The Meaning of Everything

by Simon Winchester

  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 furthe
r 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.