(Letter of application for a post at the British Museum Library written by James Murray, to Thomas Watts, Keeper of Printed Books, November 1866. Murray's application was not successful.)
James Murray was very nearly appointed to direct the fortunes of quite another dictionary. In 1876 he was approached by the publishing firm of Alexander Macmillan, who had been hired to act as agents for the American house then known as Harper & Brothers. Harper were in an agitated condition over the stunning success that was currently being enjoyed in America by the firm of George Merriam, which had been making a small fortune by publishing Noah Webster's great American Dictionary of the English Language. They now wanted to create their own work to rival Webster's, and asked Macmillan to scout around in the salons of literary London to see if they could come up with a scholar who might be amenable to accepting the post as the new project's editor. Richard Morris, a schoolmaster and a member of Furnivall's Early English Text Society, thought immediately of Murray, the young Scot who was fast making a name for himself as philology's rising star. Macmillan approached Murray, and sounded him out.
Fortunately for the future of what would in due course become our Oxford English Dictionary, Murray turned down the Macmillan proposal—which came, he said, as `a bolt from the blue'. The book that Harper had in mind, he surmised, was too short, too wanting in significance and ambition. He thought the very minimum size of a new dictionary that might rival Webster was 5,000 pages—it might not even fit into 5,500. He drew up some sample pages—they involve the early words beginning with Car-, such as carabineer, caramel, carapace, and caravan—to demonstrate how large a comprehensive dictionary would have to be.
But Harper had done their sums in New York, and the suits of the day would not budge from the corporate view that all could be encompassed by no more than 4,000 pages. And that is where the negotiations stalled. Murray was certain that the grand confection of a dictionary that the Philological Society had in mind—though in truth, with all of Furnivall's talk of a Concise edition, and the project's general lack of momentum, he was not exactly sure what the Society was now wanting—was what the English language truly deserved. So he would prefer to wait, he said, for the big dictionary to get itself under way, and he would have no truck with anything of lesser standing.
It was not quite so simple, however. Murray was notoriously a ditherer when it came to making the bigger decisions of his life— as this one was most certainly to be. And yet as so often happened, it was his wife, Ada, whose own very trenchantly expressed views eventually prevailed upon him. He should not devote his life, she said, to achieving merely a number of smaller things, if by doing so he let slip the opportunity of achieving one thing that history would regard as truly great.
James Murray 1 had been a precocious, rather solemn little boy. On the flyleaf of a copy of the Popular Educator, a magazine to which he subscribed in his early teenage years, he declared quite baldly: `Knowledge is power', and added to it (in Latin— with which, at fifteen, he was perfectly familiar, as he was also in French, Italian, German, and Greek) the motto `Nihil est melius quam vita diligentissima' (Nothing is better than a most diligent life). And even though the two best-known works about him were both written by relations—his son Wilfrid and his granddaughter Elisabeth, who might be suspected of having rather less than disinterested views of him, produced admiring biographies—his childhood does appear to have been quite exceptional.
He was omnivorous in his appetite for knowledge, quite catholic in his range of interests—he became an adept in the details of Roxburgh's geology and botany and wildlife, he took up mapping, he became an exceptional amateur astronomer (his younger brothers complained when James shook them awake to see the rising of Sirius, the time of which he had calculated and—to the family's sleepy exultation—correctly predicted), he cherished the fact that he had managed to befriend a local ancient who had been alive when Parliament proclaimed William and Mary joint sovereign in 1689, and he urged his mother to tell him over and over again how she first heard tell of the victory at Waterloo.
He volunteered at scores of nearby archaeological diggings— since Hadrian's Wall was only a few miles to the south, the ground was littered with lightly buried artefacts from Roman times. He became fascinated with the works of an obscure French writer named Théodore Agrippa d'Aubigné (he would read his works out loud to his fascinated family, translating into English as he did so). He learned how to bind books. He taught himself how to illuminate manuscripts with elegant little drawings, fleurons, and curlicues (learning in doing so that the room in which medieval monks would do such work was called a scriptorium—a word that would later come to haunt him). Though being far from a mechanical man, he once tried to invent water-wings by tying bundles of pond irises to his arms (but, being a life-long non-swimmer, nearly drowned after miscalculating their buoyancy, and only escaped by being dragged from the stream by friends hauling on his five-foot-long bow tie). He gave Latin names to the individual cows in the family's small herd of dairy cattle, and he taught them to respond to his calls. And when Louis Kossuth, the Hungarian nationalist, came on an official visit to Hawick in 1856, one of the 38 welcoming banners draped across the High Street declared, with precise Magyar perfection, `Jöjjö-el a' te orszagod!' The nineteen-year-old James Murray had thought it appropriate to welcome Kossuth appropriately, with `Thy Kingdom Come!'.
The Murray family was far too poor (though James's maternal grandfather had once been famed across Scotland for making the finest table linen of the day) for them to be able to afford to send this `argumentative earnest, naïve' young man to college of any kind, and so at fourteen James left school, to earn his own way. Three years later we find him teaching his local village schoolchildren, and three years later still doing the same, but for a halfway respectable wage, at a nearby subscription academy, where boys aged ten to sixteen were offered a rigorous education `on payment of one guinea a term'. He became a member of the Hawick Mutual Improvement Institute, then helped form the Hawick Archaeological Society and in due course gave his first lecture there, on `Reading, Its Pleasures and Advantages'. It was around this time, when he was in his early twenties, that he became fascinated by phonetics—learning more than 300 words in Romany, delighting in the mythical origins of the Scottish tongue and in the magic of Anglo-Saxon.
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).