So there was no option, at least at first, but to talk to Macmillan—though about a Macmillan-only project, not about the cut-price scheme that had been proposed by Harper and which Murray had so swiftly rejected. And so negotiations between the father-and-son Macmillan dynasty on the one hand and the Society on the other—with Murray at its head, acting both as lead negotiator and as editor-in-waiting—began. For almost a year they staggered along with what, at this distance, looks like extreme discomfort.
The discomfort all had to do with the projected book's great size. Long beforehand Murray had warned of the scale of what he was now openly calling `the Big Dictionary'. 6 It would, he wrote, `be far more enormous than one would suppose could possibly sell—far too large to be printed at anything but a frightful expenditure of money'. Macmillan, on hearing this dismaying news, tried every imaginable way to perform the arithmetic that would make economic sense—trying to persuade Murray to pare the book to its very bones, trying to pay almost nothing to those who would be employed in making the book, trying to suggest, as Furnivall had, a shorter version to act as an amuse-gueule for the reading public. But Murray—`Mr. Editor', Furnivall had taken to calling him— held firm.
Or at least, he seemed to. The trouble was that while Murray was preparing specimen pages (nine of them) for Macmillan to consider, Furnivall was at the same time dealing behind his back. He was dealing still with John Murray, he was dealing anew with Oxford, trying hard to find an alternate publisher with whose offer he could shame Macmillan into paying more. And it seems that Macmillan, eager to conclude an arrangement, would in fact have paid more, would have agreed to publish more or less the number of pages, to make the book more or less the size for which Murray was arguing. Except that they found out what Furnivall was up to—and they promptly exploded. `It is a pity', Alexander Macmillan wrote to Murray, `that [Furnivall's] pretty little ways should ever be intruded into serious business.' They pulled out of the entire deal. The only shred of politesse that emerged from the wreckage was a note from Macmillan's chief negotiator, sent personally to Murray, which said there was no doubt that the dictionary Murray had in mind would be published, would make an unassailable contribution to English scholarship, and would make Murray famous.
Even so. For a short while following the debacle with Macmillan, James Murray seems to have had some doubts, to have become more than a little discouraged. He began to toy with the idea of accepting the post as head of a boys' school in Huddersfield, somewhat closer to his family home. He complained openly to friends that the work of a lexicographer was far more tedious than he had supposed. And he grumbled further that in doing his work he felt bound by rules—principally Coleridge's now wretchedly didactic Canones Lexicographici—which he now felt were irrelevant to his purpose. He also felt personally cowed by Furnivall's brutal insistence and by his stubborn determination to get the Society's dictionary moving again.
Still, he refused to let the project go. Under Furnivall's urging the Society's dictionary team took a step backwards, and began to talk once again to the presses that had already turned them down. They found in very short order that the Syndics of Cambridge would have nothing at all to do with any project that had Furnivall associated with it. `Somehow he isn't believed in at the Universities,' wrote Walter Skeat. So Cambridge were out. (`The largest wrong decision in publishing history', wrote the Press's M. H. Black some years later, wondering how differently fortunes might have turned out had we today been familiar with the CED instead of the OED.)
John Murray then turned out to be furious with Furnivall too—he had demanded they repay an advance of £600 the Society had paid at the time of the very first negotiations. So they were non-starters too. The only serious and suitable publishing house that had not given an absolutely definitive no for an answer, therefore, was Oxford.
Henry Sweet, memorably rebarbative though he may have been, was the man who first started the ball rolling. He did so in April 1877 by writing formally (the legalisms all checked by his father, who was a solicitor) to Bartholomew Price, the Delegates' Secretary at Oxford. 7 He formally suggested that first the Clarendon Press assume responsibility for publishing the Dictionary—a work that would be based, as had always been hoped, on the treasure trove of Philological Society materials, the collection of tons of quotation slips that had been assembled (and to a bewildering and distressing extent disassembled once Furnivall began to exasperate everyone) from the armies of word-searching volunteers. Sweet argued that no matter how monumental the task might seem, it could make money: the 4,000-page Littré French dictionary that had recently been published in Paris at the price of £4 had sold a staggering 40,000 copies. And to guarantee that the Oxford dictionary would be at the very least as successful, Sweet went on to make his second formal suggestion—that James Murray, BA, LL D, senior member of the Philological Society, be appointed editor.
It was to be a full year before the decision was made. There were some doubters—Bartholomew Price first among them. He had been bothered over the delay in a long-promised work by Murray on Scottish texts, due in 1874 but now three years late. Could a man so slow in delivering this one relatively modest work be trusted to produce, on time, this much more formidable project? Then again, Max Müller, the renowned Orientalist and Sanskrit scholar, worried out loud that Murray might tend to concentrate more on the exotic words and overlook the more common, everyday terms.
Müller, seized of this idea, persuaded the Delegates to ask Murray to produce samples of commonplace words for which it was known that there were sub-edited materials (quotation slips that had been organized into their various meanings and senses) available. Murray agreed, did some experimenting, and came up with the words arrow, carouse, castle, and persuade. He wrote them up in the summer of 1877, and the Delegates looked at them and ruminated over their execution once they had begun the Michaelmas term. They pronounced themselves very much less than satisfied—with Müller in particular arguing endlessly with Murray over the etymology of one of the four words.
As if this were not bad enough, the Delegates then attacked Murray's plan for showing how each word should be pronounced, and attacked his plan for displaying the etymology—going so far as to suggest that the etymologies should be dropped entirely. This idea was germinated in part because Walter Skeat was in any case himself producing an Etymological Dictionary of English, making (in the Delegates' rather niggardly view) this particular feature unnecessary.
Furnivall, who had kept in the background until now, well aware of his unpopularity at Oxford and Cambridge, promptly turned himself into a Victorian Henry Kissinger. He raced up to Cambridge, persuaded Skeat to write to the Oxford Delegates insisting that they reverse their decision. (He also inquired once more whether Cambridge might like to publish, but was again rebuffed.) He then travelled to Oxford, bludgeoned Müller into relaxing his position, saw Henry Liddell, Dean of Christ Church and co-editor of the famous Greek-English Lexicon, 8 and told him that the dictionary team now had 393 volunteer readers at his disposal, that they should really be allowed to start work, and that James Murray was becoming weary with all the delays and with the somewhat loftily patronizing attitude that the Delegates seemed to be taking towards him. He took editors to lunch in London clubs. He wrote letters. He lobbied, persuaded, cajoled, entreated.