The Meaning of Everything

by Simon Winchester

  And then, crucially, Murray fell under the spell of the fascinations of philology, and in a fury of new enthusiasm—but one which, unlike Furnivall's, never dimmed—he pitched into a close study of the origins of Scottish dialects and the curiosities of Scottish pronunciation. He took a course on elocution in Edinburgh, and there—yet again, crucially for this story—he met the field's residing genius professor, Alexander Melville Bell. Bell taught him something of his brand new conception known as Visible Speech, a symbolic representation of every sound the human mouth was capable of making and, supposed Bell, the likely basis for a truly global language, a kind of facial Esperanto (and which, like Esperanto, never caught on).

  He introduced James to his son, Alexander Graham Bell, with a historical nicety as a consequence. Since it has long been agreed that James Murray, one summer's afternoon in 1857, taught Alexander Graham Bell the basic principles of electricity (making for the boy an electric battery and a voltaic cell out of halfpennies and discs of zinc), it is said by admirers of Murray that he is in fact the true grandfather of the electric telephone, which the younger Bell was later to invent. The first prototype telephone ever made, in fact, was said for many years to lie in James Murray's Oxford attic—though this particular anecdote, involving as it does the curious fate of the instrument, belongs rather later in this story.

  Melville Bell also introduced James Murray to the existence in faraway London of the Philological Society, and showed him papers that the organization was publishing. The visitor's interest was immediately piqued—and before long he had thrown himself into the study and had taken into his head, from a paper by Prince Louis-Lucien Bonaparte, a nephew of Napoleon's, the notion of translating biblical works into Scottish dialects. After complaining that all the earlier attempts that he had read had in his view been done very poorly and inaccurately, he eventually published his own rendering of the Book of Ruth into the language of Teviotdale. The book describing how he did this 2 —Dialect of the Southern Counties of Scotland—was to be published in 1873, and it fully confirmed for James Murray a reputation that had begun to grow as early as the 1860s: that he was a philologist of the first water.

  In 1861 he met and the following year married a local infantschool music teacher, Maggie Scott. Their wedding pictures 3 show the 25-year-old James to have been a tall, rather unkempt figure, with a bowed, almost simian appearance, with long arms that nearly brushed his knees, a ragged beard, ill-fitting and baggy clothes, and an expression that seems to mix distracted inattention with a vague apprehension of impending gloom, as turned out to be entirely appropriate.

  Two years later the young couple had a baby girl they christened Anna—but she died soon afterwards of consumption, and Maggie fell ill enough for the doctors to propose (preposterously, given the Murrays' poverty) that she travel to the south of France to convalesce. Instead they went to a small house in Peckham, in south London—a marginally better climate than the Scottish Borders, the physicians agreed—and James Murray was obliged to set aside his intellectual pursuits and to take an uninteresting job at the headquarters of the Chartered Bank of India, Australia, and China. He would perch forlornly on a high stool in the Foreign Correspondence department in the very back of the office, wearing starched cuffs and an eye-shade, and write in ledgers in copperplate script while in the company of a host of wage-slaves and Lupin Pooters, all men quite devoid of intellectual curiosity or ambition.

  Except that through all these travails he did not quite abandon his high-mindedness and his sense of an impending grand purpose. As Maggie slipped closer and closer towards her early death, James kept his intellect busied: he would speak to London policemen and try to determine, from their accents, from where they came; he studied Hindustani and Achaemenid Persian on his daily commute; he lectured on such topics as `The Body and its Architecture' before such groups as the Camberwell Congregational Church and his local Temperance League (he was a confirmed teetotaller). He learned how the Wowenoc Indians of Maine counted their sheep, and compared their peculiar brand of ovine numerology with that of the moorland farmers of Yorkshire. And, macabre though it may sound at this remove, he even took care to notice that as Maggie slipped into her deathbed delirium, she would cry out in the broad Scottish dialect of her childhood, abandoning in her misery the refined modulations of the classroom.

  It cannot but have been a blessed release when Maggie Scott eventually died, though there is no doubt from his writings that James had loved and cared for her. Looking back on a time of evident desolation he would write: `A marriage, a birth, two deaths—all in three short years! … and I was left alone in London, doing uncongenial work.' And yet it was with an almost indecent alacrity that just a year after Maggie's funeral in Hawick, James Murray married for a second time.

  Ada Ruthven, who would be his companion and helpmeet (and powerful antidote to his dithering) for the rest of his days, turned out to be a woman very much more in tune with his social and intellectual needs. Her father, George, had worked for the Great Indian Peninsular Railway—he and James Murray had indeed met on a train, where Murray found that his companion was, to his delight, an admirer of and sometime scholar devoted to the great German traveller and scientist Alexander von Humboldt. Sensing James's interest in the arcane that might not so stimulate all his hearers, George Ruthven added that his wife had long claimed to have been at school with Charlotte BronteÈ! It then seemed no more than logical, given Murray's evident fascination with these sensational revelations in a third-class railway carriage, that he should be invited home to meet the Ruthvens' daughter Ada—with the happy result that, in short order and as all concerned fondly hoped, the couple were duly married, and became wholly inseparable.

  Together James and Ada produced six sons and five daughters. To underscore the formidable intellectual atmosphere that must have prevailed in the kindly-strict Murray household (Murray had an eye that could `both pierce and twinkle', a biographer remarked), it is worth noting how Wilfrid Murray catalogues the achievements of these children `in whose achievements James Murray took great pride':

  Harold, the oldest son, Exhibitioner and First Class Graduate of Balliol, was author of the Oxford History of Chess (1913) and, at the time of his retirement, a Divisional Inspector under the Board of Education. Sir Oswyn, GBC, the fourth son, Scholar, triple First and Honorary Fellow of Exeter and Vinerian Law Scholar, was Secretary to the Board of Admiralty from 1917 until his death in 1936; Jowett, the youngest, was a Scholar and Triple First of Magdalen and became a Professor in the Anglo-Chinese College at Tientsin; the second, Ethelbert, was at his death in 1916 Electrical Engineer for North London in Willesden; the fifth, Aelfric (Wadham College), tookorders and became Vicar of Bishop Burton; the writer, also a Balliol Exhibitioner, was for 21 years Registrar of the University of Cape Town. Of the five daughters Hilda, the eldest, was a First Class Honours student at Oxford, Lecturer in English at Cambridge and Vice-Mistress of Girton College and has published several works; the second, Ethelwyn (Mrs. C. W. Cousins) was married to the Secretary for Labour of the Union of South Africa; the youngest, Gwyneth, (Mrs. H. Logan), a Girton First Class graduate, was married to a Canadian Rhodes Scholar who became Principal of the Prince of Wales Fairbridge Farm School in British Columbia; the remaining two, Elsie (Mrs. A. Barling) and Rosfrith, were both valued assistants for long periods on the Dictionary staff.

  It was Murray's early friendship with Melville Bell in Edinburgh, and his later London encounters with the `cross-grained' phonetician Henry Sweet and the Cambridge mathematician Alexander Ellis, that first led him to the Philological Society, and eventually to his fateful encounter with Frederick Furnivall. It was in 1868 that Bell—who had moved down to London himself, to become a lecturer at University College—first invited Murray to St James's Square, initially to hear Ellis deliver a paper on his speciality, the development of English pronunciation. At the same time, seeing Murray's huge contentment at being among the members, he formally introduced him, thus a
llowing the Scotsman—who still at the time was toiling in the banking house—to join a literary corps d'élite, about two hundred strong, whose fascination with the English language in particular was to become of historic importance. Since Furnivall was the Society's sole Secretary, the two men met, and were duly impressed with one another from the very start. So impressed, in fact, that by May of the following year Murray had been elected a member of the Council—a position that he held until his death nearly half a century later.

  A year later he had left the bank, and had returned to the more leisured and rewarding world of teaching, having won a post at Mill Hill School in what were in those days the leafy suburbs of north London. The years that followed, he later wrote, were his `Arcadian time, the happiest period of my life'. The school had given him a wonderfully comfortable house, which he named Sunnyside; his wife and family were in exceptional form, comforting and supportive despite the meagre wage that had been offered; he was pleasantly occupied by his immense raft of scholarly interests; and he loved teaching polite and intelligent children who had been selected to attend what remains one of the country's finer schools.

  His pupils adored him, and took great pleasure in his unconventional teaching methods. `Dr Murray knows everything' became a watchword throughout the school. `His classes were always intensely interesting,' wrote one boy:

  You never knew where you might arrive before the lesson was done. A nominal geography class might easily develop into a lecture on Icelandic roots, and we often tried to bring him backto the days when the Finnish landed on the shores of the Baltic, on occasions when we had not been given adequate time to the preparation of our set lesson. Then the tricks he could play with words! Such was his skill and knowledge that many of us firmly believed that by Grimm's law he could prove that black really was the same word as white; at least that was how it seemed to our poor intelligences.

  He was troubled, however, by the simple fact that, however distinguished a philologist he might seem to be, and however celebrated a schoolteacher he appeared to have become, he felt a certain sense of ignominy mingling with his peers in the school common room because he still did not have a university degree. He in fact tried to win a degree at London University in 1871, a year after joining Mill Hill, but as his elderly father died while James was in the middle of his examinations, he was unable to complete them and only managed a humble pass degree, a kind of academic damnation with faint praise.

  A campaign was promptly started to get him a proper one, though one that was honorary, requiring recognition rather than work. It was decided that a Scottish university would be the most appropriate for this Borders lad, and that of all the possible candidates, St Andrews would be the most stylish, but Edinburgh the most august. St Andrews had been criticized for having handed out too liberal a number of honorary degrees in recent years—and so Edinburgh, it was concluded, was the one. So a letter-writing blitz was begun.

  It was far from difficult to write in fulsome terms of this most remarkably turned-out man. James Murray, wrote Frederick Furnivall, deserved to be granted a degree because he was `the first living authority on our Northern Dialects', a man who `if he lives, and I hope he will, long, will by a series of … books … do credit to the University that allies him to itself'. Prince LouisLucien Bonaparte chipped in with a supporting letter, as did Alexander Ellis and a score of other distinguished linguists and phoneticians. The university fretted for a while, and expressed its polite doubts: it was being asked to give an honorary doctorate of letters to a young man who was merely a schoolmaster, a former bank clerk and one who had left school at fourteen? To some of the elder brethren at what was Scotland's most esteemed academic establishment, this was a bit much.

  In the end it was geology that came to the rescue—a drollery that would have amused William Whewell, one of the Philological Society's founders and a man who had expressed a firm belief that there were strong philosophical connections to be made between the historical development of words and of sedimentary rocks. In March 1874, when the Edinburgh University campaign was at its height, Murray had a chance meeting with Archibald Geikie, the professor of geology and a member of the University Senate. Geikie, later to become head of the British Geological Survey and a pioneer in work on evolution, remembered Murray's help as a youngster in solving various geological problems in the Teviot valley. He added his weight to the campaign, persuaded his fellow Senators—and James Murray became an Honorary Doctor of Laws with effect from 1 April. `It could not be All Fools Day when wise men do a wise deed,' exulted his brother Charles. `What an Easter egg! Hip Hip Hip Hurrah!' 4

  And shortly thereafter, as if to confirm the wisdom of the Edinburgh award, Murray was invited by Thomas Baynes, the editor of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, to contribute the definitive essay on `The English Language' for the ninth edition. He had not been the first choice—Baynes had initially asked Thomas Arnold—but he was flattered to get the invitation. `A mere summary from you', wrote Baynes, in necessarily oleaginous tones, `would be of more value than a longer article from a writer of less authority.' Murray wrote twelve pages, a summary that remained a classic, long in print—certainly for as long as Britannica remained a work of authority, a role it relinquished only recently. Murray was asked to revise his article in 1895, and it duly became part of the celebrated 11th edition, surviving intact for decades beyond, with the result that our uneducated Teviotdale draper's son was to become, in essence, the established authority on the national language for several generations.

  And then came the chance remark to Furnivall, during the frustrating days of searching for a replacement editor for the Philological Society's dictionary: `I rather wish I could have a go at it.'

  By this time—it was March 1876—Murray was a rising star within the Society, was properly equipped for academe with his honorary Scottish LL D (plus his London University pass degree), and now, with his book on The Dialect of the Southern Counties of Scotland that had been published three years before and his Britannica article soon to be in the works, he had fully consolidated his reputation. He was, in other words, the ideal candidate. But for what? For the short Macmillan dictionary that was wanted by Harper in America? For a rather longer Macmillan dictionary that made use of the materials collected by Furnivall and Coleridge? Might Cambridge be interested? Or John Murray? Or what about the possibility that Oxford University Press might publish a dictionary for the Philological Society? More specifically, might not the project interest the Clarendon Press, the Oxford imprint which had been established a century before to produce the most learned of works, each of them so far a book `so impenetrably erudite that it was impossible to extract from it any passage likely to entice the non-specialist reader', as Peter Sutcliffe has it in his informal history? 5

  Walter Skeat, a noted amateur philologist and Anglo-Saxon expert, approached the Syndics, as the governors were known, of the Cambridge University Press. Henry Sweet, who had excellent contacts at the Clarendon Press, was instructed by the Society to see if he could persuade the Delegates, as the Syndics' opposite numbers were called at Oxford, both to commit to the project and to cough up enough to pay an editor's salary. Five hundred pounds a year was the suggested sum. Cambridge said flatly no, and Oxford, though significantly without refusing point-blank, also balked.

  So there was no option, at least at first, but to talk to Macmillan—though about a Macmillan-only project, not about the cut-price scheme that had been proposed by Harper and which Murray had so swiftly rejected. And so negotiations between the father-and-son Macmillan dynasty on the one hand and the Society on the other—with Murray at its head, acting both as lead negotiator and as editor-in-waiting—began. For almost a year they staggered along with what, at this distance, looks like extreme discomfort.

  The discomfort all had to do with the projected book's great size. Long beforehand Murray had warned of the scale of what he was now openly calling `the Big Dictionary'. 6 It would, he wrote, `be far more enormous t
han one would suppose could possibly sell—far too large to be printed at anything but a frightful expenditure of money'. Macmillan, on hearing this dismaying news, tried every imaginable way to perform the arithmetic that would make economic sense—trying to persuade Murray to pare the book to its very bones, trying to pay almost nothing to those who would be employed in making the book, trying to suggest, as Furnivall had, a shorter version to act as an amuse-gueule for the reading public. But Murray—`Mr. Editor', Furnivall had taken to calling him— held firm.

  Or at least, he seemed to. The trouble was that while Murray was preparing specimen pages (nine of them) for Macmillan to consider, Furnivall was at the same time dealing behind his back. He was dealing still with John Murray, he was dealing anew with Oxford, trying hard to find an alternate publisher with whose offer he could shame Macmillan into paying more. And it seems that Macmillan, eager to conclude an arrangement, would in fact have paid more, would have agreed to publish more or less the number of pages, to make the book more or less the size for which Murray was arguing. Except that they found out what Furnivall was up to—and they promptly exploded. `It is a pity', Alexander Macmillan wrote to Murray, `that [Furnivall's] pretty little ways should ever be intruded into serious business.' They pulled out of the entire deal. The only shred of politesse that emerged from the wreckage was a note from Macmillan's chief negotiator, sent personally to Murray, which said there was no doubt that the dictionary Murray had in mind would be published, would make an unassailable contribution to English scholarship, and would make Murray famous.