The Meaning of Everything

by Simon Winchester

  And if all this were not enough diversion, Furnivall also managed to get himself involved in a series of the most dreadful spats and arguments, fights that would have sapped the energy of many a lesser man. The most celebrated of these fights was with the poet Algernon Charles Swinburne. It all began in 1876 with a technical dispute over the metre of lines in a play, Henry VIII, that had once been loosely attributed to Shakespeare. It smouldered for some years, then burst out into the open, and in a torrent of abuse: Swinburne called Furnivall `the most bellicose bantam cock that ever defied creation'; Furnivall countered by accusing the poet of having `the ear of a poetaster, hairy, thick and dull', and played with the origins of his name, restyling him as `Pigsbrook'. Swinburne in turn looked up the origins of Furnivall's name, and rendered it into `Brothel-dyke', and his gatherings `Fartiwell and Co.' or `The Shitspeare Society'. This undignified feud lasted for six miserable and exhausting years (great fun for all spectators, of course). It stirred up tidal waves of a lasting enmity directed at both men. And it must have had a singularly damaging impact on Furnivall's more important tasks.

  The inevitable consequence was that under Frederick Furnivall's direction, work on the Dictionary in the years following Coleridge's death, staggered, stalled, and then very nearly died itself. Furnivall was 36 when he took over the job. He assumed it would take him until he was just over 40 to complete it. And so he began in earnest, assembling yet more reading lists, gutting yet more books for quotations, taking on newarmies of volunteers: `Fling our doors wide!' he wrote, exhorting readers to send in ever more, `all—not one, but all—must enter!'

  He next arranged (once Trübner had lost interest, or the firm's contract had lapsed, or both) for the much-revered house of John Murray 10 to agree to take on the task of publishing the book. He tried to persuade the firm of his seriousness of purpose by proposing they first publish a Concise version of the book, which, he promised, could be ready in three years or less. In addition he hired a newrank of employee—the sub-editor, he was called, a fairly new term borrowed from the newspaper industry—who would undertake (without pay: Furnivall was at first most persuasive) the lexicographical grunt-work that Furnivall regarded himself as too grand to perform.

  But despite the burst of initial enthusiasm, little was to come of anything. The Concise English Dictionary never got out of the starting gates—John Murray called Furnivall a `h'arbitrary gent', and pulled out of talks. Volunteer readers, infuriated by Furnivall's short attention span and his caprices of fascination, began deserting the programme in droves. Sometimes it was simply Furnivall's irascibility that scared them away. `Next time,' he wrote to one, testily, `will you be good enough to copy out each passage on a separate half-sheet of notepaper? All your former ones I shall be obliged to have cut up and pasted on larger pieces of paper.' (At least this particular volunteer did not commit what some—though not Furnivall—regarded as the heresy of cutting up the books he was reading, and pasting the quotation onto the slip. Many was the time when sub-editors would receive slips with valuable sixteenth-century black-letter cuttings stuck onto them, evidence of a book nowruined by lazy lexicographic vandalism.)

  But sub-editors too, daunted by the huge number of quotation slips that had arrived by the sackful during the volunteers' more productive days, started abandoning ship as well. And though Furnivall did, as he had promised, successfully oversee the making of the third part of the Basis of Comparison, for the letters M to Z, it was not long before the Philological Society itself began to get cold feet too.

  A steadily decreasing official enthusiasm for the project begins to make itself evident in the Society's journal, the Transactions, as the years of Furnivall's editorship continued. In the beginning the journal's pages were filled with exuberant and confident reports of the `tremendous progress' and `great strides' and `significant achievements' that were being realized by the project's managers, as quotation slips were being solicited, shades of meaning determined, definitions written, entire letters ticked off the list. But slowly, towards the end of the 1860s, the purpose begins to falter. The year-end assessments of progress became shorter, their language less robust, the showof optimism less evident. By 1872 Furnivall was forced to report to his masters that `progress in the Dictionary has been so slight that no fresh report in detail is needed'.

  Books and papers held by the volunteers—many of them had been sent volumes from the Philological Society's library, which they would use to do their research—were now being returned by readers too exasperated, weary, or disenchanted to go on. Before long the lobby of Furnivall's house at No. 3 St George's Square was `cumbered with boxes and bundles of every size and form'; in 1879 more than two tons of papers were sent in as the wholesale abandonment of the project proceeded. Moreover, it was now clear that other disenchanted volunteers had simply left their papers and their books where they stood—had consigned them to lumber rooms, taken them away on holiday and left them behind in faraway hotels and boarding houses, dumped them in rubbish bins, lost them. By the mid-1870s, the work of thousands had been dispersed across half the world like wind-borne pollen: if the project ever were to be revived, it would take an immense amount of diligent searching to bring it all together again.

  But it was worse than that. A terminal crisis was looming. `The general belief', wrote an editor at the Athenaeum, `is that the project will not be carried out.' If the great dictionary project was to continue, it would require the appointment of a far more organized, less volatile, and better-tempered leader at its helm.

  The Society was already recognizing this as early as 1874, when its President, the mathematician Alexander Ellis, wailed that he thought the body `less fitted to compile a dictionary than to get the materials [for it] collected'. Then again a year later the sub-editor who had worked on the letter F (and who had supervised a second series of specimen pages, on the words Fa 11 to Face), the Reverend George Wheelwright, suggested, in a briskly worded pamphlet, that Furnivall make up his mind about the future of the scheme.

  He should, the cleric said, promptly find a neweditor, assure everyone that they were not on `a Fools chace which should end only in a general fiasco', and by so doing bring to an end `the intolerable suspense under which we all groan'. Wheelwright had spent ten years of his life dedicated to the Dictionary: he was not about to see it fail without someone, somewhere, making an effort to save it.

  As early as 1871—three years before his Society became publicly exasperated, four before Wheelwright's outburst—Furnivall himself had come to appreciate howhopeless he was at running the project, and had tried to find a replacement. He knewhe had lost sub-editors who had initially agreed to supervise the words beginning with the letters A, I, J, N, O, P, and W—leaving fully one quarter of the alphabet uncovered—and he wrote that he was now bound to look `for a fresh editor for the whole work'.

  He had first approached Henry Sweet, a notoriously rude phonetician who was later used by George Bernard Shaw as a model for Henry Higgins in Pygmalion—later the play and film My Fair Lady. But Sweet had turned him down flat. Furnivall then approached Henry Nicol, another eminent and rather calmer philologist, who was amenable to the idea, and rather flattered. But when he looked at the size of the task ahead he reminded himself that he was chronically unwell, and in any case too busy with other tasks—and so Furnivall had to look elsewhere. It was fully four years later that he at last came upon the man who would pull the project back from the brink, and propel it to its ultimate success. It began with a chance remark made to him at a Philological Society meeting. It ended with Furnivall concluding decisively that the man who had made the remark would, could, and indeed should be the ideal candidate for the post of new editor. He began immediately to work `like a busy spider', as he later put it, spinning the web that would eventually ensnare his candidate and keep him tightly enmeshed in the Byzantine complexities of the English language for the rest of his days.

  The man was James Augustus Henry Murray. What he had sa
id to Furnivall, when he learned of the difficulties the Secretary was having in finding a new editor for the Dictionary, was simple, no more in essence than, `I rather wish I could have a go at it.' He had not intended the remark to be taken seriously. After all, he was no more than an amateur philologist, interested in whiling away his evenings musing on the origins of dialect. He was 38 years old, a former bank clerk who was by now employed rather more happily as a teacher at the Mill Hill School in north London. He was a lowland Scot, a linen draper's son, from the Teviotdale village of Denholm, near Hawick, in Roxburghshire. He had been brought up in rural isolation, his family unmoneyed, his life unsophisticated, his future unpromising. `I am a nobody,' he would write in later years, when fame had begun to creep up on him. `Treat me as a solar myth, or an echo, or an irrational quantity, or ignore me altogether.'

  But there was no ignoring him, for James Murray was in all ways—and in particular, in intellectual ways—unforgettably remarkable. He was remarkable even in an age that produced a disproportionate share, or so it seems today, of exceptionally clever men. He has a reputation still as a towering figure in British scholarship. He was Calvinist in his spiritual outlook, polymathic in his interests and his competences, forbidding in his appearance—a fiery red beard lent him the air of faint bellicosity—and he was all too casually aware of the combined effect that these formidable attributes of looks and brains had on those around him. He radiated a magisterial air of righteous authority—rather, as it turned out, as the dictionary that he would make would also radiate in its own time.

  And he, at long last, was the man who would make all the difference.

  3

  The General Officer Commanding

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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