(Letter from James Murray to the politician Lord Bryce,
15 December 1903)
Murray was sustained for the rest of his life by an illusion that time, however quickly it ran out, was on his side. For a moment in history the language had paused and come to rest. It could be seized and captured for ever.
(Peter Sutcliffe,
The Oxford University Press: An Informal History, 1978)
Inside the bundle delivered to the Scriptorium were a dozen copies of a flimsy but curiously heavy volume, which measured some twelve inches along its spine, was eight inches deep, and, with 352 half-uncut pages between its flimsy covers, was a little less than an inch thick. It was bound in an undistinguished, muddylooking off-white paper cover. Had it come from a later era, it might well have been mistaken for a telephone directory for a smallish city—Cincinnati, perhaps, or Nottingham, or Marseilles. But it was nothing so slight. This was a work that had been designed and made with immense care, its contents the consequence of years of scholarship and furrowed brows, and intended to have value for scores of generations to come.
Its title page, grandiloquent in tone but discreet in presentation, announced itself to the waiting world: A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles, Founded Mainly on the Materials Collected by the Philological Society. Edited by James A. H. Murray, LL.D., President of the Philological Society, with the Assistance of Many Scholars and Men of Science. Part I. A-Ant. Oxford: At the Clarendon Press. 1884. [All rights Reserved.]
It was in summary a slender, somewhat undistinguishedlooking paperback book. It looked as beggarly as it did—more a publisher's starveling, not at all like the more traditional Clarendon Press books, bound as they all were in dark blue cloth or in red morocco, with handsome fleurons stamped onto the spine in gold and with marbled endpapers and silk headbands and pagemarkers—because Oxford, perpetually strapped for cash, had insisted that it should.
The department of the University called the Oxford University Press—together with its more academically inclined offspring, the Clarendon Press—had long made the bulk of its money from the publishing of Bibles, hymnals, and prayer books. Its buildings in Walton Street in west Oxford, designed in 1827 to look as collegiate as possible, were divided (they merged in 1906) into the Bible Side and the Learned Side, the profitability of the former subsidizing the indulgent obscurities of the latter. The irony of the Bible Side's unconscious reliance on the marketplace of Mammon was noted by one historian of the Press, who wrote of the early nineteenth century: `Within the huge building the industrial revolution steamed and roared: 1 an outward front of dignified piety advertised its evangelizing mission: a Bible in every home in Christendom.'
But by the nineteenth century, as the pace of learning and scientific discovery quickened and the pace and volume of production from the Learned Side expanded to keep up with it all, so the Delegates began to insist on a much higher rate of return from the books that were commissioned and made. The New English Dictionary, so immense a Learned Side publishing project, and one that seemed unlikely to offer up even a penny piece as return on the thousands of pounds of investment that the Press would be enduring for years, for decades (and how optimistic even those forecasts turned out to be!), ran the risk of proving an enormous financial trial for the Press, perhaps even a financial embarrassment for the University. Some kind of device was needed, some kind of publishing gimmick, that would make it possible for this one project to bring as much money back into the Press's coffers as could be managed, and as quickly as possible.
And so Oxford, in an unusual (though not unheard-of ) step, took a leaf from the peculiar way that magazines and newspapers were just then publishing new works by authors like Dickens and Trollope. These publishers were doing so in serial form, putting out a chapter a week, or a section a month, and permitting the reading public to spin out their buying over many months or years, keeping the costs down and in theory making everyone— the accountants most of all—content.
Oxford, a house of great dignity and gravitas, would never of course publicly countenance anything so vulgar. And yet the idea of publishing the Dictionary bit by bit had for the Delegates considerable commercial appeal. So as a means of priming the pump and allowing money to start flowing in to the great project as early as possible, the Press had demanded that the Dictionary be turned out in fascicles, sheaves of pages that were collected together to form distinct parts, but which could themselves be bound together later between hard covers and thus made into whole volumes.
This somewhat ordinary-looking and—at twelve shillings and sixpence, somewhat inexpensive 2 —book was thus the first morsel of substance to have emanated from the works of Coleridge and Furnivall, the Philological Society, and James Murray. This was it—publication number one, a volume that included, to the best of the editor's knowledge, every single one of the English words that lay between and included A and Ant. It was woefully late—Oxford had expected (and indeed, the contract had specified) that publication would begin in 1882, and that once matters were in high gear, the Dictionary team would be able to churn out some 704 pages of completed work each year, almost two pages a day. Murray had done his gallant best—Jowett's interference notwithstanding—but at one stage, he wailed piteously to a friend that though he tried to meet a personal target of completing 33 words a day, `often a single word, like approve … takes ¾ of a day itself '.
However, the eventual appearance of the first fascicle did a great deal to buck up Murray, who was at the time—on the eve of his 47th birthday—feeling more than a little intimidated by the scale of the task ahead of him. A few weeks later he would refer to `the difficulty of pushing our way experimentally through an untrodden forest where no white man's ax has been before us'. But now, and here, there was the first appearance of a pathway through the confusing and unfamiliar thickets. It was, he told the scores of admirers who wrote in with congratulations, `my offering to the world, which must be taken on its merits and demerits and with the tolerance which is the mature fruit of culture. It will improve with age.'
The way that this first part of this great—and, as it happens, essentially ageless—book was organized, the way that the 8,365 words included in it were arranged and defined and otherwise dealt with, was to set the pattern for the future of the big Dictionary itself, the path that would eventually have an end. Maybe, Murray supposed, he would get there in ten or eleven years' time. The fact that it would take the 31 years left to him, and still not be completed, might not have dismayed him had he known the fate of the other great multi-volume European dictionaries that were under way at around the same time. Although Emile Littré's rather short Dictionnaire de la langue française took only a decade from publication of its first volume to the last—though 32 years from the conception of the plan—the Grimm brothers' Deutsches Wörterbuch, which was six times bulkier than its French equivalent, was begun in 1838 and fully finished only in 1961. If that was not long enough, the Dutch dictionary known as Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal was started in 1851 and completed in 1998, 147 years later. And a nineteenth-century attempt to fix the entire Swedish tongue between hard cover continues today into the twenty-first century, with scholars still stuck on the complexities of Swedish words beginning with the letter S.