Murray was now in the direst of straits, at his wit's end, and in a letter to Gell he begged for mercy:
I wish from the bottom of my heart that I could do without your money, and honestly give you what you would consider a commercial equivalent for it. It is an embittering consideration for me that while trying to do scholarly work in a way that scholars may be expected to appreciate, circumstances place me commercially in the position of the beÃte noire of the Clarendon Press, who involves them in ruinous expenditure.
When Bwas finally done with, there was no congratulation: Gell and the Press maintained a stony silence. Murray—who was now in his 50s, and who had taken only two weeks off in the past three years, was on the verge of breaking down. Gell insisted—the only moment of humanity anyone remembers him displaying— that he take a short break; but he then swiftly reverted to type by overruling Murray's plea that the Scriptorium be closed down for a fortnight in August, when even the English sun made working inside the corrugated iron box like roasting in an oven. His staff went away on their own holidays, leaving him alone to contemplate an `accumulation of proofs, revises, 2nd revises, finals … to say nothing of the pile of letters etc. a yard deep … so appalling that I feel inclined to sit down and weep'.
But then the overlooked, derided, and unmemorialized Philip Lyttelton Gell introduced what posterity would show was his master stroke. In November 1887, with progress down to the merest trickle—a single sheet of the Dictionary produced between May and June, a fresh forecast showing that Part IV might well take four years to finish, instead of the six months previously agreed—he demanded that Henry Bradley be promoted from being a London-based assistant editor to being a full-time (and in due course Oxford-based) senior editor. He insisted further that Bradley should have his own staff and offices, and that the two men, Murray and Bradley, should take independent responsibility for producing one part of the Dictionary every year from now on.
Murray was initially thrown off balance by the news. Gell tried his best to get Murray on side, by arranging first that Bradley produce a specimen sheet for him, and for Murray to approve it—so that Murray could be certain that Bradley was capable of working well independently. But Gell's was only a momentary lapse into geniality: within days of the appointment he was publicly threatening that the pair must produce a pair of parts per year, or else. Murray countered by insisting there be no lowering of standards: if Gell insisted on his cutting corners, then he might have to resign.
But he did not resign; and with the benefit of long perspective, it appears now that it was Gell's cruelly and tactlessly implemented reforms that did, in the end, permit the Dictionary to turn the corner that it had perforce to turn in order to survive. Even today Gell is seen by admirers of Murray as having been his lifelong enemy and his potential nemesis. But perhaps he was more sinned against than sinning, for the fact remains that when Gell assumed the leadership of the Press, the Dictionary—`the dead weight that made the chariot go so heavy'—was headed for certain disaster and for probable death; when he left the Press during Victoria's Jubilee year thirteen years later, there was no doubt that the Dictionary was in rude good health, that Murray was firmly in charge, that the project was one that would continue to completion, and that it now enjoyed the blessings of Oxford, the monarchy, and the nation, all rolled into one.
It took longer than expected for Bradley to set up an Oxford office—he lived for almost the first decade of his appointment in Clapham, and worked in a room provided for him by the British Museum. He came to Oxford only when he was needed, and by train. Furnivall was highly critical of this arrangement, regarding it as unseemly that a man of Bradley's delicacy was `rattling his nerves to pieces in incessant railway journeys'.
When he finally did consent to come, in 1896, it was not at the Scriptorium that he worked, but in the Old Ashmolean Building in central Oxford, a classically designed and roomy structure next door to Christopher Wren's magnificent Sheldonian Theatre, in the very beating heart of the University. A later admiring biographer noted that this unassuming and always available man had no need of elaborate paraphernalia, but set himself up before a plain deal table, `without a drawer'. Many years would pass before this changed; his assistants, thinking it more proper for an editor to have a kneehole desk, arranged a whip-round and presented one to him.
Despite the origins of his appointment, it swiftly transpired that Bradley himself as well—to whom the completion of the entirety of the letter E was entrusted as his first editorial mission— became the frequent target of Gell's scourgings, which continued mercilessly so long as this irrepressible martinet remained the Delegates' Secretary. Bradley was in no temper to deal with it, and in consequence fell ill—he was in many senses less durable than Murray, which Murray's admirers put down to the tenacity and durability of the Scots temperament—and he had to go off to Norway for three months' sanctioned leave.
By the time Henry Bradley became a full-time senior editor in 1896, he set up shop in the Old Ashmolean Building: his first task, the editing of E, was accomplished there.
Yet inch by column inch, the work went on—with everyone looking on in wary amazement, everyone waiting for someone to resign, for someone to pull the plug, for someone to go mad. Slowly, very slowly the parts emerged. C to Cass, then Cast to Clivy, Clo to Consigner, Consignificant to Crouching, and then with the addition of the relatively small number of words between Crouchmass and Czech, C was all done, by 1893. While he was working on Cu- the ever-cheerful Walter Skeat tried to encourage Murray by inviting him up to Cambridge. `I could find enough talk to cumber you. You could come by a curvilinear railway. Bring a cudgel to walk with. We have cutlets in the cupboard, & currants and curry & custard & (naturally) cups … say you'll cum!'
When C was all done, it was realized that it had been, said Murray, `a typical letter'. (It had also the virtue that the beginning and end words of the parts were generally recognizable to most intelligent readers. The fact that so many of the Bwords had been wholly unfamiliar—battentlie, for example, byzen, bozzom—tempted some critics to say that Murray was so slow simply because he was searching out obscurities, and was moreover doing so deliberately, to annoy and obfuscate. The relative simplicity of the top-and-tail words of his C fascicles suggested otherwise, suggesting that he was dealing with the varied ordinariness of an extraordinary language—and so that particular objection, at least, could be withdrawn.)
Walter Skeat was exultant at its completion. He wrote a ditty, both to cheer up Murray and to give a fillip to Bradley, who was at the time labouring in solitude down in Clapham on the immense complexities of E. The poem, like so many written to celebrate parts of the Dictionary, is fairly execrable:
Wherever the English speech is spread,
And the Union Jack flies free,
The news will be gratefully, proudly read
That you've conquered your A, B, C.
But I fear it will come
As a shock to some