The Meaning of Everything

by Simon Winchester

  When Bwas finally done with, there was no congratulation: Gell and the Press maintained a stony silence. Murray—who was now in his 50s, and who had taken only two weeks off in the past three years, was on the verge of breaking down. Gell insisted—the only moment of humanity anyone remembers him displaying— that he take a short break; but he then swiftly reverted to type by overruling Murray's plea that the Scriptorium be closed down for a fortnight in August, when even the English sun made working inside the corrugated iron box like roasting in an oven. His staff went away on their own holidays, leaving him alone to contemplate an `accumulation of proofs, revises, 2nd revises, finals … to say nothing of the pile of letters etc. a yard deep … so appalling that I feel inclined to sit down and weep'.

  But then the overlooked, derided, and unmemorialized Philip Lyttelton Gell introduced what posterity would show was his master stroke. In November 1887, with progress down to the merest trickle—a single sheet of the Dictionary produced between May and June, a fresh forecast showing that Part IV might well take four years to finish, instead of the six months previously agreed—he demanded that Henry Bradley be promoted from being a London-based assistant editor to being a full-time (and in due course Oxford-based) senior editor. He insisted further that Bradley should have his own staff and offices, and that the two men, Murray and Bradley, should take independent responsibility for producing one part of the Dictionary every year from now on.

  Murray was initially thrown off balance by the news. Gell tried his best to get Murray on side, by arranging first that Bradley produce a specimen sheet for him, and for Murray to approve it—so that Murray could be certain that Bradley was capable of working well independently. But Gell's was only a momentary lapse into geniality: within days of the appointment he was publicly threatening that the pair must produce a pair of parts per year, or else. Murray countered by insisting there be no lowering of standards: if Gell insisted on his cutting corners, then he might have to resign.

  But he did not resign; and with the benefit of long perspective, it appears now that it was Gell's cruelly and tactlessly implemented reforms that did, in the end, permit the Dictionary to turn the corner that it had perforce to turn in order to survive. Even today Gell is seen by admirers of Murray as having been his lifelong enemy and his potential nemesis. But perhaps he was more sinned against than sinning, for the fact remains that when Gell assumed the leadership of the Press, the Dictionary—`the dead weight that made the chariot go so heavy'—was headed for certain disaster and for probable death; when he left the Press during Victoria's Jubilee year thirteen years later, there was no doubt that the Dictionary was in rude good health, that Murray was firmly in charge, that the project was one that would continue to completion, and that it now enjoyed the blessings of Oxford, the monarchy, and the nation, all rolled into one.

  It took longer than expected for Bradley to set up an Oxford office—he lived for almost the first decade of his appointment in Clapham, and worked in a room provided for him by the British Museum. He came to Oxford only when he was needed, and by train. Furnivall was highly critical of this arrangement, regarding it as unseemly that a man of Bradley's delicacy was `rattling his nerves to pieces in incessant railway journeys'.

  When he finally did consent to come, in 1896, it was not at the Scriptorium that he worked, but in the Old Ashmolean Building in central Oxford, a classically designed and roomy structure next door to Christopher Wren's magnificent Sheldonian Theatre, in the very beating heart of the University. A later admiring biographer noted that this unassuming and always available man had no need of elaborate paraphernalia, but set himself up before a plain deal table, `without a drawer'. Many years would pass before this changed; his assistants, thinking it more proper for an editor to have a kneehole desk, arranged a whip-round and presented one to him.

  Despite the origins of his appointment, it swiftly transpired that Bradley himself as well—to whom the completion of the entirety of the letter E was entrusted as his first editorial mission— became the frequent target of Gell's scourgings, which continued mercilessly so long as this irrepressible martinet remained the Delegates' Secretary. Bradley was in no temper to deal with it, and in consequence fell ill—he was in many senses less durable than Murray, which Murray's admirers put down to the tenacity and durability of the Scots temperament—and he had to go off to Norway for three months' sanctioned leave.

  By the time Henry Bradley became a full-time senior editor in 1896, he set up shop in the Old Ashmolean Building: his first task, the editing of E, was accomplished there.

  Yet inch by column inch, the work went on—with everyone looking on in wary amazement, everyone waiting for someone to resign, for someone to pull the plug, for someone to go mad. Slowly, very slowly the parts emerged. C to Cass, then Cast to Clivy, Clo to Consigner, Consignificant to Crouching, and then with the addition of the relatively small number of words between Crouchmass and Czech, C was all done, by 1893. While he was working on Cu- the ever-cheerful Walter Skeat tried to encourage Murray by inviting him up to Cambridge. `I could find enough talk to cumber you. You could come by a curvilinear railway. Bring a cudgel to walk with. We have cutlets in the cupboard, & currants and curry & custard & (naturally) cups … say you'll cum!'

  When C was all done, it was realized that it had been, said Murray, `a typical letter'. (It had also the virtue that the beginning and end words of the parts were generally recognizable to most intelligent readers. The fact that so many of the Bwords had been wholly unfamiliar—battentlie, for example, byzen, bozzom—tempted some critics to say that Murray was so slow simply because he was searching out obscurities, and was moreover doing so deliberately, to annoy and obfuscate. The relative simplicity of the top-and-tail words of his C fascicles suggested otherwise, suggesting that he was dealing with the varied ordinariness of an extraordinary language—and so that particular objection, at least, could be withdrawn.)

  Walter Skeat was exultant at its completion. He wrote a ditty, both to cheer up Murray and to give a fillip to Bradley, who was at the time labouring in solitude down in Clapham on the immense complexities of E. The poem, like so many written to celebrate parts of the Dictionary, is fairly execrable:

  Wherever the English speech is spread,

  And the Union Jack flies free,

  The news will be gratefully, proudly read

  That you've conquered your A, B, C.

  But I fear it will come

  As a shock to some

  That the sad result will be

  That you're taking to dabble and dawdle and doze,

  To dolour and dumps, and—worse than those—

  To danger and drink,

  And—shocking to think—

  To words that begin with D-.

  D duly came and went, successfully—and the letter E, on which Bradley had been cutting his teeth, was incorporated into the same volume, so that both men shared the honours of the title page. When they counted, there were found to be 13,478 main words beginning with D, but only 9,249 that started with E. (S is by far the largest letter of the alphabet, by which it is meant that words beginning with S are the most numerous in the lexicon, occupying two full volumes of the Dictionary. C is the second largest letter, with almost as many words as are begun by A and Bcombined. The smallest letter sections are—in order—X, Z, Y, Q, K, J, N, U, and V. E is a moderate letter, sitting at around the middle of the league table.)

  Murray was never happy with the way the Dictionary initially covered E. It is perhaps not that he regarded himself as in anything but good-humoured competition with Henry Bradley—he was almost equally unhappy with the way that he himself had managed A. 8 He wrote to Walter Skeat, his trusted confidant, that E was so poor because

  the Delegates were in such a hurry to get Mr. Bradley on, to show that he could (as they thought) work twice as fast as I, that he had neither the practice, the knowledge of the weakness of the Philological Society slips, nor the resources of the Scriptorium to
help him … I have always said that the letter ought to be done again. A is not quite so unsatisfactory because I had been working provisionally for a year when I began to print it, and had learned how much had to be done to supplement the slips … It was a pity to start Bradley so.

  If there was a certain waspishness about the last remark, it rarely showed itself more outwardly than this. Murray and Bradley invariably got on well. It was Murray and Gell who were so frequently at daggers drawn.

  And the daggers continued to be flashed from time to time, as slowly, imperceptibly slowly, the Dictionary got onto its feet. New schemes were implemented—bonuses to encourage the staff, smaller-sized fascicles published more often to keep the subscribers and booksellers on side, and a firm agreement on how much more comprehensive the new Dictionary was going to be than was Webster, which up to this point was regarded, if somewhat disdainfully by the Oxford men, as the high-water mark of the lexicographers' art.

  The row over the `Webster ratio' consumed much time and energy during the 1890s. Everyone agreed that the new Dictionary (with the words Oxford English Dictionary now appearing, as they did first on the loose paper cover of a fascicle in 1894, and then on the title page of all volumes after Volume III) was superior in all ways to Webster—not least in the number of quotations offered and the number of senses and meanings that were discerned from them. But more comprehensive meant much bigger—and the question that bothered Gell and his commercially minded colleagues was essentially: how much bigger?

  There was little anyone could do about the additional number of headwords that Murray and Bradley were determined to include: between A and Age, for example, Murray identified almost twice as many headwords as were to be found in Webster. There was simply no possibility that a dictionary like the OED could possibly economize by dropping words altogether—and to be fair, not even the most philistine critic of the OED ever thought this should happen.

  But economy could be won by limiting the number of quotations, by simplifying the explanations of etymology, and by curbing prolixity in definitions. Murray tried this, and while he was working on A, managed to keep a ratio of six of his pages to one of Webster's, which most thought manageable. But gradually, as his enthusiasm for the project increased, so did his page ratio. By the letter Bhe was running at seven to one; by C, eight to one; and a number of delegates began to accuse him and Bradley— particularly Bradley, who seemed to be especially undisciplined in this regard—of `systematically neglecting' the limits which had been informally imposed on him, of keeping to about six to one, and certainly no more than seven. The Delegates who warned the editors of their profligacy did, however, agree to an increase in the overall size of the OED: it could, they said, be published at 12,900 pages total, which was more than half as many pages again as had been agreed back in 1884.

  Throughout all these rows and dramas, James Murray kept threatening his resignation; Oxford kept implying that it would suspend publication; Bradley was told he would be fired unless he contained himself; whole years went by without volumes appearing; and the project—though it had begun to sputter into life in the early 1890s—seemed mired once again, or to be running out of fuel, or on fumes, or into brick walls. The metaphors for the imagined fate of the OED in those years are many and various.

  But, as before, it never did die. It kept itself alive, just—and then two things happened in quick succession. First, the news of the rows and the threats spilled out into the daily papers; second, in a perhaps not unconnected development, Philip Lyttelton Gell was summarily dismissed, and everything, suddenly, became a very great deal better.

  The press—the Saturday Review, specifically, was most detailed in its commentary—got hold of the story in April 1896. Oxford, the papers said, was planning to suspend publication of the Dictionary, because of money troubles, because of the indisciplined fractiousness of its senior editors, because of the unexpectedly vast complexity of the language that the immense book was seeking to catalogue and to fix.

  The Review immediately professed its stunned astonishment: to close down the OED would be nothing less than `a national calamity … an indelible disgrace to the University'. The Press was vilified, accused of philistinism and greed. Murray, by contrast, was transformed overnight into a noble and lonely hero, a man battered by the parsimony of a ragged army of crabbed, shortsighted, and money-obsessed zealots. And in consequence letters poured in to the Scriptorium—a building from which, on Gell's specific orders, members of the public had lately been excluded— all of them supporting Murray and Bradley in what was perceived to be their indomitably honourable quest.

  Such was the outburst of public feeling that Gell had to reverse his decisions. All of them were suddenly remade, whether they were the most trivial of his instructions—passers-by were from henceforward most welcome once again to drop in to see how Murray was working, though `Hush, please!' if the old man had a furrowed brow—to the most serious—the Webster ratio could from henceforward be more or less what the editors decided it should be. Seven to one, eight and three-quarters to one—whatever it took was, all of a sudden, just fine. It was up to the editors to run their Dictionary; Oxford just had to accept that in the short term, it probably never would make money. Thus far it had cost £50,000; and thus far it had sold enough to bring in £15,000. It would take more than a change in the Webster ratio and a ramping-up of the production schedule to close a gap such as this.

  No—it was the long term that counted, and the reputation of the University. Once that philosophical hurdle was cleared, once this extraordinary sea change was effected, a new sense of purpose, direction, and energy could and did begin to infuse the project.

  And as symbol of the new ideals, Gell was indeed dismissed. The Dictionary parts that appeared in his final year of employment—Distrustfully-Doom, Doom-Dziggetai 9 —sounded peculiarly ominous. The fascicles were made in smaller parts now, appearing more frequently, not necessarily in alphabetical order, but in the order of their completion. There was an ordered disorder to the making of the Dictionary in these newly exuberant days, and slowly, everyone began to allow a sense of sunny optimism to prevail, a sense much missed for far too long.

  And even the life of poor Philip Lyttelton Gell was made marginally more easy. He was dismissed after he had fallen ill and while he was convalescing in the south of France—he was simply told not to come back to work. A friend (one of a precious few, by all accounts) tried to cheer him up by suggesting that there was no fate so enviable `as to be unjustly ªsackedº in a civilized country'; and Gell himself expressed some relief that he was no longer bound up with all the rows that had attended his time at the Press. When he had joined, he recalled, the Press was

  in a medieval muddle, with no telephones, no speaking tubes, no typewriters … Do you recall the monotony of the old Press type, and the traditional Clarendon Press page, and all the efforts you made to equip the Press with the variety of Type which has lifted up its Typography up to its present level? … that `dead-lift' required to modernize the Press would not have to be faced twice … It took a good deal out of all concerned.

  Gell left behind him a legacy of distemper and dismay such that all connected with the Press sought actively to erase him from Oxford's collective memory. When he died in 1926 he was not even given the dignity of an entry in the Dictionary of National Biography—he was not even short-listed, so venomous was the feeling towards him by almost all of those he touched. All that Gell could do from the Derbyshire stately home to which he retired was to point to the `enormous stride' which separated the condition of the Press when he left it from its state when he had joined it back in 1883—the year when Benjamin Jowett, as he said of his sponsor, `first stirred the fire and set us all running'.

  He could point to that, and if he chose, he could point to the Dictionary, a work that was now on the very brink of being accepted as a lustrous achievement and as a permanent monument to scholarship—or, in words that were written just as Gell was sh
amefacedly making his exit, was likely to be revered for being `not the least of the glories of the University of Oxford'. At this remove, the hapless Philip Lyttelton Gell seems deserving of at least some small credit, a muted acknowledgement that his time at Oxford was not entirely misspent.

  Notes

  [2] Murray's already-mentioned childhood friendship with Alexander Graham Bell—Bell had been best man at Murray's wedding to Ada—continued to flourish when Murray lived in Oxford, with the consequence that after Bell had invented the first working telephone he presented it to Murray in gratitude for teaching him about acoustics and electricity back in their younger Edinburgh days. Murray found the wood-and-bakelite arrangement somewhat uninspiring, and consigned it to an attic. In the 1980s the present occupant of 78 Banbury Road found himself at the AT&T Museum in New Jersey, where the curator was bemoaning the fact that Telephone Number One had never been found. A search of the Oxford attic turned up nothing; but the elderly gentleman who had bought the house from Murray's widow was found, and reported that during the Second World War soldiers had been billeted at the house and, during one exceptionally frigid winter, had used all available bits of rubbish they could find in the attic as firewood. If this story is to be believed, the world's first telephone appears to have gone up in smoke, to keep a party of ice-cold infantrymen from freezing. Back