The Meaning of Everything

by Simon Winchester

  In short order Murray managed to find a house, an ideal house in fact, for Ada and himself and his (thus far nine) children in Oxford. It was a substantial and newly built structure in brick and Cotswold stone, set on the east side of the Banbury Road at the very edge of town (Oxford City's old boundary stone can still be seen in the front garden wall). There were open fields to the north, the University Press half a mile away by foot (a little longer on Murray's infamous Humber tricycle, which he pedalled furiously all around town) to the west, the Bodleian Library and the colleges (the house was built on St John's College land) a short step to the south. It was in most ways ideal—with plenty of room for the family's children, books, and lumber, and with a garden of a size that was perfect for recreation, relaxation, and privacy.

  He named it `Sunnyside'—both after his first home back down in Mill Hill and also because, at least once noon had passed, it had been built on the sunny side of the north-bound street. It still stands, at No. 78—home now to an eminent anthropologist who has taken the greatest of care to memorialize the three astonishingly productive decades that James Murray spent there, 2 not least by placing an extremely rare first edition of the Dictionary in what was once Murray's dining room, purely as `a sentimental gesture'.

  `Sunnyside'. The house on Banbury Road, Oxford, where Murray worked on the OED, an endeavour now memorialized by a blue plaque beside the famous pillar-box that was erected—to the gratitude both of Murray and of Sunnyside's current owner—by the city's Post Office.

  James went first, along with the older children, the bulk of the furniture, and the family's collection of pet doves. Ada remained for a while with the younger children and the family cat, and supervised the assistants in their dismantling of the Scriptorium, collecting all the papers and books into 40 tea-chests. She grumbled in a letter to James about the hardness, the coldness, and the loneliness of the marital bed, though, and by mid-June she had joined her husband in Oxford, to begin what was to turn out a long and generally contented life in the comfortable penumbra of academe.

  However pleasant a home for Murray and his family, Sunnyside turned out not to be an ideal headquarters for the making of the Dictionary. There was only enough room for the eleven Murrays, let alone for the assistants—eight of them, eventually—who were required for the project. So it was decided that a new Scriptorium had to be built—and this proved initially something of a trial. St John's College—acting wisely, since the Banbury Road was then and remains an exceptionally pleasantlooking thoroughfare—would not permit Murray to put up his monstrous-looking corrugated iron structure in the front garden. It had to go behind the house—so long as the next-door neighbour, the Vinerian Professor of English Law, Albert Dicey, did not object.

  But Professor Dicey did object, and strenuously. In his short history of the University Press, Peter Sutcliffe writes that, to an astonished Murray, Albert Dicey was `a raving lunatic … the absent-minded professor incarnate [who] gibbered and stared at him across the garden wall'. The DNB is somewhat kinder, explaining that Dicey had `a lack of control over his muscles which hampered him in childhood and, indeed, throughout life'. He was far from mad, insists the author of the article, but rather had `a lovable simplicity of character and a lively wit', and once told his students that it was `better to be flippant than dull'. One can imagine that a flippant, witty man with poor muscle control might well seem something of a tall order for the punctilious and rather shy Scotsman to accept as his next-door neighbour.

  The second Scriptorium, established the back garden of Murray's Oxford home soon after he moved in 1885, had a far more elaborate arrangement for filing slips.

  A tidal wave of complaining letters promptly swamped the unsuspecting Murray, with Dicey insisting that the planned iron hut would ruin his view. And so modifications were made: the hut was sunk three feet below garden level, and the large pile of clayey debris from the excavation was turned into a hillock on which Ada Murray planted flowering shrubs (it still stands in the anthropologist's garden, though the Scriptorium has been replaced by a sunken garden and a limestone plaque on the garden wall). Murray had his own views as to why Dicey had insisted on his halfburying his building: it was so that `no trace of a place of real work shall be seen by fastidious and otiose Oxford'.

  But though the Murrays and the Diceys later became firm friends, the legacy of the arguments remained: the Oxford Scriptorium, 50 feet long and fifteen wide, not only was deemed ugly (`like a toolhouse, a washhouse or a stable', said a passer-by, sniffily); because it had been built in a three-feet-deep trench, it was cold, damp, and positively unsanitary. On many a winter's day Murray and his colleagues were forced to sit with their feet in boxes filled with newspapers, to protect them from the chill and the draughts, and more than a few times Murray caught cold, and several times contracted pneumonia. He no longer sat, elevated, on a dais, as he had in Mill Hill: his only sign of authority in Oxford was that his stool was a little taller than those supplied to his assistants. So he was afflicted by the piercing cold just like everybody else—a melancholy note which gave Furnivall more ammunition with which to attack the Oxford move: the `horrid corrugated den' that had been dug into the Sunnyside back garden was quite unsuitable, he said, for the nationally important work on which Murray and his assistants were engaged.

  Despite Furnivall's carping, and despite Murray's own dejection at having to leave the teaching he loved and to reconcile himself to becoming, and probably for the rest of his days, a lexicographer—Samuel Johnson's `harmless drudge', he had cause to remember bitterly—there was one development that somewhat sweetened the pill. Benjamin Jowett directed the full force of his charm on the Murray family, and made sure that the Balliol College of which he was Master was always available as a comfortable sanctuary.

  `Welcome to your own College,' Jowett proclaimed, grandiloquently, when James and Ada arrived to dine at his High Table on the first June Sunday of their residence. He later arranged for Murray to be granted an Honorary MA—rather less for any dignity it bestowed than for the right it conferred to make use of the Bodleian Library. The friendship that developed between the two men because of gestures like these turned out to be an enduring one—so much so that when a boy, the tenth Murray child, was born in 1886, he was given Jowett as his third Christian name, and with the names Arthur Hugh before it, in memory of two of Jowett's closest friends. 3

  And as with Balliol, so with the Oxford Post Office, which, in a gesture it would be hard to imagine today, tried to make Murray's life a little easier. As soon as he was settled at Sunnyside, engineers came and erected a bright red pillar box on Banbury Road, right outside his front gate. It was recognized that the editor sent immense volumes of post each day, and the local postmaster wanted to make sure that it was as convenient as possible for him to do so. 4

  Congeniality and collegiality and pillar boxes and the Christiannaming of children were one thing, all part of the consummate pleasantness of the move to so civilized a city as Oxford. The number 704 was quite something else, however, and was the principal reason that, despite his outwardly agreeable situation, James Murray was wretchedly miserable during the first few years of his time in the city.

  The number 704 was engraved on his heart in those first years, it seems. For this, as mentioned, was the number of pages of completed dictionary that Murray was expected—contractually expected, the Press liked to remind him—to produce for them each and every year. If he managed that—if he managed to give Oxford enough material for them to publish two finished fascicles of 352 pages each year—it was calculated that there was an outside chance that the complete work might be finished before all who were presently working on it were safely in their graves.

  But Murray was finding it ever more difficult to complete 704 pages a year, or anything like it. The job was simply far too complex—and his own quest for absolute perfection so timeconsuming and demanding—to undertake at the rate that he, and Oxford, in the heady early days of the project
, had thought might be reasonable. True, now that he was free from the demands of schoolteaching, he could give an extra twenty or so hours each week to dictionary work. But even this was not enough—and the money made available by the Press would not allow him to employ more than a handful of assistants. So as the work became ever more complex, as the press of words became ever more intolerable, Murray began to fall short of his contracted targets by ever wider margins.

  As if this were not enough, it was becoming abundantly clear that the sales of the Dictionary parts were not going nearly as well as had been expected. Part I had sold only about 4,000 copies— the sales estimate had suggested ten times as many—and when Part II, Anta-Battening, was published in November 1885, it sold only 3,600. However friendly Henry Bradley's review in the Academy might have been, his words were not exactly persuading legions of readers to rush out and slap down twelve shillings and sixpence for a fascicle. This sombre fact was now exercising those in the Press who took the increasingly fashionable view—first adumbrated by Jowett—that its first business was not so much to publish fine books, but to make money, and to survive commercially.

  One might have supposed Murray would have been exultant to see the second part complete. He wrote his Preface at the Oxford Scriptorium 5 in September. `This part completes the letter A, and extends nearly to the end of Ba-,' he reported, sounding, if not smug, then at least moderately well satisfied. Of the 9,135 words that the soft-bound book contained—words that brought the total in the Dictionary's first two parts to well over 15,000, more than a third of the number of words in the whole of Johnson's dictionary of a century before—some were exceptionally difficult. The prefix anti-, for example, occupied 42 columns of the completed book, back spread over 24 columns, and words such as as, at, art, ask, bail, band, bank, and bar proved complicated because of their `multitudinous ramifications of meaning': the task of determining their mutual relationships had `hardly been more intricate than that of exhibiting the results'. In addition, words that begin with Ba- turned out to have fearfully difficult etymologies—`among the most obscure in the language'—and that slowed them down as well.

  But he was sanguine in his forecast. `I hope that the result of my removal to Oxford, and of the labours of the much larger staff of assistants with which the liberality of the Delegates of the Clarendon Press has furnished me, will be to make it possible to produce the following parts of the Dictionary at much shorter intervals, and that we may reach the end of Part III, finishing B, early in 1886.'

  It was either very tactful or very cunning of Murray to mention in his Preface what he liked to call the generous liberality of the Press. The Press saw it rather differently: it was only a most reluctant liberality, and a liberality of which, in the lofty judgement of the official History of the University of Oxford written a century later, the Dictionary was during the 1880s the most chronically needy recipient. `What makes our chariot go so heavily is the fact that it is always carrying the dead weights of scores and scores of matters which no-one will nerve themselves to finish,' wrote the Delegates' Secretary. It must have been crystal clear to Murray as he wrote those words—gratefully, or with tongue in cheek—that his project must have seemed a dead weight, and that there was not the slightest chance he would ever make his deadline.

  Nor did he. Part III, which inched the alphabet forward only as far as bozzom—and so did not `finish B', not by a long chalk— was due to appear in April 1886. In March, however, it was found that only a paltry 56 pages of its contracted-for 352 had been sent from final proof stages and into the hands of the printers. In the end the part was not to be published in the spring of 1886, nor anywhere near: it was a full year later, in March 1887, when it did appear; and the Part IV that did indeed complete B—and thus the first 1,240-page actual volume of the book, A-Byzen—was finished as late as June 1888.

  Murray blamed much on the enormous difficulties involved in dealing with specific words—such as the `terrible' word black, and its scores of derivatives, which took his best assistant, the Revd C. B. Mount, fully three months of non-stop work. 6 As if the lexicographic trials were not enough, there was always the `intolerable trouble about assistants'. Murray said that he kept trying to recruit suitable people, but found in almost every case, after each had worked no more than a week, that he or she (usually he) was completely useless. One of them, despite having an Oxford MA, was found to be, in Murray's uncharacteristically dyspeptic report, `an utter numb-skull … a most lack-a-daisical, graspless fellow, born to stare at existence'.

  But few were persuaded to listen to this litany of gripes. Many critics were coming to regard Murray's complaints as a querulous whining; and a considerable number of subscribers, those who had paid ready money to get their hands regularly on the Dictionary parts as they tumbled hot off the presses, were getting restless, their disappointment palpable, their annoyance recorded in evermore angry correspondence. Bookshops who had placed regular orders stopped placing more, and cancelled those already in place. The Athenaeum, a journal which had always been supportive, wondered if the endless wait for the first parts of the work suggested that it might not be finished in the lifetime of most readers, if ever. Certainly it supported the desire for perfection—but if the risk was then `the unattainability of zyc,' 7 might it not be sensible to cut corners, just a little? Delegates recorded their `great anxiety' at the situation. It was indeed a truly dreadful time for Murray, and for the Dictionary.

  Each one of the early ages of the Dictionary has its mascot of a villain—there was Frederick Furnivall making mayhem and scandal during the first decade, and then Benjamin Jowett, interfering and pettifogging, when the first part was about to appear. Now, once Murray had moved up to Oxford, there came a new problem in the shape of the Secretary to the Delegates who had been appointed in 1884 as successor to Bartholomew Price: he was a Balliol man whose appointment had been engineered by the meddlesome Jowett, and he was named Philip Lyttelton Gell. Not one history of this man, who in essence ran the Press for the thirteen years up until 1897, is kindly: he was widely seen as an unpleasant, idle, incompetent, and quarrelsome, and was nearuniversally loathed.

  He was also an outsider, something the English of the time generally did not care for. He had not read Greats—which was then, and remains, the University's heavily loaded by-name for the study of classics—but history, and though he had achieved a First, in the view of the Press scholars even this was clearly not credential enough. He had come from a London-based publishing firm, Cassell, and had no experience of the curious ways of publishing in Oxford. Moreover, his election had been rushed through, sneakily, during the summer holidays by a Jowett who was determined to get his way, to put his own man to run the Delegates, and thus allow Jowett to have a discreet hold on the Press, for what he arrogantly considered would be the good of all.

  Gell chivvied Murray endlessly and at times most cruelly. He disagreed totally with Murray's approach, and could not fathom why, despite the increased money being paid to the project, despite the additional assistants who had been hired, and despite the move to Oxford, progress was so glacially slow. In his view Murray was to blame, and Murray alone. He began to harass him, yapping and snapping at his heels like a sheepdog, badgering him to produce more, finish more, send more completed pages down for printing.

  In 1886 Gell insisted that Henry Bradley be brought in to help with the letter B—a move that initially flummoxed Murray, who had no experience in delegating work, and would brook no rival to his own authority. Yet Bradley's inclusion in the project made no discernible difference at first—perhaps because he was still based in London, and was initially given work by Murray which an ordinary assistant could do just as well. In the first six months after his appointment progress actually slowed—only fifteen pages were completed, less than five per cent of what had been targeted and outlined in the contract of 1879.

  The intractability of Bwas a nightmare in more ways that one. Gell had wrongly assumed that Bwould be
no more difficult than A—that it would, like all consonants, produce a slew of words that would be lexically and etymologically far simpler than any words headed by a vowel. Everyone expected that Q, for example, would be a simple letter, and that S would be formidably difficult. But B—surely it should be easier than A, at the very least. Yet this turned out not to be the case: Bhad many more words of far greater complexity and age than anyone had ever dared to imagine: it was just desperately unfortunate that at the very time the Press was beginning to complain at the slowing of the project, the very letter on which the editor was working turned out, unanticipatedly, to be among the most difficult of all to fathom.

  Murray was now in the direst of straits, at his wit's end, and in a letter to Gell he begged for mercy:

  I wish from the bottom of my heart that I could do without your money, and honestly give you what you would consider a commercial equivalent for it. It is an embittering consideration for me that while trying to do scholarly work in a way that scholars may be expected to appreciate, circumstances place me commercially in the position of the beÃte noire of the Clarendon Press, who involves them in ruinous expenditure.