The return of the proofs sparked off one of the many internal schisms that seemed to plague the early days of this great enterprise. They were, said one of those who glimpsed them, perhaps `the most heavily corrected proofs ever known', and had been covered with pencil corrections on almost every one of 2,600 lines of type that, on average, make up an eight-page sheet of the Dictionary. Many lines had themselves twenty changes to them—meaning that every single sheet could have as many as 10,000 proof marks, necessitating alterations, the expenditure of much time—and great cost.
Scores of factors caused the project to take as long as it did: not the least was the prodigious complexity of proof-reading and correcting, as this one page, shown halfway through its progress from first assembly to final printing, will suggest.
James Gilbert, a compositor at Oxford University Press appears, uniquely, to have worked on the entire Dictionary—lifting the first type for the letter A in 1882, and working until the completion of the final volume in 1928.
It was this particular prospect that apparently raised the hackles of Benjamin Jowett, in his capacity as ex officio chairman of the Delegates. Both he in particular, and the Delegates in general, began behaving in a way that Murray found most disturbing. Jowett—whose publicly stated aim was `to arrange my life in the best possible way, that I may be able to arrange other people's'—embarked on a sudden campaign of highly aggressive interference. Towards the end of July 1883 Jowett invited Murray to come up from London and stay in a guest room at Balliol; the next day he took Murray with him when he went to visit both the full body of the Delegates and then, more ominously, to see members of a hitherto moribund subcommittee that had been set up three years before specifically to look into any problems which might arise with the Dictionary. Jowett showed them all the massively corrected proofs for part of the first section, he explained how much it would cost the Press to deal with all of them, and, in an autocratic style for which he was notorious, he argued fiercely that changes needed to be made. He handed Murray a document: `Suggestions for Guidance in Preparing Copy for the Press'.
Murray, who was already upset, and by turns furious and dismayed by his treatment, went through the roof. He spluttered, he fulminated, he raged in public and in private. How dare Jowett and his minions—men who had not the faintest notion of the way that Murray worked or of the methods of the men and women in the Scriptorium—tell him how to run a dictionary? How dare some anonymous Delegate suggest, for example, that the words aardvark and aardwolf, words that are meat and drink to any beginning lexicographer, be omitted because they were deemed too scientific or too foreign? How dare Jowett suggest that newspapers not be used as source material? that only the works of `great authors' should be cited? that there should be no illustrations of words quoted from later than 1875 (nothing modern, in other words)? And that scientific and `slang' words be omitted unless they had appeared in the better sorts of literature?
`I am sure', Murray said when he had cooled down a little, `the time will come when this criticism will be pointed out as a most remarkable instance of the inability of men to acknowledge contemporary facts and read the signs of the times.' What the Delegates were demanding was a series of economies that would surely rob the book of its likely authority. `The Dictionary can be made better in quality', Murray wrote, `only by more care, more work, more time.' This was not the moment to try to speed things up, to cut corners and trim fat, and to risk making a shoddy book in place of the great one Murray had in mind.
But the `Suggestions' were not all, were not the worst of Jowett's supposed crimes. In October, even closer to the publication date of the first part of the Dictionary, Jowett perpetrated the ultimate impertinence by trying both to rewrite Murray's Preface and to change the Dictionary's title. The new Preface, which was sent to Murray without comment or explanation, was unrecognizable, and moreover—as an added insult by the meddlesome Jowett—his own effort was not returned to him. And the great book was no longer to be A New English Dictionary on a Historical Basis, but was, in Jowett-speak, A New Dictionary Showing the History of the Language from the Earliest Times.
If Murray had gone through the roof at the time of the `Suggestions'—and he was no martinet; had Jowett's criticisms been fair he surely would have accepted them—now he turned positively apoplectic. `I object emphatically to anybody altering it without consulting me … I shall write my own preface, or it shall remain unwritten.' He threatened to resign. He planned to tell his American friends that he was available to take upthe many offers of professorships with which universities in the United States were already showering him. `The future of English scholarshiplies in the United States,' he said with an uncanny prescience. `The language is studied with an enthusiasm unknown here.'
His friends rallied round him, and many agreed that he ought to go, and not let Jowett have his way and become, de facto, the editor of Murray's great work. `I boil over,' wrote Alexander Ellis from Cambridge, `to think of the misery of it … the utter shipwreck which one self-sufficient man can accomplish. It may be—I think it is—the best thing for your health and wellbeing to give it up, & insist on the removal of your name from the title page.'
But the crisis did eventually blow over—and it did so largely because of the energy, kindness, and immense tact of one of the OED's great unsung heroes, the merchant and merchant banker Henry Hucks Gibbs, later to be ennobled as the first Lord Aldenham. He was the man who, `if the inner history … ever comes to be told in full', in the words of Wilfrid Murray, `saved the Dictionary'. Or, as another writer has it, `whoever takes the credit for inspiring the Dictionary as a piece of scholarship, it is he who should receive it for maintaining the book as a business proposition'.
Hucks Gibbs was 40, wealthy, and splendidly aristocratic when he joined the Philological Society in 1859. His family had made much of their money from working the vast deposits of guano in Peru. (Doggerel of the day referred, not unkindly, to `The House of Gibbs that made their Dibs by selling Turds of Foreign Birds'.) He was fascinated by the economics of bimetallism, that (now discredited) monetary system based on the equal footings that could in theory be enjoyed by both gold and silver.
He was a keen huntsman and a good shot. 15 He collected books with a fury. He regarded himself as a Liberal Conservative. He paid for the restoration of a number of English churches and cathedrals, and essentially funded the building of Keble College, Oxford. He was, in other words, the perfect saviour for a project as English and as worthy as Murray's Dictionary.
Murray was a neighbour on Mill Hill, as well as a leading light in the Philological Society, and so it was not too surprising that the two men became friends, and Murray came to regard Hucks Gibbs as a confidant. The problems faced by Murray in pioneering the work on the Dictionary became particularly acute once the proof sheets were returned for his inspection: three hours would be needed, he estimated, for him to examine every single sheet—and yet there were new sheets to prepare, new words to define. Sometimes the `terrible undertow of words', as he wrote, seemed to present an impossibly powerful and ever-running tide; to try to halt it was a never-ending battle that an ordinary mortal could never hope to reverse or to win.
It was not just that. Mill Hill was a good distance from central London with its libraries and museums, both essential to his work; and Oxford was nearly a day's travel away too. The Delegates had started to become difficult, Jowett was impossible, the post was so often late and packages were lost; and then there was the money. Always the money. Oxford was grudging in parting with it, niggardly in budgeting for it, parsimonious in demanding detailed accounting for it. The undertow of words seemed sometimes as nothing when compared to the debilitating miseries of having to pay for so much effort with such deeply diminished funds.
Hucks Gibbs stepped smartly into the breach, lending Murray £400 so that the editor could pay his assistants and settle other expenses, and he made no immediate demands for repayment. He worked eagerly as a sub-editor, on the le
tters C, K, and Q—with critics later saying that his work on C resulted in one of the bestfurnished sections of all. He also mediated the dispute between Murray and Jowett—having already established some credentials for doing so, since much earlier on he had brought Jowett down to see the Scriptorium. Murray's diary records the meeting: `Prof. Jowett. A week past on Wed. Mr. Gibbs showed him everything as well as his patience would allow, not very great—jumping at conclusions.' Hucks Gibbs remembered both men as having been `rather heated'.
By now the heat between the pair had become unbearable, and Hucks Gibbs had to employ all his reserves of diplomacy and tenacity to prevent Murray resigning, sailing off to America in a huff, and leaving the Dictionary to be completed by no doubt lesser men. By dint of a cascade of letters, by dining Jowett in the finest London clubs, by smothering him with aristocratic admiration, he eventually won the day.
The Vice-Chancellor wrote to Murray explaining that the Delegates now wanted the editor to write his own Preface, and implying that the `Suggestions'—`good authors', no newspaper quotations, no words to be included post-1875—were essentially now moot. Murray, returning the favour, rewrote his Preface to include as many of the Vice-Chancellor's suggestions as seemed prudent—and the matter was closed. Jowett was widely seen as an irritating nuisance, and Murray as a man to be reckoned with— stubborn, principled, and right. But for the wise and steady intervention of Henry Hucks Gibbs, the rightness that led Murray to make so fine a dictionary might have been of no value at all.
The upshot of all the argumentation was that the first part of the great work was slightly delayed. But on 29 January 1884— five years after James Murray had signed his contract and started battling with the undertow—the messengers from the Press delivered to the Scriptorium at Sunnyside a bundle of bound copies of what all the lexicographic world had been waiting for. Part I of the New English Dictionary was, at last, officially, and as the phrase of the day had it, uttered for publication.
5
Pushing through the Untrodden Forest
I think it was God's will. In times of faith, I am sure of it. I look back & see that every step of my life has been as it were imposed upon me—not a thing of choice; and that the whole training of my life with its multifarious & irregular incursions into nearly every science & many arts, seems to have had the express purpose of fitting me to do this Dictionary … So I work on with a firm belief (at most times) that I am doing what God has fitted me for, & so made my duty; & a hope that He will strengthen me to see the end of it … But I am only an instrument, only the means that He has provided, & there is no credit due to me, except that of trying to do my duty; Deo soli gloria.
(Letter from James Murray to the politician Lord Bryce,
15 December 1903)
Murray was sustained for the rest of his life by an illusion that time, however quickly it ran out, was on his side. For a moment in history the language had paused and come to rest. It could be seized and captured for ever.
(Peter Sutcliffe,
The Oxford University Press: An Informal History, 1978)
Inside the bundle delivered to the Scriptorium were a dozen copies of a flimsy but curiously heavy volume, which measured some twelve inches along its spine, was eight inches deep, and, with 352 half-uncut pages between its flimsy covers, was a little less than an inch thick. It was bound in an undistinguished, muddylooking off-white paper cover. Had it come from a later era, it might well have been mistaken for a telephone directory for a smallish city—Cincinnati, perhaps, or Nottingham, or Marseilles. But it was nothing so slight. This was a work that had been designed and made with immense care, its contents the consequence of years of scholarship and furrowed brows, and intended to have value for scores of generations to come.
Its title page, grandiloquent in tone but discreet in presentation, announced itself to the waiting world: A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles, Founded Mainly on the Materials Collected by the Philological Society. Edited by James A. H. Murray, LL.D., President of the Philological Society, with the Assistance of Many Scholars and Men of Science. Part I. A-Ant. Oxford: At the Clarendon Press. 1884. [All rights Reserved.]
It was in summary a slender, somewhat undistinguishedlooking paperback book. It looked as beggarly as it did—more a publisher's starveling, not at all like the more traditional Clarendon Press books, bound as they all were in dark blue cloth or in red morocco, with handsome fleurons stamped onto the spine in gold and with marbled endpapers and silk headbands and pagemarkers—because Oxford, perpetually strapped for cash, had insisted that it should.
The department of the University called the Oxford University Press—together with its more academically inclined offspring, the Clarendon Press—had long made the bulk of its money from the publishing of Bibles, hymnals, and prayer books. Its buildings in Walton Street in west Oxford, designed in 1827 to look as collegiate as possible, were divided (they merged in 1906) into the Bible Side and the Learned Side, the profitability of the former subsidizing the indulgent obscurities of the latter. The irony of the Bible Side's unconscious reliance on the marketplace of Mammon was noted by one historian of the Press, who wrote of the early nineteenth century: `Within the huge building the industrial revolution steamed and roared: 1 an outward front of dignified piety advertised its evangelizing mission: a Bible in every home in Christendom.'
But by the nineteenth century, as the pace of learning and scientific discovery quickened and the pace and volume of production from the Learned Side expanded to keep up with it all, so the Delegates began to insist on a much higher rate of return from the books that were commissioned and made. The New English Dictionary, so immense a Learned Side publishing project, and one that seemed unlikely to offer up even a penny piece as return on the thousands of pounds of investment that the Press would be enduring for years, for decades (and how optimistic even those forecasts turned out to be!), ran the risk of proving an enormous financial trial for the Press, perhaps even a financial embarrassment for the University. Some kind of device was needed, some kind of publishing gimmick, that would make it possible for this one project to bring as much money back into the Press's coffers as could be managed, and as quickly as possible.
And so Oxford, in an unusual (though not unheard-of ) step, took a leaf from the peculiar way that magazines and newspapers were just then publishing new works by authors like Dickens and Trollope. These publishers were doing so in serial form, putting out a chapter a week, or a section a month, and permitting the reading public to spin out their buying over many months or years, keeping the costs down and in theory making everyone— the accountants most of all—content.
Oxford, a house of great dignity and gravitas, would never of course publicly countenance anything so vulgar. And yet the idea of publishing the Dictionary bit by bit had for the Delegates considerable commercial appeal. So as a means of priming the pump and allowing money to start flowing in to the great project as early as possible, the Press had demanded that the Dictionary be turned out in fascicles, sheaves of pages that were collected together to form distinct parts, but which could themselves be bound together later between hard covers and thus made into whole volumes.
This somewhat ordinary-looking and—at twelve shillings and sixpence, somewhat inexpensive 2 —book was thus the first morsel of substance to have emanated from the works of Coleridge and Furnivall, the Philological Society, and James Murray. This was it—publication number one, a volume that included, to the best of the editor's knowledge, every single one of the English words that lay between and included A and Ant. It was woefully late—Oxford had expected (and indeed, the contract had specified) that publication would begin in 1882, and that once matters were in high gear, the Dictionary team would be able to churn out some 704 pages of completed work each year, almost two pages a day. Murray had done his gallant best—Jowett's interference notwithstanding—but at one stage, he wailed piteously to a friend that though he tried to meet a personal target of comp
leting 33 words a day, `often a single word, like approve … takes ¾ of a day itself '.
However, the eventual appearance of the first fascicle did a great deal to buck up Murray, who was at the time—on the eve of his 47th birthday—feeling more than a little intimidated by the scale of the task ahead of him. A few weeks later he would refer to `the difficulty of pushing our way experimentally through an untrodden forest where no white man's ax has been before us'. But now, and here, there was the first appearance of a pathway through the confusing and unfamiliar thickets. It was, he told the scores of admirers who wrote in with congratulations, `my offering to the world, which must be taken on its merits and demerits and with the tolerance which is the mature fruit of culture. It will improve with age.'
The way that this first part of this great—and, as it happens, essentially ageless—book was organized, the way that the 8,365 words included in it were arranged and defined and otherwise dealt with, was to set the pattern for the future of the big Dictionary itself, the path that would eventually have an end. Maybe, Murray supposed, he would get there in ten or eleven years' time. The fact that it would take the 31 years left to him, and still not be completed, might not have dismayed him had he known the fate of the other great multi-volume European dictionaries that were under way at around the same time. Although Emile Littré's rather short Dictionnaire de la langue française took only a decade from publication of its first volume to the last—though 32 years from the conception of the plan—the Grimm brothers' Deutsches Wörterbuch, which was six times bulkier than its French equivalent, was begun in 1838 and fully finished only in 1961. If that was not long enough, the Dutch dictionary known as Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal was started in 1851 and completed in 1998, 147 years later. And a nineteenth-century attempt to fix the entire Swedish tongue between hard cover continues today into the twenty-first century, with scholars still stuck on the complexities of Swedish words beginning with the letter S.
The Meaning of Everything Page 13
