A year later he had left the bank, and had returned to the more leisured and rewarding world of teaching, having won a post at Mill Hill School in what were in those days the leafy suburbs of north London. The years that followed, he later wrote, were his `Arcadian time, the happiest period of my life'. The school had given him a wonderfully comfortable house, which he named Sunnyside; his wife and family were in exceptional form, comforting and supportive despite the meagre wage that had been offered; he was pleasantly occupied by his immense raft of scholarly interests; and he loved teaching polite and intelligent children who had been selected to attend what remains one of the country's finer schools.
His pupils adored him, and took great pleasure in his unconventional teaching methods. `Dr Murray knows everything' became a watchword throughout the school. `His classes were always intensely interesting,' wrote one boy:
You never knew where you might arrive before the lesson was done. A nominal geography class might easily develop into a lecture on Icelandic roots, and we often tried to bring him backto the days when the Finnish landed on the shores of the Baltic, on occasions when we had not been given adequate time to the preparation of our set lesson. Then the tricks he could play with words! Such was his skill and knowledge that many of us firmly believed that by Grimm's law he could prove that black really was the same word as white; at least that was how it seemed to our poor intelligences.
He was troubled, however, by the simple fact that, however distinguished a philologist he might seem to be, and however celebrated a schoolteacher he appeared to have become, he felt a certain sense of ignominy mingling with his peers in the school common room because he still did not have a university degree. He in fact tried to win a degree at London University in 1871, a year after joining Mill Hill, but as his elderly father died while James was in the middle of his examinations, he was unable to complete them and only managed a humble pass degree, a kind of academic damnation with faint praise.
A campaign was promptly started to get him a proper one, though one that was honorary, requiring recognition rather than work. It was decided that a Scottish university would be the most appropriate for this Borders lad, and that of all the possible candidates, St Andrews would be the most stylish, but Edinburgh the most august. St Andrews had been criticized for having handed out too liberal a number of honorary degrees in recent years—and so Edinburgh, it was concluded, was the one. So a letter-writing blitz was begun.
It was far from difficult to write in fulsome terms of this most remarkably turned-out man. James Murray, wrote Frederick Furnivall, deserved to be granted a degree because he was `the first living authority on our Northern Dialects', a man who `if he lives, and I hope he will, long, will by a series of … books … do credit to the University that allies him to itself'. Prince LouisLucien Bonaparte chipped in with a supporting letter, as did Alexander Ellis and a score of other distinguished linguists and phoneticians. The university fretted for a while, and expressed its polite doubts: it was being asked to give an honorary doctorate of letters to a young man who was merely a schoolmaster, a former bank clerk and one who had left school at fourteen? To some of the elder brethren at what was Scotland's most esteemed academic establishment, this was a bit much.
In the end it was geology that came to the rescue—a drollery that would have amused William Whewell, one of the Philological Society's founders and a man who had expressed a firm belief that there were strong philosophical connections to be made between the historical development of words and of sedimentary rocks. In March 1874, when the Edinburgh University campaign was at its height, Murray had a chance meeting with Archibald Geikie, the professor of geology and a member of the University Senate. Geikie, later to become head of the British Geological Survey and a pioneer in work on evolution, remembered Murray's help as a youngster in solving various geological problems in the Teviot valley. He added his weight to the campaign, persuaded his fellow Senators—and James Murray became an Honorary Doctor of Laws with effect from 1 April. `It could not be All Fools Day when wise men do a wise deed,' exulted his brother Charles. `What an Easter egg! Hip Hip Hip Hurrah!' 4
And shortly thereafter, as if to confirm the wisdom of the Edinburgh award, Murray was invited by Thomas Baynes, the editor of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, to contribute the definitive essay on `The English Language' for the ninth edition. He had not been the first choice—Baynes had initially asked Thomas Arnold—but he was flattered to get the invitation. `A mere summary from you', wrote Baynes, in necessarily oleaginous tones, `would be of more value than a longer article from a writer of less authority.' Murray wrote twelve pages, a summary that remained a classic, long in print—certainly for as long as Britannica remained a work of authority, a role it relinquished only recently. Murray was asked to revise his article in 1895, and it duly became part of the celebrated 11th edition, surviving intact for decades beyond, with the result that our uneducated Teviotdale draper's son was to become, in essence, the established authority on the national language for several generations.
And then came the chance remark to Furnivall, during the frustrating days of searching for a replacement editor for the Philological Society's dictionary: `I rather wish I could have a go at it.'
By this time—it was March 1876—Murray was a rising star within the Society, was properly equipped for academe with his honorary Scottish LL D (plus his London University pass degree), and now, with his book on The Dialect of the Southern Counties of Scotland that had been published three years before and his Britannica article soon to be in the works, he had fully consolidated his reputation. He was, in other words, the ideal candidate. But for what? For the short Macmillan dictionary that was wanted by Harper in America? For a rather longer Macmillan dictionary that made use of the materials collected by Furnivall and Coleridge? Might Cambridge be interested? Or John Murray? Or what about the possibility that Oxford University Press might publish a dictionary for the Philological Society? More specifically, might not the project interest the Clarendon Press, the Oxford imprint which had been established a century before to produce the most learned of works, each of them so far a book `so impenetrably erudite that it was impossible to extract from it any passage likely to entice the non-specialist reader', as Peter Sutcliffe has it in his informal history? 5
Walter Skeat, a noted amateur philologist and Anglo-Saxon expert, approached the Syndics, as the governors were known, of the Cambridge University Press. Henry Sweet, who had excellent contacts at the Clarendon Press, was instructed by the Society to see if he could persuade the Delegates, as the Syndics' opposite numbers were called at Oxford, both to commit to the project and to cough up enough to pay an editor's salary. Five hundred pounds a year was the suggested sum. Cambridge said flatly no, and Oxford, though significantly without refusing point-blank, also balked.