Murray decided that the American efforts, which were very large and involved many hundreds of readers, should be locally superintended (as they still are today—for, as we shall see, the process of reading for the Dictionary still goes on, as it always must). He first appointed the great Pennsylvania-based literature teacher Francis March 5 to run the American reading programme—an inspired choice, and one that redeemed a pledge made by Herbert Coleridge twenty years before, which was to have American readers exclusively responsible for reading eighteenth-century English literature (the era being one in which Americans would be naturally peculiarly interested) as well as all American-born literature thereafter. Murray had voiced some dissatisfaction in his Appeal; once March was in place and working hard, all his earlier misgivings evaporated.
(Few readers, at least in those early days, seemed to admit to coming from France and Italy, however. One has to assume, if unkindly, that those living under the heel of firmly prescriptive linguistic authorities like the Forty Immortals of the Académie in Paris and the members of the Accademia of Florence, were a little unsure how prudent it might be to read for a book that would be so wildly different in its constitution from those they were used to.)
In any event, the speed of the response was staggering. Within a month of sending out the pamphlet Murray was able to report that 165 people had signed up to do work; 128 of them had chosen the books they were going to read (a total of 234 books had been sent off); all had been sent their slips 6 and so were now presumed to be beavering away. Some who had volunteered to read very large or important books—such as the fourteenth-century northern poem the Cursor Mundi, which in time became the most-quoted work in the entire OED—were sent pre-printed slips, designed by Murray to free these particular volunteers from the labours of writing each time the title and the edition for each of the quotations they found.
A year later the number of readers had more than quadrupled, to 754; 1,568 books had been sent for reading, and 934 of these had been thoroughly combed through and finished. This was work on a scale and at a pace of which Coleridge and Furnivall had never dreamed: within just a year of signature of the contract the number of quotations returned on slips had increased by 361,670, and a year later still, by 656,900. Within a matter of months a further ton of material had been received in the Scriptorium, and Murray and his tiny band of workers were kept furiously busy sifting, sorting, and deciding, day after day after day.
Indeed, the first three or four years of the enterprise in Mill Hill were completely dominated by the seemingly incessant processes of sorting and classifying slips and then reading the quotations written on them. The idea of actually producing even the first volume of the mighty work seemed still very distant, no more than a chimera, a mirage, a phantasm.
About 1,000 slips arrived at the Scriptorium every single day. Each time a packet of slips was received—maybe one particular reader had sent but a single slipin his envelope, more probably he had saved up his efforts and sent in a brown-paper parcel that held fifty or more—it was opened up, and the slips examined to see if there was any egregious error—an obviously misspelled word, say, or if a reference was clearly less full than would be useful. If that were the case, the slipwould be set aside and Murray would write a letter asking the reader to rectify matters.
Then the sorters—two young Mill Hill village women employed, a Miss Skipper and Miss Scott, at fifteen shillings a week—arranged the slips into the alphabetical order of their headwords. The two were the uneducated daughters of local tradesmen, and they cheerfully admitted little knowledge of what it was that they were sorting; but they learned an extraordinary dexterity in shuffling the slips into order, and proved themselves invaluable. 7
After these, in the ascendant pecking order, came the rather more learned (and, as it happens, male) helpers, like the thusfar-unmasked kleptomaniac Mr Herrtage, or James Murray's brother-in-law Herbert Ruthven, Alfred Erlebach, and John Mitchell (who was to be killed mountain climbing in Snowdonia). This team looked closely at each headword and sorted those that were spelled the same way into their different parts of speech—for example, lie the verb, as in to lie down, or lie the noun as in falsehood. Once this was done, the slips were further arranged within the new categories such that the quotations written on them were in chronological order.
A selection of slips—some handwritten, some cut from books, some printed—for the word mechnical, which would have been housed in the Scriptorium pigeonholes,
waiting to be examined, considered and finally perhaps used in the pages of the Dictionary.
The most crucial stage came next. An editor-sorter of even more experience—James Murray being primus inter pares, of course—would then look carefully at the quotations and from them attempt to discern the differences in the meanings and senses that the quotations showed had been used over the centuries. For an important word there might be several hundred quotations—and it would only be by the very slow and painstaking reading of these quotations that a skilled editor could discern, could see in his mind's eye, the various ways the words had been employed over the centuries.
Sometimes the differences were obvious; sometimes they were more subtle; occasionally the differences were the merest shadings of meaning, the discernment and determining and defining of which were to make this one dictionary so infinitely superior to all others. And to make sure the quotations did each reflect the meaning that a sagacious editor thought they did, each and every quotation would have to be checked. Was what the volunteer reader had written accurate? Was the date he had assigned to it correct? If there were errors here, then the whole basis of the definition and the history of the word would be thrown into disarray, and any dictionary based on such inaccuracy would be made useless. Checking and rechecking the original sources, however tedious it might seem, and however seemingly disrespectful to the volunteers, was essential.
The assistants—or the sub-editors or that special sub-class called re-sub-editors—who did all these determinings would pin together the slips that fed into each category of meaning and attach with the same pin 8 a piece of paper that showed a first attempt at a definition of what the slips' quotations appeared to show the word to mean. And then the sub-editor would take all the small pinned bundles for any one word and arrange these bundles chronologically, so that the lexical history of the word could be ascertained as well.
Finally in this multi-layered process, the gently fierce-looking, pepper-and-salt-bearded (the red had faded to brown and was now beginning to grey itself ), and black-velvet-capped James Murray, working steadily away upon his foot-high dais and from behind a semicircular and seemingly machicolated fortress wall of reference books, would receive the pinned bundles. He would make such further subdivisions as might seem to him appropriate, work into the mix the etymology of each word, add its alternate spellings and then the way that the Philological Society and common sense suggested that it might best be pronounced. He would number the bundles from 1 to 1,000 (in case they were ever to be dropped by a clumsy sub-editor or a compositor), and eventually he would perform the most important of all the tasks that a dictionary editor must accomplish—he would write and polish and fuss with and burnish, for each one of the words and senses and meanings, what he divined as their definitions.