The Meaning of Everything

by Simon Winchester

  And an aptitude, as it happened, for much, much more. Just as with James Murray—and, so it seems, with so many of the men and women involved in the dictionary project—Henry Bradley had a range of interests and a level of scholarship in each (except music—he could only recognize one tune, `God Save the Queen', and that he knew only because everyone stood up when it was played) that was almost unimaginable. He had taken only fourteen days to learn Russian, it was said—`with no help but the alphabet and a knowledge of the principles of Indo-Germanic philology'. He also had an uncanny ability to read a book when it was upside down. He had learned to do this, he said, by looking at the Bible perched on his father's knees while he sat before the family reading prayers; it was a facility which, once learned, he was never to lose.

  A friend once stumbled upon some of Bradley's childhood notebooks, which, he noted, included :

  facts of Roman history, scraps of science, lists of words peculiar to the Pentateuch or Isaiah, Hebrew singletons, the form of the verb to be in Algerine, Arabic, bardic and cuneiform lettering, Arabisms and Chaldaisms in the New Testament, with vocabularies that imply he was reading Homer, Virgil, Sallust and the Hebrew Old Testament at the same time. In another group the notes pass from the life of Antar ben Toofail by `Admar' (apparently of the age of Haroun Arrashid) to the rules of Latin verse, Hakluyt and Hebrew accents, whereupon follow notes on Sir William Hamilton and Dugald Stewart and a translation of parts of Aeschylus' Prometheus …

  Henry Bradley, a remarkable linguist and amateur lexicographer, first came to Murray's attention after writing a two-part critique of the first fascicle. He soon joined the staff as an assistant, and was appointed joint senior editor—though still doffing his cap to Murray—in 1896.

  This dauntingly learned early middle-aged man, understandably weary of clerking in Sheffield, arrived in London, along with his fragile wife Eleanor and their four children, at the end of 1883. They took rooms in Fulham, on the Wandsworth Bridge Road, and Bradley started pounding the pavements in search of freelance writing assignments. Before long he befriended a man named J. S. Cotton, who then ran an elegant weekly magazine (thirteen shillings a year, published every Saturday) called the Academy.

  In every sense the journal was a perfect outlet for the talents of a figure like Bradley. It was styled A Weekly Review of Literature, Science and Art—it was kept mercifully free of the canting irrelevancies of politics—and it usually ran to sixteen or twenty pages. A typical issue might have a dozen book reviews, a number of theatrical notices, and columns filled with delicious arcana—essays on the latest developments in France (`160,000 francs subscribed for a statue of Gambetta at Cahors') and America (`Matthew Arnold reportedly taking elocution lessons in Andover, Maine, to prepare himself for an American tour'), jottings on scientific advances (`new fossils discovered in the Bagshot Beds to the south of London'), philological studies (`fresh information on the number of Greek words in the Karlsruhe Priscian No. 132'), and countless other oddities besides.

  In early February 1884 Cotton called Bradley to his offices on Chancery Lane and handed him a single copy of Part Iof James Murray's New English Dictionary, suggesting that the cutlery clerk might like to try to write a five-column review of it, both to test his abilities of comprehending so complex a book and then to see if he might be capable of organizing some sensible thoughts about it.

  Bradley took the thick slab of printed pages back to Fulham, exultant at the chance. He had not fully moved in: he had only a tea-chest in his living room to use as a desk; but he nonetheless wrote his review and handed it in within days. Cotton found it far too long—but quite fascinating, and extraordinarily well written. Rather than return it to Bradley to cut it down—Victorian editors were more lenient about allotting space than their counterparts today—he decided he would divide it into two parts. These duly appeared, edited in double-quick time, in the issues of Saturday 16 February and Saturday 1 March.

  The appearance of the notice—written as it was by a hitherto quite unknown figure, by someone well outside the philological priesthood—provoked an instant small sensation. It was an essay that in due course changed Bradley's life—plucking him from the tiresome trajectories of freelancing into the highest realms of academe and establishment. It was an essay that in due course changed James Murray's life too. And it changed—most happily—the fortunes of the Dictionary, like almost no other event before or since.

  The most notable characteristic of Bradley's review was that it managed to be admiring and yet neither slavish nor sycophantic in its admiration. To be sure, there was no doubt that Bradley liked the book: `the present specimen affords every reason to hope that the skill of Dr Murray and his assistants will prove equal to the arduous task which lies before them,' he said in his first paragraphs. It could be confidently asserted, Bradley continued, `that if the level of excellence achieved in this opening part be sustained throughout, the completed work will be an achievement without parallel in the lexicography of any living language'.

  He used the essay to work his way in detail through the design and structure of the book. Nothing much was quoted before what Murray chose as the linguistically epoch-changing year of ad 1150—when standard English had finally wrested itself free from the strictures of Anglo-Saxon—this, Bradley noted with singular approval. The pages were far more elegantly designed, he said, than the typographic `chaos' of M. Littré's French dictionary. Murray had been much more sensible in his relatively economical use of quotations—he had been wise not to pile on simply repetitious examples, as Littré had done (we can feel the anti-Gallic gorge rising in Bradley's throat), and he cited, in a sideswipe at the Frenchman, his `twenty-three numbered senses of eau'—which just had to be an `over-refinement, which is rather confusing than helpful'.

  He was not entirely enamoured, however, of some of the lesser details of Murray's work. He chided the editor gently for somehow failing to include all the phrases with which he, Bradley, was familiar—why was the phrase acting edition not included? What about free agent, for example? Where was alive and kicking? The idiomatic nature of the phrase old age was not explained, and Bradley could not fathom why. And as for Murray's habit of including a very large number of quotations from the two or three years before publication—what, pray, was the point? `It seems to savour too much of “bringing the work down to the latest date” '—a phrase which critics of Bradley's essay might think was a piece of verbal clumsiness for `bringing it up to date', until we learn (from the modern OED) that the phrase up to date did not itself become current until around 1888, four years after Bradley wrote his review.

  There were other cavils. Bradley wondered if it was right to remark that the word anemone signified `daughter of the wind', since the Greek suffix was not, he said with the casual confidence of one who knew, `exclusively patronymic'. The first syllable of alpaca was probably not Arabic, as Murray had written—and Bradley went on to argue why it was much more likely, in fact, to be Spanish. Nor was the Academy's essay entirely sure that it was wise of Murray to quote himself (from the Mill Hill school magazine) using the word anamorphose; warming to this theme, and slightly facetiously, Bradley then wondered whether Murray might do likewise in Part II, when it came to the word aphetize, a favourite word of Murray's, and one he was often heard to use when making speeches devoted to etymology and philology. 9

  All told, the 4,500-word review, with its broad and measured praise and its cleverly detailed and quietly stated criticism, was very evidently the work of a figure of rare intelligence and judgement. The tone of the piece seems to have been unaffected by Bradley's obvious delight at seeing the book in print at last, and by his expectation that it would, when completed, be a masterpiece. It was, in short, just the kind of review that any intelligent editor might dream of—and it had a singular impact on James Murray.

  It made him want, all of a sudden, to accomplish two related things. He wanted to find out who on earth this unknown and mysterious writer for the Academy wa
s. And once he had found that out, he wanted to hire him. A man of his evident perspicacity, and fondness for the book, should be taken on to help. So Murray wrote from Mill Hill to Fulham, commended and thanked Bradley for his review—and then without further ceremony began to ask him a number of complex problems of etymology of words that began with B. Bradley wrote back, unfazed and helpful; and in June he wrote to Murray asking whether, in the event of some vacancy in the Scriptorium, there might be a place for him on the staff. The job had to be full-time, and salaried, he said: he had a wife and four children, and the life he could live on the proceeds of freelancing was a modest one indeed. He needed a sense of security.

  And in due course, Henry Bradley did indeed join the staff of the Dictionary. He eventually presided over vast numbers of pages, becoming the most critically important of Murray's colleagues. In time, with Murray's death, he succeeded him as senior editor. Yet history has perhaps been less kind to him than he deserves: fate has consigned him to remain permanently memorialized in Murray's shadow, and his reputation, by comparison with that of Murray, has never been able truly to flourish. More of the details of his work belong to the next chapter: suffice to say here that his nearly 40-year connection with the Dictionary began modestly enough, with Mr Cotton's invitation in February 1884 to write an experimental book review for his small London literary magazine. The story of what then befell Henry Bradley should serve as encouragement for today's writers, one might think, and prompt them to consider the possibilities and opportunities that might yet come from the vagaries of the freelance life.

  There was one unanticipated reward for Murray, one that was specifically timed to coincide with the appearance of Part I. Henry Hucks Gibbs had been working behind the scenes for the past year, trying to persuade the government, no less, to help alleviate Murray's troubling personal financial position. (Furnivall, Trench, and Prince Louis-Lucien Bonaparte had added their support to the campaign as well.) And in the end, it worked. At the beginning of 1884 Gladstone, the Prime Minister, even though he was then deeply embroiled in the nation-gripping saga involving General Gordon of Khartoum, 10 agreed to award the editor a pension from the Civil List—even though the List was a body set up in the late seventeenth century to pay the costs of the Royal Family and high officials of the government, like judges and ambassadors. The idea of paying the editor of a book was eccentric, to say the least—but Gladstone was clearly sufficiently impressed with the worth of what Murray was doing to persuade Queen Victoria to make an exception.

  I am directed [the Downing Street private secretary wrote] to acquaint you that having given further consideration to the question of affording you additional aid in the work upon which you engaged of editing the New English Dictionary, he has received the Queen's approval to his recommendation that you should be granted a pension from the Civil List of £250 a year. He hopes that this proposal may be agreeable to you, and he wishes you all success in your important task.

  Murray was thrilled, and wrote back to Gladstone saying that he accepted happily, though not for himself, but for his staff—the number of which he would now be able to increase. Hucks Gibbs added to his improving state by setting up an Indemnity Fund in Murray's name, to which others of his admirers contributed. And Oxford, too, chipped in, by revising its budget to make a total sum of £1,750 available each year. Of that sum, £1,175 would cover the wages of up to eight assistants. Seventy-five pounds would go for postage and stationery. And fully £500 would be earmarked for the editor—which meant that, together with the subvention from the Civil List, Murray would earn the not-so-trifling sum of £750 a year. Back in 1879 it had been suggested that he might be earning one pound for every page of the book: if he could keep to the Oxford target of 700 pages each year, then he would indeed be earning just what had been forecast, back when he had first signed the contract to start his work.

  There were, however, two conditions applied to the seeming generosity of the Press. First of all, Murray had to agree that, were he to find himself falling short of producing 704 pages a year—two fully finished fascicles of 352 pages each—he would be obliged to hire a second senior editor, someone who would, in the pecking order, enjoy essentially the same standing and authority as himself. Murray agreed—hoping, if matters did demand it, that his new-found friend Henry Bradley would become available. And secondly, said Oxford—if the new funds were to be forthcoming, then James Murray would have to give up his schoolteaching in Mill Hill, and he would have to move himself and the entire dictionary operation to the city of Oxford, where logic and expediency had long suggested it should be shifted. The New English Dictionary, and all of its staff, together with its shelves of reference books, its hierarchy of desks and tables, its suites of pigeon-holes, and, most important, its ever-growing tonnage of quotation slips, should be removed in short order to a new location 56 miles to the west, to Oxford.

  James Murray had been expecting this requirement for some time, and he was barely troubled by it. His response—or, at least, a response that coincided with the request—came with his inclusion of a quotation in the next part of the Dictionary that was as celebratory as it was entirely invented.

  He was working on the word arrival, in the sense of `one that arrives or has arrived'. His new (and ninth) daughter, Rosfrith Ada Nina Ruthven Murray, happened to be born on 5 February 1884, just a week after the birth of Part I, and as he was dealing with arrival, he inserted into the proofs of the Dictionary the sentence the new arrival is a little daughter. He had done this once before, when Elsie Mayflower was born in May 1882, when he was working on A: he inserted into the list of illustrative quotations as fine a child as you will see.

  In time Elsie Mayflower began to work on the Dictionary (and when she was eighteen, so did Rosfrith Ada Nina—despite her left-handedness, which made for some early difficulties). Elsie worked for her father for most of the rest of his life. The quotation announcing her birth survives in the OED to this day.

  6

  So Heavily Goes the Chariot

  Only those who have made the experiment know the bewilderment with which the editor or sub-editor, after he has apportioned the quotations for such a word as above … among 20, 30 or 40 groups, and furnished each of these with a provisional definition, spreads them out on a table or on the floor where he can obtain a general survey of the whole, and spends hour after hour in shifting them about like pieces on a chess-board, striving to find in the fragmentary evidence of an incomplete historical record, such a sequence of meanings as may form a logical chain of development. Sometimes the quest seems hopeless; recently, for example, the word art utterly baffled me for several days; something had to be done with it; something was done and put in type; but the renewed consideration of it in print, with the greater facility of reading and comparison which this afforded, led to the entire pulling to pieces and reconstruction of the edifice, extending to several columns of type … those who think that such work can be hurried, or that anything can accelerate it, except more brain power to bear on it, had better try.

  (James Murray,

  Presidential Address to the Philological Society, 1884)

  It was Benjamin Jowett of Balliol who first formally suggested that James Murray should move full-time up to Oxford. Yes, Jowett, the infuriating, arrogant, self-regarding, and yet quite unspeakably brilliant martinet whose interference in the early stages of the Dictionary's planning very nearly caused Murray to resign. By now, however, the two men had more or less settled their differences—Henry Hucks Gibbs had seen to that—and were, despite all early appearances to the contrary, fast becoming the very best of friends. And Murray, despite his self-evident fondness for Mill Hill School and the increasingly well-oiled machinery of his little Scriptorium, accepted that it was mightily inconvenient for him to live so far away from where his Dictionary was being typeset, printed, and published.

  However fast the ice might be melting between Murray and Jowett, the fact is that the mills of Oxford themselves
grind exceeding slow, and it took some months of negotiation and argumentation about money—and reams of correspondence with the always annoying Frederick Furnivall, who was not at all keen to see Murray taken away from him and his own headquarters in Primrose Hill—before everything was agreed. Jowett had made his first suggestion of the move in the autumn of 1883; Murray was not to shift until the summer of 1885.

  Mill Hill School bade him a heartfelt farewell at a ceremony in that year's Foundation Day. The little iron hut that had served as the first Scriptorium was presented by Murray as his valedictory gift, and after the Old Boys raised the necessary cash, it was moved from the Murrays' garden to the grounds of the main school itself. It was to be a reading room for the boys, Murray said, a memento of his mastership among them, 1 and a place where, especially on the Sabbath he still held dear, they could enjoy peace and time for reflection. And as a pleasing coda for the departing family, Harold Murray, the oldest son, who was a senior pupil at the school, distinguished himself in appropriate fashion by carrying off most of that year's academic prizes.