When first I engaged in this work, I resolved to leave neither words nor things unexamined, and pleased myself with the prospect of the hours which I should revel away in feasts of literature, with the obscure recesses of northern learning which I should enter and ransack; the treasures with which I expected every search into these neglected mines to reward my labour, and the triumph with which I should display my acquisitions to mankind. When I had thus inquired into the original of words, I resolved to show likewise my attention to things; to pierce deep into every science, to enquire the nature of every substance of which I inserted the name, to limit every idea by a definition strictly logical, and exhibit every production of art or nature in an accurate description, that my book might be in place of all other dictionaries whether appellative or technical.
But these were the dreams of a poet doomed at last to wake a lexicographer. I soon found that it is too late to lookfor instruments, when the workcalls for execution, and that whatever abilities I had brought to my task, with those I must finally perform it. To deliberate whenever I doubted, to enquire whenever I was ignorant, would have protracted the undertaking without end, and, perhaps, without much improvement; for I did not find by my first experiments, that what I had not of my own was easily to be obtained: I saw that one enquiry only gave occasion to another, that bookreferred to book, that to search was not always to find, and to find was not always to be informed; and that thus to pursue perfection, was, like the first inhabitants of Arcadia, to chase the sun, which, when they had reached the hill where he seemed to rest, was still beheld at the same distance from them. I then contracted my design, determining to confide in myself, and no longer to solicit auxiliaries, which produced more incumbrance than assistance; by this I obtained at least one advantage, that I set limits to my work, which would in time be ended, though not completed.
Perhaps no more eloquent a testament to the trials of a lexicographer—a man performing `the work of a poet at last doomed to wake'—has ever been written. James Murray chose these paragraphs as his set of guiding principles, words which seemed somehow designed by the Fates to inspire him, but also to remind and to warn him.
For he in his work now vowed absolute perfection, no matter that it involved the asking of uncountable questions, nor boundless quantities of time. He said to himself that in making this new work he would brook no expedience, he would take no short cut, he would turn away from no unsolved enigma, no unexplained mystery. James Murray vowed, in short, to complete the work that Samuel Johnson could only claim to have brought to an end that was convenient for himself and his small band of scriveners; that he would, eventually and once and for all, fix and enumerate and catalogue all of the English language, no matter if it seemed that he was thereby bound, endlessly, to be chasing the very same sun that Samuel Johnson had so signally failed to reach.
4
Battling with the Undertow
The writer of a dictionary rises every morning like the sun to move past some little star in his zodiac; a new letter is to him a new year's festival, the conclusion of the old one a harvest home.
(Translated from Jean Paul Richter's Levana, 1807)
There are two beginnings to every year,' says an old Irish proverb. The Oxford English Dictionary had the first of its beginnings in 1861. And now, with James Murray's formal appointment in 1879 as editor, it was having its second almost twenty years later. But it was not quite so simple, getting matters under way again after so long a period of quietude.
First, there was the small matter of what everyone called quite simply `the slips'. These were the quotation slips, the morsels of paper on which the brief—but to a dictionary editor absolutely essential—pieces of information that had been gleaned from all those years of volunteer reading of the core books of English literature, of the newspapers 1 and learned journals and railway timetables and technical manuals and navigational almanacs and collections of belles lettres besides. Within the sentences that were written onto these slips, and which were waiting to be sifted and sorted and discovered by dictionary editors, lay all the subtle and not-so-subtle shades of meaning and sense of the various words that the quotations illustrated.
There were said to be something like two million of these slips already collected, tied together in rough order, no doubt covered in dust and lint, curled and yellow, and perhaps even crumbling themselves with age and decrepitude. It was already twenty years since Herbert Coleridge had begun to amass them at his house on Chester Terrace, and fifteen or so since Frederick Furnivall had entreated his scores of readers to `copy and burrow' in the literature, to write out the slips, and to send them in to him to St George's Square. Some were therefore very old indeed, and by now a good number of those gentle readers who had collected them had perhaps not survived to see them put to use.
Many of those worthies whom Furnivall had appointed as subeditors for individual letters had taken away their bundles of slips for sorting; and when Furnivall's attention settled on one of his other enthusiasms—Amazonian scullers from Hammersmith teashops, for example, or practising with early English balladeers, or setting up Working Men's Clubs—many had stopped working on them, had squirrelled them away somewhere, and everyone involved had forgotten about them.
Most of the slips were simply half-sheets of white writing paper, each of them (if properly filled in by the volunteers who submitted them, though not all complied) with the headword—or the catchword, or the lemma, as it is now generally known—at the topleft, the date and author and precise source of the quotation that contained it written below, and then the quotation itself, either in full or in what the rules were pleased to call an `adequate form'. Two million of such slips, weighing the better part of two tons, were in existence.
But where in God's name were they? To begin work properly on his dictionary, Murray needed to find them, and given that the contract clock was running, he needed to find them fast. Frederick Furnivall, it will be remembered, had entirely lost the will and concentration that was necessary to run the project, and had quite frankly lost track of all the scores of volunteers, the hundreds of thousands of slips, the pages of schedules and proofs and specimen pages and type designs and other details of dictionary assembly, such that the entire enterprise under his care had been reduced to a sorry shambles of decay and desuetude.
The slips were the most important asset of Furnivall's legacy, such as it was. His headquarters had been in Primrose Hill. James Murray's were now in Mill Hill. The tons of slips had perforce to be moved across the outer villages of London town—if only, that is, they could be found.
In anticipation of Murray's editorship, a somewhat embarrassed Furnivall had already been scratching his head and wondering where the missing sub-editors and thus his missing slips might be. Come the spring of 1879, when the final contracts were exchanged with Oxford, and with James Murray champing at the bit, he made a big push—and slowly but surely, from the recesses of the scholarly universe, many of the packages of slips began to come to light.
First, he sent a van with everything that had accumulated in his own house. The van was late—`things must be got away from here on Friday, as my wife is coming home from the seaside'—but eventually, after he had found a willing local man (but he demanded that Murray pay him) who piled into his cart everything that Furnivall had stacked in his hallway, the load was dispatched. Along with it came a note, suitably cryptic, which hinted at the state of affairs Murray was in short order to discover (and also, in the chiding italicized passage that is included, reminded the new editor why so many people found Frederick Furnivall a meddling and cantankerous old fool):