The Meaning of Everything

by Simon Winchester

  Once Her Majesty had been toasted and her Jubilee'd status remarked upon, and once the cigars had been lit, there were fully fourteen speeches—Frederick Furnivall, irrepressible and as flirtatious as ever, made the longest, slyly attacking the universities (Cambridge included) for being so slow in their admission of women. Sir William Markby, a Delegate, a former Calcutta judge, and a fanatical supporter of temperance, responding to the toast to the Clarendon Press, made a speech that must have caused Murray some wry amusement:

  We have never hesitated in the performance of what we consider a great duty which we owe to the University and to the nation, and we have never felt any doubt as to the ultimate completion of the work under the able editorship of Dr. Murray and the co-operation of those associated with him in this great work.

  If Murray saw some irony—or even some mealy-mouthedness on Markby's part—he sensibly held his tongue.

  He was in any case to be doubly cheered by winning yet another award that night: in this case both he and Bradley were that night made honorary members of the Netherlands Society of Arts, Science, and Literature. This was merely the latest in an immense string of honours to be added to the catalogue that Murray was busily amassing—his name on the fascicles' title pages is underpinned by an ever-enlarging paragraph that lists his collection of distinctions. Already he possessed degrees from London and Edinburgh; in the years following he was to be given honorary doctorates by the Universities of Durham, Freiburg, Glasgow, Wales, the Cape of Good Hope, Dublin, and Cambridge; he was inducted into Academies in Vienna, Ghent, Prussia, Leyden, and Uppsala and was also made, to his particular pride, a Foreign Correspondent of the Académie FrancËaise. He was a member of the Edinburgh Royal Society and the American Academy of Arts, and was on the Council of the British Academy.

  He was given a knighthood in 1908: when he received the letter from Herbert Asquith—`a slight and too long delayed recognition of a great work greatly conceived and greatly executed,' the Prime Minister wrote—he rather scoffed at the idea of calling himself Sir James, `as if I were a brewer or a local mayor'. He later said he would have preferred to have been granted the infinitely more exclusive token of state congratulation, the Order of Merit. But in the end he proved gracious: he dressed up in his court robes and fixed on his sword and his jewelled slippers with the great glee of the dandy, and went happily off to the Palace to collect his prize from the King.

  Finally, but not until 1914, he got what he really wanted. He and Bradley were awarded the degree of D.Litt honoris causa by Oxford University itself. Ada opened the post that morning and simply said what the entire family and all of Murray's friends had been feeling ever since the great dinner of 1897: `At last!'

  And all this for a draper's son from the Borders, who left school at fourteen and went off to work in a bank.

  But the dinner that night had been to honour the Dictionary, and in truth not the one figure who was already most closely associated with it. The man from The Times summed up the event nicely for his readers the next morning. The production of the Dictionary which the dinner had cause to celebrate was, he wrote,

  the greatest effort which any University, it may be any printing press, has taken in hand since the invention of printing. A University Press … might be defined as one which exists, partly at all events, for the production of unremunerative works which, however, will tend to the benefit of posterity and enrich the language and the literature of the country. An exhaustive dictionary … was a labour which was beyond the scope of private enterprise. It will not be the least of the glories of the University of Oxford to have completed this gigantic task.

  Man proposes, but God disposes. Even with the finishing line in sight, so the runners began to fall.

  Fitzedward Hall was the first of the great men to go. He had worked for twenty years, for four hours every day at least, writing from his East Anglian cottage until almost the day he died, 1 February 1901. He had not wanted to attend the great dinner; he had fallen ill fairly soon thereafter, prompting Murray to depart briefly from his usual formality: instead of ending his letter to Hall with his customary `Yours truly', he instead wrote `Yours very affectionately', and told Hall that he had in recent years looked upon him almost as a senior relative of his own. Hall was one of the firmest opponents of the efforts of men like Jowett and Furnivall as they tried to prompt Murray to lower his standards and to produce more pages more frequently: Hall's support to Murray was irreplaceable, and we all today owe the curiously embittered hermit as great a debt as Murray did.

  Henry Hucks Gibbs, without whose solicitous influence, soothing balms—and, quite frankly, his money—the project might well have foundered, died in 1907. Fred Elworthy, who had helped Murray with West Country dialect, died a few weeks later. Walter Skeat went in 1912, Murray's friend Edward Arber was knocked down soon afterwards by a Birmingham taxi, and Robinson Ellis, a great classical scholar, translator of Catullus and a climbing friend and close adviser as well, dropped dead in 1913.

  Some weeks before, Ellis had given his final lecture, on Ovid, in the Hall of Trinity College. He was lame and nearly blind, and had to be led in by a younger don who would read his lecture for him. `How many have come?' the old man enquired. The Hall, he was told, was all but empty. `No matter,' said Ellis. `I just thought perhaps Dr. Murray might come.' And of course, he had. Of the seven persons present in the Hall that day, James Murray was one, constant to his friend, who many say died more happily as a consequence, just a few days later.

  `Thus one by one they pass away,' Murray told an audience at the Philological Society. `Who is to be the next?'

  Of all the deaths, that of Frederick Furnivall on 2 July 1910 was perhaps the most keenly felt. Late in 1909 he had told Murray he was ill—an `internal tumour', he called it—and thought he had six months left in him. He congratulated Murray in the same letter for his definition of the phrase tallow ketch, 4 but went on to mourn how `our Dict. Men go gradually, & I am next. … I wanted to see the Dict. before I die. But it is not to be. However, the completion of the work is certain. So that's all right.' Murray tried to cheer him up, and in a way that both men knew might work: `Would it give you any satisfaction to see the gigantic TAKE in final, before it is too late?'

  Cheered or not, Furnivall died peacefully where he had lived and worked, in Primrose Hill, and was cremated in north London. Around the catafalque, said his biographer,

  were representatives from the many educational and learned bodies with which he had been connected, including the London Shakespeare League, the Oxford University Press, the English Association, the Board of Education, the Oxford English Dictionary, students, friends, and associates from the British Museum, the New Oxford Street A.B.C. teashop and the London Men's Working College; and a group of young people from the Furnivall Sculling Club at Hammersmith.

  He had last been seen sculling three years before: he had done fourteen miles on the day in question, and he had been 82 years old.

  And then before too much longer, to universal dismay and lamentation, it was the turn of James Murray himself.

  As late as 1914 he was saying publicly that he still hoped to see the Dictionary through to its completion. For most of the previous years he, Bradley, and Craigie published their monthly page totals, to see who was the fastest—and Murray invariably won, month after month, year after year. 5 When Furnivall died Murray was well into the letter T, and with Craigie now a full editor (he had been designated such in 1901) and with Onions similarly exalted since 1914, and with Bradley steaming away at full tilt, there seemed at least a possibility of a swift end to the enterprise: only sixletters to go, and Murray not yet 80 years old. Perhaps he could manage the grand Victorian conjunction he long imagined—his golden wedding anniversary, his four-score birthday, and the finishing of the OED.

  The Regius Professor of Medicine, Sir William Osler, once spotted the elderly Murray tricycling his way through town, his long white beard blowing in the wind, and remarked to his co
mpanion: `The University pays me my salary to keep that old man alive until his 80th birthday in 1917, when his dictionary will be finished.'

  But neither came to pass. James Murray succumbed to cancer of the prostate, and though he bore nobly the fantastic burning pain of the X-rays that in those days were used to treat the ailment, he knew he was fighting a losing battle. He continued to work on the letter T until the very end: 6 there is a photograph of him in the Scriptorium taken on 10 July 1915, his daughters Elsie and Rosfrith to his left and right, and behind him three assistants—a bearded Arthur Maling, wearing his Esperanto star; Frederick Sweatman of possible radium fame; and the littleknown F. A. Yockney, a member of the team since 1905.

  James Murray with daughters

  It was Murray's final day in the little iron room. The following Monday he contracted pleurisy, and on 26 July, he died. Popular legend has it that he was working on the word turn-down at the end—and certainly this is the last section (Trink-Turn-down) known to be edited by him. But his name also appears on the next section, Turndun-Tzirid, and a note from Bradley states that `eighty-four columns of this section were already in type' at the time James Murray died.

  The last word of the 84th column of this section happens to be twentieth. Though there is a presentiment of sleep about the word turn-down, 7 which some might find apposite for a dying man, I like to think that the word that defined the century in which his great work would be published was, in fact, the one for which he would most like to be have been known. He was a nineteenth-century man, and yet the author of what was to be very memorably a twentieth-century achievement.

  Bradley, Craigie, and Onions then consolidated themselves in the Old Ashmolean Building, and left those at Sunnyside to suffer the peace of their bereavement. From now on, the large, manycolumned building beside the Sheldonian was to be the headquarters of the OED, and for the first time since 1885, the word `Scriptorium' would cease to appear in the prefaces to the parts that still emerged, now at an ever-increasing rate. There was something of a delay in production in the aftermath of Henry Bradley's death in 1923; but the pace of dictionary-making quickened again soon after, and it did not noticeably falter when Craigie was appointed Professor of English at the University of Chicago: the preface to the letter U, indeed, is datelined Chicago, and Craigie worked happily in his office in Hyde Park until the book, no matter that it was 5,000 miles to the east of him, was finished. Craigie `bestrode the Atlantic like a colossus', it was said.

  The last sections positively tumbled out. As it happened, the alphabetically ultimate section XYZ—with its final word, zyxt, the last word in the entire Dictionary—was not the last to be made. Because it was so short and relatively easy it was completed seven years before the end, on 6 October 1921, under the editorship of Onions (and once again with the help, according to the Preface, of the redoubtable Thompson sisters). An earlier section, W-Wash, prepared by Bradley, was published on the very same day, giving subscribers a surprise bonus.

  The year 1923 saw the appearance of Wash-Wavy and Wh-Whisking. Unforeseeing-Unright and Whisky-Wilfulness came in 1924. There was nothing—because of Bradley's passing—in 1925. The following year came Unright-Uzzle and Wilga-Wise. There was, once again, nothing published in 1927.

  But on the historic afternoon of 19 April 1928, under the supervisory imprimatur of Chicago's Professor William Craigie, the final part, the 64 pages that contained the few hundreds of words that lay between Wise and Wyzen, was completed. And with the inclusion of (it has to be said) the rather disagreeable-looking and unfortunate-sounding word wyzen, which is an obscure Scottish form of the long obsolete and equally unattractive word weasand, which in some circles once meant the oesophagus or gullet, the throat or the windpipe, the work was finished.

  The OED was finally and fully made. The English language, in what was at the time believed to be its entirety, had at long last been fixed between the hard covers of—at first ten and then, after a reprinting, a dozen—tombstone-sized volumes; and the labour of making it all, the work of the 71 years that had been taken up by this most magnificent and romantic of enterprises, was now all done. The triumphant moment that Trench and Coleridge and Furnivall and Murray—and Gell and Hart and Minor and Fitzedward Hall and the Thompson sisters besides—had all so longed for had been well and truly reached. Samuel Johnson, literature's Great Cham and the true father of English lexicography, had once remarked on the human creation of words, compared with the divine creation of the things they described. He had put it more elegantly: that words were the daughters of earth, while things were the sons of heaven. With the finishing of the OED, it could now fairly be said that all of earth's daughters, so very long sought, had now been brought safely to their home.

  What happened next—in the weeks after completion in April, and before Stanley Baldwin's great celebration dinner on Derby Day in June—was all down to the obsessions of one of those curious and eccentric figures who lurk in the woodwork of England and Oxford, and of whose strange endeavours we are all mightily delighted to learn. This particular figure was named R. M. Leonard, and for the previous many years he had been carefully watching the growth of the Dictionary, keeping silent track of its progress and noting down, most significantly, all of the numbers.

  Leonard was a newspaperman, who until 1896 had worked on the Pall Mall Gazette. He was also a first-class composer of occasional verse, rather better than the poetasters of the day; he was an anthologist; and he was an active and prominent member of the Anti-Bribery and Corruption League. Henry Frowde, the august Publisher to the University, had spotted him as an interesting kind of cove, and had hired him to edit, from London, a brand-new sixteen-page quarterly journal about the doings of the Press, which Frowde thought, in a flash of what now would be called public relations genius, ought to be called The Periodical.

  Complete first ten-volume set of the OED

  The paper was duly made and sent out free of charge and postage paid—`With Mr. Henry Frowde's Compliments'—to anyone who expressed an interest. And as a small sign of the beneficence of the Press there was a charming rubric sentence on the front of every issue: `The Periodical is printed on one side of the paper only, for the convenience of those who may care to take extracts from its pages.'

  And within, a perpetual gallimaufry of delights. We learn, for instance, about Oxford India Paper, used for Bibles and prayer books. It was first made in the Potteries, from rope, and was used in the factories for wrapping up china. The Oxford paper mill at Wolvercote then started making it, and soon astonished Press men were proudly showing off its extraordinary strength—a threeinch-wide strip could support a load of a quarter of a hundredweight, one sheet could support an entire volume of 1,500 pages, and when rubbed hard it turned into something like chamois leather and could be used for cleaning windows. One blesses Mr Leonard for telling us such things.

  As we bless him most relevantly here for painstakingly working out and then telling us, in a 1900 issue of The Periodical, some of the OED's early statistics. Back then the Dictionary had only reached I (though it lacked the words between Graded and Gyzzarn, which had not then been published). And yet, if all the columns thus far made were piled on top of one another they would be four times as high as Snowdon, the Welsh mountain, fourteen times the height of the Eiffel Tower, and would reach around the Reading Room of the British Museum almost 100 times. Moreover, the OED was very cheap indeed: for one penny piece the purchaser receives `1 yard 1 foot and 8 odd inches of solid printed matter, 2½ inches wide, on unexceptionable paper, turned out in the best manner of the University Press'.

  In 1928 R. M. Leonard was still there, eagle-eyed and eager to celebrate. By then Henry Frowde had long retired, 8 and the triumphal issue of The Periodical came `With Mr. Humphrey Milford's Compliments' instead. From its pages we learn that what Arnold Bennett had called `the longest sensational serial ever written' contained, as mentioned in the Prologue, no fewer than 414,825 headwords and 1,827,306 illustrative quota
tions; Mr. Leonard had calculated that, even when leaving out every full stop and colon and comma, there were 227,779,589 letters and numbers in the finished work. The total amount of type used would stretch 178 miles, the distance from London to the suburbs of Manchester.

  The man who printed this magisterial work, the man fortunate enough to enjoy the practical side of the lexicographical triumph, was John deMonins Johnson, the then 44-year-old former papyrologist with the Egyptian Civil Service, who had been Printer to the University since 1925. Together with the famous Oxford Lectern Bible, designed by the legendary Bruce Rogers, the OED was the most signal achievement in the career of a man who, like so many in this story, was remarkable in myriad ways.

  Johnson, for example, was a great collector of printed ephemera: there is a Johnson Room in the Bodleian Library today which houses a million items rescued from the waste-paper baskets of the last 300 years. The DNB hints at the scale: early seventeenthcentury book proposals and prospectuses, title pages, specimen pages, material illustrating the history of printing, including copyright, spelling, and design, specialized collections of banknotes, postage stamps, political pamphlets, Christmas cards, valentines, and cigarette cards. There are tourist brochures from Albania to Zanzibar, directions for making cocoa, advertisements for corselettes—in short, `the richest collection of jobbing printing in existence'.