But the `Suggestions' were not all, were not the worst of Jowett's supposed crimes. In October, even closer to the publication date of the first part of the Dictionary, Jowett perpetrated the ultimate impertinence by trying both to rewrite Murray's Preface and to change the Dictionary's title. The new Preface, which was sent to Murray without comment or explanation, was unrecognizable, and moreover—as an added insult by the meddlesome Jowett—his own effort was not returned to him. And the great book was no longer to be A New English Dictionary on a Historical Basis, but was, in Jowett-speak, A New Dictionary Showing the History of the Language from the Earliest Times.
If Murray had gone through the roof at the time of the `Suggestions'—and he was no martinet; had Jowett's criticisms been fair he surely would have accepted them—now he turned positively apoplectic. `I object emphatically to anybody altering it without consulting me … I shall write my own preface, or it shall remain unwritten.' He threatened to resign. He planned to tell his American friends that he was available to take upthe many offers of professorships with which universities in the United States were already showering him. `The future of English scholarshiplies in the United States,' he said with an uncanny prescience. `The language is studied with an enthusiasm unknown here.'
His friends rallied round him, and many agreed that he ought to go, and not let Jowett have his way and become, de facto, the editor of Murray's great work. `I boil over,' wrote Alexander Ellis from Cambridge, `to think of the misery of it … the utter shipwreck which one self-sufficient man can accomplish. It may be—I think it is—the best thing for your health and wellbeing to give it up, & insist on the removal of your name from the title page.'
But the crisis did eventually blow over—and it did so largely because of the energy, kindness, and immense tact of one of the OED's great unsung heroes, the merchant and merchant banker Henry Hucks Gibbs, later to be ennobled as the first Lord Aldenham. He was the man who, `if the inner history … ever comes to be told in full', in the words of Wilfrid Murray, `saved the Dictionary'. Or, as another writer has it, `whoever takes the credit for inspiring the Dictionary as a piece of scholarship, it is he who should receive it for maintaining the book as a business proposition'.
Hucks Gibbs was 40, wealthy, and splendidly aristocratic when he joined the Philological Society in 1859. His family had made much of their money from working the vast deposits of guano in Peru. (Doggerel of the day referred, not unkindly, to `The House of Gibbs that made their Dibs by selling Turds of Foreign Birds'.) He was fascinated by the economics of bimetallism, that (now discredited) monetary system based on the equal footings that could in theory be enjoyed by both gold and silver.
He was a keen huntsman and a good shot. 15 He collected books with a fury. He regarded himself as a Liberal Conservative. He paid for the restoration of a number of English churches and cathedrals, and essentially funded the building of Keble College, Oxford. He was, in other words, the perfect saviour for a project as English and as worthy as Murray's Dictionary.
Murray was a neighbour on Mill Hill, as well as a leading light in the Philological Society, and so it was not too surprising that the two men became friends, and Murray came to regard Hucks Gibbs as a confidant. The problems faced by Murray in pioneering the work on the Dictionary became particularly acute once the proof sheets were returned for his inspection: three hours would be needed, he estimated, for him to examine every single sheet—and yet there were new sheets to prepare, new words to define. Sometimes the `terrible undertow of words', as he wrote, seemed to present an impossibly powerful and ever-running tide; to try to halt it was a never-ending battle that an ordinary mortal could never hope to reverse or to win.
It was not just that. Mill Hill was a good distance from central London with its libraries and museums, both essential to his work; and Oxford was nearly a day's travel away too. The Delegates had started to become difficult, Jowett was impossible, the post was so often late and packages were lost; and then there was the money. Always the money. Oxford was grudging in parting with it, niggardly in budgeting for it, parsimonious in demanding detailed accounting for it. The undertow of words seemed sometimes as nothing when compared to the debilitating miseries of having to pay for so much effort with such deeply diminished funds.
Hucks Gibbs stepped smartly into the breach, lending Murray £400 so that the editor could pay his assistants and settle other expenses, and he made no immediate demands for repayment. He worked eagerly as a sub-editor, on the letters C, K, and Q—with critics later saying that his work on C resulted in one of the bestfurnished sections of all. He also mediated the dispute between Murray and Jowett—having already established some credentials for doing so, since much earlier on he had brought Jowett down to see the Scriptorium. Murray's diary records the meeting: `Prof. Jowett. A week past on Wed. Mr. Gibbs showed him everything as well as his patience would allow, not very great—jumping at conclusions.' Hucks Gibbs remembered both men as having been `rather heated'.
By now the heat between the pair had become unbearable, and Hucks Gibbs had to employ all his reserves of diplomacy and tenacity to prevent Murray resigning, sailing off to America in a huff, and leaving the Dictionary to be completed by no doubt lesser men. By dint of a cascade of letters, by dining Jowett in the finest London clubs, by smothering him with aristocratic admiration, he eventually won the day.
The Vice-Chancellor wrote to Murray explaining that the Delegates now wanted the editor to write his own Preface, and implying that the `Suggestions'—`good authors', no newspaper quotations, no words to be included post-1875—were essentially now moot. Murray, returning the favour, rewrote his Preface to include as many of the Vice-Chancellor's suggestions as seemed prudent—and the matter was closed. Jowett was widely seen as an irritating nuisance, and Murray as a man to be reckoned with— stubborn, principled, and right. But for the wise and steady intervention of Henry Hucks Gibbs, the rightness that led Murray to make so fine a dictionary might have been of no value at all.
The upshot of all the argumentation was that the first part of the great work was slightly delayed. But on 29 January 1884— five years after James Murray had signed his contract and started battling with the undertow—the messengers from the Press delivered to the Scriptorium at Sunnyside a bundle of bound copies of what all the lexicographic world had been waiting for. Part I of the New English Dictionary was, at last, officially, and as the phrase of the day had it, uttered for publication.
5
Pushing through the Untrodden Forest
I think it was God's will. In times of faith, I am sure of it. I look back & see that every step of my life has been as it were imposed upon me—not a thing of choice; and that the whole training of my life with its multifarious & irregular incursions into nearly every science & many arts, seems to have had the express purpose of fitting me to do this Dictionary … So I work on with a firm belief (at most times) that I am doing what God has fitted me for, & so made my duty; & a hope that He will strengthen me to see the end of it … But I am only an instrument, only the means that He has provided, & there is no credit due to me, except that of trying to do my duty; Deo soli gloria.