusely and mysteriously unwilling to relinquish them. Entreaties seemed not to work; a visit by one of Murray's assistants proved fruitless because Crane was away and no one in his household would release the papers; and then lawyers had to be hired, and everyone became insanely worried lest Crane, in a fit of rage, make his whole collection into a bonfire. In the end, `by great importunity', Murray got the papers out of Crane's hands and into Mill Hill—but it was, at one time, touch-and-go for a letter that was to occupy 356 pages, from O itself, via Oaf to Ozonous.

(In later years there were further trials, as might be expected with so vast a project. Words beginning with the preposition invanished when they were in proof and on their way to the printers, but eventually turned up. A policeman happened to find a packet of copy dropped in the street, and restored it to its editors unscathed. And at the very end of the enterprise one entire word— bondmaid—was found to have been left out of the first edition altogether: its slips had fallen down behind some books, and the editors had never noticed that it was gone.)

But now where, once the great pile had been found and gathered and assembled, to put it all? `Sunnyside' was a pleasing and comfortable Victorian house, true; but by 1879 James and Ada already had six of their eventual eleven children, and some of them were at nursery age, others ready for the schoolroom. The idea of having the family house filled to the brim with two tons or more of dusty paper piles was pure anathema to the houseproud Ada, no matter how supportive she might have been of her husband. He had, quite simply, to find somewhere else to do his work.

His first thought was to rent a neighbouring cottage. Mill Hill in those days was a village on the edge of London, and there was indeed a small house with a thatched roof on Hammer's Lane that seemed suitable for the purpose. But the thatch was the problem: it created, Murray thought, too much of a fire risk. If he took it, it would only be to house one of his assistants.

And then Ada saw in one of the illustrated gardening magazines an advertisement for a new type of small shed-like structure, ugly and made of corrugated iron, and which the wealthier type of people used for potting, or storage, or housing their lawn-rollers or their diligences. The Sunnyside back garden, it turned out, was large enough to accommodate one of the larger models; the school governors, perhaps unaware of just quite how ugly it was, gave their sanction to its construction; and so at about the time that the first piles of slips began to come in from Primrose Hill, from Florence, from Brixton, and from all other points of the compass, the shed was bought (for £150) and swiftly put up. It took three weeks to build. It had skylights and was lined with deal, and was painted grey with a brown roof. Some said it looked like a Methodist chapel.

Murray had his brother-in-law Herbert Ruthven build and install on the walls a set of no fewer than 1,029 pigeon-holes— it will be remembered that Coleridge, twenty years before, had optimistically imagined that his nest of 54 would be sufficient. Visitors remarked on how in this new incarnation pigeon-holes seemed to dominate everything in the little building—every available wall was either covered with them or with plain deal shelving, some of which was horizontal and some sloping, and with a beaded edge to prevent books falling to the floor. There was a look of studied purpose in all that Murray did.

He bought desks and tables—and, in a nod to the way Samuel Johnson is supposed to have worked, he had the chippy build a foot-high dais at one end of the room, on which he could place his own chair and desk, and from which eyrie he could survey the work of his helpers. He decided that while everyone else seemed to call this nasty and dampand unhealthy little building `the Shed', he would dignify it by the name monks gave to the room in which they prepared illuminated manuscripts: `the Scriptorium'. The name stuck—to this building in Mill Hill, and later when the project moved to Oxford.

All that remained was for James Murray to put on top of his greying head the black silk velvet biretta that had been part of his vestments when he received his Edinburgh LL D. He had remarked then that the capwas modelled on that worn by his hero John Knox (although the founder of the Church of Scotland was also the author of the phrase `the monstrous regiment of women', which did not reflect the thinking of Murray, for whom women were a boon in myriad ways). No matter its origin: James Murray was to wear his old Knox capfor every one of his 35 years of editing that followed. Pictures of him clad thus, surrounded by row upon row of slip-filled pigeon-holes and against a background of shelves of learned books, and with a groupof suited and scholarly looking helpers in the background, remain classic illustrations of the lexicographic art, as well as being an image of Murray from which he, a proud man now not entirely unaware of his growing worth, derived great pleasure.

So now, come the late spring of 1879, the Scriptorium—the Scrippy—was declared by Murray to be `in full orderly work'. He was ready, he announced, to receive interested visitors, and to show them himself and his general staff beginning their formidable battle.

Once he had settled down to draw breath and plan his campaign, Murray realized that, voluminous though the mass of material now arranged along his Scriptorium walls was, it just was not enough. One problem was that readers had never bothered to consider with much enthusiasm what might be called the ordinary words of the language—they had succumbed to an understandable temptation to send in slips for interesting words, but not for the prosaic ones. So the supply slips for these banal words was meagre, almost useless. `Thus of abusion,' writes Murray, referring to an unusual word that means deception or outrage, `we found in the slips about 50 instances: of abuse, not five.' It was clear that to solve this problem, fresh instructions to readers needed to be issued, and, what is more, that very many more volunteers needed to be pressed into service.

The Scriptorium (Mill Hill)

Within weeks of taking on the job, Murray acted. He first persuaded the Clarendon Press to issue his now-famous Appeal, and had it published quickly, at the end of April 1879. This was a four-page printed document entitled `An Appeal to the English-Speaking and English-Reading Public in Great Britain, America and the British Colonies to read books and make extracts for the Philological Society's New English Dictionary'. Readers were wanted, Murray wrote, `to finish the volunteer work so enthusiastically commenced twenty years ago, by reading and extracting the books which still remain unexamined'. So there were four further pages that listed the `unexamined' books that Murray thought it might be useful for volunteers to read. Two thousand copies of the Appeal were printed, with Murray pleading in each that `a thousand readers are wanted, and confidently asked for, to complete the work as far as possible within the next three years'. He summarized the kind of reading that needed to be done:

In the Early English period up to the invention of Printing, so much has been done and is doing that little outside help is needed. But few of the earliest printed books—those of Caxton and his successors—have yet been read, and any one who has the opportunity and time to read one or more of these, either in the originals, or accurate reprints, will confer valuable assistance by so doing. The later sixteenth-century literature is very fairly done; yet here several books remain to be read. The seventeenth century, with so many more writers, naturally shows still more unexplored territory. The nineteenth-century books, being within the reach of everyone, have been read widely; but a large number remain unrepresented, not only of those published during the last ten years while the Dictionary has been in abeyance, but also of earlier date. But it is in the eighteenth century above all that help is urgently needed. The American scholars promised to get the eighteenth century literature taken up in the United States, a promise which they appear not to have … fulfilled, and we must now appeal to English readers to share the task, for nearly the whole of that century's books, with the exception of Burke's works, have still to be gone through.

The first page of the Appeal for Readers, written by Murray and sent to bookshops and libraries across the English-speaking world,

with which he assembled the immense army of unpaid helpers for the making of the OED.

This formula cast the net: but what exactly was to be swept up into it? To widen the selection—to make sure that abuse got treatment as fair as abusion, for instance—Murray offered some gently phrased guidance:

Make a quotation for every word that strikes you as rare, obsolete, old-fashioned, new, peculiar or used in a peculiar way.

Take special note of passages which show or imply that a word is either new and tentative, or needing explanation as obsolete and archaic, and which thus help to fix the date of its introduction or disuse.

Make as many quotations as you can for ordinary words, especially when they are used significantly, and tend by the context to explain or suggest their own meaning.

The leaflet was distributed first to newspapers, who treated it as a press release and printed extracts as they saw fit. Then it was sent off in bulk to bookshops and libraries, in the United Kingdom and America, in Australia, Canada. Anyone borrowing or buying a book would likely find, tucked between the pages, this small and elegantly designed little document. The first 2,000 were swiftly augmented by a further print run of 500. And the leaflet found itself, evidently, in many other places besides those to which it was first sent. More than 800 men and women responded in total, saying that they were happy to help—and by squinting at their names written in the small type of the various Prefaces to the very first finished parts of the Dictionary we may learn something of who they were, as well as the success of the brochure's scatter-shot landings.

Aside from the hundreds of towns and villages in the British Isles that provided enthusiastic new readers, there are submissions written from would-be volunteers living in Austria, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Holland, New South Wales, Indiana, Calcutta, New York, San Francisco, Ceylon, Arkansas, New Zealand, and Wisconsin, and a dozen other places besides.

Murray decided that the American efforts, which were very large and involved many hundreds of readers, should be locally superintended (as they still are today—for, as we shall see, the process of reading for the Dictionary still goes on, as it always must). He first appointed the great Pennsylvania-based literature teacher Francis March ⁵ to run the American reading programme—an inspired choice, and one that redeemed a pledge made by Herbert Coleridge twenty years before, which was to have American readers exclusively responsible for reading eighteenth-century English literature (the era being one in which Americans would be naturally peculiarly interested) as well as all American-born literature thereafter. Murray had voiced some dissatisfaction in his Appeal; once March was in place and working hard, all his earlier misgivings evaporated.

(Few readers, at least in those early days, seemed to admit to coming from France and Italy, however. One has to assume, if unkindly, that those living under the heel of firmly prescriptive linguistic authorities like the Forty Immortals of the Académie in Paris and the members of the Accademia of Florence, were a little unsure how prudent it might be to read for a book that would be so wildly different in its constitution from those they were used to.)

In any event, the speed of the response was staggering. Within a month of sending out the pamphlet Murray was able to report that 165 people had signed up to do work; 128 of them had chosen the books they were going to read (a total of 234 books had been sent off); all had been sent their slips ⁶ and so were now presumed to be beavering away. Some who had volunteered to read very large or important books—such as the fourteenth-century northern poem the Cursor Mundi, which in time became the most-quoted work in the entire OED—were sent pre-printed slips, designed by Murray to free these particular volunteers from the labours of writing each time the title and the edition for each of the quotations they found.

A year later the number of readers had more than quadrupled, to 754; 1,568 books had been sent for reading, and 934 of these had been thoroughly combed through and finished. This was work on a scale and at a pace of which Coleridge and Furnivall had never dreamed: within just a year of signature of the contract the number of quotations returned on slips had increased by 361,670, and a year later still, by 656,900. Within a matter of months a further ton of material had been received in the Scriptorium, and Murray and his tiny band of workers were kept furiously busy sifting, sorting, and deciding, day after day after day.

Indeed, the first three or four years of the enterprise in Mill Hill were completely dominated by the seemingly incessant processes of sorting and classifying slips and then reading the quotations written on them. The idea of actually producing even the first volume of the mighty work seemed still very distant, no more than a chimera, a mirage, a phantasm.

About 1,000 slips arrived at the Scriptorium every single day. Each time a packet of slips was received—maybe one particular reader had sent but a single slipin his envelope, more probably he had saved up his efforts and sent in a brown-paper parcel that held fifty or more—it was opened up, and the slips examined to see if there was any egregious error—an obviously misspelled word, say, or if a reference was clearly less full than would be useful. If that were the case, the slipwould be set aside and Murray would write a letter asking the reader to rectify matters.

Then the sorters—two young Mill Hill village women employed, a Miss Skipper and Miss Scott, at fifteen shillings a week—arranged the slips into the alphabetical order of their headwords. The two were the uneducated daughters of local tradesmen, and they cheerfully admitted little knowledge of what it was that they were sorting; but they learned an extraordinary dexterity in shuffling the slips into order, and proved themselves invaluable. ⁷

After these, in the ascendant pecking order, came the rather more learned (and, as it happens, male) helpers, like the thusfar-unmasked kleptomaniac Mr Herrtage, or James Murray's brother-in-law Herbert Ruthven, Alfred Erlebach, and John Mitchell (who was to be killed mountain climbing in Snowdonia). This team looked closely at each headword and sorted those that were spelled the same way into their different parts of speech—for example, lie the verb, as in to lie down, or lie the noun as in falsehood. Once this was done, the slips were further arranged within the new categories such that the quotations written on them were in chronological order.

A selection of slips—some handwritten, some cut from books, some printed—for the word mechnical, which would have been housed in the Scriptorium pigeonholes,

waiting to be examined, considered and finally perhaps used in the pages of the Dictionary.

The most crucial stage came next. An editor-sorter of even more experience—James Murray being primus inter pares, of course—would then look carefully at the quotations and from them attempt to discern the differences in the meanings and senses that the quotations showed had been used over the centuries. For an important word there might be several hundred quotations—and it would only be by the very slow and painstaking reading of these quotations that a skilled editor could discern, could see in his mind's eye, the various ways the words had been employed over the centuries.

Sometimes the differences were obvious; sometimes they were more subtle; occasionally the differences were the merest shadings of meaning, the discernment and determining and defining of which were to make this one dictionary so infinitely superior to all others. And to make sure the quotations did each reflect the meaning that a sagacious editor thought they did, each and every quotation would have to be checked. Was what the volunteer reader had written accurate? Was the date he had assigned to it correct? If there were errors here, then the whole basis of the definition and the history of the word would be thrown into disarray, and any dictionary based on such inaccuracy would be made useless. Checking and rechecking the original sources, however tedious it might seem, and however seemingly disrespectful to the volunteers, was essential.

The assistants—or the sub-editors or that special sub-class called re-sub-editors—who did all these determinings would pin together the slips that fed into each category of meaning and attach with the same pin ⁸ a piece of paper that showed a first attempt at a definition of what the slips' quotations appeared to show the word to mean. And then the sub-editor would take all the small pinned bundles for any one word and arrange these bundles chronologically, so that the lexical history of the word could be ascertained as well.

Finally in this multi-layered process, the gently fierce-looking, pepper-and-salt-bearded (the red had faded to brown and was now beginning to grey itself ), and black-velvet-capped James Murray, working steadily away upon his foot-high dais and from behind a semicircular and seemingly machicolated fortress wall of reference books, would receive the pinned bundles. He would make such further subdivisions as might seem to him appropriate, work into the mix the etymology of each word, add its alternate spellings and then the way that the Philological Society and common sense suggested that it might best be pronounced. He would number the bundles from 1 to 1,000 (in case they were ever to be dropped by a clumsy sub-editor or a compositor), and eventually he would perform the most important of all the tasks that a dictionary editor must accomplish—he would write and polish and fuss with and burnish, for each one of the words and senses and meanings, what he divined as their definitions.

Defining words is a rare and special art. Some rules for the process have evolved, the earliest of them Aristotelian in origin. A word—let us take the noun ⁹ cow as an example—must first be defined according to the class of things, by the genus, to which the chosen meaning belongs (mammal, quadruped, hooved), and then differentiated—defined by differentiae, in Aristotelian terms—from other members of its class (bovine, female). The definition must be written to show what the thing signified by the word is, and not what it is not. And all the words used in the definition must appear elsewhere in the dictionary, so that any reader's puzzlement can be rectified by his simply looking those up as well—to repeat, the rule of thumb has it that no word in the definition should be more complicated than the word that is being defined. (Samuel Johnson broke this rule on numerous occasions. In his definition of the word elephant, for example, he writes of the animal's pudicity— few know at first blush that this word means shyness, making the definition, and thus by extension Johnson's entire dictionary—less than ideal. Which is, of course, what Dean Trench pointed out in his famous paper of 1857.)

James Murray's definition of cow (or one of its many meanings—cow has about nine, though cower has only two) is a model of elegant simplicity, as were most of the hundreds of thousands he wrote: `The female of any bovine animal (as the ox, bison or buffalo); most commonly applied to the female of the domestic species (Bos taurus).'

Once having completed his definition, and having assembled in bundles enough work to make the next part of the venture worthwhile, he would tie them together, place them in a large brown package marked, triumphally, with the simple word `Press'—and send them post-haste to the printers.

Murray's son Wilfrid, who spent much of his adult life in Cape Town, employed a delightful South African English word inspan— it means to yoke upa team of oxen or horses, and it has outspan as its opposite—to describe how the editor would employ his children in the service of the Dictionary. `They were inspanned', he writes, `as soon as they were of an age to be trusted.' What he meant was that as soon as they seemed able to read they were asked to report to the door of the `iron room' (the inside of what their father called the Scriptorium was out of bounds to them), collect from an assistant some newly arrived packets of slips, and take them back to the Sunnyside breakfast room for sorting.

`We received no pocket money as a matter of course,' wrote Jowett, the youngest Murray boy, `but had to earn it by sorting slips.'

Hours & hours of our childhood were spent in this useful occupation. The motive actuating us was purely mercenary: we wanted money for our Christmas or our birthday presents, or to spend on our summer holidays, & the only way to get it was to sort slips. We were paid according to age, not according to skill or speed. The standard rate was one penny an hour, but this rose to two-pence, threepence or even sixpence, as you mounted up in your teens.

Wilfrid, who sounds to have been something of a playroom lawyer, brought in a spoof bill to regulate the practice, reading it as a motion before what was called the Sunnyside Debating Society. He called it the Appropriation Act, and it read: `That the members of this House to steadily henceforth keepto the work of half an hour's slips per day for the gain of sixpence a week.' The children passed it nem con. James Murray appears not to have taken the slightest notice of it. Jowett was obliged to continue writing his description of the trials of the task:

The sorting into first letters was easiest: that into second letters was a little harder, because you often had to read the whole catchword. The final sorting and combining two or perhaps three bundles were hardest of all; but we became very skillful with practice &, I believe, quite as quick as the junior assistants in the Scriptorium. … Financially considered, I am sure the Oxford University Press did very well by our labour.

The work was not uninteresting if done for only an hour or two at a time. But when we wanted to earn half a crown or even five shillings in the space of a week, we had to work long hours. We enlivened the task by reading out tit-bits from Dr. Furnivall's newspaper cuttings, & bundles of slips from Dr. Furnivall were in demand, in spite of the bad handwriting.

However, just as at first with the poor Misses Skipper and Scott, none of the labour of the young Murrays was to be publicly acknowledged. It seems a rather ungracious Victorian attitude, but evidently one that had precious little to do with gender. More than likely this conferring of invisibility was just the result of James Murray's whims and caprices, and not based in any kind of settled policy.

There was, though, one unforeseen bonus to be derived from all their labours. In their old age, and when such puzzles became a regular feature in the newspapers, the Murray children turned out to be brilliantly adept at solving crosswords. They also—though this could perhaps hardly be termed a bonus—derived from their work one splendid phrase of insult. They had found the word toerag in one of Furnivall's newspaper cuttings, and decided to make adolescent use of it themselves. The halls of Sunnyside would resound with cries of `You dirty toe-rag!'

And all the while, Murray was inching towards the moment when he would be able to offer uphis first publication—the first real indication of progress, and one which he could share with all the interested world.

He began working on his words at what suddenly seems to have been a rare old clip. As early as May 1879—not three months following his appointment—he had advanced from the letter A ¹⁰ as far as Aby, covering 557 words, which made upenough copy (depending on the design, the number of columns, the size of the typeface) for perhaps 36 pages of the completed Dictionary. By May 1880 he had struggled through a further 124 pages, reaching as far as Al-. In 1881 (by which time he had sent out fifteen hundredweight of paper, in the shape of 817,625 of the pre-printed slips, to his readers) he had begun thinking seriously about typography, and in June 1881 there was talk of making specimen pages.

The design of the Dictionary occupied his mind for many months—and the fact that the design he eventually came up with has lasted for so very long since those Mill Hill ponderings points up the extraordinary prescience of Murray as a bookmaker, as well as a lexicographer. For in all his decisions he seems to have achieved a rare perfection—the form of the book is one that no designer since has had reasons either to tinker with or to complain about.

The Periodical, the in-house journal of Oxford University Press, understandably gave much of the credit to their own printers, who were regarded as men possessed of an unusual degree of skill and taste. Their compositors and readers, said the journal, puffing out its chest, had bestowed the greatest care upon the Dictionary:

The variety of type used, the many languages involved, and the multiplication of `arbitraries' ¹¹ have demanded technical knowledge and minute accuracy to an extent probably unequalled in any other work. The typographical superiority of the Oxford Dictionary over works of comparable scope is everywhere acknowledged. One has but to turn to great books like Littré and Grimm to be impressed once again with the choice of type and the disposition of the page which have made the Oxford book easy and pleasant to read.

Whether it was Murray who made the final design decision or the then Printer to the University, Edward Pickard Hall, is a little difficult to discern. ¹² And certainly the celebrated Vice-Chancellor of the University and Master of Balliol, Benjamin Jowett—for whom there was a rhyme using his name and which ended `there is no knowledge but I know it'—was deeply (and, to Murray, annoyingly) involved as well. But whoever of these was properly responsible for the look of the finished product, the result was then, and remains today, unutterably pleasing.

The book is laid out in three columns, each essentially ten inches tall and two-and-a-half inches wide. The body type is a classic British Imperial-era face called Clarendon, which had been designed and the punches cut in 1845 by Benjamin Fox for Robert Besley at London's renowned Fann Street Foundry: it used boldface for the headwords, and then a variety of styles (light and italic among them) and a variety of fount sizes for the various elements that Murray decided required illustration. ¹³ The definitions are set in Old Style; the quotations in a smaller fount size of the same. All kinds of typographical device—daggers, parallels, inferior and superior stress marks, numbers—are there to mark various elements of each word. A bewildering variety of other typefaces are used as well—not the least of them Arabic, Hindi, Icelandic, Greek, and the various symbols of Old English (such as thorns, yoghs, wyns, ashes, and eths), and, in the dictionary section that is devoted to what lexicographers call `orthoepy', and which all else call `correct pronunciation', the equally arcane and irritatingly non-intuitive symbols of the phonetic alphabet.

It was on 19 April 1882 that Murray sent off a first batch of all-butfinished copy to the Clarendon Press printing house at Oxford. Things were now moving, and in terms of the glacier-like mobility of the dictionary world, they were moving fast. Some days later, in early May 1882, he signalled the epochal moment of possible publication to his fellow members of the Philological Society. It had been three years since his appointment as editor: now at last he was able to employ the words that have been already used as the epigraph to Chapter 2: `The great fact … is, that the Dictionary is now at last really launched, and that some forty pages are in type, of which forty-eight columns have reached me in proof.'

Since he was now in the business of editing the book, rather than collecting material for it, he decided that he could now call a halt—or at least a temporary halt—to the main volunteer reading programme. `The general amassing of quotations must cease with the present year,' he declared. By now he had enough slips (about three and a half million) to be going on with, and he decided he would in future ask for more books to be read only when he needed to fill a gap, or when he was uncertain whether the quotations he already had truly did represent the full history of a particular word. He would also make uplists of those words for which he felt he needed citations earlier than those his volunteers had already found. He called these lists his desiderata—and such lists also still exist today, as the modern editors of the OED entreat today's volunteers to see if they can spy any uses of words at earlier dates than so far found.

Meanwhile, the proof pages began to come back from the compositors' stones. Each page was set by hand. So complex was the typesetting that every sheet was reckoned to cost about £5 to make up. ¹⁴ Dozens of compositors were involved: one of them, James C. Gilbert—a slender man, balding with a regallooking and very tidy white beard—appears, remarkably, to have worked on the entire run of the Dictionary. He joined the Press as an apprentice in 1880, then, according to a brief appreciation of his almost unimaginably long tenure, he recalled how he `lifted his first take … in 1882, at an early stage of the letter A', and was still working 36 years later when the final words (which all began with W, not Z, as will be explained) were set in January 1928. `James Gilbert had worked for a greater length of time and had set more type for the Dictionary than any other compositor,' the brochure records.

The return of the proofs sparked off one of the many internal schisms that seemed to plague the early days of this great enterprise. They were, said one of those who glimpsed them, perhaps `the most heavily corrected proofs ever known', and had been covered with pencil corrections on almost every one of 2,600 lines of type that, on average, make up an eight-page sheet of the Dictionary. Many lines had themselves twenty changes to them—meaning that every single sheet could have as many as 10,000 proof marks, necessitating alterations, the expenditure of much time—and great cost.

Scores of factors caused the project to take as long as it did: not the least was the prodigious complexity of proof-reading and correcting, as this one page, shown halfway through its progress from first assembly to final printing, will suggest.

James Gilbert, a compositor at Oxford University Press appears, uniquely, to have worked on the entire Dictionary—lifting the first type for the letter A in 1882, and working until the completion of the final volume in 1928.

It was this particular prospect that apparently raised the hackles of Benjamin Jowett, in his capacity as ex officio chairman of the Delegates. Both he in particular, and the Delegates in general, began behaving in a way that Murray found most disturbing. Jowett—whose publicly stated aim was `to arrange my life in the best possible way, that I may be able to arrange other people's'—embarked on a sudden campaign of highly aggressive interference. Towards the end of July 1883 Jowett invited Murray to come up from London and stay in a guest room at Balliol; the next day he took Murray with him when he went to visit both the full body of the Delegates and then, more ominously, to see members of a hitherto moribund subcommittee that had been set up three years before specifically to look into any problems which might arise with the Dictionary. Jowett showed them all the massively corrected proofs for part of the first section, he explained how much it would cost the Press to deal with all of them, and, in an autocratic style for which he was notorious, he argued fiercely that changes needed to be made. He handed Murray a document: `Suggestions for Guidance in Preparing Copy for the Press'.

Murray, who was already upset, and by turns furious and dismayed by his treatment, went through the roof. He spluttered, he fulminated, he raged in public and in private. How dare Jowett and his minions—men who had not the faintest notion of the way that Murray worked or of the methods of the men and women in the Scriptorium—tell him how to run a dictionary? How dare some anonymous Delegate suggest, for example, that the words aardvark and aardwolf, words that are meat and drink to any beginning lexicographer, be omitted because they were deemed too scientific or too foreign? How dare Jowett suggest that newspapers not be used as source material? that only the works of `great authors' should be cited? that there should be no illustrations of words quoted from later than 1875 (nothing modern, in other words)? And that scientific and `slang' words be omitted unless they had appeared in the better sorts of literature?

`I am sure', Murray said when he had cooled down a little, `the time will come when this criticism will be pointed out as a most remarkable instance of the inability of men to acknowledge contemporary facts and read the signs of the times.' What the Delegates were demanding was a series of economies that would surely rob the book of its likely authority. `The Dictionary can be made better in quality', Murray wrote, `only by more care, more work, more time.' This was not the moment to try to speed things up, to cut corners and trim fat, and to risk making a shoddy book in place of the great one Murray had in mind.

But the `Suggestions' were not all, were not the worst of Jowett's supposed crimes. In October, even closer to the publication date of the first part of the Dictionary, Jowett perpetrated the ultimate impertinence by trying both to rewrite Murray's Preface and to change the Dictionary's title. The new Preface, which was sent to Murray without comment or explanation, was unrecognizable, and moreover—as an added insult by the meddlesome Jowett—his own effort was not returned to him. And the great book was no longer to be A New English Dictionary on a Historical Basis, but was, in Jowett-speak, A New Dictionary Showing the History of the Language from the Earliest Times.

If Murray had gone through the roof at the time of the `Suggestions'—and he was no martinet; had Jowett's criticisms been fair he surely would have accepted them—now he turned positively apoplectic. `I object emphatically to anybody altering it without consulting me … I shall write my own preface, or it shall remain unwritten.' He threatened to resign. He planned to tell his American friends that he was available to take upthe many offers of professorships with which universities in the United States were already showering him. `The future of English scholarshiplies in the United States,' he said with an uncanny prescience. `The language is studied with an enthusiasm unknown here.'

His friends rallied round him, and many agreed that he ought to go, and not let Jowett have his way and become, de facto, the editor of Murray's great work. `I boil over,' wrote Alexander Ellis from Cambridge, `to think of the misery of it … the utter shipwreck which one self-sufficient man can accomplish. It may be—I think it is—the best thing for your health and wellbeing to give it up, & insist on the removal of your name from the title page.'

But the crisis did eventually blow over—and it did so largely because of the energy, kindness, and immense tact of one of the OED's great unsung heroes, the merchant and merchant banker Henry Hucks Gibbs, later to be ennobled as the first Lord Aldenham. He was the man who, `if the inner history … ever comes to be told in full', in the words of Wilfrid Murray, `saved the Dictionary'. Or, as another writer has it, `whoever takes the credit for inspiring the Dictionary as a piece of scholarship, it is he who should receive it for maintaining the book as a business proposition'.

Hucks Gibbs was 40, wealthy, and splendidly aristocratic when he joined the Philological Society in 1859. His family had made much of their money from working the vast deposits of guano in Peru. (Doggerel of the day referred, not unkindly, to `The House of Gibbs that made their Dibs by selling Turds of Foreign Birds'.) He was fascinated by the economics of bimetallism, that (now discredited) monetary system based on the equal footings that could in theory be enjoyed by both gold and silver.

He was a keen huntsman and a good shot. ¹⁵ He collected books with a fury. He regarded himself as a Liberal Conservative. He paid for the restoration of a number of English churches and cathedrals, and essentially funded the building of Keble College, Oxford. He was, in other words, the perfect saviour for a project as English and as worthy as Murray's Dictionary.

Murray was a neighbour on Mill Hill, as well as a leading light in the Philological Society, and so it was not too surprising that the two men became friends, and Murray came to regard Hucks Gibbs as a confidant. The problems faced by Murray in pioneering the work on the Dictionary became particularly acute once the proof sheets were returned for his inspection: three hours would be needed, he estimated, for him to examine every single sheet—and yet there were new sheets to prepare, new words to define. Sometimes the `terrible undertow of words', as he wrote, seemed to present an impossibly powerful and ever-running tide; to try to halt it was a never-ending battle that an ordinary mortal could never hope to reverse or to win.

It was not just that. Mill Hill was a good distance from central London with its libraries and museums, both essential to his work; and Oxford was nearly a day's travel away too. The Delegates had started to become difficult, Jowett was impossible, the post was so often late and packages were lost; and then there was the money. Always the money. Oxford was grudging in parting with it, niggardly in budgeting for it, parsimonious in demanding detailed accounting for it. The undertow of words seemed sometimes as nothing when compared to the debilitating miseries of having to pay for so much effort with such deeply diminished funds.

Hucks Gibbs stepped smartly into the breach, lending Murray £400 so that the editor could pay his assistants and settle other expenses, and he made no immediate demands for repayment. He worked eagerly as a sub-editor, on the letters C, K, and Q—with critics later saying that his work on C resulted in one of the bestfurnished sections of all. He also mediated the dispute between Murray and Jowett—having already established some credentials for doing so, since much earlier on he had brought Jowett down to see the Scriptorium. Murray's diary records the meeting: `Prof. Jowett. A week past on Wed. Mr. Gibbs showed him everything as well as his patience would allow, not very great—jumping at conclusions.' Hucks Gibbs remembered both men as having been `rather heated'.

By now the heat between the pair had become unbearable, and Hucks Gibbs had to employ all his reserves of diplomacy and tenacity to prevent Murray resigning, sailing off to America in a huff, and leaving the Dictionary to be completed by no doubt lesser men. By dint of a cascade of letters, by dining Jowett in the finest London clubs, by smothering him with aristocratic admiration, he eventually won the day.

The Vice-Chancellor wrote to Murray explaining that the Delegates now wanted the editor to write his own Preface, and implying that the `Suggestions'—`good authors', no newspaper quotations, no words to be included post-1875—were essentially now moot. Murray, returning the favour, rewrote his Preface to include as many of the Vice-Chancellor's suggestions as seemed prudent—and the matter was closed. Jowett was widely seen as an irritating nuisance, and Murray as a man to be reckoned with— stubborn, principled, and right. But for the wise and steady intervention of Henry Hucks Gibbs, the rightness that led Murray to make so fine a dictionary might have been of no value at all.

The upshot of all the argumentation was that the first part of the great work was slightly delayed. But on 29 January 1884— five years after James Murray had signed his contract and started battling with the undertow—the messengers from the Press delivered to the Scriptorium at Sunnyside a bundle of bound copies of what all the lexicographic world had been waiting for. Part I of the New English Dictionary was, at last, officially, and as the phrase of the day had it, uttered for publication.