Nonetheless, in this first fascicle of the Philological Society's work we find what some might regard as a classically Oxford sense of amusement when we encounter the following, buried in the second sense of the very rare noun abbreviator:
An officer of the court of Rome, appointed … to draw up the Pope's briefs …
Would James Murray have inserted that definition, heavily freighted with its double entendre, deliberately, and out of a sense of fun? Probably not: briefs meaning underwear did not come into use until 1933—in all likelihood its inclusion truly was inadvertent, reflecting only the splendid innocence of the utterly aloof. And yet Ilike to wonder. There are more than a few photographs of Murray wearing a decidedly impish grin behind his beard, and Ilike to imagine that, from time to time, this increasingly confident man allowed himself the pleasure of teasing his otherwise rather stern and exacting readership, just a little.
Many eminent figures read that first part of the great Dictionary. Some were admiring. A few of them carped. The Delegates—to Murray's chagrin, hurt, and disappointment—said nothing, offered no note of congratulation or encouragement. But there was one outsider who did read it, and who, moreover, did so with the greatest dispatch and eagerness. He was someone quite unknown to Murray: an outsider, an apparently unqualified critic with no track record in any of the lexical skills. He was, in fact, no more than a former corresponding clerk in a Sheffield cutlery firm, recently made redundant, a 39-year-old Nottinghamshire farmer's son named Henry Bradley. His reading of it changed everything.
On close scrutiny it would seem that Bradley's life and career to this point was in many respects rather like Murray's (except that Bradley had had far better than a rural Scottish village education—he had been at a grammar school in Chesterfield, a very traditional and well-regarded academy sited in the shadow of the curiously twisted spire of the town's Church of St Mary and All Saints 8 ). At the time of the publication of the Dictionary's first fascicle he was living in London and working as a freelance writer. He had been forced by impoverishment to take his previous job, and it was one that he didn't like (Bradley had counted shipments of spoons and knives that had been sent off to foreign clients, Murray had, prior to his schoolmastering days, written ledger entries for the foreign department of a bank). He had a sickly wife who needed to be moved to the warmer airs of the south (hence London, once the cutlers had sacked him). And, most importantly, he had an extraordinary and Murray-like aptitude for language.
And an aptitude, as it happened, for much, much more. Just as with James Murray—and, so it seems, with so many of the men and women involved in the dictionary project—Henry Bradley had a range of interests and a level of scholarship in each (except music—he could only recognize one tune, `God Save the Queen', and that he knew only because everyone stood up when it was played) that was almost unimaginable. He had taken only fourteen days to learn Russian, it was said—`with no help but the alphabet and a knowledge of the principles of Indo-Germanic philology'. He also had an uncanny ability to read a book when it was upside down. He had learned to do this, he said, by looking at the Bible perched on his father's knees while he sat before the family reading prayers; it was a facility which, once learned, he was never to lose.
A friend once stumbled upon some of Bradley's childhood notebooks, which, he noted, included :
facts of Roman history, scraps of science, lists of words peculiar to the Pentateuch or Isaiah, Hebrew singletons, the form of the verb to be in Algerine, Arabic, bardic and cuneiform lettering, Arabisms and Chaldaisms in the New Testament, with vocabularies that imply he was reading Homer, Virgil, Sallust and the Hebrew Old Testament at the same time. In another group the notes pass from the life of Antar ben Toofail by `Admar' (apparently of the age of Haroun Arrashid) to the rules of Latin verse, Hakluyt and Hebrew accents, whereupon follow notes on Sir William Hamilton and Dugald Stewart and a translation of parts of Aeschylus' Prometheus …
Henry Bradley, a remarkable linguist and amateur lexicographer, first came to Murray's attention after writing a two-part critique of the first fascicle. He soon joined the staff as an assistant, and was appointed joint senior editor—though still doffing his cap to Murray—in 1896.
This dauntingly learned early middle-aged man, understandably weary of clerking in Sheffield, arrived in London, along with his fragile wife Eleanor and their four children, at the end of 1883. They took rooms in Fulham, on the Wandsworth Bridge Road, and Bradley started pounding the pavements in search of freelance writing assignments. Before long he befriended a man named J. S. Cotton, who then ran an elegant weekly magazine (thirteen shillings a year, published every Saturday) called the Academy.
In every sense the journal was a perfect outlet for the talents of a figure like Bradley. It was styled A Weekly Review of Literature, Science and Art—it was kept mercifully free of the canting irrelevancies of politics—and it usually ran to sixteen or twenty pages. A typical issue might have a dozen book reviews, a number of theatrical notices, and columns filled with delicious arcana—essays on the latest developments in France (`160,000 francs subscribed for a statue of Gambetta at Cahors') and America (`Matthew Arnold reportedly taking elocution lessons in Andover, Maine, to prepare himself for an American tour'), jottings on scientific advances (`new fossils discovered in the Bagshot Beds to the south of London'), philological studies (`fresh information on the number of Greek words in the Karlsruhe Priscian No. 132'), and countless other oddities besides.
In early February 1884 Cotton called Bradley to his offices on Chancery Lane and handed him a single copy of Part Iof James Murray's New English Dictionary, suggesting that the cutlery clerk might like to try to write a five-column review of it, both to test his abilities of comprehending so complex a book and then to see if he might be capable of organizing some sensible thoughts about it.
Bradley took the thick slab of printed pages back to Fulham, exultant at the chance. He had not fully moved in: he had only a tea-chest in his living room to use as a desk; but he nonetheless wrote his review and handed it in within days. Cotton found it far too long—but quite fascinating, and extraordinarily well written. Rather than return it to Bradley to cut it down—Victorian editors were more lenient about allotting space than their counterparts today—he decided he would divide it into two parts. These duly appeared, edited in double-quick time, in the issues of Saturday 16 February and Saturday 1 March.
The appearance of the notice—written as it was by a hitherto quite unknown figure, by someone well outside the philological priesthood—provoked an instant small sensation. It was an essay that in due course changed Bradley's life—plucking him from the tiresome trajectories of freelancing into the highest realms of academe and establishment. It was an essay that in due course changed James Murray's life too. And it changed—most happily—the fortunes of the Dictionary, like almost no other event before or since.