And all the while Murray himself was lost, deep in worried thought. Later he wrote to a friend: `My interest … was purely unselfish. I wanted to see an ideal Dictionary, & to show what I meant by one.'
The two weeks that spanned the last part of March and the beginning of April 1878 were, Murray would later write, `the most anxious fortnight my wife and I passed, or ever may'. He knew full well that Max Müller had voiced the Delegates' deep concern that `in an undertaking of this magnitude, in which one might almost say that the national honour of England is engaged, no effort should be spared to make the work as perfect as possible …' So there was little doubt that the Delegates would permit him to try to create an ideal, a perfect dictionary. But was he really up to it? Could he manage the work and do it as well as it needed to be done? Would he be able to muster the energy and the time and the intellectual resources necessary to complete a task that, all of a sudden, seemed so terribly daunting? The book would not be a mere academic text—it would be of national, perhaps even international, importance. It could turn out to be the standard work, the grandfather of all word-books, the world's unrivalled über-dictionary for what in time might well become the world's über-language. Was he, the untutored linen draper's boy from distant Teviotdale, truly the man to do it? He trembled, his confidence waning by the day, as he waited for the call.
It came, in the end, in late April—just as he was due to set out for an Easter in Somerset, where he had plans to interview a dialectician. He was minded to go; but friends advised otherwise, urged him that it would be prudent to cancel this particular West Country tour, and to report instead to Dean Liddell's rooms at Christ Church at 2.30 p.m. on Friday, 26 April 1878.
And so, nervous (having mugged up overnight on chemistry, the topic on which he felt himself the weakest), he duly travelled up from Mill Hill the night before, stayed with friends in what were then the rural surroundings of Park Town (now part of a hugely expanded city), and the next afternoon walked down the Banbury Road and Cornmarket and across Carfax and beneath Tom Tower, and climbed the staircase off the Peckwater Quadrangle to attend the Delegates in their lair, laying out for them his case for taking personal command of what was clearly to be the greatest lexicographical project ever to be attempted.
It must have been a daunting occasion. The men who assembled that week after Easter were as distinguished and intellectually rarefied a group as Oxford can ever have assembled. Liddell was there, presiding; the ever-sceptical Max Müller was at his side; the Regius Professors of both History and Ecclesiastical History were there—the former the great William Stubbs, who was credited with making history worthy of respectable academic pursuit in these muscularly philistine Victorian times; the University ViceChancellor, James Sewell, a high churchman of a formidably conservative bent; John Griffiths, Keeper of the University Archives; the classical scholar Edwin Palmer; Granville Bradley, a wellknown educationalist and Master of University College—and so on.
Yet in the event the encounter proved not to be in the slightest bit terrifying for any of the parties involved. They all appeared to like one another. The Delegates saw Murray as `docile, but dogged'—and were greatly relieved that he did not seem quite so unstable as Furnivall, nor as unpleasant as Sweet. They treated Murray well, and when he emerged back out on the street it was with an evident spring in his step. He stayed an extra night or two in Oxford, but wrote immediately to Ada back in Mill Hilclass="underline"
Seen the great men—a very long and pleasant interview, increasing I thinkour mutual respect and confidence—but I don't thinkit decided anything or that we are much nearer a decision. Max Müller played first fiddle and talked as everybody's friend. It struckme that we were playing Congress 9 with myself as Russia, the Dons as England, Max Müller as Bismarck, and the result— nothing yet! Absit omen! But they are decent fellows and shook me very warmly by the hand at leaving as a man and brother.
It took one further full year before the deal was done—with the twelvemonth almost entirely devoted to wranglings about money. There were many explosions, most of them involving Furnivall. At one time he derided Bartholomew Price as a `mean old skunk-rat'. Then he became convinced that the Delegates themselves were a byword for `shiftiness and cupidity', or on another occasion men of `miserable parsimony and sharp practice', and essentially told them so. In one extraordinary speech he accused the Delegates—in most un-Victorian language—of wanting to `screw' the Society. Henry Sweet could get distempered, as well.
At one stage in the talks he forecast that Oxford simply wanted to take charge of the Society's materials, whereupon `Murray would be fired and some Oxford swell, who would draw a good salary for doing nothing, put in his place. I know something of Oxford,' Sweet said, ominously, `and of its low state of morality as regards jobbery and personal interest.'
But finally, on 1 March 1879, a deal was struck. Bartholomew Price sent the package of papers to Murray at Sunnyside, Mill Hill. It was a formal, ten-page contract between the Society and Oxford University Press. The intention behind the hard-won document was to produce what would be called A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles formed mainly on the Materials collected by the Philological Society and with the Assistance of many Scholars and Men of Science. The book was expected to be of some 7,000 pages, and work on it, fully funded by the Press at an estimated cost of £9,000, should take no more than ten years. The editor would indeed be James Murray 10 —by now fully-fledged as President of the Philological Society—and he would be paid an annual salary (the arrangement for its payment was excruciatingly complex, involving pounds per page-published, lateness penalties, and lump sum payments for subordinate staff) that amounted to around £500. As token of the completion of the year-long marathon of talks, Dr Price enclosed a cheque for £175, and a note which ended: `Let us all congratulate each other on having arrived at this resting place in our enterprise. Believe me to be with the best wishes for you in the large undertaking.'
Dr Price, like almost everyone else, had absolutely no idea how magnificently wrong was the forecasting. The Dictionary took not ten years to complete, but 54. The number of pages was not 7,000, but 16,000. And the cost of the entire project turned out not to be £9,000, but £300,000.
Not that James Murray was much better informed. In all the excitement and sanguine mood of the contract-signing day, he gaily supposed that he would be able to continue as a schoolmaster at Mill Hill and simply edit the Dictionary in his spare time. He did not reckon with the terrible undertow of all those hundreds of thousands of words that lay hidden, waiting to be included in the book that would eventually contain and compass them all. He was optimistic; the Philological Society was optimistic; Oxford was optimistic; and all of them, though they were essentially right in spirit to be so, and though their rosy view of lexical ambition was to be vindicated at the very end, were nonetheless at this moment in the saga, spectacularly unrealistic. This was all going to be very much more difficult than anyone could possibly have imagined.
Let us leave it to Samuel Johnson to offer his perspective, in paragraphs taken from the deservedly famous Preface to his own dictionary of the century before. Murray could almost recite these words by heart: he would later reproduce them, as if they had been carved in stone, in his first Preface to Volume I of his great book: