The Meaning of Everything

by Simon Winchester

  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 educationalis
t 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.

  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 sli
ps, 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.